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Title: The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume II (of 2)

Author: Benjamin Ellis Martin
        Charlotte M. Martin

Release Date: March 19, 2013 [EBook #42367]

Language: English

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Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

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  index entry to the Scholars' Quarter.




THE STONES OF PARIS

IN HISTORY AND LETTERS

  [Illustration: Madame de Sévigné.
   (From the portrait by Mignard.)]




     THE STONES OF PARIS
     IN HISTORY AND LETTERS

     BY
     BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN
     AND
     CHARLOTTE M. MARTIN


     IN TWO VOLUMES

     VOL. II


     _ILLUSTRATED_


     NEW YORK
     CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
     MDCCCXCIX




     COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY
     CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS


     TROW DIRECTORY
     PRINTING AND BOOK BINDING COMPANY

     NEW YORK




CONTENTS


                                                     Page

     The Southern Bank in the Nineteenth Century        1

     The Paris of Honoré de Balzac                     51

     The Paris of Alexandre Dumas                      89

     The Paris of Victor Hugo                         123

     The Making of the Marais                         163

     The Women of the Marais                          213




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

_From drawings by John Fulleylove, Esq. The portraits from photographs
by Messrs. Braun, Clément et Cie._


     Madame de Sévigné (from the portrait by Mignard).
                                                          Frontispiece

                                                                  PAGE

     Alphonse de Lamartine (from a sketch by David d'Angers,
     "_un soir chez Hugo_")                                  facing 10

     Madame Récamier (from the portrait by Gros)             facing 40

     The Abbaye-aux-Bois                                            43

     Portal of Châteaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac               46

     The Court of the Pension Vauquer                        facing 52

     Honoré de Balzac (from the portrait by Louis Boulanger) facing 64

     Les Jardies                                                    70

     The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the house where
     Voltaire died                                           facing 78

     The Pension Vauquer                                            80

     The Commemorative Tablet to Balzac                             84

     The Figure of d'Artagnan (from the Dumas Monument by
     Gustave Doré)                                           facing 90

     Alexandre Dumas                                        facing 104

     The Wall of the Carmelites                                    113

     Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hôtel de Picardie             facing 118

     The Hôtel de Toulouse                                         128

     Alfred de Musset (from the sketch by Louis-Eugène Lami)
                                                            facing 144

     The Cemetery of Picpus                                        153

     Victor Hugo (from the portrait by Bonnat)              facing 160

     The Hôtel du Prévôt                                           175

     Anne de Bretagne (from a portrait by an unknown artist in a
     private collection)                                    facing 186

     Louis XII (from a water-color portrait by an unknown artist,
     in a private collection)                               facing 190

     Sully (from a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musée
     Condé at Chantilly)                                    facing 194

     The Court of the Hôtel de Béthune. Sully's Residence          196

     The Hôtel de Mayenne. In the distance, the Temple Sainte-Marie,
     called the Church of the Visitation                    facing 198

     The Place des Vosges                                   facing 214

     The Hôtel de Beauvais                                  facing 238

     The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de Brinvilliers
                                                            facing 246

     The Hôtel de Sens                                      facing 254

     Marguerite de Valois (from a portrait by an unknown artist, in
     the Musée de Montpellier)                              facing 258

     The Hôtel Lamoignon                                    facing 262

     The Tourelle of the Hôtel Barbette                            268

     The Gateway of the Hôtel de Clisson                           276




THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY




THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY


In preceding chapters we have come upon the small beginnings of the
Scholars' Quarter; we have had glimpses of the growth of the great
mother University and of her progeny of out-lying colleges; and we
have trodden, with their scholars and students, the slope of "the
whole Latin Mountain," as it was named by Pantaléon, that nephew of
Pope Urban IV., who extolled the learning he had acquired here.
Looking down from its crest, over the hill-side to the Seine, we have
had under our eyes the mediæval _Pays Latin_, filling up the space
within its bounding wall, built by Philippe-Auguste and left untouched
by Charles V.; we have seen that wall gradually obliterated through
the ages, its gate-ways with their flanking towers first cut away, its
fabric picked to pieces, stone by stone; while, beyond its line, we
have watched the building up, early in the seventeenth century, of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, over the Pré-aux-Clercs, and in the fields
beyond, and along the river-bank toward the west. In the centre of
this new quarter the nobility of birth was soon intrenched behind its
garden-walls, and in the centre of the old quarter the aristocracy of
brains was secluded within its courts. The boundary-line of the two
quarters, almost exactly defined by the straight course from the
Institute to the Panthéon, speedily became blurred, and the debatable
neutral ground between was settled by colonists from either region,
servants of the State, of art, of letters. In our former strollings
through long-gone centuries, we have visited many of these and many of
the dwellers on the University hill; we are now to turn our attention
to those brilliant lights on the left bank who have helped to make
Paris "_la ville lumière_" during the forenoon of the nineteenth
century.

Through the heart of the _faubourg_ curved the narrow Rue
Saint-Dominique, from Esplanade des Invalides to Rue des Saints-Pères.
This eastern end, nearly as far west as Rue de Bellechasse, has been
carried away by new Boulevard Saint-Germain, and with it the _hôtel_
of the de Tocqueville family, which stood at No. 77 of the ancient
aristocratic street. Here in 1820 lived the Comtesse de Tocqueville,
with her son, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, a lad of fifteen. Here he
remained until the events of 1830 sent him to the United States, with
a mission to study their prison systems; a study extended by him to
all the institutions of the Republic, which had a profound interest
for the French Republicans of that time. His report on those prisons
appeared in 1832, and in 1835 he put forth the first volume of "De la
Démocratie en Amérique," its four volumes being completed in 1840.
That admirable survey of the progress of democracy--whose ascendancy
he predicted, despite his own predilections--still carries authority,
and at the time created a wide-spread sensation. It made its author
famous, and promoted him to the place of first-assistant lion in the
_salon_ of Madame Récamier, whose head lion was always Châteaubriand.
De Tocqueville had settled, on his return to Paris, in this same
_faubourg_; residing until 1837 at 49 Rue de Verneuil, and from that
date to 1840 at 12 Rue de Bourgogne. Elected Deputy in 1839, he soon
crossed the Seine, and we cannot follow him to his various residences
in the quarter of the Madeleine. For a few months in 1849 he served as
Minister for Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of the Prince-President,
and was among the Deputies put into cells in December, 1851. His
remaining years, until his death at Cannes in 1859, were spent in
retirement from all public affairs.

A notable inhabitant of the University quarter, in the early years of
the nineteenth century, was François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot, a young
professor at the Sorbonne. His classes were crowded by students and by
men from outside, all intent on his strong and convincing presentation
of his favorite historical themes. He lived, near his lecture-room, at
No. 10 Rue de la Planche, a street that now forms the eastern end of
Rue de Varennes, between Rues du Bac and de la Chaise. From 1823 to
1830 his home was at 37 Rue Saint-Dominique, where now is No. 203
Boulevard Saint-Germain, next to the Hôtel de Luynes, already visited
with Racine. This latter period saw Guizot, after a temporary
dismissal from his chair by the Bourbon King, at the height of his
powers and his prestige as a lecturer. He carried his oratory to the
Chamber of Deputies in 1830, and there compelled equal attention. In
1832 we find him, Minister of Public Instruction, installed in the
official residence at 116 Rue de Grenelle, on the corner of Rue de
Bellechasse. His work while there still lasts as the basis of the
elementary education of France, and it is to him that she owes her
primary schools. Pushed out from this office in 1836 by the pushing
Thiers, he went to England as Ambassador for a few months in 1840, and
in the autumn of that year he took up his abode in the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, where he remained until he was driven out in 1848.
That ancient mansion, no longer in existence, stood on the triangle
made by Boulevard and Rue des Capucines. With his desertion of this
Southern Bank, we lose sight of his dwellings, always thereafter in
the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Guizot and Louis-Philippe failed in their
fight against a nation, and the men of February, 1848, revolted
against the Prime Minister as well as against the King of the French.
That _opéra-bouffe_ monarch with the pear-shaped face, under the guise
of Mr. Smith, with a fat umbrella, slipped out of the back door of the
Tuileries and away to England; Guizot got away to the same safe shores
in less ludicrous disguise. He returned to his own land in 1849, and
lived until 1874, always poor, always courageous, and always at work.
Among his many volumes of these years, all marked by elevation of
thought and serenity of style, as well as by absence of warmth and
color, were his "Mémoires," wherein he proves, to the satisfaction of
his austere dogmatism, that he had always been in the right throughout
his public career.

The Revolution of 1830, that sent de Tocqueville on his voyage, and
that started Guizot in political life, brought Alphonse-Marie-Louis de
Lamartine to the public ear as an orator. He had filled the public eye
as a poet since 1820, when his "Méditations Poétiques" appeared. In
1830, his "Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses" had made it sure that
here was a soul filled with true harmony. And while he sang the
consolations of religion, as Châteaubriand had sung its splendors, he
gave proof of his devotion to the Church and throne. But he bore the
Revolution of 1830, and the flight of the Bourbons, with the same
equanimity he always summoned for the reverses of others, as well as
for his own. When a literary genius is out of work, says Sainte-Beuve,
he takes to politics and becomes an Illustrious Citizen, for want of
something better to do. Lamartine was elected a Deputy soon after the
upset of 1830, and sprang at once into the front rank of parliamentary
orators. His speeches in the Chamber, and his "History of the
Girondists"--enthralling and untrustworthy--helped to bring on the
Revolution of 1848, quite without his knowing or wishing it. It was
his superb outburst of rhetoric, as he stood alone on the steps of the
Hôtel de Ville, on February 25th, backed by no colleague and clad in
no authority, that saved to France her Tricolor--"that has swept all
around the world, carrying liberty and glory in its folds"--in place
of the white flag of the Bourbons that had gone, and the red rag of
the mob that was near coming. Between that month of February and June
of that same year, Lamartine had been on the crest of his highest
wave, and had sunk to his lowest level in the regard of his Parisians.
Their faith was justified in his genius and his rectitude, but a
volcano is not to be squirted cold by rose-water, and the new republic
could not be built on phrases. After his amazing minority in the
election for president, Lamartine sank out of sight, accepting without
complaint his sudden obscurity, as he had accepted without intrigue
his former lustre. The conspiracy of December, 1851, sent him into
retirement, and he lived alone with his pen, his only weapon against
want--a pathetically heroic figure during these last years. George
Sand had seen a good deal of Lamartine in the days of 1848, and he
struck her as "a sort of Lafayette without his shrewdness. He shows
respect for all men and all ideas, while believing in no ideas and
loving no man." A more just and complete judgment is that of Louis
Blanc: "He is incessantly laboring under a self-exalting
hallucination. He dreams about himself marvellous dreams, and believes
in them. He sees what is not visible, he opens his inward ear to
impossible sounds, and takes delight in narrating to others any tale
his imagination narrates to him. Honest and sincere as he is, he
would never deceive you, were he not himself deceived by the familiar
demon who sweetly torments him."

For twenty years he had been a resident of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Indeed, when he came to Paris for a while, in 1820, to see to the
publication of his first poems, he found rooms on Quai d'Orsay. From
there he went to make that call on young Hugo, to be narrated later.
From 1835 to 1855 his apartment was in the grand mansion, "between
court and garden," No. 82 Rue de l'Université. His reception-room was
decorated with portraits and busts of Alphonse de Lamartine, we are
told by Frederick Locker-Lampson, who visited him there. His host was
a handsome and picturesque figure, he says, albeit with an
over-refinement of manner. No keener criticism of the poet and his
poetry, at this period, has been made than that by Locker-Lampson, in
one curt sentence. His sane humor is revolted by that "prurient
chastity, then running, nay, galloping, to seed in an atmosphere of
twaddle and toadyism."

The desolate fallen idol was rescued from oblivion and poverty by the
Second Empire, whose few honorable acts may not be passed over. In
1867, in its and his dying years, that government gave him money, and
the municipality gave him a house. These gifts came to him in Rue
Cambacérès, in a small hotel now rebuilt into No. 7 of that street.
Where it meets with Rue de Penthièvre, just above, you will find the
attractive old mansion, with its ancient number 43 cut in the stone
over the doorway, in which, during the years after leaving the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, he carried on his courageous struggle with his
pen against debt and poverty. He had but few months' enjoyment of his
last home, the gift of the people of Paris, for he died there in 1869.
It was at Passy, not far from the square in Avenue Henri-Martin, named
for him and holding his statue. The chair in which he is seated might
be a theatrical property, perhaps humorously and fittingly so
suggested by the sculptor; who has, however, done injustice to his
subject, in robbing him of his natural grace and suavity, and in
giving him a pedantic angularity that was never his.

When Lamartine writes to Sainte-Beuve, "I have wept, I who never
weep," we are amused by the poet's naïve ignorance of his persistent
lachrymose notes. The "smiling critic" accepted them simply as a
pardonable overflow of the winning melancholy of that nature, in which
he recognized all that was genuine and laudable. This wide-minded
tolerance is perhaps the secret of Sainte-Beuve's strength as a
critic. With his acute discernment of the soul of a book and of its
author, his subtle appreciation of all diverse qualities, he was
splendidly impartial. He could read anything and everything, with a
keenness of appraisement that did not prejudice his enjoyment of that
which was alive, amid much that might be dead. "A pilgrim of ideas,
but lacking the first essential of a pilgrim--faith"--he gave all that
he was to literature through all his life, and when near its end, he
had the right to say: "Devoted with all my heart to my profession
of critic, I have tried to be, more and more, a good and--if
possible--a skilful workman."

  [Illustration: Alphonse de Lamartine.
   (From a sketch by David d'Angers. "_un soir chez Hugo._")]

He devoted himself so entirely to his profession, that his life was
like a mill, as he said, perpetually feeding and grinding. On the
Monday morning, he would shut himself in with the new volumes, which
he was to feed into himself and assimilate, during the twelve hours of
each of the five following days; on Saturday he was ready to grind out
the result. His Sunday holiday was given to the proof-reading of his
next day's "Causerie du Lundi." On that evening he took his only
relaxation, in the theatre. His work-room was bare of all
superfluities, and his daily life went in a round, with simple diet,
no wine, nor coffee, nor tobacco.

At the age of twenty-five, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was living,
with his mother, in a small apartment on the fourth floor of No.
19--now 37--Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He had given himself to letters
instead of medicine, for which he had studied, and had become a
regular contributor of critical papers to the press. His name was
already spoken along with the names of Victor Cousin, Villemain,
Guizot, Mérimée. He had produced his "Historical and Critical
Pictures," his "French Poetry and French Theatre of the Sixteenth
Century," and the "Poems of Joseph Delorme"--his selected pen-name.
The poet in him had abdicated to the critic, handing down many choice
gifts. In this apartment he received for review a volume of poems,
"by a young barbarian," his editor wrote. This was the "Odes et
Ballades" of Victor Hugo, with whom the critic soon made acquaintance,
and at whose house, a few doors away in the same street, he became a
constant visitor. From here Madame Sainte-Beuve removed, with her son,
in 1834, to Rue du Mont-Parnasse, and in that street he had his home
during his remaining years. His official residence, from 1840 to 1848,
as a Keeper of the Mazarin Library, was in that building now occupied
by the Institute. He found installed there, among the other Keepers,
Octave Feuillet. The upheaval of February, 1848, drove Sainte-Beuve
into Belgium. On his return in the following year, he settled in the
house left him by his mother, and there he died in 1869. This
two-storied, plaster-fronted, plain little No. 11 Rue du
Mont-Parnasse, saw his thirty years of colossal work. From here, he
went to take his chair of Latin poetry in the Collège de France, where
he was hissed by the students, who meant to hiss, not the critic and
lecturer, but the man who had accepted the Second Empire in accepting
that chair. He was no zealous recruit, however, and preserved his
entire independence; and when he consented to go to the Senate in
1865, it was for the sake of its dignity and its salary. He was always
poor in money.

To his workroom in this house, came every French writer of those
thirty years, anxious to plead with or to thank that Supreme Court of
Criticism. Among those who bowed to its verdicts and who have owned
to its influence, Edmond de Goncourt has given us the most vivid
sketch of the critic in conversation: "When I hear him touch on a dead
man, with his little phrases, I seem to see a swarm of ants invading a
body; cleaning out all the glory, and in a few minutes leaving a very
clean skull of the once illustrious one." And, in his written reviews,
Sainte-Beuve had the supreme art of distilling a drop of venom in a
phial of honey, so making the poison fragrant and the incense deadly.
There is no more constant presence than his on this southern
hill-side, where all his days and nights were spent. We seem to see
there the short, stout figure, erect and active, the bald head covered
with a skull-cap, the bushy red eyebrows, the smooth-shaven face,
redeemed from ugliness by its alert intelligence. His walks were down
this slope of Mont-Parnasse, which he thought of as the
pleasure-ground of the mediæval students of the University, to the
quays, where he hunted among the old-book stalls. And he loved to
stroll in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens. In the Poets' Corner,
now made there, you will find his bust along with those of Henri
Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, and Paul Verlaine.

Crossing the street from Sainte-Beuve's last home to No. 32, we find a
modest house set behind its garden-wall, in which is a tablet
containing the name of Edgar Quinet. More than passing mention of his
name is due to this fine intellect and this great soul. His mother
thought that "an old gentleman named M. Voltaire"--whom she might have
seen in her childhood, as her village crowded about his carriage on
its way to Paris--was the cleverest man who ever lived. She brought up
her boy to think for himself, after that philosopher's fashion, and
the boy bettered her teachings. He spent his life in looking into the
depths of beliefs and institutions, in getting at the essence of the
real and the abiding, in letting slip that which was shallow and
transitory; so that, towards the end, he could say: "I have passed my
days in hearing men speak of their illusions, and I have never
experienced a single one." He became, in Professor Dowden's apt
phrase, "a part of the conscience of France," and as such, his
influence was of higher value than that exerted by his busy pen in
politics, history, poetry. Indeed, his enthusiasms for the freedom and
progress of his fellow-beings carried his pen beyond due restraint. Of
course he was honored by exile during the Second Empire, and when it
tumbled to pieces, he returned to Paris, and soon went to Versailles
as a Deputy. At his grave, in 1875, Hugo spoke of him as living and
dying with the serene light of truth on his brow, and he can have no
happier epitaph.

Quinet had outlived, by only a few months, his life-long friend Jules
Michelet, who died in 1874. He, too, had his homes and did his work,
private and public, on this same hill-side. His birth-place, far away
on the northern bank, on the corner of Rues de Tracy and Saint-Denis,
is now given over to business. It was a church, built about 1630 in
the gardens of "_Les Dames de Saint-Chaumont_," and had been closed
in 1789, along with so many other churches. Going fast to ruin, it
was fit only for the poverty-stricken tenant, who came along in the
person of the elder Michelet, a printer from Laon. He set up his
presses in the nave and his household gods in the choir, where the boy
Jules was born on August 22, 1798. The building is unchanged as to its
outer aspect, with its squat columns supporting the heavy pediment of
the façade, except that two stories have been placed above its main
body. In these strange surroundings for a child, and in the shelters
equally squalid, to and from which his father removed during many
years, the boy grew up, haunted and nervous, cold, hungry and
ill-clad, and always over his books when set free from type-setting.

He got lessons and took prizes at the Lycée Charlemagne, but the
pleasantest lesson and the dearest prize of his youth did not come in
school. They were his first sight, from his father's windows in Rue
Buffon, of the sun setting over beyond the trees, tuneful with birds,
of the Jardin du Roi. Grass and foliage, and a sky above an open
space, had been unknown to his walled-in boyhood. When he became able
to choose a home for himself, it had always its garden, or a sight of
one. At an early age he went to tutoring; in 1821 he was appointed
lecturer on history in the Collège Rollin, then in its old place on
the University hill; soon after 1830 he succeeded to Guizot's chair in
the Sorbonne, and in 1838 the Collège de France made him its professor
of History and Moral Science. In that institution, he and his
colleague Quinet caused immense commotion by their assaults on the
Church intrenched in the State, and from their halls the hootings of
the clericals, and the plaudits of the liberals, re-echoed throughout
France. The priesthood complained that "the lecturer on history and
morals gave no history and no morals," and it began to be
believed--rightly or wrongly--that he was using his professor's
platform as a band-stand, and was beating a big drum for the
gratification of the groundlings. He was speedily dismissed, he was
reinstated soon after 1848, and was finally thrown aside by the Second
Empire.

At this period only, he disappears from the Scholars' Quarter for a
while. His earliest residence there was, soon after his marriage in
1827, at 23 Rue de l'Arbalète, a street named from the "_Chevaliers de
l'Arbalète_," who had made it their archery grounds in mediæval days.
The site of Michelet's residence is fittingly covered by a large school,
on the corner of that street and of the street named for Claude
Bernard. After a short stay in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor--that
street nearly all gone now--he returned to this neighborhood, and
settled in Rue des Postes, which, in 1867, received the name of the
grammarian Lhomond. Otherwise, no change has come to this quiet
street, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century buildings, among
which is the Hôtel Flavacourt, set in the midst of gardens. On its
first floor Michelet lived from 1838 to 1850. At No. 10 is the arched
gateway through which he went, in its keystone the carved head of a
strong man with thick beard and curling locks. Above the long
yellow-drab wall shows the new chapel of the priests, who, with
unknowing irony, have taken his favorite dwelling for their schools.

Absent from this quarter during the early years of the Second Empire,
and absent from Paris during part of that time, it was in 1856 that
Michelet settled in his last abode. It was at 44 Rue de l'Ouest, and
his garden here was the great Luxembourg Garden. In 1867, the street
was renamed Rue d'Assas, and his house renumbered 76. After his death
in the south of France in 1874, his widow lived there until her own
death in 1899, and kept that modest home just as he had left it. She
was his second wife, and had been of great help to him in his work,
and had done her own work, aided by his hand, which sprinkled
gold-dust over her manuscript, as she prettily said. That hand had not
been idle for over fifty years. He gave forty years of labor, broken
only by his other books, to his "History of France," which at his
death was not yet done, as he had meant that it should be done. It is
a series of pictures, glowing and colored by his sympathetic
imagination, which let him see and touch the men of every period, and
made him, for the moment, the contemporary of every epoch. And Taine
assures us, contrary to the general belief, that we may trust its
accuracy. His style has a magic all its own. He had said: "Augustin
Thierry calls history a narration, Guizot calls it an analysis; I
consider that history should be a resurrection." This idea is
translated into durable marble on his striking tombstone in
Père-Lachaise, done in high relief by the chisel of Mercié.

The life of Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littré, a few years longer than that
of Michelet and equally full of strenuous labor, was passed on this
same slope and ended in this same Street of Assas. Born on February 1,
1801, in the plain house of three stories and attic at No. 21 Rue des
Grands-Augustins, he got his schooling at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where
we have seen other famous scholars. He appears for a day and a night
on the barricades of 1830, and then settles quietly at No. 11 Rue du
Colombier, now Rue Jacob. On his marriage, in 1835, he removed to No.
21 Rue des Maçons, now Rue Champollion, once Racine's street, in the
heart of the University. In 1838 he made his home in Rue de l'Ouest,
and in that home he remained until his death on June 2, 1881. His
apartment took up the entire second floor of present 44 Rue
d'Assas--the new name of Rue de l'Ouest--at the corner of Rue de
Fleurus, and its windows on the curve opened on ample light and air.

Like Sainte-Beuve, Littré gave up medicine, to which he had been
trained, for journalistic work; some of which, in his early days, was
done for the Gazette Médicale, and much of it all through life for the
political press. He was an ardent Liberal, and after the fall of the
Empire, was elected a Deputy, and later a Senator, of the Third
Republic. Nothing in the domain of literature seemed alien to this
catholic mind, equally at ease in science and philosophy, philology
and history. The enduring achievement of his life is his Dictionary of
the French Language. It was begun in 1844 and completed in 1872, and a
supplement was added in 1877. In his fortieth year, he was attracted
by the teachings of Comte, and became a leader of the Positivists and
a copious contributor to their review. His career is that of an
earnest and a self-denying student; a teacher of unfettered thinking
in science, religion, politics; a modest and disinterested
fellow-worker in letters.

His master in the cult that won him solely by its scientific
fascinations, Auguste Comte, had lived for the last fifteen years of
his life at No. 10 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and there he died in 1857.
We can but glance at the tablet in passing, and we cannot even glance
at the altered residences, in this quarter, of the gifted Amédée
Thierry and of his more gifted brother, Augustin, the historian "with
the patience of a monk and the pen of a poet." He died, in 1856, in
Rue du Mont-Parnasse, in the house that had been Quinet's, it is said.
We look up, as we go, at the sunny windows, facing full south over the
Luxembourg Gardens, of the home of Jules Janin, in his day "the prince
of critics." They are on the first floor at the corner of Rues Rotrou
and de Vaugirard, alongside the Odéon, the theatre in which he had his
habitual seat. He died at Passy in 1874.

This _faubourg_ has had no more striking figure than that of Prosper
Mérimée, tight-buttoned in frock-coat, and of irreproachable
starchedness; with a curiously round, cold eye behind glasses, a large
nose with a square end, a forehead seamed with fine wrinkles. It was
his pride to pass as an Englishman in his walk. In his work, in
romance equally with archæology, the gentleman prevails over the
author, so that he seems to stand aloof, reserved, sceptical, correct;
never showing emotion, never giving way to his really infinite wit and
frisky mockery. He began his working-life in 1825, as a painter with
his father, alongside the École des Beaux-Arts, at No. 16 Rue des
Petits-Augustins, now 12 Rue Bonaparte. In 1840 he moved around the
corner to No. 10 Rue des Beaux-Arts, half way between the school and
his other place of work in the Institute, as Inspector of the
Historical and Artistic Monuments of France. From 1848 to 1851 he was
to be found at 18 Rue Jacob, and close at hand he found
"_l'Inconnue_," at 35 of the same street. In 1852 he removed to his
last residence at 52 Rue de Lille, on the corner of Rue du Bac. The
Commune burned that house along with others adjacent, and until
rebuilding began, long after, there stood in the ruins a marble bust
on its pedestal, unharmed except for the stain of the flames. It was
all that was left of Mérimée's great art-collection, with which, and
with his books and cats, he had lived alone since his mother's death.
He had gone away to Cannes to die in 1870. So that he did not see the
ruins of the Empire, to which he had rallied, altogether from devotion
to the Empress, whom he had known in Spain when she was a child. He
accepted nothing from the Emperor except the position of Librarian at
Fontainebleau, and was as natural and sincere with the Empress, as he
had been with Eugenie Montijo playing about his knee. In his other
office he was a loyal servant of the State, and to his alert, artistic
conscience France owes the preservation of many historic structures.

There are those who claim that the influence of Taine on modern
thought has been deeper and will be more durable than that of Renan.
They base their belief on the groundless notion that men are most
profoundly impressed by pure reason, forgetful of that well-grounded
experience, which proves that all men are touched and moved and
persuaded rather by sentiment than by conviction. And the writer is
irresistible, who, like Renan, appeals to our emotional as well as to
our thinking capacities. We are captivated by those feminine qualities
in his strain that are disapproved of by his detractors; his refined
fancy and his undulating grace seduce us. We are convinced by his zest
in the search for truth, by his courage in speaking it as he found it;
we recognize his sincerity and sobriety that do not demand applause;
we respect the magnanimity that looked on curses as oratorical
ornaments of his enemies, and that took no return in kind. And so we
stand in the peaceful court of homelike No. 23 Rue Cassette, on whose
first floor Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine died in 1893, in respectful memory
of the man who has helped us all by his dissections, his cataloguing,
and his array of facts. The structure of the philosophy of history,
that he raised, stands imposing and enduring on the bank of the stream
of modern thought, and yet it may be that Edmond de Goncourt was not
wholly wrong, in his characterization of Taine as "the incarnation of
modern criticism; most learned, most ingenious, and most frequently
unsound." We turn away and follow eagerly the steps of sympathetic
Joseph-Ernest Renan.

We have already seen the country boy coming to school, at
Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, in 1838. After four years' tuition there,
he passed on to higher courses in the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice. That
renowned school faces the _place_ of the same name, which it entirely
covered, when built in the early years of the seventeenth century.
When the Revolution demolished the old structure, it destroyed the
_parloir_ where the young student, the Chevalier des Grieux, gave way
before the beguilements of his visitor, Manon Lescaut. The fountain in
this open space flashes with that adorable creation of the Abbé
Prévost; the original of two creations as immortal, says Jules Janin:
"For who is the Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre but Manon made
pure; and who is Châteaubriand's Atala but Manon made Christian?"

Once a week, while at the seminary, young Renan took an outing with
the other pupils to its _succursale_ at Issy. It is a dreary walk,
along the wearisome length of Rue de Vaugirard, to the village to
which Isis gave her name, when that goddess, once worshipped in
Lutetia, was banished to this far-away hamlet. There "Queen Margot"
had a hunting-lodge and vast grounds, and when these were taken by the
brothers of Saint-Sulpice, they saved the grounds and transformed the
cupids on the walls of the lodge into cherubs, and the Venus into a
Madonna. Now their new structures in Caen stone face the street named
for Ernest Renan. In the gardens is a chapel built around the grotto,
roofed with shells, wherein Bossuet and Fénelon used to meet, toward
the end of the eighteenth century. There they doubtless began that
controversy over the mystical writings of Madame Guyon, which ended in
Fénelon's dismissal from the court through the influence of the
imperious Bossuet. Under these trees that shaded them, walked Renan in
his long and cruel conflict between his conscience and his traditions,
most dreading the pain he would give his mother by the step he felt
impelled to take. He took that step in October, 1845, when he laid
aside the _soutane_--to be adorned and glorified by him, his teachers
had hoped--and walked out from the seminary to a small _hôtel-garni_
on the opposite side of Place Saint-Sulpice. Supported at first only
by the savings of his devoted sister, Henriette, he started as a
tutor, and began his life's pen-work, in a cheap _pension_, in one of
the shabby houses just west of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, in Rue des
Deux-Églises, now renamed Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Épée.

His future dwellings, befitting his modest gains, were all in quiet
streets of this scholarly quarter. The site of that one occupied from
1862 to 1865, at 55 Rue Madame, is covered by Collége Bossuet, where
priests teach their dogmas. Old Passage Sainte-Marie, where he lodged
for a while in 1865, is now Rue Paul-Louis-Courier, and his lodging is
gone. During the ten years from 1866 to 1876, he lived in the plain
house numbered 29 of retired Rue Vaneau. Then for three years, he had
an apartment at No. 16 Rue Guillaume; "a short street of provincial
aspect," says Alphonse Daudet, "grass-grown, with never a wheel; of
silent mansions and unopened gates, and of closed windows on the
court; faded and wan after centuries of sleep." This mansion was built
for Denis Talon, an advocate-general at the end of the seventeenth
century, and described by Germain Brice, writing in 1684, as having
"most agreeable apartments, with outlook on neighboring gardens, and a
large court, and great expense in building." He did not mention the
entrance-door, which is monumental, nor the knocker, worth a
pilgrimage to see. In 1880 Renan removed to No. 4 Rue de Tournon, so
finding himself between No. 6, once occupied by Laplace, and No. 2,
once occupied by Balzac. In 1883 he was made Administrator of the
Collége de France, and there took up his official residence. His
appointment to the chair of Hebrew in that institution, on his return
from the Orient in 1861, had so perturbed the Church behind the State
that he was dismissed after he had given but one lecture.

The Second Empire gone, he came back, mainly through the action of
Jules Simon, a wise and learned statesman and a most lovable man.
Renan the administrator remained the lecturer as well, and has left
ineffaceable memories with those who saw and heard him in his
declining years; when, his body disabled by maladies, he still went
singing on his way, as he manfully put it. It was a gross and clumsy
body; to use Edmond de Goncourt's words, an ungraceful, almost
disgraceful body, full of the moral grace of this apostle of doubt,
this priest of science. His lectures were rather readings of the
scriptures, interspersed with his own exegesis. On chairs about a
large table, and against the wall, in a small room of the college,
were seated the few intent listeners. Renan sat at one end of the
table, his head--"an unchurched cathedral"--bent over a bulky copy of
the scriptures as he read; then, as he talked, he would raise his head
and throw back the long hair that had tumbled over his brow, the
subtle humor of his mobile mouth and his dreamy eyes effacing the
effect of his big nose and fat cheeks, his beardless face luminous
with an exalted intellectual urbanity. His interpretations and
illustrations were spoken with his perfect art of simple and limpid
phrase, and in those tones that told of his dwelling with the saints
and prophets of all the ages, and with the elusive spirits of mockery
of our own day.

He died, on October 2, 1892, in his official residence in the Collége
de France, an apartment on the second floor of the main structure
facing the front court. The austere simplicity of this Breton interior
was leavened by the books and the equipment of the scholar. The
window of his death-chamber is just under the clock.

The "touch of earth" demanded by Tennyson's Guinevere was a need of
the nature of George Sand. The three stages of her growth, shown in
her work, reveal the three inspirations of her life, each most actual:
the love of man, the love of humanity, the love of nature. The woman's
heart in her made her, said Renan, "the Æolian harp of our time"; and
Béranger's verse well fits her:

     "_Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
     Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne._"

It vibrated to the touch of outrages on woman and of injustice to man,
and it pulsated with equal passion for her children and for the rural
sights and scents of her birth-place. And we feel her heart in her
phrases, that stir us, as Thackeray puts it, like distant
country-bells. This half-poet, half-mystic, came fairly by her
fantastic inheritance; for she was, in the admirable phrase of Mr.
Henry James, "more sensibly the result of a series of love affairs
than most of us." On the other side, we may accurately apply to her
Voltaire's words concerning Queen Elizabeth: "And Europe counts you
among her greatest men." There were masculine breadth and elevation in
her complex, ample nature, with divine instincts and ideal purities,
that left no room for vulgar ambitions and mean avidities. Balzac, of
kindred qualities, wrote, after having learned to know her a little:
"George Sand would speedily be my friend. She has no pettiness
whatever in her soul; none of the low jealousies that obscure so many
contemporary talents. Dumas resembles her in this."

When Madame Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant, a young woman of
twenty-six, came, in 1830, to Paris to stay--she had already, while a
girl, been a _pensionnaire_ in the convent of the "_Augustines
Anglaises_," where, under its ancient name, we have met with Mlle.
Phlipon--she found her only acquaintance in the capital, Jules
Sandeau, living on Quai Saint-Michel. He had known M. Dudevant and his
wife during his visit to Nohant, a year or so earlier. She rented a
garret in the same house, one of the old row on the quay, just east of
Place Saint-Michel. Here she discovered that she could use a pen; at
first with scant success and for small pay in the columns of the
"Figaro," and then, with not much greater power, in a romance, written
conjointly with Sandeau. They named it "Rose et Blanche," and its
authors' pseudonyme was Jules Sand. Here she assumed the male costume
which enabled her to pass for a young student, unmolested in her walks
in all weathers and with all sorts and conditions of men, whom she
delighted to scrutinize. In a letter written in July, 1832, she says
that she is tired of climbing five long flights so many times a day,
and is seeking new quarters. She found them, with the same superb
outlook over the Seine as that she had left, on a third floor of Quai
Malaquais.

It may have been, for she always dwelt on her royal ancestry, in the
house now No. 5, which had been the home of Maurice de Saxe. That son
of Augustus the Strong of Poland and of the Countess of Königsmark
was the father of a natural daughter, who became the grandmother and
guardian of Mlle. Lucile-Aurore. Madame Dudevant gave his name to her
son, and this young Maurice, and his sister Solange, were now brought
to their mother's new home. She devoted hours to their amusement and
instruction, and hours to her pen-work; writing far into the night
when daylight did not suffice. She improvised a study in the ground
floor on the court, cool when the westering sun flooded her windows
above, and quiet when too many visitors disturbed her. For she had
sprung into fame with her "Indiana"--its author styled George
Sand--and after only two months' interval with her "Valentine."
Naturally inert, she had to push herself on to work, and then her
"serene volubility" knew no pause. She had now to be reckoned with in
the guild of letters, and its members met in the "poets' garret," as
she termed her little _salon_.

Balzac came--he who discouraged her in the beginning, on Quai
Saint-Michel--and Hugo and Dumas and Sainte-Beuve and young de Musset.
With this last-named she went from here to Italy, having persuaded his
mother that his infatuation would reform the wayward youth. All the
world knows, from the books on both sides, the story of the
short-lived _liaison_. She returned to this home in August, 1834,
hungry for her children. Then we lose sight of her for many years, in
her visits to her beloved provincial scenes, and her journeys to other
lands, and her temporary residences on the right bank of the Seine.
In the winter of 1846 and 1847 she had a _pied-à-terre_ in her son's
studio, in the secluded square of Cours d'Orléans, its entrance now at
80 Rue Taitbout. There she was visited by Charles Dickens, who
describes her as "looking like what you'd suppose the queen's monthly
nurse would be; chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed; a singularly
ordinary woman in appearance and manner." Others describe her, at this
period, when she had just passed her fortieth year, as having a
wearied, listless bearing, her only notable feature being her dull,
mild, tranquil eyes. In February, 1852, she was found by Mr. and Mrs.
Browning in the small apartment attached to her son's studio, at No. 3
Rue Racine. It is at the top of the house, and can be rented to-day. A
curious picture of her and her surroundings is given by the Brownings.
She was a constant attendant at this time at the Odéon--on whose stage
her plays were produced--and at the restaurant in the _place_ in front
of the theatre. There she used to sit among her male friends, smoking
"those horrid big cigars" which so revolted Rachel that she would
never meet the smoker.

George Sand's last Paris home was in Rue Gay-Lussac, and she was one
of the earliest tenants in that street, opened in 1868. She had three
or four small rooms in the _entresol_ of No. 5, the lease of which,
after her death in 1876, was sold by her son to a Roumanian lady,
along with some of his mother's furniture. This lady is delighted to
chatter about her illustrious predecessor in this apartment, and
allows the favored visitor to sit on the broad couch, covered in dingy
and worn leather, whereon George Sand was fond of reclining in her
last tranquil days, at rest after stormy and laborious years.

There is a hospitable little inn in the Faubourg Saint-Germain
endeared to many of us by memories, joyous or mournful. The Hotel de
France et de Lorraine, in narrow Rue de Beaune, just south of the
quay, was one of the earliest hotels in Paris, and was an approved
resort of the Royalists, before emigration and after Restoration. They
seem still to haunt its court and halls, where there lingers that
atmosphere of decayed Bourbonism, which James Russell Lowell
humorously hits off in a letter written when he was a guest here. The
pervading presence is that of Châteaubriand, and our amiable hosts
have a pride in keeping his apartment--on the first floor, in plain
wood panelling of time-worn gray--much as it was when he wrote, in its
_salon_, his letter of resignation of his post in the Diplomatic
Service, to the First Consul, to be Emperor within two months.
Châteaubriand was in Paris on leave of absence at the time of the
shooting of the Duc d'Enghien, in the ditch of Vincennes on the night
of March 20, 1804, and he refused to serve any longer the man whom he
regarded as an assassin. Just seventeen years earlier these two men
had arrived in Paris, both sub-lieutenants, of nearly the same age,
equally obscure and ambitious, equally without heart. Napoleon
Bonaparte, coming from Corsica, took a room in the Hôtel de
Cherbourg, as we have seen; François-Auguste, Vicomte de
Châteaubriand, coming from his natal town of Saint-Malo, found lodging
in the Hôtel de l'Europe in Rue du Mail. This street, between Porte
Saint-Denis, by which the coaches entered, and Place des Victoires,
where they put up, was full of _hôtels-garnis_ for travellers.
Installed there, Châteaubriand hunted up the great Malesherbes, a
friendly counsellor who put him in the way of meeting men of note;
among others Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, at the top of them all, just
then, with his "Paul et Virginie." These two, the one just fifty, the
other not yet twenty, then in 1787, strolled together in the Jardin du
Roi, forgetting their old world and its worries, in their talks of the
new world and its glories.

During the next two or three years, Châteaubriand came frequently to
Paris, an intent and disgusted onlooker at its doings. He stood, with
his sisters, at their windows in Rue de Richelieu, open on that
September day, when the mob surged by holding aloft on pikes the heads
of Foulon and Berthier. His Royalist stomach revolted, and he joined
his regiment at Rouen, to retire soon from the service, and to sail in
1791 for the new United States, with dreams of distinction as the
discoverer of the Northwest Passage. He dined with George Washington,
to whom he carried a letter from a French officer, who had served in
the colonial army. The President waved aside Châteaubriand's florid
compliments, and advised him to give up his futile quest. The young
Breton wandered far into the new country, and while resting in a
clearing on the Scioto, where now is Chillicothe, Ohio, he read in an
old newspaper of the royal flight to Varennes, and of the enforced
return.

At once he started for France, to offer his sword to his King,
arriving in January, 1792, and in the summer of that year he joined
the growing train of _émigrés_ to England. For eight years he toiled
and starved in London, and returned to Paris in 1800. His passport
bore the name of "Lassague," and he posted, in company, as far as
Porte de l'Étoile. Thence he went on foot down the Champs Élysées,
finding none of the silence and desolation his fancy had pictured,
but, on either hand, lights and music. On the spot where the
guillotine had stood he stopped, provided with the proper emotions. He
crossed Pont Royal, then the westernmost bridge, and betook himself to
lodgings in Rue de Lille, in an _entresol_ of one of the dignified
mansions, that seem still to stand aloof from their _bourgeois_
neighbors. From here, he stole out to his meals, hiding his face
behind his journal, in which he had been reading impassioned praise of
the new book, "Atala," and listened to the other guests speculating as
to the unknown genius who had written it. The picture is to be
cherished, for it is the only known portrait of Châteaubriand, modest
and shrinking. He had brought the manuscript of "Atala" to Paris in
his pocket, and had sought long before securing a publisher. The book
found a public eager for novelty. It came in a period of sterility in
letters, when all the virility of France had been spent in her
colossal wars, and the new century was alert to greet the serene
light of science and literature. That came from all points of the
horizon, but the resplendent figures of these years were Madame de
Staël and Châteaubriand.

These two had nothing in common, but they were not inimical, and
Châteaubriand was one of the minor lions at Madame de Staël's
receptions. For this was a little earlier than 1803, when a more
beneficial air than that of Paris was ordered for her by the First
Consul, whom she bored. This "cyclone of sentiment" must have bored
Mr. Pitt, also, when she visited England during the Terror; for he
seemed to think that the lady did protest too much about the absence
of an equivalent in English for the French word "_sentiment_," and he
replied: "_Mais, Madame, nous l'avons; c'est 'My eye and Betty
Martin.'_" And when she got to Germany she bored Goethe, not only with
her sloppy sentimentality, but with her shapely arms, too lavishly
displayed. There could be no sympathy between the woman, who, in
Sainte-Beuve's words, "could not help being even more French than her
compatriots," and the stuff of whose dreams was a union of the
theories of the dead and of the newly born centuries; and
Châteaubriand, the hard-headed opponent of every revolutionary idea,
who pompously labelled himself "a Bourbon by honor, a Royalist by
reason, and still by taste and nature a Republican"!

A year after his "Atala," in 1802, his "Génie du Christianisme" had
placed him, in the estimation of his country and of himself, on a
literary throne level with the military throne of Bonaparte. The
rhetorical fireworks of this book, corruscating around the Catholic
Church, lighted up the night of scepticism, when worship had been
abolished and God had been outlawed. Yet, as he poetized beyond
recognition the North American savages in his "Atala," so now he
prettified the sanctuary and "gilded the Host." The First Consul,
welcoming any aid in his scheme to use the Church for his own ends,
sent the author to the legation at Rome. We have seen his return.
After this, he moves about Paris, lodging, for a while, he says, "in a
garret" offered him by Madame la Marquise de Coislin, a stanch friend
and stanch Royalist. "Hotel de Coislin" may still be read above the
doorway of the stately mansion that faces Place de la Concorde, at the
western corner of Rue Royale, and aggressive Bourbonism speaks from
its stone pillars and pediment. His garret there was no squalid
lodging. On his return from the Holy Land in 1807, Châteaubriand
planted the Jerusalem pines and cedars of Lebanon he had brought back,
in the garden of "_Vallée-aux-Loups_," a little place he then
purchased near Aulnay, on the south of the city. Here, while the
Empire lasted, he passed years of quiet content, with his wife, his
plants, and his books, but writing no more romance after 1809. In
1817, having a town residence, and finding himself too poor to keep
this country place, he sold it, and new buildings cover the site of
his cottage and garden.

Recalled to active life by the Restoration, Châteaubriand posed as one
who was more Royalist than the King, with a mental reservation of his
platonic fancy for a republic. He was a pretentious statesman, none
too sincere. His pamphlet, "De Buonaparte et des Bourbons," had been
worth an army to the cause, said Louis XVIII., who placed him in the
Chamber of Peers, and in 1822, after a short stay at the Berlin
Embassy, in the Ambassador's residence in London. Lording it there, in
all "the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power," he recalled his former
years of obscurity and privation in London streets, and began his
"Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." In writing about himself he was at his ease,
feeling that he had a subject worthy of his best powers, and these
memoirs have little of the inflated and fantastic mannerisms of his
romances about other people. As to the rest, they are a colossal
monument to his conceit and selfishness. Dismissed suddenly and
indecently by Louis XVIII., from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Châteaubriand was made Ambassador to Rome on the accession of Charles
X., in 1828. He refused to recognize the younger branch of the
Bourbons in 1830, and when the crown was given to Orleans, he strode
out of the Chamber of Peers, and stripped himself of his peer's robe,
with great theatric effect. Appearing no more in public life, he was
active in pamphlets and in the press as an opponent of the new
royalty, which would lead to a republic, he predicted.

"_Châteaubrillant, Vicomte de, Rue de l'Université 25_," is his
address in the _Bottin_ of 1817; a record of interest in its
antiquated spelling of his name, and because this is the house, on the
corner of Rue du Bac, which we shall visit later with Alexandre
Dumas. This three years' lease expiring in 1820, he removed to the
fine old mansion, where he gave reception to young Victor Hugo, to be
described later, at No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique. Its site is covered by
the modern building numbered 197 in Boulevard Saint-Germain, whose
southern side, just here, replaces the same side of Rue
Saint-Dominique, as has been already told. He kept other town
addresses, to which we need not follow him, during his absences on
diplomatic duty. From 1827 to 1838 we find him and Madame de
Châteaubriand in their retired home, in the southern outskirts of the
city. Their 84 Rue d'Enfer is now 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, the old
street name thus punningly extended, in homage to the heroic defender
of Belfort.

The dingy yellow front of the long wall and the low building is broken
by a gate-way, and within is a small lodge on the left, wherein sits a
woman in the costume of a sisterhood. She permits entrance into the
cottage on the right, and you are in Châteaubriand's small _salon_,
the remaining portion of the cottage being now in possession of the
Institution des Jeunes Filles Aveugles, alongside. His portrait in
pencil, and a water-color sketch of his wife, hang on the wall. Her
face shows the boredom and patience that were put into it by her life
with this man of irascible genius and of frequent infidelities. She is
buried behind the altar of the chapel of the Marie-Thérèse Infirmary,
which she founded and carried on, in the devoutness that dwelt in her
soul for the Church, whose appeal to him was in its artistic
endowments. A portion of the revenue that supports this institution
comes from the sale of chocolate, made first to her liking by her
_chef_, and made after his rule ever since. As Soeur Marie shows you
out from the salesroom, alongside this little reception-room, you see
the group of trees in the circular lawn, that was planted by husband
and wife; on the farther side are the dilapidated buildings of their
day, now used for the chocolate _fabrique_; behind the great court
rise the walls of the Infirmary for aged and invalid priests.
Châteaubriand had known, while in Kensington during his exile, many of
the impoverished _curés_ who were, like himself, refugees from the
Revolution; and some of them had followed him here, and had become
domesticated pets of the household, together with the big gray cat
given him by the Pope. To them and their successors in poverty and
illness, he bequeathed this comfortable retreat.

There is an episode of these years that shows a kindly side of
Châteaubriand, that he seldom allows us to see. He was suggested for
the presidency of the republic, adventured by the political clubs for
a year or two after the unwelcome accession of Louis-Philippe.
Châteaubriand did not join the plotters, but he was arrested, along
with many of them, and locked up for two weeks or so. Now, when the
Bourbons had put Béranger in prison, in 1828, Châteaubriand had been
one of the many sympathizers who had flocked to the cell of the
courageous singer. In 1832 the rôles were reversed, and Béranger came
in, from his cottage in Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne, to visit the
imprisoned statesman. And after Châteaubriand's release, he wrote a
charming letter to Béranger, thanking him for that token of
fellow-feeling, and begging him not to "break his lyre," as the
veteran _chansonnier_ had threatened to do, and urging him to go on
"making France smile and weep; for, by a secret known only to you, the
words of your _chansons_ are gay and the airs are plaintive."
Béranger's songs touch no chord now, their plaintiveness is
commonplaceness, his philosophy has no loftiness, his sentimentality
is of the earth earthy, and his lyre is, to us, a tinkling
hurdy-gurdy.

When the young Breton officer walked through Rue du Mail first in
1787, his gaze might have turned, as our gaze turns to-day, to two
striking façades in that street: that of No. 7, built by Colbert,
whose emblematic serpents are carved high up in the capitals of the
heavy columns; and that of No. 12, as stolid as the other is
fantastic, its heaviness not lightened by the two balconies, and their
massive supports, on the wide stone front. It was erected in 1792 by
Berthault, the architect whose work we see at Malmaison and in the
Palais-Royal. Châteaubriand might well have been attracted by this
house, for it was soon to shelter the woman who became later the
lasting influence of his life.

In 1793, at the very top of the Terror, Jacques Récamier brought to
this house his bride not yet sixteen, who had been Mlle.
Jeanne-Françoise-Julie-Adélaïde Bernard. Here they lived for five
years. Their house is unaltered as to fabric, and the original heavy,
circular, stone staircase still mounts to the upper floors. These are
now divided by partitions into small rooms, and the lofty first story
is cut across by an interposed floor; all for the needs of trade. The
ceiling of the grand _salon_ retains its admirable cornice. Like other
mansions on the south side of Rue du Mail, this Récamier house
extended, behind a large court, now roofed over with glass, through to
Rue d'Aboukir, where its rear entrance is at No. 11. On the first
floor of this wing, in the oblong ceiling of a small room, is a deeply
sunk oval panel, that holds a painting of that time, in good
preservation.

From here Jacques Récamier, just then wealthy, removed to the newest
fashionable quarter of which the centre was Rue du Mont-Blanc, now Rue
de la Chaussée-d'Antin, whose No. 7 covers the site of his magnificent
mansion. It was then a street of small and elegant _hôtels_, each in
its own grounds, and M. Récamier bought the one that had belonged to
Necker, and had been confiscated by the State. He bought also the
adjoining house, and rebuilt the two into one. Its furniture,
fittings, bronzes, and marbles were all especially designed for this
new palace of a prosperous financier. Here was the scene of those
balls that were the wonder of Paris during the Consulate and the early
years of the Empire. The costumes of the period, both for men and
women, were picturesque in cut and coloring. Among the guests shone
Caroline Bonaparte, later to marry Murat, the youngest of the sisters
and most resembling her great brother in face and character. M. and
Mme. Récamier spent their summers in a _château_ owned by him in the
suburbs of Clichy; and to it every man of note in the State and the
army found his way. Napoleon said he, too, would be glad to go to
Clichy, if the fair _châtelaine_ would not come to court, and sent
Fouché to arrange it, but with no success. She fought shy of Napoleon,
the man and the Emperor, as Madame de Staël itched for his attention,
personal and political. Nor did Madame Récamier like his brother
Lucien, who languished about her, to the ridicule of his equally
love-lorn rivals.

His justification, and that of all her other adorers, speaks from
David's unfinished canvas in the Louvre. Yet this shows only the outer
shell of her loveliness; within was a lovely nature, simple and
kindly, sympathetic and loyal, that made her generous in her
friendships with men and women, and devoted to the welfare of her
friends. The single passion of her life was her passion for goodness.
Her modesty kept her unconscious of her attractions of mind and body,
and thus she held, almost unaware, the widest dominion of any woman of
her day. The Duchess of Devonshire put it daintily: "First she's good,
next she's _spirituelle_, and after that, she's beautiful." And so, as
we come to know her, we learn infinite respect for the woman, who
"with an unequalled influence over the hearts and wills of men,
scorned to ask a favor, and endured poverty and ... exile, which fell
with tenfold severity on one so beloved and admired, without
sacrifice of dignity and independence."

  [Illustration: Madame Récamier.
   (From the portrait by Gros.)]

Comparative poverty, hurried by the Emperor, came in 1806, and the
town house and the _château_ were sold, along with her plate and
jewels. In 1811 she was exiled from Paris on the pretext that her
_salon_ was a centre of Royalist conspiracy, and she passed the years
until the Restoration in the south of France, in Italy, and in
Switzerland with her beloved Madame de Staël.

Just beyond the Boulevards de la Madeleine and des Capucines, which
show the line of the rampart levelled by Louis XIV., and along the
course of its outer moat, a new street had started up at the end of
the eighteenth century, and was completed in the early years of the
nineteenth century. It began at present Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin,
and ended at the Church of the Madeleine, then in course of
construction; it was built up in the best style of that period, and it
was named Rue Basse-du-Rempart. That untouched section, to the west of
Rue Caumartin, shows us the admirable architecture of the early Empire
in the stately fronts, that shrink back behind the boulevard in
stony-faced protest against its turmoil. Eastwardly from Rue
Caumartin, the northern side of Boulevard des Capucines has trampled
out nearly the whole of the old street. The stones of Place de l'Opéra
lie on the site of the modest house, at 18 Rue Basse-du-Rempart, taken
by M. Récamier after his first business reverses, and occupied by him
during his wife's exile; and the florist's shop, under the Grand
Hôtel, is on the spot of their stately residence at No. 32 of the
same street, after her return and until 1820. In that year, his
fortune regained, he moved farther west in the same street to a more
sumptuous home at No. 48. This house has been happily saved for us,
and is now numbered 18 of Boulevard des Capucines; one of the three
structures of the old street, which stand back from the line of modern
frontage, and lower than the level of modern paving. The present No.
16 is the Récamier coach-entrance, and the huge stabling in the rear
is built on the Récamier gardens. Their house preserves its
wrought-iron balconies, and within is the circular staircase mentioned
in her "Mémoires." Down these stairs, for the last time, she came in
1827, leaving M. Récamier to his disastrous speculations, which had at
last swallowed up her own fortune, and drove to the Abbaye-aux-Bois.
There was her home until her death in 1849.

The venerable mass of the convent is in sight behind the railed-in
court at No. 16 Rue de Sèvres. One portion that we see was built in
1640 for the "_Annonciades_," and from them bought by Anne of Austria,
in 1654, for the sisterhood of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, who had been
driven from their convent near Compiègne by the civil wars of the
Fronde. That wing which was burned in 1661 was speedily rebuilt, and
forms part of the structure before us. Convents had then, and have
still, rooms and apartments which are let or sold to lone spinsters
and widows, and to "decayed gentlewomen who have seen better days."
This Abbaye-aux-Bois, during the Bourbon Restoration, "when the sky
had no horizon," was a favorite retreat for fashionable _dévotes_,
mending their reputations by a temporary retirement. The life there is
pleasantly described in the early letters of Mary Clarke--later Madame
Julius Mohl--who lived there with her mother. M. Bernard, the father
of Madame Récamier, had bought one of its grandest apartments for his
daughter, after the first bankruptcy of her husband. When she came
here it was occupied, and she rented a shabby upper floor for two or
three years, and then went down to her own apartment on the first
floor, to which she added another in the rear of the same floor. It
is in the western wing, of modern construction, with windows on Rue de
Sèvres, and on the terrace that overlooks the garden, now shorn of a
goodly slice by Boulevard Raspail. We know all about this _salon_,
famous for twenty years, the roll of whose frequenters holds every
illustrious name in France during that period, as well as those of
many charlatans and bores.

  [Illustration: The Abbaye-aux-Bois.]

It is reported that Madame Récamier and Châteaubriand met first, in
the earliest years of the century, at the receptions of Madame de
Staël. Whenever they met to become mutually attracted, this attraction
grew in him until it became the dominant sentiment of his life. With
all his elevation of soul and his breadth of mind, he had no depth of
feeling. "I have a head, good, clear, cold," he wrote; "and a heart
that goes jog-trot for three-and-one-half quarters of humanity." The
other one-eighth was Madame Récamier, and she outcounted all the rest
of the world in stirring such heart as he had. "You have transformed
my nature," he tried to make her believe, and he may have believed it
himself. Sick with conceit as he was, spoiled by flattery, morbid from
introspection, her companionship lifted him out of his melancholy and
raised him into serenity. As for her, so long as Madame de Staël
lived, she had no other affection to spare for anyone, and perhaps
this incomparable creature never gave to Châteaubriand more than
homage to her hero, tenderness to the isolated man, and medicine to a
mind diseased. He may well have written, toward the last: "I know
nothing more beautiful nor more good than you."

The "_chemin des vaches_" of the sixteenth century became a country
road by the passage of the drays that carted stone, from the Vaugirard
quarries to the ferry on the southern shore, for the building of the
Tuileries. The Pont Royal of Mansart has taken the place of the wooden
bridge built above that ferry, and the ferry has given the name to
that road, now Rue du Bac. Along its line, on both sides, _seigneurs_
and priests took land and built thereon. There are yet, behind the
huge stone blocks of houses, immense tracts of grounds and of
woodland, unsuspected by the wayfarer through the narrow, noisy
street. One of the most extensive of these open spaces is owned by the
Seminary of the Missions Étrangères, whose church is near the corner
of Rue de Babylone. For two bishops, who had charge here in the time
of Louis XIV., were erected two houses, exactly alike without and
within, and these are now numbered 118 and 120 Rue du Bac. In the
latter in the apartment on the ground floor, M. and Mme. de
Châteaubriand installed themselves in 1838; having left their cottage
and its domain in Rue d'Enfer, to the needy priests there. Here, in an
angle of the front court, are the low stone steps that mount to their
apartment.

  [Illustration: Portal of Châteaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac.]

Its dining-room and a chapel, arranged by them, gave on this court.
The chapel has been thrown into, and made one with, the dining-room,
but this is the only alteration since their time. His bedroom, and
that of his wife--with her huge bird-cages behind--and the _salon_
between the two rooms, looked out on their garden, and beyond it on
the vast grounds of the Missions Étrangères. The enchanting seclusion
was dear to him in these last years, during which his only work was
the completion and touching-up of his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." Select
extracts from the manuscript were sometimes read by him to the group
that assembled in the drawing-room at the _abbaye_, between four and
six o'clock of every afternoon. The hostess sat on one side of the
fireplace, her form grown so fragile that it seemed transparent for
the gentle spirit shining out, like a radiant light within a rich
vase. Châteaubriand "pontificated" in his arm-chair opposite, toying
with the household cat, the while he tried to listen to the lesser
men; "a giant bored by, and smiling pitifully down on, a dwarf world,"
is Amiel's phrase. When Châteaubriand spoke or read, it was with
sonorous tones, and with attitude and gesture of a certain
stateliness. He was always an artist in all details. His costume was
simple and elegant. Short of stature, he made himself shorter by his
way of sinking his head--"an Olympian head," says Lamartine--between
his shoulders. Under his thick-clustering locks rose a noble forehead,
power shone from his eyes, pride curled his lips--too often--and his
expression gave assurance of a glacial reserve.

The day came when he found himself too feeble for the short walk
between his house and the _abbaye_. Then his friend came to him. She
and Madame de Châteaubriand had been sufficiently friendly, but that
good lady gave her days to her prayer-books, and to reading her
husband's books; which she never understood, albeit she had the finest
mind of any woman he had known, he always asserted. She died in the
winter of 1846-47, and her body was carried to the Infirmary, the care
of which had been the occupation and the happiness of her later years.
Jacques Récamier, when in mortal illness in 1830, had been brought to
his wife's rooms in the _abbaye_, at her request and by special favor
of the Mother Superior, and there he had died.

And now, Châteaubriand offered marriage to Madame Récamier, and she
refused what she might have accepted, could it have come a few years
earlier. "But, at our age," she asked, "who can question our intimacy,
or prevent me taking care of you?" She was prevented only by the
cataract that slowly blinded her, and she sat by his bedside,
helpless, while Madame Mohl--who had remained Mary Clarke until the
summer of 1847--wrote his necessary letters. That sympathizing woman,
one of the few congenial to him, had only to come down from the
apartment she had taken on the third floor of this house, overlooking
the gardens; the apartment which she and her learned husband, Julius
Mohl, made the social successor of the Récamier _salon_, through many
years. Châteaubriand's death took place on July 4, 1848. He had lived
to see the Orleans throne, which he hated, overthrown as he had
foretold by the republic, which he did not love. His faithful lady
stood by his deathbed, with Béranger, equally faithful to old friends,
old customs, and old clothes, clad as we see him in his statue of
Square du Temple.

Châteaubriand's funeral service, attended by all that was best in
France, was solemnized in the Church of the Missions Étrangères, next
door, and his body was laid in a rock of the harbor of Saint-Malo.
Madame Récamier went back to her now desolate rooms. On May 10, 1849,
she drove over to the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, on a visit to her
niece, whose husband, M. Lenormant, was its librarian and had his
apartment there. That night she died in that building, in a sudden
seizure of cholera.




THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  [Illustration: The Court of the Pension Vauquer.]




THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC[1]


Set in the front wall of a commonplace house, in the broad main street
of sunny Tours, a tablet records the birth of Balzac in that house, on
the _27 Floréal, An VII._ of the Republic--May 16, 1799--the day of
Saint-Honoré, a saint whose name happened to hit the fancy of the
parents, and they gave it to their son. Many a secluded corner of the
town, many a nook within and about its Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, many
a portrait of its priests, has been brought into his books. And he has
portrayed, with his artist hand, the country round about of the broad
Loire and of bright Touraine, always vivid in his boyish
reminiscences. In his life and his work, however, he was, first and
always, a Parisian. To the great town, with all its mysteries and its
possibilities, his favorite creations surely found their way, however
far from it they started, drawn thither, as was drawn and held their
creator, by its unconquerable authority.

His father had been a lawyer, forced for safety during the Revolution
into army service, and when he was ordered from Tours, in 1814, to
take charge of the commissariat of the First Division of the Army in
Paris, he brought his family with him. Their abode was in Rue de
Thorigny, one of the old Marais streets, and the boy, nearly fifteen,
was put to school in the same street, and later in Rue Saint-Louis,
hard by. Transformed as is this quarter, there yet remain many of the
magnificent mansions with which it was built up in the days of its
grandeur, and their ample halls and rooms and gardens serve admirably
now as schools for boys and for girls. The young Honoré and his Louis
Lambert are one in their pitiful memories of these schools and of
their earlier schooling at the Seminary of Vendôme.

To please his father, the boy, when almost eighteen, went through the
law course of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France. To please
himself he listened, for the sake of their literary charm, to the
lectures of Villemain and Cousin and Guizot, and would rehearse them
with passion when he got home. But he had no love for the arid
literature of the law, and was wont to linger, in his daily walks
along the quays and across the bridges to and from his lecture-rooms,
over the bookstalls, spending his modest allowance for old books,
which he had learned already to select for their worth.

These studies ended, he entered the law office of M. de Merville, a
friend of his father, with whom Eugène Scribe had just before finished
his time, and to whom Jules Janin came for his training a little
later. And these three, unknown to one another, were, as it happened,
of the same mind in their revolt against the drudgery of the desk, and
against the servitude of the attorney, coupled with certain competence
as it might be; and in their preference for that career of letters,
which might mean greater toil, but which brought immediate freedom and
promised not far-off fame, and perhaps fortune, too.

The elder Balzac, severely practical, dreamed no dreams, and was
horrified by his son's refusal to pursue the profession appointed for
him. He foretold speedy starvation, and--perhaps to prepare Honoré for
it--allowed him to try his experiment, for two years, on a hundred
francs or less a month. So, the family having to leave Paris early in
1820, a garret--literally--was rented for the young author, and poorly
furnished by his mother; a painstaking, hard-working, fussy old lady,
who looked on him as a little boy all her life long, who drudged for
him to his last days, and who felt it to be her duty to discipline him
to hardship in these early days! This attic-room was at the top of the
old house No. 9 Rue Lesdiguières, which was swept away by the cutting
of broad Boulevard Henri IV. in 1866-67, its site being in the very
middle of this new street. To wax sentimental--as has a recent
writer--over the present No. 9 as Balzac's abode is touching, but
hardly worth while, that house having no interest for us beyond that
of being of the style and the period of Balzac's house, and serving to
show the shabbiness of his surroundings. These did not touch the young
author, whose garret's rental was within his reach, as was the
_Librairie de Monsieur_; for he gives it the old Bourbon name, and how
it got that name shall be told in our last chapter. It was the Library
of the Arsenal, still open to students as in his days there, in the
building begun by François I. for the casting of cannon, which he made
lighter and easier of carriage, and the casting of which exploded the
Arsenal within twenty years, and with it part of the adjacent Marais.
The Valois kings rebuilt it, Henri IV. enlarged it, and gave it for a
residence to his Grand Master of artillery, Sully, for whom he
decorated the _salons_ as we see them to-day. You may climb the grand
staircase, and stand in the rooms--their gildings fresh, their
paintings bright--occupied by the great minister. In the cabinet that
contains his furniture and fittings is an admirable bust of the King.
And you seem to see the man himself, as he enters, his debonair
swagger covering his secret shamefacedness for fear of a refusal of
his stern treasurer to make the little loan for which he has again
come to beg, to pay his last night's gambling or other debt of honor!

In this library by day, and in his garret by night, Balzac began that
life of terrific toil from which he never ceased until death stopped
his unresting hand. The novels he produced during these years were
hardly noticed then, are quite unknown now; showing no art, giving no
promise. He never owned them, and put them forth under grotesque
pen-names, such as "Horace de Saint-Aubin," "Lord R'hoone"--an anagram
of Honoré--and others equally absurd, all telling of his fondness for
titles.

This garret, in which he lived for fifteen months, is vividly pictured
in "La Peau de Chagrin," written in 1830, as Raphael's room in his
early days, before he became rich and wretched. Balzac's letters to
his sister Laure (Madame Laure de Surville) detail, with delightful
gayety, his exposure to wind and wet within these weather-worn walls;
and his ingenious shifts in daily small expenditure of _sous_ to make
his income serve. He relates how he shopped, how he brought home in
his pockets his scant provender, how he fetched up from the court-pump
his large allowance of water. For he used it lavishly in making his
coffee, that stimulation supplying the place of insufficient food, and
carrying him through his nights of pen-work. Excessive excitation and
excessive toil, begun thus early, went on through all his life, and he
dug his too early grave with his implacable pen. His only outings, by
day or by night, were the long walks that gave him his amazing
acquaintance with every corner of Paris, and his solitary strolls
through the great graveyard of Paris, near at hand. "_Je vais m'égayer
au Père-Lachaise_," he writes to his sister; and there he would climb
to the upper slopes, from which he saw the vast city stretched out.
For he was fond of height and space, and we shall see how he sought
for them in his later dwelling-places.

And in this storm-swept attic he had his first dreams of dwelling in
marble halls. Extreme in everything, he could imagine no half-way
house between a garret and a palace; he began in the one, he ended in
the other, unable to find pause or repose in either!

Dreaming the dreams of Midas, he loved to plunge his favorite young
heroes into floods of sudden soft opulence, and his longings for
luxury found expression in those unceasing schemes for instant wealth
which made him a kindly mock to his companions. His first practical
project was started in 1826, during a temporary sojourn for needed
rest and proper food at his father's new home in Villeparisis,
eighteen miles from Paris, on the edge of the forest of Bondy. He
speedily hurried back to Paris and turned printer and publisher;
bringing out, among other reprints, the complete works of Molière and
of La Fontaine, each with his own introduction, each in one
volume--compact and inconvenient--and, at the end of the year which
saw twenty copies of either sold, the entire editions were got rid of,
to save storage, at the price by weight of their paper. This and other
failures left him in debt, and to pay this debt and to gain quick
fortune, he set up a type-foundry in partnership with a foreman of his
printing-office. The young firm took the establishment at No. 17 Rue
des Marais-Saint-Germain, now Rue Visconti; named for the famous
archæologist who had lived, and in 1818 had died, in that venerable
mansion hard by on the corner of Rue de Seine and Quai Malaquais. We
have already found our way to this short and narrow Rue Visconti, to
visit Jean Cousin and Baptiste du Cerceau, and, last of all, the rival
houses of Racine.

Balzac's establishment, now entirely rebuilt, was as typical a setting
of the scene as any ever invented by that master of scene-setting in
fiction. It may be seen, as it stood until very lately, in its
neighbor No. 15, an exact copy of this vanished No. 17. Its frowning
front, receding as it rises, is pierced with infrequent windows, and
hollowed out by a huge, wide doorway, within which you may see men
casting plates for the press, albeit the successors of "_Balzac et
Barbier_" no longer set type nor print.

"_Balzac H. et Barbier A., Imprimeurs, Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, 17_;"
so appears the firm in the Paris directory for 1827. The senior partner
had not yet assumed the particle "_de_," so proudly worn in later years
when, too, he is labelled in the directory "_homme-de-lettres_," the
title of "_imprimeur_," on which he prided himself because it meant
wealth, having lasted only until the end of 1827 or the beginning of
1828. Printing-office and type-foundry were sold at a ruinous
sacrifice, and Balzac was left with debts of about 120,000 francs; a
burden that nearly broke his back and his heart for many years. He
never went through that narrow street without groaning for its
memories; and for a long time, he told his sister, he had been tempted
to kill himself, as was tempted his hero of "La Peau de Chagrin." In
his "Illusions Perdues" he has painted, in relentless detail, the
cruel capacity of unpaid, or partially paid, debts for piling up
interest. But the helpless despair of David Séchard was, in Balzac
himself, redeemed by a buoyant confidence that never deserted him for
long. To pay his debts, he toiled as did Walter Scott, whom Balzac
admired for this bondage to rectitude, as he admired his genius. All
through the "Comédie Humaine" he dwells on the burden of debt, the
ceaseless struggle to throw it off, by desperate, by dishonorable,
expedients.

On an upper floor of his establishment, Balzac had fitted up a small
but elegant apartment for his living-place, his first attempt to
realize that ideal of a bachelor residence such as those in which he
installed his heroes. This was furnished, of course, on credit, and
when failure came, he removed his belongings to a room at No. 2 Rue de
Tournon, a house quite unchanged to-day. Here his neighbor was the
editor of the "Figaro," Henri de la Touche--his intimate friend then,
later his intimate enemy; a poor creature eaten by envy, whose
specialty it was to turn against former friends and to sneer at old
allies.

Here Balzac finished the book begun in his former room over his works,
"Les Chouans." It was published in 1829, and was the first to bear his
real name as author, the first to show to the reading world of what
sterling stuff he was made. That stuff was not content with the book,
good as it was, and he retouched and bettered it in after years. It
brought him not only readers but editors and publishers; and before
the end of 1830, he had poured forth a flood of novels, tales, and
studies; among them such works as "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote,"
"Physiologie du Mariage," "Gobseck," "Étude de Femme," "Une Passion
dans le Désert," "Un Épisode sous la Terreur," "Catherine de Médicis,"
"Lettres sur Paris"--with "Les Chouans," seventy in all!

Werdet, one of Balzac's publishers--his sole publisher from 1834 to
1837--lived and had his shop near by, at No. 49 Rue de Seine. To his
house, just as it stands to-day, the always impecunious young author
used to come, morning, noon, and night for funds, in payment of work
unfinished, of work not yet begun, often of work never to be done.

From Rue de Tournon he removed, early in 1831, to Rue Cassini, No. 1,
as we find it given in the Paris _Bottin_ of that year. It is a short
street of one block, running from Avenue de l'Observatoire to Rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, and takes its name appropriately from the
Italian astronomer, who was installed in the Observatory, having been
made a citizen of France by Colbert, Louis XIV.'s great Finance Minister.
It is a secluded quarter still, with its own air of isolation and its
own village atmosphere. In 1831 it was really a village, far from
town, and these streets were only country lanes, bordered by infrequent
cottages, dear to the weary Parisian seeking distance and quiet. Three
of them, near together here, harbored famous men at about this period,
and all three have remained intact until lately for the delight of the
pilgrim--that of Châteaubriand, No. 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, that of
Victor Hugo, No. 27 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and this one of Balzac.
His house, destroyed only in 1899, was on the southwest corner of Rue
du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques and Rue Cassini. It was a little cottage of
two stories, with two wings and a small central body, giving on a tiny
court. A misguided Paris journal has claimed, with copious letterpress
and illustrations, the large building at No. 6 Rue Cassini for
Balzac's abode. This is a lamentable error, one of the many met with
in topographical research, by which the traditions of a demolished
house are transplanted to an existing neighbor. This characterless No.
6 carries its own proof that Balzac could never have chosen it, even
were we without the decisive proof given by the _cadastre_ of the
city, lately unearthed by M. G. Lenôtre among the buried archives of
the _Bureau des Contributions Directes_.

In the sunny apartment of the left wing dwelt Balzac and his friend,
Auguste Borget; in the other wing, Jules Sandeau lived alone and
lonely in his recent separation from George Sand. Their separation was
not so absolute as to prevent an occasional visit from her, and an
occasional dinner to her by the three men. She has described one of
these wonderful dinners with much humor; telling how Balzac, when she
started for her home--then on Quai Malaquais--arrayed himself in a
fantastically gorgeous dressing-gown to accompany her; boasting, as
they went, of the four Arabian horses he was about to buy; which he
never bought, but which he quite convinced himself, if not her, that
he already owned! Says Madame Dudevant: "He would, if we had permitted
him, have thus escorted us from one end of Paris to the other." He so
far realized his vision as to set up a tilbury and horse at this
period--about 1832--and exulted in the sensation created by his
magnificence as he drove, clad in his famous blue coat with shining
buttons, and attended by his tiny groom, "_Grain-de-mil_."

This equipage and that gorgeous dressing-gown were but a portion of
the bizarre splendor with which Balzac loved to relieve the squalor of
his debt-ridden days. Here, his creditors forgetting, by them
forgotten, as he fondly hoped, hiding from his friends the furniture
he had salvaged from his wreck, he wantoned in silver toilet-appliances,
in dainty porcelain and _bric-à-brac_; willing to go without soup and
meat--never without his coffee--that he might fill, with egregious
_bibelots_, his "nest of boudoirs _à la marquise_, hung with silk and
edged with lace," to use George Sand's words; boudoirs which he has
described in minute detail, placing them in the preposterous apartment
of "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or."

In his work-room, apart and markedly simple and severe, he began that
series of volumes, amazing in number and vigor, with which he was
resolute to pay his enormous debts. Here, in this little wing, in the
years between 1831 and 1838, he produced, among over sixty others of
less note, such masterpieces as "La Peau de Chagrin," "Le Chef
d'Oeuvre Inconnu," "Le Curé de Tours," "Louis Lambert," "Eugénie
Grandet," "Le Médecin de Campagne," "Le Père Goriot," "La Duchesse de
Langeais," "Illusion Perdues" (first part only), "Le Lys dans la
Vallée," "L'Enfant Maudit," "César Birotteau," "Cent Contes
Drôlatiques" (in three sections), "Séraphita," "La Femme de Trente
Ans," and "Jésus-Christ en Flandres."

In addition to his books, he did journalistic writing, chiefly for
weekly papers; and in 1835 he bought up and took charge of the
"Chronique de Paris," aided by a gallant staff of the cleverest men of
the day. It lived only a few months. In 1840 he started "La Revue
Parisienne," written entirely by himself. It lived three months.

When once at work, Balzac shut himself in his room, often seeing no
one but his faithful servant for many weeks. His work-room was
darkened from all daylight, his table lit only by steady-flamed
candles, shaded with green. A cloistered monk of fiction, he was clad
in his favorite robe of white cashmere, lined with white silk, open at
the throat, with a silken cord about the waist, as we see him on the
canvas of Louis Boulanger. He would get to his table at two in the
morning and leave it at six in the evening; the entire time spent in
writing new manuscript, and in his endless correction of proofs,
except for an hour at six in the morning, for his bath and coffee, an
hour at noon for his frugal breakfast, with frequent coffee
between-times. At six in the evening he dined most simply, and was in
bed and asleep by eight o'clock.

  [Illustration: Honoré de Balzac.
   (From the portrait by Louis Boulanger.)]

With no inborn literary facility, with an inborn artistic conscience
that drove him on in untiring pursuit of perfection, he filled the
vast chasm between his thought and its expression with countless
pen-strokes, and by methods of composition all his own: the exact
reverse of those of Dumas, writing at white heat, never rewriting; or
of Hugo, who said: "I know not the art of soldering an excellence in
the place of a defect, and I correct myself in another work." Balzac
began with a short and sketchy and slip-shod skeleton, making no
attempt toward sequence or style, and sent it, with all its errors, to
the printer. Proofs were returned to him in small sections pasted in
the centre of huge sheets; around whose wide borders soon shot from
the central text rockets and squibs of the author's additions and
corrections, fired by his infuriated fist. The new proofs came back on
similar sheets, to be returned to the printer, again like the web and
tracks of a tipsy spider. This was repeated a dozen or, it is said, a
score of times, always with amplifications, until his type-setters
became palsied lunatics. He overheard one of them, as he entered the
office one day, say: "I've done my hour of Balzac; who takes him
next?" Type-setter, publisher, author were put out of misery only when
the last proof came in, at its foot the magic "_Bon à tirer_."

This stupendous work had been preceded and was accompanied by as
stupendous preparation of details. He dug deep to set the solid
foundations for each structure he meant to build. "I have had to read
_so many_ books," he says, referring to his preliminary toil on
"Louis Lambert." So real were his creations to him--more alive to his
vision than visible creatures about--that he must needs name them
fittingly, and house them appropriately. Invented nomenclature gave no
vitality to them, in his view, and he hunted, on signs and shop-fronts
wherever he went, for real names that meant life, and a special life.
"A name," as he said, "which explains and pictures and proclaims him;
a name that shall be his, that could not possibly belong to any
other." He revelled in his discovery of "Matifat," and "Cardot," and
like oddities. He dragged Léon Gozlan through miles of streets on such
a search, refusing every name they found, until he quivered and
colored before "Marcas" on a tailor's sign; it was the name he had
dreamed of, and he put "Z" before it, "to add a flame, a plume, a star
to the name of names!"

His scenes, too, were set for his personages with appalling care, so
that, as has been well said, he sometimes chokes one with brick and
mortar. He knew his Paris as Dickens knew his London, and found in
unknown streets or unfrequented quarters the scenes he searched long
for, the surroundings demanded by his characters. If his story were
placed in a provincial town, he would write to a friend living there
for a map of the neighborhood, and for accurate details of certain
houses. Or, he would make hurried journeys to distant places: "I am
off to Grenoble," or, "to Alençon"--he wrote to his sister--"where
So-and-so lives:" one of his new personages, already a living
acquaintance to him. In his artistic frenzy for fitting atmosphere he
has, unconsciously, breathed his spirit of unrest into much of his
narrative, and the reader plunges on, out-of-breath, through
chapterless pages of fatiguing detail.

These excursions were not his only outings in later years. He got away
from his desk during the summer months, for welcome journeys to his
own Touraine, and to other lands, and for visits to old family
friends. Always and everywhere he carried his work with him.

And he began to see the world of Paris, and to be seen in that world,
notably in the famous _salon_ of Emile de Girardin and his young wife,
Delphine Gay de Girardin, where the watchword was "Admiration, more
admiration, and still more admiration." He met well-bred women and
illustrious men, whose familiar intercourse polished him, whose
attentions gratified him. The pressure of his present toil removed for
a while, he was fond of emerging from his solitude, and of flashing in
the light of publicity. He was an interested and an interesting
talker, earnest and vehement and often excited in his utterances; yet
frank and merry, and vivid with a "Herculean joviality." His thick
fine black hair was tossed back like a mane from his noble, towering
brow; his nose was square at the end, his lips full and curved, and
hidden partly by a small mustache. His most notable features were his
eyes, brown, spotted with gold, glowing with life and light--"the eyes
of a sovereign, a seer, a subjugator." A great soul shone out of them,
and they redeemed and triumphed over all that was heavy in face and
vulgar in body; for, with a thickness of torso like Mirabeau, and the
neck of a bull, he had his own corpulence. Lamartine says that the
personal impression made by Balzac was that of an element in nature;
he gripped one's brain when speaking, and one's heart when silent.
Moreover, it was an element good as well as strong, unable to be other
than good; and his expression, we know from all who saw it, told of
courage, patience, gentleness, kindliness.

He was commonly as careless of costume as a vagrant school-boy in
outgrown clothes. He would rush from his desk to the printer's or race
away in search of names, clad in his green hunting-jacket with its
copper buttons of foxes' heads, black and gray checked trousers,
pleated at the waist, and held down by straps passing under the huge
high-quartered shoes, tied or untied as might happen, a red silk
kerchief cord-like about his neck, his hat, shaggy and faded, crushed
over his eyes--altogether a grotesque creature! In contrast, he was
gorgeous in his gala toilet of the famous blue coat and massive gold
buttons, and the historic walking-stick, always carried _en grande
tenue_, its great knob aglow with jewels sent him by his countless
feminine adorers.

When Balzac removed with Sandeau, in 1838, to new quarters, he kept
this apartment in Rue Cassini for an occasional retreat, perhaps for a
friendly refuge against the creditors, who became more and more
clamorous in their attentions. The two comrades furnished the lower
floor of their new home most handsomely; mainly with the view of
dazzling urgent publishers, who, as said Balzac, "would give me
nothing for my books if they found me in a garret." Coming to drive a
bargain, these guileless gentry found themselves too timid to haggle
with the owners of such luxury. They could not know that that luxury
was merely hired under cover of a friend's name, and lit up only by
night to blind and bewilder them, while the haughty authors lived by
day in bare discomfort, on a half-furnished upper floor.

Of this mansion only the site remains. It was at No. 17 Rue des
Battailles, on the heights of Chaillot--the suburb between Paris and
Passy--and that street and the Balzac house have been cut away by the
modern Avenue d'Iéna. Retired and high as it was, with its grand view
over river and town, it was not high enough nor far enough away for
this lover of distance and height. He soon tried again to realize his
ideal of a country home by buying, in 1838, three acres of land at
Ville d'Avray, a quarter near Sèvres, on the road to Versailles. On
the ground was a small cottage called, in Louis XIV.'s time, "_Les
Jardies_," still known by that name, and notable in our time as the
country-home of Léon Gambetta, wherein he died. That home remains
exactly as he left it, at No. 14 Rue Gambetta, Ville d'Avray, and has
been placed among the National Monuments of France. It is a shrine for
the former followers of the great tribune, who visit it on each
anniversary of his death. The statue they have erected to their
leader, alongside the house, may be most kindly passed by in silence.

  [Illustration: Les Jardies.]

The glorious view from this spot--embracing the valley of Ville
d'Avray, the slopes opposite, the great city in the distance--was a
delight to Balzac. _Les Jardies_ was a tiny box, having but three
rooms in its two stories, which communicated by a ladder-like
staircase outside. He had tried to improve the place by a partial
rebuilding, and the stairs were forgotten until it was too late to put
them inside. A later tenant has enclosed that absurd outer staircase
within a small addition. His garden walls gave him even more trouble,
for they crumbled and slid down on the grounds of an irate neighbor.
The greater part of that garden has been walled off. Yet the poor
little patch was a domain in his eyes; its one tree and scattered
shrubs grew to a forest in his imagination, and his fancy pictured,
in that confined area, a grand plantation of pineapples, from which he
was to receive a yearly income of 400,000 francs! He had fixed on the
very shop on the boulevards where they were to be sold, and only
Gautier's cold sense prevented the great planter, as he saw himself,
from renting it before he had grown one pineapple!

His rooms were almost bare of furniture, and this was suggested by his
stage directions charcoaled on the plaster walls: "Rosewood panels,"
"Gobelins tapestries," "Venetian mirror," "An inlaid cabinet stands
here," "Here hangs a Raphael." Thus he was content to camp for four or
five years, hoping his house would yet be furnished, and perhaps
believing it was already furnished.

At this time, and for many years, Balzac rented a room over the shop
of his tailor Buisson, at the present No. 112 Rue de Richelieu. His
letters came here always, and he used the place not only for
convenience when in town, but, in connection with other shelters, for
his unceasing evasion of pursuing creditors. A tailor still occupies
that shop, and seems to be prosperous; probably able to collect his
bills from prompter customers than was Balzac.

In 1843, forced to sell _Les Jardies_, he came back into the suburbs,
to a house then No. 19 Rue Basse, at Passy, now No. 47 Rue Raynouard
of that suburb. On the opposite side of the street, at No. 40, is a
modest house, hiding behind its garden-wall. This was the unpretending
home of "_Béranger, poète à Passy_," to quote the Paris _Bottin_. No.
47 is a plain bourgeois dwelling of two stories and attic, wide and
low, standing on the line of the street; in the rear is a court, and
behind that court is the pavilion occupied by Balzac. He had entrance
from the front, and unseen egress by a small gate on the narrow lane
sunk between walls, now named Rue Berton, and so by the quay into
town. This was a need for his furtive goings and comings, at times.

Balzac's work-room here looked out over a superb panorama--across the
winding Seine, over the Champ-de-Mars, and the Invalides' dome, and
all southern Paris, to the hills of Meudon in the distance. This room
he kept austerely furnished, as was his way; while the living
apartments were crowded with the extraordinary collection of rare
furniture, pictures, and costly trifles, which he had begun again to
bring together. To it he gave all the money he could find or get
credit for, and as much thought and labor and time as to his books,
although with little of the knowledge that might have saved him from
frequent swindlers. It was only his intimates who were allowed to
enter these rooms, and they needed, in order to enter them, or the
court or the house on the street, many contrivances and passwords,
constantly changed. He himself posed as "_la Veuve Durand_," or as
"_Madame de Bruguat_," and each visitor had to ask for one of these
fictitious persons; stating, with cheerful irrelevancy: "The season of
plums has arrived," or, "I bring laces from Belgium." Once in, they
found free-hearted greeting and full-handed hospitality, and
occasional little dinners. The good cheer was more toothsome to the
favored _convives_, than were the cheap acrid wines, labelled with
grand names, made drinkable only by the host's fantastic fables of
their vintages and their voyages; believed by _him_, at least, who
dwelt always in his own domain of dreams.

These dinners were not extravagant, and there was no foolish
expenditure in this household at Passy. Balzac wrote later to his
niece, that his cooking there had been done only twice a week, and in
the days between he was content with cold meat and salad, so that each
inmate had cost him only one franc a day. For this man of lavish
outlay for genuine and bogus antiques, this slave to strange
extravagances and colossal debts--partly imaginary--was painfully
economical in his treatment of himself. He thought of money, he wrote
about money. Before him, love had been the only passion allowed in
novels; he put money in its place and found romance in the Code. All
through his life he worked for money to pay his debts, intent on that
one duty. In October, 1844, he wrote two letters, within one week, to
the woman who was to be his wife; in one of them he says that his
dream, almost realized, is to earn before December the paltry twenty
thousand francs that would free him from all debt; in the other he
gloats over recent purchases of _bric-à-brac_, amounting to hundreds
of francs. He saw nothing comically inconsistent in the two letters.

In all his letters, the saddest reading of all letters, there is this
curious commingling of the comic and the sordid. Those, especially,
written to his devoted sister and to the devoted lady who became his
wife at the last, give us most intimate acquaintance with the man;
showing a _man_, indeed, strong and vehement, steadfast and patient;
above all, magnanimous. Self-assertive in his art, eager and insistent
concerning it, he was quite without personal envy or self-seeking.
Said Madame Dudevant: "I saw him often under the shock of great
injustices, literary and personal, and I never heard him say an evil
word of anyone." Nor was there any evil in his life--a life of
sobriety and of chastity, as well as of toil. At the bottom of his
complex nature lay a deep natural affection. This giant of letters,
when nearly fifty years old, signed his letters to his mother, "_Ton
fils soumis_"; so expressing truly his feeling for her, from the day
she had installed him in his mean garret, to that later day, when she
fitted up his grand last mansion. In his letters to those dear to him,
amid clamorous outcries about debts and discomforts, comes a deeper
cry for sympathy and affection. Early in life, he wrote to his sister:
"My two only and immense desires--to be famous and to be loved--will
they ever be satisfied?" To a friend he wrote: "All happiness depends
on courage and work." So, out of his own mouth, we may judge this man
in all fairness.

From this Passy home one night, Balzac and Théophile Gautier went to
the apartment of Roger de Beauvoir, in the Hôtel de Lauzun-Pimodan, on
the Island of Saint-Louis; and thence the three friends took a short
flight into a hashish heaven. Their strange experiences have been
told by their pens, but to us, Balzac's night of drugged dreams is not
so strange as his days of unforced dreams. That which attracts us in
this incident is its scene--one of the grandest of the mansions that
sprang up from the thickets of Île Saint-Louis, as _le Menteur_ has
put it. Built in the middle years of the seventeenth century, it
stands quite unchanged at No. 17 Quai d'Anjou, bearing, simply and
effectively, every mark of Mansart's hand in his later years. Its
first owner followed his friend Fouquet to the Bastille and to
Pignerol; its next tenant came to it from a prison-cell, and went from
it to the very steps of the throne. He was the superb adventurer,
Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Duc de Lauzun, and his family name clings
still to the place, and is cut in gold letters on the black marble
tablet above the door. On that prettiest balcony in Paris, crowded the
prettiest women of Paris, on summer nights, to look at the river fêtes
got up by their showy and braggart Gascon host. Through this portal
have passed Bossuet and Père Lachaise, going in to convert the plain
old Huguenot mother of de Lauzun, who lived retired in her own
isolated chamber through the years of her son's ups and downs. When
her family had gone, came the Marquis de Richelieu, great-nephew of
the great Richelieu, with the bride he had stolen from her convent at
Chaillot--the daughter of Hortense Mancini, niece of Mazarin, and of
her husband, it is alleged. Then came the Pimodan, who was first of
that name, and who gave it to his _hôtel_. It is an admirable relic;
its rooms, with their frescoed ceilings and their panelled walls, are
as remarkable as those of the _château_ of Fontainebleau, and are not
surpassed by any in Paris. The mansion is well worth a visit for
itself and for its memories.

Balzac's Paris--the Paris for which his pen did what Callot and Meryon
did for it with their needles--has been almost entirely pickaxed out
of sight and remembrance. The Revolution, wild-eyed in its mad
"Carmagnole," gave itself time to raze a few houses only, after
clearing the ground of the Bastille, although it had meant much more
destruction; the Empire cut some new streets, and planned some new
quarters; the Bourbons came back and went away again, leaving things
much as they had found them. It remained for Louis-Philippe to begin
"works of public utility," an academic phrase, which being interpreted
signified the tearing down of the old and the building up of the new,
to gratify the grocers and tallow-chandlers whose chosen King he was,
and to fill his own pocket. Yet much of Balzac's stage-setting
remained until it was swept away by Haussmann and his master of the
Second Empire. Such was the wretched Rue du Doyenné, that "narrow
ravine" between the Louvre and Place du Carrousel, where Baron Hulot
first saw _la Marneffe_, and where _la Cousine Bette_ kept guard over
her Polish artist in his squalid garret; doubtless the very garret
known to Balzac in his visits there, when it was tenanted by Arsène
Houssaye, Gautier, Gavarni, and the rest of "Young France, harmless in
its furies." That house, one of a block of black old eighteenth-century
structures, stood where now is the trim little garden behind the
preposterous statue of Gambetta.

History and fiction meet on the steps of Saint-Roch. There César
Birotteau, the ambitious and unlucky perfumer, was "wounded by
Napoleon," on the _13 Vendémiaire_, the day that put the young
Corsican's foot into the stirrup, and gave to the sham-heroic César
that sounding phrase, always thereafter doing duty on his tongue. He
was carried to his shop in Rue Saint-Honoré, on its northern side near
Rue de Castiglione, and hid and bandaged and nursed in his _entresol_.
This part of Rue Saint-Honoré and its length eastward, with its narrow
pavement and its tall, thin houses, is still a part of the picture
Balzac knew and painted; but the business district hereabout has
greatly changed since his day. The Avenue de l'Opéra, and all that
mercantile quarter dear to the American pocket, the Bourse and the
banking-houses about, date from this side of his Paris. Nucingen would
be lost in his old haunts, and Lucien de Rubempré could not recognize
the newspaper world of our day.

The _hôtels_ of the Faubourg Saint-Germain--the splendid mansions of
the splendid eighteenth century, where his Rastignac and his lesser
pet swells lorded it--are now, in many cases, let out in apartments,
their owners content with the one floor that is in keeping with their
diminished fortunes. Undiminished, however, are their traditions and
their prejudices, albeit "_Le Faubourg_" exists no longer, except as
an attitude of mind. Yet, here on the left bank, are still to be
found some of the scenes of the "Comédie Humaine." On Quai Voltaire,
alongside the house in which Voltaire died, is the very same shop of
the antiquary, from whom Raphael de Valentin bought the _peau de
chagrin_. Balzac knew it well, doubtless was swindled there, and
to-day you will find it as crowded with curiosities, as begrimed with
dust, as suggestive of marvels hid in its dusky corners, as when he
haunted it.

Raphael de Valentin lived in the _hôtel-garni_ Saint-Quentin, Rue des
Cordiers. Long before his day, Rousseau had been a tenant of a dirty
room in the same dirty _hôtellerie_, going there because of the
scholarly neighborhood of the place and of its memories, even at that
time. Leibnitz, in 1646, had found it a village inn in a narrow lane,
hardly yet a street. Gustave Planche lived there, and Hégésippe Moreau
died there in 1838--a true poet, starved to death. The old inn and all
its memories and the very street are vanished; and the new buildings
of the Sorbonne cover their site.

  [Illustration: The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the house
   where Voltaire died.]

"One of the most portentous settings of the scene in all the
literature of fiction. In this case there is nothing superfluous;
there is a profound correspondence between the background and the
action." Such is the judgment of so competent a critic as Mr. Henry
James, concerning the house in which is played the poignant tragedy of
"Père Goriot." You will, if you love Balzac, own to the truth of this
statement, when you look upon this striking bit of salvage. It
stands, absolutely unchanged as to externals, at No. 24 Rue
Tournefort; a street named in honor of the great botanist who cleared
the track for Linnæus. In Balzac's day, this street was known by its
original name of Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève; one of the most ancient and
most isolated streets on the southern bank. Once only, through the
centuries, has its immemorial quiet been broken by unseemly noise,
when, in the days of François I., a rowdy gambling-den there, the
"_Tripôt des 11,000 Diables_," did its utmost to justify its name. The
street seems to creep, in subdued self-effacement, over the brow of
Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, away from the Paris of shops and cabs and
electric light. The house stands narrow on the street, its gable
window giving scanty light to poor old Goriot's wretched garret;
framed in it, one may fancy the patient face of the old man, looking
out in mute bewilderment on his selfish, worldly daughters. The place
no longer holds the "_pension bourgeoise de deux sexes et autres_" of
the naïve description on the cards of Madame Vauquer, _née_ Conflans;
and is now let out to families and single tenants. Its gate-way stands
always open, and you may enter without let or hindrance into the
court, and so through to the tiny garden behind, once the pride of
Madame Vauquer, no longer so carefully kept up. You peep into the
small, shabby _salle-à-manger_, on the entrance floor of the house,
and you seem to see the convict Vautrin, manacled, in the clutch of
the _gens-d'armes_, and, cowering before him, the vicious old maid who
has betrayed him. That colossal conception of the great romancer had
found his ideal hiding-place here, as had the forlorn father his
hiding-place, in his self-inflicted poverty. All told, there is no
more convincing pile of brick and mortar in fiction; sought out and
selected by Balzac with as much care and as many journeys as Dickens
gave to his hunt for exactly the right house for Sampson and Sally
Brass.

  [Illustration: The Pension Vauquer.]

While Balzac was still at Passy, after long searching for a new home,
he made purchase, as early as 1846, in the new quarter near the
present Parc Monceaux. That name came from an estate hereabout, once
owned by Philippe Égalité; and his son, the King of the French, and
the shrewdest speculator among the French, was just at this time
exploiting this estate, in company with lesser speculators. The whole
suburb was known as the Quartier Beaujon, from a great banker of the
eighteenth century, whose grand mansion, within its own grounds, had
been partly demolished by the cutting of new streets, leaving only
out-buildings and a pavilion in a small garden. This was the place
bought by Balzac; the house and grounds, dear as they were, costing
much less, as he found, than his furniture, bronzes, porcelains, and
pottery, paintings and their frames--all minutely described in the
collection of _le cousin Pons_. He made a museum, indeed, of this
house, bringing out all his hidden treasures from their various
concealments here and there about town. There was still a pretence of
poverty regarding his new home; he would say to his friends, amazed by
the display: "Nothing of all this is mine. I have furnished this house
for a friend, whom I expect. I am only the guardian and doorkeeper of
this _hôtel_."

The pretty mystery was resolved within a few months, and its solution
explained Balzac's frequent and long absences from Paris after the
winter of 1842-43. These months had been passed at the home of Madame
Ève de Hanska, the Polish widow who was to be his wife. Her home was
in the grand _château_ of Wierzchownie, in the Ukraine, whose present
owner keeps unchanged the furniture of Balzac's apartment, where is
hung his portrait by Boulanger, a gift to Madame de Hanska from her
lover. And from there he brought his bride to Paris in the summer of
1850, their marriage dating from March of that year, after many years
of waiting in patient affection. She had made over--with Balzac's
cordial consent--nearly the whole of her great fortune to her
daughter, her only child, and to that daughter's husband, retaining
but a small income for herself. It was--and the envious world owned
that it was--truly a love-match. They came home to be welcomed, first
of all, by Balzac's aged mother; who had, during his absence, taken
charge of all the preparations, with the same anxious, loving care she
had given to the fitting-up of his garret thirty years before. She had
carried out, in every detail, even to the arrangement of the flowers
in the various rooms, the countless directions he had sent from every
stage of the tedious journey from Wierzchownie.

"And so, the house being finished, death enters," goes the Turkish
proverb. This undaunted mariner, after his stormy voyage, gets into
port and is ship-wrecked there. His premonition of early years,
written to his confidant Dablin in 1830, was proven true: "I foresee
the darkest of destinies for myself; that will be to die when all that
I now wish for shall be about to come to me." As early as in the
preceding summer of 1849, he had ceased to conceal from himself any
longer the malady that others had seen coming since 1843. The long
years of unbroken toil, of combat without pause, of stinted sleep, of
insufficient food, of inadequate exercise, of the steady stimulation
of coffee, had broken the body of this athlete doubled with the monk.
Years before, he had found that the inspiration for work given by
coffee had lessened in length and strength. "It now excites my brain
for only fifteen days consecutively," he had complained; protesting
that Rossini was able to work for the same period on the same
stimulus! So he spurred himself on, listening to none of the warnings
of worn nature nor of watchful friends. "Well, we won't talk about
that now," was always his answer. "In the olden days," says
Sainte-Beuve, "men wrote with their brains; but Balzac wrote, not only
with his brains, but with his blood." And now, he went to pieces all
at once; his heart and stomach could no longer do their work; his
nerves, once of steel and Manila hemp, were torn and jangled, and
snapped at every strain; his very eyesight failed him. The most
pitiful words ever penned by a man-of-letters were scrawled by him, at
the end of a note written by his wife to Gautier, a few weeks after
their home-coming: "_Je ne puis ni lire ni écrire._"

"On the 18th August, 1850"--writes Hugo in "Choses Vues"--"my wife,
who had been during the day to call on Madame Balzac, told me that
Balzac was dying. My uncle, General Louis Hugo, was dining with us,
but as soon as we rose from table, I left him and took a cab to Rue
Fortunée, Quartier Beaujon, where M. de Balzac lived. He had bought
what remained of the _hôtel_ of M. de Beaujon, a few buildings of
which had escaped the general demolition, and out of them he had made
a charming little house, elegantly furnished, with a _porte-cochère_
on the street, and in place of a garden, a long, narrow, paved
court-yard, with flower-beds about it here and there."

  [Illustration:  Plaque marking place of death of Balzac]

It was to No. 14, Allée Fortunée, that Hugo drove. That suburban lane
is now widened into Rue Balzac, and where it meets Rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Honoré there is a bit of garden-wall, and set in it is
a tablet recording the site of this, Balzac's last home. The house
itself has quite vanished, but one can see, above that wall, the upper
part of a stone pavilion with Greek columns, built by him, it is
believed.

"I rang," continues Hugo; "the moon was veiled by clouds; the street
deserted. No one came. I rang again. The gate opened; a woman came
forward, weeping. I gave my name, and was told to enter the _salon_,
which was on the ground floor. On a pedestal opposite the fireplace
was the colossal bust by David. A wax-candle was burning on a handsome
oval table in the middle of the room.... We passed along a corridor,
and up a staircase carpeted in red, and crowded with works of art of
all kinds--vases, pictures, statues, paintings, brackets bearing
porcelains.... I heard a loud and difficult breathing. I was in M. de
Balzac's bedroom.

"The bed was in the middle of the room. M. de Balzac lay in it, his
head supported by a mound of pillows, to which had been added the red
damask cushions of the sofa. His face was purple, almost black,
inclining to the right. The hair was gray, and cut rather short. His
eyes were open and fixed. I saw his side face only, and thus seen, he
was like Napoleon.... I raised the coverlet and took Balzac's hand. It
was moist with perspiration. I pressed it; he made no answer to the
pressure...."

The bust that Hugo saw was done by David d'Angers; a reduced copy
surmounts Balzac's tomb. His portrait, in water-color, painted, within
an hour after his death, by Eugène Giraud, is a touching portrayal of
the man, truer than any made during life, his widow thought. While
long suffering had wasted, it had refined, his face, and into it had
come youth, strength, majesty. It is the head of the Titan, who
carried a pitiable burden through a life of brave labor.

Balzac's death was known in a moment, it would seem, to his creditors,
and they came clamoring to the door, and invaded the house--a ravening
horde, ransacking rooms and hunting for valuables. They drove the
widow away, and she found a temporary home with Madame de Surville, at
47 Rue des Martyrs. This house and number are yet unchanged. Cabinets
and drawers were torn open, and about the grounds were scattered his
letters and papers, sketches of new stories, drafts of contemplated
work--all, that could be, collected by his friends, also hurrying to
the spot. They found manuscripts in the shops around, ready to enwrap
butter and groceries. One characteristic and most valuable letter was
tracked to three places, in three pieces, by an enthusiast, who
rescued the first piece just as it was twisted up and ready to light a
cobbler's pipe.

"He died in the night," continues Hugo. "He was first taken to the Chapel
Beaujon.... The funeral service took place at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule.
As I stood by the coffin, I remembered that there my second daughter
had been baptized. I had not been in the church since.... The
procession crossed Paris, and went by way of the boulevards to
Père-Lachaise. Rain was falling as we left the church, and when we
reached the cemetery. It was one of those days when the heavens seemed
to weep. We walked the whole distance. I was at the head of the coffin
on the right, holding one of the silver tassels of the pall. Alexandre
Dumas was on the other side.... When we reached the grave, which was
on the brow of the hill, the crowd was immense.... The coffin was
lowered into the grave, which is near to those of Charles Nodier and
Casimir Delavigne. The priest said a last prayer and I a few words.
While I was speaking the sun went down. All Paris lay before me, afar
off, in the splendid mists of the sinking orb, the glow of which
seemed to fall into the grave at my feet, as the dull sounds of the
sods dropping on the coffin broke in upon my last words."

Yes, stretched before his grave, lies all Paris, as his Rastignac saw
it, when he turned from the _fosses-communes_, into which they had
just thrown the body of Père Goriot, and with his clinched fist flung
out his grand defiance toward the great, beautiful, cruel city: "_À
nous deux, maintenant!_"

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Just as Balzac was a victim of calumny during life, so, since
death, has he suffered from carelessness. It is almost impossible to
make sure of incidents and dates in his career. These errors begin
with his birth, which is placed on the 20th May by many writers, and
is so cut on the memorial tablet in Paris. In this text, his
birth-date is fixed on the 16th May, on the strength of his family
records, and the statements of his life-long friends. Of these, some
say that he was born on the _27 Floréal_, and others on the day of
Saint-Honoré. No figuring can make these dates fall on any other day
than the 16th May. As for the many conflicting statements concerning
him that have been handed down, in the absence of indisputable
evidence, those alone are accepted here which are most nearly in
keeping with the proven facts and dates in his life.




THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS

  [Illustration: The Figure of d'Artagnan.
   (From the Dumas Monument, by Gustave Doré.)]




THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS


It was in 1823 that Alexandre Dumas, in his twenty-first year, took
coach for Paris from his boyhood-home with his widowed mother, at
Villers-Cotterets. He was set down at the principal landing-place of
the provincial diligences in Place des Victoires, and found a room
near by in an inn at No. 9 Rue du Bouloi. Its old walls are still
there on the street and in the court, and the Hôtel de Blois still
awaits the traveller. Thence he started on foot, at once, for No. 64
Rue du Mont-Blanc, the home of the popular Liberal spokesman in the
Chamber of Deputies, General Foy, an old comrade-in-arms of General
Dumas, to whom his son brought a letter of introduction.

About that house, two years later, a few days after November 28, 1825,
all Paris assembled, while all France mourned, for the burial of this
honest man, whose earnest voice had been heard only in the cause of
freedom and justice. Marked by a tablet, his house still stands, and
is now No. 62 Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin--the renamed Rue du
Mont-Blanc--on the corner of Rue de la Victoire.

Besides this letter, young Dumas carried only a meagre outfit of
luggage, and such meagre education as may be picked up by a clever
and yet an idle lad, in a notary's office in a provincial town.
Indeed, when he was made welcome by General Foy, he was questioned,
too; and, to his chagrin, he was found to be without equipment for any
sort of service. On the strength, however, of his "_belle écriture_,"
he obtained, through the influence of the general, a petty clerkship
in the household of the Duc d'Orléans, coming naturally enough to the
boy from Villers-Cotterets, the country-seat of the Orleans family.
Its stipend of 1,200 francs a year was doubtless munificent in the
eyes of Orleans thrift, and was certainly sufficient for the needs
then of the future owner of Monte-Cristo's millions. He earned his
wage and no more; for his official pen--at his desk in the
Palais-Royal--while doing its strict duty on official documents, was
more gladly busied on his own studies and his own paper-spoiling. For
the author within him had come to life with his first tramping of the
Paris streets and his first taking-in of all that they meant then.

The babies, begotten by French fathers and mothers during the
Napoleonic wars, and during those tremendous years at the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, breathed,
full-lunged, an air of instant and intense vitality. Now, come to
stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, eager to speed the coming of
red-blooded Romanticism and the going of cold and correct Classicism,
showed itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in literature
and the arts, after the sterility of so many years.

When Dumas came to Paris, Lamartine had already, in 1820, charmed the
public by the freshness and grace of his "Méditations." His admirers
were content with the sonorous surface of his vague, spiritual
exaltations, satisfied not to seek for any depth below. Hugo, barely
twenty, had thrilled men with the sounding phrases of his "Odes et
Ballades." These two, coming behind Chénier the herald and
Châteaubriand the van-courier, were imposing pioneers of the great
movement. Even more popular than these two Royalist poets, as they
were regarded, was Casimir Delavigne--already installed over Dumas as
Librarian at the Palais-Royal--rather a classicist in form, yet hailed
as the poet and playwright of the Liberal Opposition. Soulié, not so
well known now as he merits, won his first fame in 1824 by his poems
and plays. De Vigny had brought out his earliest poems in 1822; and
now, "isolated in his ivory tower," he was turning the periods of his
admirable "Cinq-Mars." De Musset was getting ready to try his wings,
and made his first open-air flight in 1828; a flight alone, for the
poet of personal passion joined no flock, ever. Gautier was serving
his apprenticeship to that poetic art, to whose service he gave a
life-long devotion and the most perfect craftsmanship in all France.

"They all come from Châteaubriand," said Goethe, of these and of other
rhymesters of that time. Châteaubriand himself had closed his career
as poet and as imaginative writer as far back as 1809, and had by now
taken his rank as a classic in literature, and in life as a Peer of
France and a Minister of the Bourbons.

But of all the singers of that day it was to Béranger that the public
ear turned most quickly and most kindly; even though he, then
forty-three years of age, might also seem to be of an earlier
generation. Those others touched, with various fingers, the lyre or
the lute; he turned a most melodious hand-organ, with assured and
showy art, and around it the captivated crowd loved to throng, with
enraptured long ears. His cheaply sentimental airs were hummed and
whistled all over France, and, known to everybody everywhere, there
was really no need of his putting them in type on paper, and no need
of his being sent to prison for that crime by Charles X. Yet he had
his turn, soon again, and his _chansons_, as much as any utterance of
man, upset the Bourbon throne and placed Louis-Philippe on that shaky
seat. That most prosaic of monarchs was sung up to the throne, and the
misguided poet soon found him out for what he was.

In prose, during these years, Nodier, Librarian at the Arsenal, was
plying his refined and facile pen. Mérimée showed his hand in 1825,
not to clasp, with any show of sympathy, the hand of any
fellow-worker, yet willing to take his share of the strain. Guizot,
out of active politics for a time, did his most notable pen-work
between 1825 and 1830. His untiring antagonist, Thiers, not yet turned
into the practical politician, produced, between 1823 and 1827, his
"History of the French Revolution," voluminous and untrustworthy; its
author energetically earning Carlyle's epithet, "a brisk little man in
his way." His life-long crony, Mignet, was digging vigorously in dry,
historic dust. Sainte-Beuve left, in 1827, his medical studies for
those critical studies in which he soon showed the master's hand;
notably with his early paper on Hugo's "Odes et Ballades." Michelet
was finding his _métier_ by writing histories for children. The two
Thierry brothers, Augustin and Amédée, proved the genuine historian's
stuff in them as early as 1825. Balzac was working, alone and unknown,
in his garret; and young Sue was handling the naval surgeon's knife,
before learning how to handle the pen.

And nearly all of these, nearly all the fine young fellows who made
the movement of 1830, had got inspiration from Villemain, who had
spoken, constantly and steadfastly, from his platform in the Sorbonne
during the ten years from 1815 to 1825, those sturdy and graphic words
which gave cheer and courage to so many.

There were a similar vitality and fecundity in painting and music and
their sister arts, and the brilliant host stirring for their sake
might be cited along with the unnumbered and unnamable pen-workers of
this teeming decade.

Less aggressive was the theatre. Scribe had possession, flooding the
stage with his comedies, vaudeville, opera-librettos, peopling its
boards with his pasteboard personages. There was call for revolt and
need of life. Talma, near his end, full of honors, devoted to his
very death to his art, longed to fill the rôle of a _man_ on the
boards, after so many years' impersonation of bloodless heroes. So he
told Dumas, who had come to see him only two weeks before his death,
in 1826, when the veteran thought he was recovering from illness--an
illness acceptable to the great tragedian, for it gave him, he pointed
out with pride, the lean frame and pendent cheeks, "beautiful for old
Tiberius"--the new part he was then studying. Death came with his cue
before that rôle could be played.

This wish for a real human being on the boards came home to Dumas,
when he saw the true Shakespeare rendered by Macready and Miss
Smithson at the Salle Favart in 1826. It was Shakespeare, in the
reading before and now in the acting, that helped Dumas more than any
other influence. No Frenchman has comprehended more completely than
Dumas the Englishman's universality, and he used to say that, after
God, Shakespeare was the great creator. His first attempt to put live
men and women on the stage, in "Christine," was crowded out by a
poorer play of the same name, pushed by the powers behind the Comédie
Française. But on its boards, on the evening of February 16, 1829, was
produced his "Henri III. et sa Cour," an instantaneous and
unassailable success. He might have said, in the words of Henri IV. at
Senlis, "My hour has struck"; for from that hour he went on in his
triumphant dramatic career. The Romantic drama had come at last, with
its superb daring, its sounding but spurious sentiment, its
engorgement of adjectives, and its plentiful lack of all sense of the
ludicrous. Perhaps if it had not taken itself so seriously, and had
been blessed with a few grains of the saving salt of humor, it had not
gone stale so soon.

Dumas had removed, soon after coming to town, from the inn in Rue du
Bouloi to another of the same sort just around the corner, Hôtel des
Vieux-Augustins, in the street of the same name--now widened and
renamed Rue Hérold. In the widening they have cut away his inn, at
present No. 12, and that of "_La Providence_," next door at No. 14,
where Charlotte Corday had found a room on coming to Paris, thirty
years before, to visit Monsieur Marat. The sites of the two hotels are
covered by the rear buildings of the Caisse d'Epargne, which fronts on
Rue du Louvre. One ancient house, which saw the arrival of both these
historic travellers, has been left at No. 10; in it was born, on
January 28, 1791, the musician Hérold, composer of "Zampa" and
"Pré-aux-Clercs." Dumas lived for a while later at No. 1 Place des
Italiens, now Place Boïeldieu. In the summer of 1824 he brought his
good mother to town, and took rooms on the second floor of No. 53 Rue
du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, next door to the old _cabaret_, "_Au Lion
d'Argent_." Mother and son soon after moved across the river, where he
found for her a home in Rue Madame, and found for himself an apartment
at No. 25 Rue de l'Université, on the southeastern corner of Rue du
Bac. There had been an illustrious tenant of this house, in 1816 and
1817, who was named Châteaubriand. Dumas, in his "Mémoires," gives
both the third and the fourth floors for his abode, as he happens to
feel like fixing them. He had windows on both streets, and he fitted
up the rooms "with a certain elegance." Shoppers at the big
establishment, "_Au petit Saint-Thomas_," may explore its annex and
mount to Dumas's rooms in the house that now hides its stately façade
and its entrance _perron_ in the court behind modern structures. Here
he remained from 1824 to 1833, making a longer stay than in any of the
many camping-places of his migratory career. And here he gave his name
to his most memorable endowment to the French drama, in the person of
his only son, born on July 29, 1824, at the home of the mother,
Marie-Catherine Lebay, a dressmaker, living at No. 1 Place des
Italiens, where Dumas had had his rooms. On March 17, 1831, the father
formally owned the son by _l'acte de reconnaissance_, signed and
recorded at the office of the mayor of the Second Arrondissement, May
6, 1831. So came into legal existence "Alexandre Dumas, _fils_."

Portions of the child's early life were passed with his father, but
separations became more frequent and more prolonged, as the boy
developed his own marked character--in striking contrast with that of
the elder. Their mutual attitude came, before many years, to be as
queer and as tragi-comic as any attitudes invented by either of them
for the stage. The son used to say, in later life, that he seemed to
be the elderly guardian and counsellor of the father--a
happy-go-lucky, improvident, chance child. For the son of the
Parisienne had inherited her hard shrewdness along with his father's
dramatic range, and this happy commingling of the stronger qualities
of the parents gave him his special powers.

The doings of the elder Dumas during the famous three days of July,
1830, would make an amusing chapter. Eager to play the part of his own
boisterous heroes, he flung himself, with hot-headed and bombastic
ardor, into throne-upsetting and throne-setting-up. Of course he
allied himself with the opponents of Louis-Philippe--possibly in keen
memory of his monthly hundred francs worth of drudgery--and of course
the success of the Orleanists left him with no further chance for
place or patronage.

So his pen was his only ally, and it soon proved itself to be no
broken reed, but a strong staff for support. Strong as it was and
unresting, no one pen could do even the manual labor required by the
endless volumes he poured forth. In 1844, having finished
"Monte-Cristo," he followed it by "The Three Musketeers," and then he
put out no less than forty volumes in that same year; each volume
bearing his name as sole author. But this sturdy and undaunted toiler
was no laborious recluse, like Balzac, and he was surrounded by clerks
for research, secretaries for writing, young and unknown authors for
collaborating; reserving, for his own hand, those final telling
touches that give warmth and color to the canvas signed by him. His
"victims," as they are described in the "Fabrique de Romans, Maison
Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie," a malicious exposure, are hardly
subjects for sympathy; they earned money not otherwise within their
power to earn, and not one of them produced, before or after, any work
of individual distinction. In his historical romances, their work is
evident in the study and research that give an accuracy not commonly
credited to Dumas and about which he never bothered. The _belle
insouciance_ of his touch is to be seen in the dash of the narrative,
and above all in the dialogues, not only in their dramatic force and
fire, but in their growing long-windedness. For he was paid by the
line at a royal rate, and he learned the trick of making his lines too
short and his dialogues too long, his paymasters complained. And, as
he went on, it must be owned that he used his name in unworthy ways,
not only for books of no value and for journalistic paltriness, but
for shameless signature to shopkeepers' puffs, composed for coin.

As the volumes poured out, money poured in, and poured out again as
freely. For he was a spendthrift of the old _régime_, spending not
only for his own caprices, but for his friends and flatterers and
hangers-on. He made many foolish ventures, too, such as building his
own theatre and running it; and he squandered fabulous sums in his
desire to make real, at Saint-Gratien, his dream of a palace fit for
Monte-Cristo himself. The very dogs abused his big-hearted
hospitality, quartering themselves on him there, until his favorite
servant, under pretence of fear of the unlucky number thirteen, to
which they had come, begged to be allowed to send some of them away.
He gave up his attempt toward reformatory thrift when Dumas ordered
him to find a fourteenth dog! He would have drained dry a king's
treasury, and have bankrupted Monte-Cristo's island of buried
millions. Yet with all his ostentatious swagger and his preposterous
tomfoolery, he had a childlike rapture in spending, and a manly joy in
giving, that disarm stingy censure. The lover of the romancer must
mourn for the man, growing poorer as he grew older, and must regret
the degrading shifts at which he snatched for money, by which he sank
to be a mountebank in his declining years. Toward the last his purse
held fewer _sous_ than it held when he came to Paris to hunt for them.

From his eight years' home in Rue de l'Université, Dumas crossed the
Seine, preferring always thereafter the flashily fashionable quarters
of the northern side; and none of his numerous dwellings henceforward
are worth visiting for their character or color. For nearly two years
he lived in a great mansion, No. 40 Rue Saint-Lazare, in other rooms
of which George Sand lived a little later. His next home, from 1835 to
1837, at 30 Rue Bleue, has been cut away by Rue Lafayette. From 1838
to 1843 he had an apartment, occasionally shared by his son, at No. 22
Rue de Rivoli, between Place des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Roch.

Twenty-five years after the death of the father, when the son, as he
says, was older and grayer than his father had ever grown to be, a
letter to him was written by that son. It is an exquisite piece of
literature. He brings back their life in this apartment, when,
twenty-two years apart in their birth, they were really of the same
age. He tells how he, a young man going early to his studies, left the
elder at his desk, already at work at seven in the morning, clad only
in trousers and shirt, the latter with open neck and rolled-up
sleeves. At seven in the evening his son would find him planted there
still at work, his mid-day breakfast often cold at his side, forgotten
and untouched! Then these two would dine, and dine well, for the
father loved to play the cook, and he was a master of that craft. All
the while he was preparing the _plats_ he would prattle of his heroes,
what they'd done that day, and what he imagined they might do on the
next day. And then the letter calls back to the father that evening, a
little later, when he was found by his son sunk in an armchair,
red-eyed and wretched, and mournfully explained: "Porthos is dead!
I've just killed him, and I couldn't help crying over him!" It must
have been at this period that the romancer tried to secure his son as
his permanent paid critic, offering him 25,000 francs a year, and
"you'll have nothing to do but to make objections." The offer was
declined, and rightly declined.

It was in this and in his succeeding residences--Rue de Richelieu,
109, in 1844, and Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, 45, in 1845--that he
brought out in newspaper _feuilletons_ "The Count of Monte-Cristo,"
and "The Three Musketeers," these amazing successes written from day
to day to keep pace with the press. In 1846, while his address was at
No. 10 Rue Joubert, he was in Spain with the Duc de Montpensier, one
of his many companions among princes. They, along with other cronies,
male and female, more or less worthy, found Dumas at Saint-Germain
from 1847 to 1854. Then, suddenly, he disappeared into Belgium, "for
reasons not wholly unconnected with financial reverses," as he and his
only peer in fiction, Micawber, would have put it. He was in town
again in 1856, at No. 77 Rue d'Amsterdam, and there remained until
1866, when he rushed off to the head-quarters of the "Dictator of
Sicily," Garibaldi, to whom Dumas appointed himself aide and
messenger. Between 1866 and 1870 his residence was at 107 Boulevard
Malesherbes. On the coming of the Prussians, he was carried, ailing
and feeble, to his country-place at Puys, near Dieppe, where he died
December 5, 1870. His public burial was delayed until the close of the
war, and then, in 1872, was solemnized in the presence of all that was
notable in French art and literature, at his birthplace and his
boyhood-home, Villers-Cotterets.

When Dumas was asked how a monument might be erected in memory of a
dead pen-worker, who in life had been misunderstood and maligned, he
replied: "Use the stones thrown at him while he lived, and you'll have
a tremendous monument." The lovers in all lands of the great romancer
could well have brought together more telling stones than those that
make Doré's monument in Place Malesherbes, near his last Paris home.
And yet, curiously weak in its general impression, its details are
effective. The group in front is well imagined: a girl is reading to a
young student, and to an old, barefooted workman; on the other side is
our hero d'Artagnan. The seated statue of Dumas, on too tall a
pedestal, is an admirable portrait, with his own vigorous poise of
head and gallant regard.

In 1864 the American Minister to France, Mr. John Bigelow, breakfasted
with Dumas at Saint-Gratien, near Paris, where the romancer was
temporarily sojourning. It was toward the close of our Civil War, and
he had a notion of going to the United States as war-correspondent for
French papers, and to make another book, of course. Mr. Bigelow gives
an accurate and admirable description of the host, as he greeted him
at the entrance of his villa; over six feet in height, corpulent, but
well proportioned; a brown skin, a head low and narrow in front,
enlarging as it receded, covered with crisp, bushy hair growing gray,
thick lips, a large mouth, and enormous neck. Partly African and
wholly stalwart, from his negress grandmother, he would have been a
handsome creature but for his rapidly retreating forehead. But in his
features and his expression nothing showed that was sordid or selfish,
and his smile was very sweet.

  [Illustration: Alexandre Dumas.]

Dumas lives and will never die as long as men love strength and
daring, loyalty and generosity, good love-making and good fighting. He
has put his own tenderness and frankness and vivacity into the real
personages, whom he has reanimated and refined; and into the ideal
personages, whom he has made as real as the actual historic men and
women who throng his thrilling pages. His own virility and lust of
life are there, too, without one prurient page in all his thousands.
And he tells his delightful stories not only with charm and wit, but
in clean-cut, straightforward words, with no making of phrases.

Very little of the Valois Paris is left to-day, and the searcher for
the scenery familiar to Margot and to Chicot must be content with what
is left of the Old Louvre, and of the then new Renaissance Louvre as
it was known to the grandchildren of its builder, François I. Of the
old, the outer walls and the great central tower are outlined by light
stones in the darker pavement of the southwest corner of the present
court. Of the new structure, as we see it, the cold and cheerless
Salle des Caryatides lights up unwillingly to us with the brilliancy
of the marriage festival of Marguerite de France and Henri de Navarre,
as it is pictured by Dumas. This festivity followed the religious
ceremony, that had taken place under the grand portal of Notre-Dame,
for Henry's heresy forbade his marriage within. He and his _suite_
strolled about the cloisters while she went in to mass. In this hall
of the Caryatides his body, in customary effigy, lay in state after
the assassination. There is no change in these walls since that day,
except that a vaulted ceiling took the place, in 1806, of the original
oaken beams, which had served for rare hangings, not of tapestries,
but of men. The long corridors and square rooms above, peopled
peaceably by pictures now, echoed to the rushing of frightened feet on
the night of Saint Bartholomew, when Margot saved the life of her
husband that was and of her lover that was to be. Hidden within the
massive walls of Philippe-Auguste's building is a spiral stairway of
his time, connecting the Salle des Sept Cheminées with the floor
below, and beneath that with the cumbrous underground portions of his
Old Louvre. As one gropes down the worn steps, around the sharp turns
deep below the surface, visions appear of Valois conspiracy and of the
intrigues of the Florentine Queen-Mother.

Here the wily creature had triumphed at last after waiting through
weary years of humiliated wifehood; passed, such of them as Henri II.
was willing to waste in Paris far from his beloved Touraine, in the
old Palais des Tournelles. We shall visit, in another chapter, that
residence of the early kings of France, when they had become kings of
France in more than name.

After the accidental killing of Henry at the hand of Montmorency in
the lists of this palace, his widow urged its immediate destruction,
and this was accomplished within a few years. One portion of the site
became a favorite duelling-ground, and it was here--exactly in the
southeastern corner of Place des Vosges, where now nursemaids play
with their charges and romping schoolboys raise the dust--that was
fought, on Sunday, April 27, 1578, the duel, as famous in history as
in the pages of Dumas, between the three followers of the Duc de Guise
and the three _mignons_ of Henri III. Those of the six who were not
left dead on the ground were borne away desperately wounded. The
instigator of the duel, Quélus--"_un des grands mignons du roy_"--lay
for over a month, slowly dying of his nineteen wounds, in the Hôtel de
Boissy, hard by in Rue Saint-Antoine, which the King had had closed to
traffic with chains. By his bedside Henri spent many hours every day,
offering, with sobs, 100,000 francs to the surgeon who should save
him.

Not far from this house of death, in Rue Saint-Antoine too, was a
little house, very much alive, for it belonged to Marguerite--Navarre
only in name--to which none may follow her save the favored one to
whom her latest caprice has given a nocturnal meeting. She is carried
there, under cover of her closed litter, whenever her mother, never
her husband, shows undue solicitude concerning her erratic career.

In the same street, on the corner of Rue Sainte-Catherine, now
Sévigné--where stand new stone and brick structures--was the town
house of the Comte de Monsoreau. To this house, says Brantôme, Bussy
d'Amboise, done with Margot, was lured by a note written by the
countess, under her husband's orders and eyes, giving her lover,
Bussy, his usual _rendezvous_ during the count's absence. _This_ time
the count was at home, with a gang of his armed men; and on this
corner, on the night of August 19, 1579, the gallant was duly and
thoroughly done to death, not quite so dramatically as Dumas narrates
it in one of his magnificent fights.

This Rue Saint-Antoine was, in those days, hardly less of a bustling
thoroughfare than in our days, albeit it was then a country road,
unpaved, unlighted, bordered by great gardens with great mansions
within them, or small dwellings between them. Outside Porte
Saint-Antoine--that gate in the town wall alongside the Bastille where
now is the end of Rue de la Bastille--on the road to Vincennes, was La
Roquette, a _maison-de-plaisance_ of the Valois kings. Hence the title
of the modern prisons, on the same site. It was a favorite resort of
the wretched third Henry, that shameless compound of sensuality and
superstition; and it was on his way there, at the end of Rue de la
Roquette, that the vicious little lame Duchesse de Montpensier had
plotted to waylay him, and to cut his hair down to a tonsure with the
gold scissors she carried so long at her girdle for that very use. He
had had two crowns, she said--of Poland and of France--and she meant
to give him a third, and make a monk of him, for the sake of her
scheming brother, the Duc de Guise. The plot was betrayed, just as
Dumas details, by one Nicolas Poulain, a lieutenant of the Prévôt of
the Île de France, in the service of the League.

Gorenflot's priory--a vast Jacobin priory--was on the same road, just
beyond the Bastille. To visit him out here came Chicot, almost as
vivid a creation in our affections as d'Artagnan. Once, when the fat
and esurient monk was fasting, Chicot tormented him with a description
of their dinner awhile ago, near Porte Montmartre, when they had teal
from the marshes of the Grange Batelière--where runs now the street
of that name--washed down with the best of Burgundy, _la Romanée_.
These two dined most frequently and most amply, at "_La Corne
d'Abondance_"--a _cabaret_ on the east side of Rue Saint-Jacques,
opposite the cloisters and the gardens of Saint-Benoît, where the boy
François Villon had lived more than a century before. Either of the
two shabby, aged hotels, still left at one corner of the old street
may serve for Chicot's pet eating-place. His dwelling was in Rue des
Augustins, now Rue des Grands-Augustins. Where that street meets the
quay of the same name, is a restaurant dear to legal and medical and
lay _gourmets_, where those two noble diners would be enchanted to
dine to-day. Near Chicot's later dwelling in Rue de Bussy--now spelt
"Buci"--was the inn, "The Sword of the Brave Chevalier," which served
as the meeting-place of the Forty-five Guardsmen, on their arrival in
Paris. You may find, in that same street, the lineal descendant of
that inn, dirty and disreputable and modernized as to name, but still
haunted for us by those forty-five gallant Gascon gentlemen.

The striking change of atmosphere, from the Valois court to the
regency of Marie de' Medici and the reign of the two great cardinals,
is shown clearly in the pages of Dumas, with his perhaps unconscious
subtlety of intuition. We greet with delight the entrance into Paris
of a certain raw Gascon youth mounted on his ludicrously colored
steed, and we are eager to follow him to the _hôtel_ of the Duc de
Tréville in Rue du Vieux-Colombier. This street stretches now, as
then, between Place de Saint-Sulpice and Place de la Croix-Rouge, but
it has been widened and wholly rebuilt, and the courtyard that bustled
with armed men, and every stone of de Tréville's head-quarters, have
vanished.

The _hôtel_ of his temporary enemy, Duc de La Trémouille, always full
of Huguenots, the King complained, was in Rue Saint-Dominique, at No.
63, in that eastern end cut away by Boulevard Saint-Germain. This had
been the Trémouille mansion for only about a century, since the
original family home had been given over to Chancellor Dubourg. Built
by the founder of the family, Gui de La Trémoille--as it was then
spelt--the great fighter who died in 1398, that superb specimen of
fourteenth-century architecture, with additions late in the fifteenth
and early in the sixteenth centuries, stood at the corner of Rues des
Bourdonnais and de Béthisy--two of the oldest streets on the north
bank--until the piercing of Rue de Rivoli in 1844 compelled its
destruction. Fragments of its fine Gothic carvings are set in the wall
of the court of No. 31 Rue des Bourdonnais, a building which occupies
a portion of the original site. On the front of this house is an
admirable iron balcony of later date. And just above, at No. 39 of
this street, over the entrance gate of the remaining wing of another
mediæval mansion, is a superbly carved stone mask of an old man with a
once gilded beard.

It was the new Hôtel La Trémouille, on the south side of the river,
not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, that was nearly wrecked by de
Tréville's guardsmen, running to the rescue of d'Artagnan on that
morning of his duel with Bernajoux, and of his danger from the
onslaught of de La Trémouille's retainers.

That duel ought to be good enough for us, but we have a hankering for
the most dramatic and delightful of all duels in fiction. To get to
its ground, we may follow either of the four friends, each coming his
own way, each through streets changed but slightly even yet, all four
coming out together at the corner of Rues de Vaugirard and Cassette;
where stands an ancient wall, its moss-covered coping overshadowed by
straggling trees, through whose branches shows the roof of a chapel.
It is the chapel, and about it are the grounds, of the Carmes
Déchaussés. A pair of these gentry, sent by Pope Paul V., had appeared
in Paris in the year of the assassination of Henri IV., and drew the
devout to the little chapel they built here in the fields. The order
grew rapidly in numbers and in wealth, acquiring a vast extent of
ground; roughly outlined now by Rues de Vaugirard, du Regard, du
Cherche-Midi and Cassette. The corner-stone of the new chapel, that
which we see, was laid by the Regent Marie de' Medici on July 26,
1613. Beyond its entrance, along the street, rise modern buildings;
but behind the entrance in the western end of the wall, near Rue
d'Assas, stands one of the original structures of the Barefooted
Carmelites. This was used for a prison during the Revolution, and no
spot in all Paris shows so graphic a scene of the September Massacres.
Nothing of the prison has been taken away or altered. Here are the
iron bars put then in the windows of the ground floor on the garden
side. At the top of that stone staircase the butchers crowded about
that door; out through it came their victims, to be hurled down these
same steps, clinging to this same railing; along these garden walks
some of them ran, and were beaten down at the foot of yonder dark
wall. This garden has not been changed since then, except that a large
portion was shorn away by the cutting of Rues d'Assas and de Rennes
and the Boulevard Raspail.

The narrow and untravelled lane, now become Rue Cassette, and the
unfrequented thoroughfare, now Rue de Vaugirard, between the monastery
and the Luxembourg Gardens--which then reached thus far--met at just
such a secluded spot as was sought by duellists; and this wall, intact
in its antique ruggedness, saw--so far as anybody or anything saw--the
brilliant fight between five of Richelieu's henchmen, led by the keen
swordsman Jussac, and Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, aided by the
volunteered sword of d'Artagnan; the sword he had meant to match
against each one of the three, at whose side he found himself fighting
in the end. And so, cemented by much young blood, was framed that
goodly fellowship, of such constancy and vitality as to control kings
and outwit cardinals and confound all France, as the lover of Dumas
must needs believe!

Not only the duelling ground, but many of the scenes of "The Three
Musketeers" are to be looked for in this quarter, near to de
Tréville's dwelling; where, too, the four friends, inseparable by
day, were not far apart at night, for they lived "just around the
corner," one from the other.

  [Illustration: The Wall of the Carmelites.]

Athos had his rooms, "within two steps of the Luxembourg," in Rue
Ferou, still having that name, still much as he saw it. Those few,
whom the taciturn Grimaud allowed to enter, found tasteful furnishing,
with a few relics of past splendor; notably, a daintily damascened
sword of the time of François I., its jewelled hilt alone worth a
fortune. The vainglorious Porthos would have given ten years of his
life for that sword, but it was never sold nor pledged by Athos.

Porthos, himself, lived in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, _he used to say_;
and he gave grandiloquent descriptions of the superb furniture and
rich decorations of his apartment. Whenever he passed with a friend
through this street, he would raise his head and point out the
house--before which his valet, Mousqueton, was always seen strutting
in full fig--and proudly announce, "_That_ is my abode." But he never
invited that friend to enter, and he was never to be found at home. So
that one is led to suspect that his grand apartment is akin to his
gorgeous corselet, having only a showy front and nothing behind! We
know that his "fine lady," his "duchess," his "princess"--she was
promoted with his swelling mood--was simply a Madame Coquenard, wife
of a mean lawyer, living in Rue aux Ours. That dingy street, named
from a corruption of the ancient "_Rue où l'on cuit des oies_,"
between Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, has been partly cut away by
Rue Étienne-Marcel; but its tall, hide-bound, tight-fisted houses,
that are left, make vivid to us those scrimped Sunday dinners, at
which Porthos was famished even more than the already starved
apprentices; and bring home to us his artful working on the lady's
credulous infatuation, that he might get his outfit from her
husband's strongbox.

The wily Aramis let his real duchess pass, with his friends, for the
niece of his doctor, or for a waiting-maid. She was, indeed, a _grande
dame_, beautiful and bold, devoted to political and personal intrigue,
the finest flower of the court of that day. Marie de Rohan, Duchesse
de Chevreuse, known as "_la Frondeuse Duchesse_," was the trusted
friend of Anne of Austria, and the active adversary of Richelieu and
of Mazarin, and exiled from Paris by each in turn. She plays as busy a
rôle in history as in Dumas. The daughter of Hercule de Rohan, Duc de
Montbazon, and the wife of Charles d'Albert, Duc de Luynes, and, after
his death, of Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse, this zealous
recruit of the Fronde naturally had her "fling" in private as well as
in public life. Her Hôtel de Chevreuse et de Luynes was one of the
grandest mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, as it originally
stood at No. 31 Rue Saint-Dominique. The cutting of Boulevard
Saint-Germain, leaving it No. 201 of that boulevard, has shorn off its
two wings and its great front court. The main body, which remains, is
impressive in the simple, stately dignity stamped on it by Mansart,
who gave to it his own roof. Its first-floor _salons_ and chambers,
lofty and spacious, glow with the ornate mouldings and decorations of
that period, mellowed by the sombre splendors of its tapestries. Much
of the garden--once a rural park within city limits--has been cut away
by Boulevard Raspail, but from that street one sees, over the new
boundary wall, wide-spreading trees that strike a welcome note of
green amid surrounding stone. The latest _Bottin_, with no room for
romance within its covers, gives the Comtesse de Chevreuse as tenant
of the house, along with other tenants, to whom she lets her upper
floors.

Aramis was not a guest at that mansion, his rôle being that of her
host at his own apartment; daintily furnished and adorned, in harmony
with his taste and that of his frequent visitor. His comrades in the
troop had infrequent privilege of admission. His apartment, on the
ground floor, easy of entrance, was in Rue de Vaugirard, just east of
Rue Cassette, and his windows looked out on the Luxembourg Gardens
opposite. There were three small rooms, communicating, and the bedroom
behind gave on a tiny garden, all his own, green and shady and well
shut in from prying eyes. The whole place forms a most fitting
_entourage_ for the youthful priest who, after this episode of arms
and of intrigue, was to rise so high in the Church, and who has always
been, to all readers, the least congenial of the four musketeers.

To the most sympathetic of them, d'Artagnan, dearer to us than all the
others, we are eager to turn. The real d'Artagnan of history, who
succeeded de Tréville in command of the Guards, has left his memoirs,
possibly written by another hand under his guidance. They are
commonplace and coarse, broad as well as long, and leave us with no
distinct portrait of the man. Our d'Artagnan, bodied forth from that
ineffective sketch by the large brush that never niggled, might serve
as an under-study for Henri IV.; equally brave and resourceful,
equally buoyant in peril and ready in disaster; with the same
guileless and ingenuous candor that covered and carried off the
craftiness beneath. The Gascon, no less than the Béarnais, was master
of the jaunty artlessness of an astute and artful dodgery, a
_fausse-bonhomie_ that is yet delicious and endears them both to us.

Stroll down Rue Servandoni, in its short length from Rue de Vaugirard
to Rue Palatine against Saint-Sulpice Church--the architect of whose
western towers, Servandoni, gave his name to this street--and you will
not fail to find, among the old houses still left, one which might
have sheltered d'Artagnan during his early days in de Tréville's
troop. This street was then known as Rue des Fossoyeurs, and, still as
narrow though not quite so dirty as in d'Artagnan's day, has been
mostly rebuilt. His apartment--"a sort of garret," made up of one
bedroom and a tiny room in which Planchet slept--was at the top of a
house, given as No. 12 and No. 14 in different chapters, owned by the
objectionable and intrusive husband of the beloved Constance. For her
sake, d'Artagnan remains in these poor rooms, and there his three
friends say good-by to Paris and to him, now lieutenant of the famous
troop.

"Twenty Years After" we find our friend, but slightly sobered by those
years, in search of a good lodging and of a good table. He fell on
both at the inn, "_La Chevrette_," kept by the pretty Flemish
Madeleine, in Rue Tiquetonne. Once a path on the outer side of the
ditch, north of the town-wall, named for Rogier Tiquetonne, or
Quinquetonne, a rich baker of the fourteenth century, that narrow
curved street is, still, as to most of its length, a village highway
in the centre of Paris. Its tall-fronted houses rise on either hand
almost as he saw them. Among them is the Hôtel de Picardie, and it is
out of reason to doubt that d'Artagnan, in memory of Planchet--for
Planchet came from Picardy--was attracted by the name and made search
therein for suitable rooms. Or, it may please our fancy to believe
that this inn bore then the sign of The Kid, and that the kindly
hostess changed its name, later, in memory of Planchet, grown
prosperous and rich.

D'Artagnan, mounting still higher in rank and income while here, went
down lower in the inn; and one fine morning said to his landlady:
"Madeleine, give me your apartment on the first floor. Now that I am
captain of the Royal Musketeers, I must make an appearance;
nevertheless, still keep my room on the fifth story for me, one never
knows what may happen!"

Good Master Planchet, sometime valet, and lifelong friend of the great
d'Artagnan, turned grocer, and lived over his shop at the sign of "_Le
Pilon d'Or_," in Rue des Lombards. This had been a street of bankers
and money-dealers in the outset, and it was named, to alter De
Quincey's ornate reference to another Lombard Street, after the
Lombards or Milanese, who affiliated an infant commerce to the matron
splendors of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. When the financial
centre went westward, this street was invaded by the grocers and
spice-dealers, who hold it to this day. Its narrow length is still
fragrant with the descendants of the spices in which Planchet traded,
and of the raisins into which d'Artagnan plunged his hands so
greedily.

  [Illustration: Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hôtel de Picardie.]

To those of us who go through the short and stupid Rue de la Harpe of
our Paris, it is puzzling to read of its re-echoing with the ceaseless
clatter of troopers riding through. But in those old days, and up to a
comparatively recent date, it was one of the important arteries of
circulation between the southern side of the town and the Island; the
most frequented road between the Louvre and the Luxembourg, when they
were both royal residences. It started from the little open _place_,
now enlarged and boasting its fountain, where Rue Monsieur-le-Prince
comes out opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, and curved down to the
river-bank, and to the first Pont Saint-Michel. It was the only long,
unbroken thoroughfare to the west of Rue Saint-Jacques, that street
leading to Petit-Pont, and so across the Island to Notre-Dame Bridge.
So Rue de la Harpe was a crowded highway, bordered by busy shops. Its
western side was done wholly away with by the cutting of Boulevard
Saint-Michel, and that broad boulevard has usurped the site of most of
the old street; its eastern side saved only in that section along the
Cluny garden.

D'Artagnan, while living on the left bank in his early days, made his
way by this street to visit his flame Lady de Winter. That dangerous
adventuress is domiciled by Dumas at No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des
Vosges, the number of the house still the same. It is a historic
house, and its story is told in our Hugo pages. Dumas was one of the
frequenters of Hugo's apartment there, and made use of it and its
approaches in "The Three Musketeers."

When Athos came to town, in later years, it was his custom to put up
at the _auberge_, "_Au Grand Roi Charlemagne_," in Rue Guénégaud; a
street bearing still its old name, but the inn has gone. So, too, has
gone the sign of The Fox, in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, where he found
quarters for himself and his son Bragelonne, twenty years after. He
brought the youth here, to the scenes of his own youth, hoping to
launch him in a like career of arms.

From there, the two went, one night, across the river to a house in
the Marais, known to all the footmen and sedan-chairmen of Paris, says
Dumas; a house not of a great lord or of a great lady, and where was
neither dancing, dining, nor card-playing; yet it was the favorite
resort of the men best worth knowing in Paris. It was the abode of
"_le petit Scarron_." About his chair, wherein he was held helpless by
his paralysis, met especially the enemies of Mazarin, the witty and
lewd rhymesters of the Fronde--not one of them as witty or as lewd as
was the crippled host. Yet some _soupçon_ of decency had been brought
into his house by his young wife; the poor country girl of sixteen,
Françoise d'Aubigné, who accepted the puny paralytic of forty and
more, rather than go into a convent. After his death she became Madame
de Maintenon, and later Queen of France, by her secret marriage with
Louis XIV., as old and almost as decrepit as was her first husband.

Dumas has brought Scarron to this house a few years later than history
warrants, and he places the house in Rue des Tournelles, while it was
really a short step from there, being at the corner of Rues des
Douze-Portes and de Saint-Louis, now Rue Turenne. We shall visit it in
our final stroll.

With the going of time came the loosening of the ties that held the
great quartette together; yet, each passing on his own way, all were
ready to reunite, at any moment, for a new deed of emprise and for the
joy of countless readers. We spare ourselves the pain of seeing them
at that cruel moment when they found themselves on opposing sides,
blade crossing blade. We take leave of Aramis, the Bishop, deep in the
intrigues dear to his plotting spirit; of Porthos, complacent in his
wealth, growing more corpulent at his well-spread table; of Athos,
sedate and dignified, content in the tranquil life of his beloved
_château_, at Blois.

And d'Artagnan? Most fitting in _his_ eyes, mayhap, would it be to
take our last look at him in the height of his glory, host of the
Hôtel de Tréville, receiving the King at his own table. We prefer,
rather, to hold him in memory just when Athos introduces his old
comrade to the assemblage at Blois, as "Monsieur le Chevalier
d'Artagnan, Lieutenant of his Majesty's Musketeers, a devoted friend
and one of the most excellent and brave gentlemen I have ever known."

The reading world echoes his words. In the whole range of fiction
there exists no gentleman more excellent and more brave!




THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO




THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO


When Madame Hugo brought her two younger boys, Eugène and Victor, to
Paris in 1808, she took a temporary lodging in Rue de Clichy, until
she found an apartment with a garden, on the southern side of the
Seine. In this part of the town, where gardens, such as she needed,
are plentiful even yet, she sought all her future abodes. Her first home
in this quarter was near the old Church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.
Victor, then six years old, could never recall its exact site, after
he grew up, and could not say if the house were still standing. This
ground-floor apartment proved to be too small for the small family;
which was soon installed, a few steps farther south, in a roomy old
house within its own garden. It was a portion of the ancient Convent
of the Feuillantines, left untouched by the Revolution, at Impasse des
Feuillantines, No. 12--an isolated mansion in a deserted corner of
southern Paris. The great garden running wild, its fine old trees, and
its ruined chapel, claimed the first place in the recollections of
Victor's boyhood; "a religious and beloved souvenir," he fondly
regarded it.

This homely paradise has disappeared; partly invaded by the aggressive
builder, and partly cut away to make room for Rue d'Ulm, called by
Hugo a "big and useless street." The greater portion of the site of
his house and garden is now covered by the huge buildings of one of
the city schools. By a curious coincidence, at No. 12 Rue des
Feuillantines--which must not be confused, as it is often confused,
with the Impasse of the same name--there stands just such an old
house, in the midst of just such gardens, shaded by just such old
trees, as Hugo describes in the pathetic reminiscences of his youth,
and as those of us remember, who saw his old home, only a few years
ago.

His childish memories went back, also, to his days at school in Rue
Saint-Jacques, not far from home; and to a night lit up by the
illumination of all Paris, in celebration of the birth of the little
King of Rome, in 1811. This was just before the sudden journey of the
three to Madrid to join General Hugo. The delineation of the boy
Marius, swaying between his clashing relatives, is a vivid drawing of
the attitude, during these and later years, of the young Victor,
leaning at times toward his Bourbonist mother, at times toward his
Bonapartist father. Of that gallant soldier, whose hunt for "Fra
Diavolo"--the nickname of a real outlaw--seems to belong rather to the
realm of fiction than of fact, one hears but little in his son's early
history. Except to send for them from Madrid, and except for his brief
appearance in Paris, during the Hundred Days, General Hugo seldom saw
and scarcely influenced these two younger sons during their boyhood.

Once more in Paris, and for awhile at the Feuillantines, we find the
devoted mother settling herself and her sons, on the last day of the
year 1813, in a roomy old building of the time of Louis XV., in Rue du
Cherche-Midi. Her rooms were on the ground floor, as usual, with easy
access to the health-giving garden, and the boys slept above. There
was a court in front, in which, during the occupation of Paris by the
Allies, were quartered a Prussian officer and forty of his men; to the
disgust of the mother, and to the joy of her boys, captivated by
soldierly gewgaws. The site of court and house and garden is covered
by a grim military prison, in which history has been made in the
closing years of the nineteenth century.

On the other side of the street, at the corner of Rue du Regard, was
and is the Hôtel de Toulouse, a seventeenth-century structure, named
for its former occupant, the Comte de Toulouse, son of Madame de
Montespan. It was used as a prison early in the nineteenth century,
and since then it has been the seat of the Conseil-de-Guerre; famous,
or infamous, in our day, as the head-quarters of the Court-Martial.
The wide façade on the court has no distinction, nor has the "Tribunal
of Military Justice" on the first floor; to which we mount by the
broad staircase at the left of the entrance-door. Above are the
living-rooms of the commandant, who was a Monsieur Foucher at that
time, with whose family, the Hugo family, already acquainted, formed
now a lasting friendship. It was this intimacy that made their home
here the brightest spot in Hugo's boyish horizon.

  [Illustration: The Hôtel de Toulouse.]

When Napoleon's return from Elba brought his old officers back to
their allegiance, General Hugo hurried to Paris, and, before hurrying
away again, placed his boys in a boarding-school--the Abbaye Cordier,
in Rue Sainte-Marguerite. This was a gloomy little street, dingy with
the smoke of the smiths' forges that filled it, elbowed in among
equally narrow ways between the prison of the Abbaye--then standing
where now runs the roadway of modern Boulevard Saint-Germain--and the
Cour du Dragon. This superb relic of ancient Paris has been left
untouched, and the carved dragon above its great arched entrance looks
down, out of the past, on modern Rue de Rennes. Rue Sainte-Marguerite
has been less lucky, for such small section of it, as remained after
the cutting of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue de Rennes, is mainly
rebuilt, and renamed Rue Gozlin.

A little later, Victor was advanced to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the
college of many another Frenchman who became famous in after life,
notably of Molière. These two youths saw the same buildings of the
Lycée and studied in the same rooms; for it was demolished and rebuilt
only under the Second Empire. It stood--and the new structure
stands--in Rue Saint-Jacques, behind the Collége de France. It was
something of a stretch for youthful legs by the roundabout way between
college and home, but he plodded sturdily along, that solemn lad,
taking himself and all he did as seriously then as when he became a
Peer of France, and the self-elected Leader of a Cause.

In 1818 Madame Hugo and her boys came to a new home on the third floor
of No. 18 Rue des Petits-Augustins, in a wing of that old _abbaye_ of
the Augustin fathers, which had given its name to the street, now Rue
Bonaparte. The entrance court, on that street, of the École des
Beaux-Arts, covers the site of this wing, and the school has replaced
the rest of the monastery, saving, within its modern walls, only the
chapel built by Queen Marguerite. In the old court and the old
buildings behind, at that time, were stored tombs of French kings and
historic monuments and historic bones, removed from their original
grounds, as has been told in our Molière chapter, to save them from
mutilation at the hands of the Revolutionary Patriots. On this queer
assemblage the boys' room looked down; their mother, from her front
windows, looked down on the remains of the vast gardens of the Hôtel
de La Rochefoucauld, once a portion of the grounds of Marguerite, that
stretched to the north of Rue Visconti, between Rues de Seine and
Bonaparte. The view, so far below, could not compensate Madame Hugo
for the loss of her own garden, which meant sun and air and health.
She drooped and fell ill, and her only solace was the devotion of her
son Victor. Whenever she was able to go out, they spent their evenings
with the Foucher family, at the Hôtel de Toulouse. While the boys sat
silent, listening to the talk of their elders, Victor's eyes were
busy, and they taught him that Adèle Foucher was good to look upon.
These two children walked, open-eyed, into love, as simply and as
naturally as did Cosette and Marius; and after a brief period of storm
and stress, their marriage came in due time, and they began their long
and happy life together.

This Hugo home in Rue des Petits-Augustins, rising right in front of
all who came along Rue des Beaux-Arts, was a familiar sight to a young
Englishman, about ten years after this time. His name was William
Makepeace Thackeray, and he was lodging in this latter street among
other students of the Latin Quarter, and trying to make a passable
artist with the material given him by nature for the making of an
unsurpassable author. His way lay in front of the old _abbaye_, each
time he went to or from the schools, or his modest restaurant.
Thirion was the host of this cheap feeding-place, esteemed by art
students, on the northern side of old Rue des Boucheries; of which
this side and some of its buildings have been saved, while the street
itself has been carried away in the wider stream of Boulevard
Saint-Germain. There, at No. 160, to-day, you will find the same
restaurant, under the same name on the sign, and the same rooms,
swarming with students as during Thackeray's days in Paris.

In 1821, at the end of her term of three years in the _abbaye_, Madame
Hugo took her sons and her furniture directly up Rue Bonaparte and
turned into Rue des Mézières, and in its No. 10 they were soon settled
in a ground floor with its garden. The great new building at No. 8
stands on the site of house and court and garden. There is left, of
their day there, only the two-storied cottage on the western end of
No. 6 Rue des Mézières--then No. 8--which preserves the image of the
Hugo cottage, and brings back the aspect of the street as they saw it,
countrified with just such cottages.

Early in their residence here, Victor was honored by a summons to
visit Châteaubriand, long the literary idol of the schoolboy, who had
written in his diary, when only fourteen: "I will be Châteaubriand or
nothing!" For he had begun to rhyme already at the Cordier school, and
in his seventeenth year he had established, in collaboration with his
eldest brother, Abel, "Le Conservateur Littéraire," a bi-monthly of
poetry, criticism, politics, most of it written by Victor. It lived
from December, 1819, to March, 1821, and its scarce copies are prized
by collectors. Now the precocious boy's ode "On the death of the Duke
of Berry"--assassinated by Louvel in February, 1820, in Rue Rameau, on
the southern side of Square Louvois, then the site of the
opera-house--had fallen under the eye of Châteaubriand, who was
reported to have dubbed him "The Sublime Child." Châteaubriand denied
this utterance, in later years, but agreed to let it stand, since the
phrase had become "consecrated." It was at the door of No. 27 Rue
Saint-Dominique, then the residence of the elder author, that the
young poet knocked in those early days of his fame; and here, a little
later, he was invited by the diplomat to join his Embassy to Berlin.
Madame Hugo's health prevented the acceptance of this flattering
offer.

While still at this home in Rue des Mézières, Victor received another
honor in a call from Lamartine, the lately and loudly acclaimed author
of "Les Méditations," who was then about thirty-one years of age. In a
letter, written many years after, Lamartine described this first
meeting: "Youth is the time for forming friendships. I love Hugo
because I knew and loved him at a period of life when the heart is
still expanding within the breast.... I found myself on the ground
floor of an obscure house at the end of a court. There a grave,
melancholy mother was industriously instructing some boys of various
ages--her sons. She showed me into a low room a little apart, at the
farther end of which, either reading or writing, sat a studious youth
with a fine massive head, intelligent and thoughtful. This was Victor
Hugo, the man whose pen can now charm or terrify the world."

The grave, melancholy mother died in the early summer of 1821, and her
bereaved sons carried her body across the Place, to the Church, of
Saint-Sulpice and then to the Cemetery of Mont-Parnasse. On the
evening of that day of the burial, Victor returned to the cemetery,
and there, overcome with grief and choked by sobs, the boy of only
nineteen wandered alone for hours, recalling his mother's image and
repeating her name. Seeking blindly for some comforting presence, he
found his way, that same night, to the Hôtel de Toulouse, for a
glimpse of Adèle Foucher. Unseen himself, he saw her dancing, all
unconscious of his mother's death and his heart-breaking loss.

After weeks of wretched loneliness, young Hugo went to live, with a
country cousin just come to town, on the top floor of No. 30 Rue du
Dragon. This street is connected with the court of the same name by a
narrow passage under the houses at the western end of the court. No.
30 is still standing, a high, shabby old building, that yet suggests
its better days. In the belvedere high above the attic windows, Hugo
lived the life of his Marius, keeping body and soul together on a
slender income of 700 francs a year. Luckier than Marius, who could
only follow Cosette and the old convict in the Luxembourg Gardens,
Hugo was allowed little walks there with his adored lady, her mother
always accompanying them. This chaperonage did not prevent the secret
slipping of letters between the lovers' hands, and many of these have
been preserved for future publication.

It was at this time that the Post-office officials held up, in their
_cabinet-noir_, a letter from Hugo, offering the shelter of his one
room, "_au cinquième_," to a young fellow implicated in the conspiracy
of Saumur, and hiding from the royal police. Hugo makes this offer,
his letter explains, in pure sympathy for a misguided young man in
peril of arrest and death; his own allegiance to the throne being so
established as to permit him to give this aid with no danger to
himself and no discredit to his loyalty. The letter was copied,
resealed, sent on its way; the copy was carried to Louis XVIII., and
so moved him--_not_ in the direction meant by his officials--that he
made inquiry about its writer, and presently gave him a pension. This
incident was not known to Hugo until many years after.

Among the men who visited him in this garret was Alfred de Vigny, then
a captain in the Royal Guard, and dreaming only, as yet, of his
"Cinq-Mars." Hugo was dreaming many dreams, too, over his work, and
his brightest dream became a reality in October, 1822, when, in
Saint-Sulpice's Chapel of the Virgin--the chapel from which his mother
had been buried eighteen months earlier--was performed the Church part
of his marriage with Adèle Foucher. The wedding banquet was given at
the Hôtel de Toulouse by her father, who had been won over to this
immediate marriage, despite the delay he had urged because of the
youth of the bride and the poverty of the bridegroom.

The young couple, whose combined ages barely reached thirty-five,
found modest quarters for awhile in Rue du Cherche-Midi, near her and
his former homes, and then removed to No. 90 Rue de Vaugirard. Their
abode, cut away by the piercing of that end of Rue Saint-Placide, is
replaced by the new building still numbered 90 Rue de Vaugirard, near
the corner of Rue de l'Abbé-Grégoire.

In this first real home of his married life, Hugo produced his "Hans
d'Islande" and his "Bug Jargal"--the latter rewritten from a crude
early work--by which, poor things though they were, he earned money,
as well as by his poems, poured forth in ungrudging flood. In the
ranks of the Classicists at first, he soon fell into line with the
Romanticists, and by 1827 he was the acknowledged leader of "_La Jeune
France_." On his marriage, he had been allotted the pension, already
alluded to, of 1,500 francs yearly, by Louis XVIII., in recognition of
his Royalist rhymings, and this sum was doubled in 1823.

With their growing fortune, the young couple allowed themselves more
commodious quarters. These they found, early in 1828, in a house
behind No. 11 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a street somewhat curtailed
in its length by the cutting of Rue de Rennes, and the old No. 11 is
now No. 27. A long alley, once a rural lane between bordering trees,
leads to the modest house hidden away from the street. Quiet enough
to-day, it was quieter then, when it was really in the Fields of Our
Lady, in that quarter of the town endeared to Hugo by his several
boyhood-homes.

The long, low cottage, since divided and numbered 27 and 29, still
faces the street, just as when he first passed under its northern end
into the lane, with his young wife. She writes, in her entrancing
"Life of Victor Hugo, by a Witness": "The avenue was continued by a
garden, whose laburnums touched the windows of his rooms. A lawn
extended to a rustic bridge, the branches of which grew green in
summer." The rustic bridge, the lawn, and the laburnums are no longer
to be found, but the house is untouched, save by time and the
elements. Behind those windows of the second floor, where was their
apartment, was written "Marion Delorme," his strongest dramatic work,
in the short time between the 1st and the 24th of June, 1829; and
there he read it to invited friends, among whom sat Balzac, just then
finishing, in his own painstaking way, "Les Chouans." In October of
this year "Hernani" was written and put on the boards of the Comédie
Française, long before reluctant censors allowed "Marion Delorme" to
be played.

To these rooms came, of evenings, those brilliant young fellows and
those who were bent on being brilliant, who made the vanguard of the
Romanticists. Here was formed "_le Cénacle_," of which curious circle
we shall soon see more. Here Sainte-Beuve dropped in, from his rooms a
few doors off, at No. 19, now No. 37, Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs;
dropped in too frequently, for the "smiling critic" came rather to
smile on young Madame Hugo than for other companionship. Sometimes of
an afternoon, such of the group as were walkers would start for a long
stroll out to and over the low hills surrounding the southern suburbs,
to see the sun set beyond the plains of Vanves and Montrouge. As they
returned they would rest and quench their modest thirst in a suburban
_guinguette_ and listen to the shrill fiddling of "_la mère Saguet_."
All this and much more is told in Hugo's verse. The town has grown
around and beyond the tavern, where it stands on the southwestern
corner of Rue de Vanves and Avenue du Maine, its two stories and steep
roof and dormer windows all like an old village inn going to decay.

One day, late in 1828, Hugo started from his house for the prison of
the Grande-Force, to visit Béranger. The simple-seeming old singer,
during his nine months' imprisonment, had an "at home" every day,
receiving crowds of men eminent in politics and in letters. His
conviction made one of the most potent counts in the indictment of the
Bourbons by the populace, two years later.

It was in this way that Hugo had opportunity to study the prison, in
such quick and accurate detail, as enabled him to make that dramatic
description of the escape of Thénardier; an escape made possible, at
the last, by little Gavroche, fetched from his palatial lodging in the
belly of the huge plaster elephant on Place de la Bastille, on the
very night of his giving shelter to the two lost Thénardier boys,
whom he--the heroic, pathetic, grotesque creature--didn't know to be
his brothers any more than he knew he was going to rescue his father!

This prison had been the Hôtel du Roi-de-Sicile, away back in the
"middling ages," and had been enlarged and renamed many times, until
it came, about 1700, to Caumont, Duc de La Force, whose name clung to
it until its demolition early in the Second Empire. Taken in 1754 by
the Government, Necker made of it what was then considered a "model
prison," to please the King, and to placate himself and the
philosophers about him, righteously irate with the horrors of the
Grand-Châtelet. The Terror packed its many buildings, surrounding
inner courts, with political prisoners, and killed most of them in the
September Massacres. Its main entrance was on the northern side of Rue
du Roi-de-Sicile, near Rue Malher, recently cut. Just at the
southwestern junction of those two streets, stood--men yet living have
seen it--the _borne_ (a large stone planted beside the roadway to keep
wheels from contact with the bordering buildings), on which was hacked
off the head of the Princesse de Lamballe, as she was led from that
entrance to be "_élargie_," on the morning of September 3, 1792.

The landlady of the Hugo household had retired from trade with enough
money to buy this quiet place, set far back from this quiet street,
intending to end her days in an ideal resting-place. From the first,
her smug comfort had been violated by many queer visitors, and when
"Hernani" made its hit, there was a ceaseless procession of the
author's noisy admirers, by night and by day, on her staircase and
over her head--she had kept the ground floor for her tranquil
retreat--until the maddened woman gave Monsieur Hugo "notice to quit."
She liked her tenants, she hastened to say, she felt for the poor
young wife in _her_ loss of sleep, and, above all, she pitied her for
having a husband "who had taken to such a dreadful trade!"

So they had to move, and late in 1830, or early in 1831, they went
across the river to No. 9 Rue Jean-Goujon, where, in an isolated house
surrounded by gardens, in the midst of the then deserted and desolate
Champs-Élysées, they could be as noisy as they and their friends
chose. Soon after coming here they took their new daughter and their
last child, Adèle, to Saint-Philippe-du-Roule for her baptism, as Hugo
recalled, twenty years later, at Balzac's burial service in the same
church. But here, despite the fields that tempted to walks in all
directions, Hugo shut himself in and shut out his friends. For he was
bound, by contract with his publisher, to produce "Notre-Dame de
Paris" within a few months. With his eye for effect, he put on a
coarse, gray, woollen garment, reaching from neck to ankles, locked up
his coats and hats, and went to work, stopping only to eat and sleep.
He began his melodramatic book to the booming of the cannon of a
Parisian insurrection, and he ended it in exactly five and one-half
months, just as he had got to the last drop of ink in the bottle he
had bought at the beginning. He thought of calling this romance "What
there is in a Bottle of Ink," but gave that title to Alphonse Karr,
who used it later for a collection of stories. Goethe's verdict on
"Notre-Dame de Paris" must stand; it is a dull and tiresome show of
marionettes.

This house has gone, that street has been rebuilt, the whole quarter
has a new face and an altered aspect. After his book was finished,
Hugo hurried out to see the barricades of 1832, which he has glorified
in "Les Misérables." At this time, too--by way of contrast--he permits
a glimpse of his undisturbed home life. It is seen by a friend, who,
"ushered into a large room, furnished with simple but elegant taste,
was struck with the womanly beauty of Madame Hugo, who had one of her
children on her knee." When he saw the poet, sitting reading by the
fireside close by, "he was vividly impressed with the resemblance of
the entire scene to one of Van Dyck's finest pictures."

During the rehearsals of "Le Roi s'Amuse," in October, 1832, Hugo
found time to settle himself and his family in the apartment on the
second floor of No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des Vosges. We shall
prowl about this historic spot when we come to explore the Marais;
just now, only this apartment and this house come under our scrutiny.
It was one of the earliest and grandest mansions of this grand square,
and took its title of Hôtel de Guéménée when that family held
possession in 1630. Ten years later one of its floors was tenanted by
Marion Delorme, whose gorgeous coach with four horses drew a crowd to
that south-eastern corner whenever she alighted, and whose dainty
rooms drew a crowd of another sort on her evenings, so much the vogue.
They were the gathering-place of the swells of her day, of dignitaries
of the court and the Church, of men famous in letters and science, all
attracted by the charm and wit and polish of this young woman. In his
"Cinq-Mars," de Vigny brings together in her _salon_, among many
nameless fine people, Descartes, Grotius, Corneille--fresh from his
latest success, "Cinna"--and a youth of eighteen, Poquelin, afterward
Molière. This is well enough, but he goes too far in his fancy for a
telling picture, and drags in Milton, shy and silent. John Milton had
long before passed through Paris, on his way home from Italy, and was
then busy over controversial pamphlets in London. Nor can the English
reader take seriously the recitation, urged on "_le jeune Anglais_,"
of passages from his "Paradise Lost"--written twenty years later--a
recitation quite comprehended by this exclusively French audience. For
the Delorme is moved to tears, and Georges Scudéry to censure, so
shocked are his religious scruples and his poetic taste! De Vigny is
surer of his stepping when on French ground, and plausibly makes
Marion a spy on the conspirators, in the pay of Richelieu. At that
time, during the construction of his Palais-Cardinal--now the
Palais-Royal--his residence was diagonally opposite No. 6, in the
northwestern corner of Place Royale. That corner has been cut through,
and his house cut away, by the prolongation of Rue des Vosges along
that side of the square. It has been said that the cardinal's hunting
to death of Cinq-Mars was less a punishment for the conspiracy against
King and State than a personal vengeance on the dandy, with a hundred
pairs of boots, who had supplanted him with Mlle. Delorme. The Marais
streets knew them both well. Cinq-Mars lived with his father in the
family Hôtel d'Effiat, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, demolished in 1882.
Marion did not pine long after his execution, but went her way gayly,
until she was driven by her debts to a pretended death and a sham
funeral, at which she peeped from these windows. She sank out of sight
of men, and died in earnest, before she had come to forty years, in
her mother's apartment in Rue de Thorigny, leaving a fortune in fine
lace and not a _sou_ in cash for her burial.

De Vigny proves his intimate acquaintance with this house, during
Hugo's residence, by his use of its back entrance for the confederates
of Cinq-Mars, making their way to Delorme's house, on the night of
their betrayal. And Dumas makes this entrance serve for d'Artagnan in
his visits to Lady de Winter and to her attractive maid.

That entrance is still in existence from Rue Saint-Antoine, by way of
the Impasse--then Cul-de-sac--Guéménée, and at its end through a small
gate into the court, and so by a back door into the house. Through
that rear entrance crowded a squad of the National Guard, from Rue
Saint-Antoine, during the street fighting of February, 1848,
intending by this route to enter the square unseen, and secure it
against the regular troops of Louis-Philippe. Some few among them
amused themselves by mounting the stairs and invading Hugo's deserted
apartment. He had gone, that day, at the head of a detachment of the
royal force, not leading it against the rioters, but lending his
influence as Peer of France to save, from its bayonets, the
fellow-rioters of the men just then intruding on his home. They did no
harm, happily, as they filed through the various rooms, and past a
child's empty cradle by the side of the empty bed. It had been the
cradle of the daughter, Adèle, and perhaps of the other babies, and
was always cherished by Madame Hugo. In a small room in the rear, that
served as Hugo's study, the leader of the band picked up some written
sheets from the table, the ink hardly dry, and read them aloud. It was
the manuscript of "Les Misérables," just then begun, but not finished
and published until 1862, when the exile was in Guernsey.

While plodding along with that great work, Hugo put forth from this
study much verse and his last plays. Here, in 1838, he wrote his final
dramatic success, "Ruy Blas," and his final dramatic failure, "Les
Burgraves," which ended his stage career. From here he went to his
_fauteuil_ in the Academy in 1841, the step to the seat of Peer of
France, accorded him by the King within a few years. Meanwhile, his
larger rooms hardly held the swelling host of his friends, and, it
must be said, his flatterers. Not Marion Delorme had more, nor
listened to them with a more open ear. Their poison became his food.
Indeed, the men who formed "_le Cénacle_," in these and other
_salons_, seemed to find their breath only in an atmosphere of mutual
admiration. Each called the other "_Cher Maître_," and all would
listen, in wistful reverence, to every utterance of the others and to
the deliverance of his latest bringing-forth, vouchsafed by each in
turn. While Lamartine, standing before the fireplace, turned on the
pensive tune of his latest little thing in verse, Hugo gazed intent on
him as on an oracle. Then Hugo would pour forth his sonorous rhymes,
his voice most impressive in its grave monotone. The smaller singers
next took up the song. No vulgar applause followed any recitation, but
the elect, moved beyond speech, would clutch the reciter's hand, their
eyes upturned to the cornice. Those not entirely voiceless with
ecstasy might be heard to murmur the freshest phrases of sacramental
adoration: "_Cathédrale_," or "_Pyramide d'Égypte_!"

There were certain minor chartered _poseurs_ in the circle. There was
Alfred de Vigny, "before his transfiguration," to whom might be
applied Camille Desmoulins's gibe at Saint-Just: "He carries his head
as if it were a sacrament." To which Saint-Just replied by the
promise, that he kept, to make Camille carry _his_ head after the
fashion of Saint-Denis. There was Alfred de Musset, who had been
brought first to the cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs by Paul
Foucher, his schoolmate and Hugo's brother-in-law. Like his
Fantasio, de Musset then "had the May upon his cheeks," and was young
and gay and given to laughter; now, old at thirty, he posed as the
bored and _blasé_ prey and poet of passion.

  [Illustration: Alfred de Musset.
   (From the sketch by Louis-Eugène Lami.)]

Yet there were others, by way of contrast: Dumas, fresh from his
romance-factory, full-blooded, stalwart, sane; Gautier, dropping in
from his rooms near by, at No. 8 in the square, ship-shape inside his
skull for all its mane of curling locks, and for all his eccentric
costume; Barye, coming from his simple old house at No. 4 Quai des
Célestins, sitting isolated and silent, dreaming of the superb curves
of his bronze creatures; Nodier, escaping from his Librarian's desk in
the Arsenal, the _flâneur_ of genius, with no convictions about
anything, and with generous friendships for everybody; Delacroix,
impetuous chief of the insurgents in painting, most mild-mannered of
men, his personal suavity disarming those who were going gunning for
him, because of his insurrectionary brush; Mérimée, frock-coated,
high-collared, buttoned-up, self-contained, cold and correct, of
formal English cut.

Among the guests were occasional irreverent onlookers, not deemed
worthy of admission to the inner circle, who sat outside, getting much
fun out of its antics. Such a one was Madame Ancelot, whose graphic
pen is pointed with her jealousy as a rival lion-hunter, who had
outlived her vogue of the early Restoration. Daudet's sketch of her
blue-stockinged _salon_, a faded survival of its splendors under Louis
XVIII., is as daintily malicious as is her sketch of Hugo's evenings.
Through those evenings, Madame Ancelot says, Madame Hugo reclined on a
couch, as if over-wearied by the load of glory she was helping to
carry. That lady had one relief in this new home, its doors being shut
against the ugly face of Sainte-Beuve, at the urging of the indignant
young wife. This happened in 1834, and within a few years Sainte-Beuve
gave to the world his "Book of Love," a book of hatred toward Hugo,
with its base suggestion of the wife's complaisance for the writer.
Him it hurt more than it hurt Hugo. _He_ had taken, and he still
keeps, his unassailable place in the affection, as in the admiration,
of his countrymen. There can be no need to summon them as witnesses,
yet it may be well to quote the words of two foreign fellow-craftsmen.

The Englishman, Swinburne, in his wild and untamed enthusiasm,
acclaims Hugo as a healer and a comforter, a redeemer and a prophet;
burning with wrath and scorn unquenchable; deriving his light and his
heat from love, while terror and pity and eternal fate are his
keynotes. No great poet, adds Swinburne, was ever so good, no good man
was ever so great. Heine, German by birth, scoffs at Hugo, claiming
that his greatest gift was a lack of good taste, a condition so rare
in Frenchmen that his compatriots mistook it for genius. He sees
merely a studied passion and an artificial flame in Hugo's specious
divine fire; and the product is nothing but "fried ice." And Heine
sums him up: "Hugo was more than an egoist, he was a Hugoist."

Charles Dickens describes Madame Hugo as "a little, sallow lady, with
dark, flashing eyes." Making the round of Paris with John Forster, in
the winter of 1846-47, they came to this "noble corner house in the
Place Royale." They were struck by its painted ceilings and wonderful
carvings, the old-gold furniture and superb tapestries; and, more than
all, by a canopy of state out of some palace of the Middle Ages. It is
worthy of note here that Hugo was almost the first man of his
period--a deplorable period for taste in all lands--to value and
collect antiques of all sorts. They were a fit setting for these
rooms, and for the youth and loveliness that crowded them, up to the
open windows on the old square. The young smokers among the men were
driven forth to stroll under its arcades, recalling the strollers of
Corneille's and Molière's time, albeit these were painfully ignorant
of tobacco bliss, so loud were the papal thunders against its
temptations then.

Dickens and Forster found Hugo the best thing in that house, and the
latter records the sober grace and self-possessed, quiet gravity of
the man, recently ennobled by Louis-Philippe, but whose nature was
already written noble. "Rather under the middle size, of compact,
close buttoned-up figure, with ample dark hair falling loosely over
his close-shaven face. I never saw upon any features, so keenly
intellectual, such a soft and sweet gentility, and certainly never
heard the French language spoken with the picturesque distinctness
given it by Victor Hugo."

Within the portal of the Church of Saint-Paul and Saint-Louis, in Rue
Saint-Antoine, on either side, is a lovely shell holding holy-water,
given by Hugo in commemoration of the first communion of his eldest
child, Léopoldine. In this church she and young Charles Vacquerie were
married in February, 1842. Both were drowned in August of that year.
And this is the church selected by Monsieur Gillenormand for the
marriage of Marius and Cosette, because the old gentleman considered
it "more coquettish" than the church of his parish. For he lived much
farther north in the Marais, at No. 6 Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,
where a new block of buildings has taken the place of his
eighteenth-century dwelling. For this marriage, after playing the
obdurate and irascible godfather so long, he was suddenly transformed
into a fairy godmother.

Toward the end of 1848, after the escape of Louis-Philippe, Hugo moved
to Rue d'Isly, No. 5, for a short period, and then to No. 37, now No.
41 Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne, where he remained until 1851. In the
Paris _Bottin_ during these years he is entitled--considering it,
strangely to us, his especial distinction--"_Représentant du Peuple_."
The youthful Royalist poet, the friend of Charles X., the friend later
of Louis-Philippe, had become an oracle of Democracy. He added nothing
to his honestly earned fame by his long-winded bombast in the
_Tribune_; and however genuine his attitude may have been, it appealed
almost entirely to the groundlings.

They came in crowds about this house, with flaming torches and
blaring bands, howling their windy homage. They are remembered, with
mute disapproval, by the old _concierge_ of the house, Lagoutte
Armand. With real pleasure does he recall "Monsieur Hugo," and prattle
memories of his friends like Béranger, and of his family. There were
two sons, Charles and François-Victor, the former known as "Toto," a
"_très gentil garçon_." In his _loge_, pointed out with pride by the
_concierge_, to whom it was given by Hugo, is a rare engraving of the
poet, which makes him serious, almost stern, of aspect, his mouth
showing its strength in the beardless face, his hair plastered down
about the superb brow. His head was carried always well bent forward,
and he went gravely, the old man tells us. The house is unaltered, but
the street has grown commonplace since the days when its
half-countryfied cut attracted Hugo and Béranger and Alphonse Karr.
This witty editor of "Les Guêpes," something of a _poseur_ with his
pen, had a genuine love of flowers and of women, on whom he lavished
his pet camelias and tulips. He cultivated them in the garden of the
house, now numbered 15, which he occupied in this street from 1839 to
1842. The sculptor Carrier-Belleuse is now in possession of Karr's old
rooms, and his studio covers the one-time garden. Béranger came, in
1832, to No. 31, then a small cottage behind a garden, where he lived
for three years. The bare walls of the communal school, numbered 35,
now cover the site of his home, and there are no more cottages nor
gardens in the street.

From 1851, when the _coup-d'état_ of December drove him first into
hiding and then into exile, through all the years of the empire, we
find in each year's _Bottin_: "_Hugo, Victor, Vicomte de, de
l'Institut_, . . . . ." These dots represent a home unknown to the
Paris directory; no home indeed, for there can be none for a Frenchman
beyond his country's borders. Of Hugo's dwellings during these years
nothing need be said here, save that his long residence in Guernsey
gave him his characters and colors for "Les Travailleurs de la Mer,"
and such slight acquaintance with seafaring and ships as is shown in
"Quatre-Vingt-Treize." Where he got the fantastic English details of
"L'Homme-qui-rit," no man shall ever know.

Here, too, he finished "Les Misérables," writing it, he said, with all
Paris lying before him in his mind's eye; or, as he puts it, with the
exile's longing, "_on regarde la mer, et on voit Paris_." His
topographical memory was none too accurate, and errors of slight or of
real importance may be detected in "Les Misérables." It is really in
his poetry that he has done for his "maternal city" what Balzac did
for her in prose; singing in all tones the splendor and the squalor of
"_la ville lumière_," to use his swelling phrase. Despite some errors,
and despite the pulling-about of Paris since Valjean's day, we may
still trace his flight through nearly all that thrilling night, when
Javert and his men hunted him about the southern side of the town, and
across the river from the Gorbeau tenement. This tenement, so striking
a set in many scenes of the drama, was an historic mansion run to
seed, standing just where Hugo places it--on the site of Nos. 50 and
52 Boulevard de l'Hôpital, almost directly opposite Rue de la
Barrière-des-Gobelins. Facing that street--renamed Rue Fagon in
1867--on the northern side of Boulevard de l'Hôpital, the little
market of the Gobelins replaces the squalid old shanty which gave
perilous shelter to Valjean and Cosette, and later to Marius.

From here, driven by a nameless terror after his recognition of Javert
in the beggar's disguise, the old convict started, leading Cosette by
the hand. He took a winding way to the Seine, through the deserted
region between the Jardin des Plantes and Val-de-Grâce, turning
strategically on his track in streets through which we can follow him
as easily as did Javert. He was not certain that he was followed,
until, turning in a dark corner, he caught full sight of the three men
under the light before the police-station. Hugo places this station in
Rue de Pontoise, and this is a mistake; it was then and is still in
the next parallel street, Rue de Poissy, at No. 31.

Now, Valjean turns away from the river, carrying the tired child in
his arms, and makes a long circuit around by the Collége Rollin--long
since removed to the northern boulevards--and by the lower streets
skirting the Jardin des Plantes--no longer the Jardin du Roi--and so
along the quay. He is bent, as Javert guessed, on putting the river
between himself and his pursuers. He crosses Pont d'Austerlitz, and
plunges into the maze of roads and lanes, lined with woodyards and
walls, on the northern side of the river. There Javert loses the
trail; while for us, that trail is hidden under new streets laid out
along those lanes, and under railway tracks laid down on those roads.
We come in sight of the fugitive again, as he climbs the convent wall,
drawing up Cosette by the rope taken from the street lantern. Here is
that high gray wall, stretching along the eastern side of old Rue de
Picpus, and the southern side of the new wide Avenue Saint-Mandé. This
wall--of stone, covered with crumbling plaster--is as old as the
garden of "_Les Religieuses de Picpus_," which it surrounds, and as
the buildings within, which it hides from the street. We may enter the
enclosure by the old gate at No. 35 Rue de Picpus, the very gate
through which Cosette was carried out in a basket, and Valjean borne
alive in the nun's coffin to his mock burial. About the court within,
the red-tiled low roofs of the ancient foundation peep out among more
modern buildings. Behind all these and beyond the court stretches the
garden, a portion still set aside for vegetables, and we look about
for Fauchelevent's protecting glasses for his cherished melons. What
we do find is the very outhouse, in an angle of the wall, on which
Valjean dropped; it is a shanty nearly gone to ruin, but serving still
to store the garden tools of Fauchelevent's successor.

  [Illustration: The Cemetery of Picpus.]

"Near the old village of Picpus, now a part of the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, under the walls of the garden which belonged to the
Canoness of Saint-Augustin, in a bit of ground not more than thirty
feet in length, repose thirteen hundred and six victims beheaded at
Barrière du Trône, between _26 Prairial_ and _9 Thermidor_, in the
second year of the republic." This extract, from the "Mémorial
Européen" of April 24, 1809, is a fitting introduction to the small
cemetery, hid away at the very end of this convent garden. In this
snug resting-spot sleep many illustrious dead. On the wall, alongside
the iron-railed gate, under a laurel-wreath, is a tablet inscribed
with the name of "André de Chénier, son of Greece and of France," who
"_servit les Muses, aima la sagesse, mourut pour la verité_." He and
his headless comrades were carted here and thrown into trenches, when
the guillotine was busy at the Barrière du Trône, now Place de la
Nation, only a step away, in the early summer of 1794, up to the day
of Robespierre's arrest. Their mothers, widows, children, dared not
visit this great grave nor, indeed, ask where it was. In that time of
terror, grief was a crime and tears were no longer innocent. It was
only in after years that this bit of ground was bought, and walled in,
and cared for, by unforgetting survivors. Some few among them, of high
descent or of ancient family, planned for their own graves and those
of their line to come and to go, within touch of this great common
grave that held the clay of those dear to them. They bought, in
perpetuity, this bit of the convent garden on the hither side of the
gate, through which we have been looking, and it is dotted with many a
cross and many a slab. And this tiny burial-ground draws the American
pilgrim as to a shrine, for in it lies the body of Lafayette.

The sisters of the Séminaire de Picpus, who inherited the duties,
along with the domain of "_Les Religieuses_" of the eighteenth
century, devote themselves to the instruction and the training of
their young _pensionnaires_. The story of the establishment is told in
"Les Misérables," in detail that allows no retelling.

Fauchelevent had planned to carry off his tippling crony of the
Vaugirard Cemetery to the tap-room, "_Au bon Coing_," and so get
Valjean out of his coffin. To his horror, he found the drunkard
replaced by a new grave-digger, who refused to drink, and Valjean was
nearly buried alive. We will, if it please you, visit the "Good
Quince," no longer in its old quarters, for it quitted them when the
historic Cemetery of Vaugirard was closed forever. On its ground, at
the corner of Rue de Vaugirard and Boulevard Pasteur, has been built
the Lycée Buffon. To be near the then newly opened burial-ground of
Mont-Parnasse, "_Au bon Coing_" put up its sign on the front of a
two-storied shanty, at the corner of Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and Rue de
la Gaieté, a street strangely misguided in title in this joyless
neighborhood. About the bar on this corner crowd the grave-diggers and
workmen from the near-at-hand graves, and at the tables sit mourners
from poor funerals, all intent on washing the smell of fresh mould
from out their nostrils. This den is the _assommoir_ of this quarter,
swarming, noisy, noisome.

On those summer days, when Hugo used to stroll from his cottage in Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs out to the southern slopes, he discovered the
Champ de l'Alouette--a fair field bordering the limpid Bièvre, just
beyond the factory of the Gobelins. It had borne that name from
immemorial time, and was the field, as the man told Marius, where
Ulbach had killed the shepherdess of Ivry. Marius came to this green
spot that he might dream about "The Lark," after he had heard, from
his peep-hole in the wall of the Gorbeau tenement, the Thénardiers so
name his unknown lady. We, too, may walk in the Field of the Lark, its
ancient spaciousness somewhat shrunken, as with all those erstwhile fields
hereabout, of which we get glimpses along Boulevard Saint-Jacques and
other distant southern boulevards. There is a wide gateway in the high
wall that runs along stony Rue du Champ-de-l'Alouette, and we pass
through it and the court within to the bright little garden beyond,
where children are playing, guileless as Cosette. This is her field,
now shut in by great tanneries, its air redolent of leather, its
Bièvre sullied by the stains and the scum of the dye-works above. Yet,
hid away in this dreary quarter--where the broad and cheerless streets
are sultry in summer, bleak in winter, and gritty to the feet all the
year round--it is still, as Hugo aptly says, the only spot about here
where Ruysdael would have been tempted to stop, and sit, and sketch.

Among the countless American feet that tread Rue du Bac and Rue de
Babylone, on their way to the shop that is a shrine at the junction of
those two streets, there may be some few that turn into Rue Oudinot.
It is well worth the turning, if only because it has contrived to keep
that village aspect given by gardens behind walls, and cottages
within those gardens. It still bore its old name, Plumet, when General
Hugo came to live in it, that he might be near his son in Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and here he died suddenly in January, 1828. In
this house, well known to Hugo, he installed Valjean and the girl
Cosette. From this house, by its back door and by the lane between
high parallel walls, Valjean slips out unseen into Rue de Babylone. In
its front garden, under a stone on her bench, Cosette finds her
wonderful love-letter; and here is the scene of that exquisite
love-making, when Marius appears in the moonlight.

The trumpery tumults of 1832--in hopeless revolt against the Orleans
monarchy and in impotent adventure for the republic--give occasion for
grandiose barricade-building and for melodramatic combats. Hugo takes
us, with Marius and his fellow-students, to that labyrinth of
narrowest lanes, twisting about high bluffs of houses, that was then
to be found between the churches of Saint-Leu and Saint-Eustache. It
was a most characteristic corner of mediæval Paris, and it has, only
recently and not yet entirely, been cut away by Rue Rambuteau, and
built over by the business structures around the Halles. The street of
la Grande-Truanderie is for the most part respectabilized, that of la
Chanverie is reformed quite out of life, and la Petite-Truanderie
alone remains narrow and malodorous. But "_Corinthe_" has been carted
clean away. This was the notorious tavern, of two-storied stone, in
front of which Enjolras defended his barricade, within which
Grantaire emptied his last bottle, and in whose upper room these two
stood up against the wall to be shot. Grantaire was doubtless sketched
from his illustrious precursor and prototype, the poet, Mathurin
Régnier, who tippled and slept at a table of this squalid drinking-den
during many years, until the year 1615, when debauchery killed him too
young. His colossal and abused body carried the soul, original,
virile, and fiery, which he has put into his verse, although he has
over-polished it a bit. When this tavern--in the fields near the open
markets--was his favorite resort, it bore the sign and name,
"_Pot-aux-Roses_"; it was dedicated later "_Au Raisin de Corinthe_";
and this was soon popularly shortened to "_Corinthe_." Forty years
after his death, another true poet was born in the tall house that
rose alongside this tavern, its windows looking out over the waste
lands of the Marais, as Jean-François Regnard says in his verse. Like
young Poquelin, thirty years before, this boy played about the Halles;
then he went away to strange adventures in foreign lands with pirates
and with ladies; and came home here to write comedies, that have the
gayety and sparkle, yet not the depth, of those of Molière. Indeed,
Voltaire asserts that he who is not pleased with Regnard is not fit to
admire Molière. The seventeenth-century mansion, in which he was born,
befitted the position of his father, a rich city merchant, and it has
luckily escaped demolition, albeit brought down to base uses, as you
shall see on looking at No. 108 Rue Rambuteau. And if you hurry to
this neighborhood, you may yet find some few reminders of the scenes
of 1832. In Rue de la Petite-Truanderie is just such a tavern as was
"_Corinthe_," in its worst days. Its huge square pillars will hardly
hold up, much longer, the aged stone walls. Just here is the dark
corner where Valjean set Javert free; and in Rue Mondétour, at that
end not yet shortened and straightened into a semblance of
respectability, you may see a small sewer-mouth, direct descendant of
the grated hole, down which Valjean crawled, with Marius on his back,
to begin that almost incredible march through the tortuous sewers to
their outlet on the Seine, under Cours-la-Reine. He came out on a spit
of sand, "not very far distant from the house brought to Paris in
1824," says Hugo, who should have said 1826. His reference is to the
house popularly named "_la maison de François Ier_." It was built
by that monarch, at Moret on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau,
for his beloved sister, Marguerite de Navarre, it is believed. It was
removed, stone by stone, and re-erected on its present site in
Cours-la-Reine, where it is a delight to the lover of French
Renaissance.

Hugo was one of the earliest, among the exiles of the Empire that
ended worthily in the shame of Sedan, to be welcomed by the new
Republic on his hastening to Paris. There he remained through _l'Année
Terrible_ of the Prussian siege, with his friend Paul Meurice, a hale
veteran of letters, still in the youth of age in 1899. Paris being
once more opened, Hugo went to and fro between Brussels and Guernsey
and his own country for awhile. In 1873 he had quarters in the Villa
Montmorenci at Auteuil, we learn by a letter from him dated there. In
1874 he settled in an apartment at No. 66 Rue de La Rochefoucauld, an
airy spot at the summit of the slope upward toward Montmartre. Here he
remained a year, and in 1875 removed a little farther along this same
slope, to No. 21 Rue de Clichy, on the corner of Rue d'Athènes. His
apartment on the third floor was bright and sunny, having windows
quite around the corner on both streets, and here he lived for four
years. Much of the last two years was taken up by his new duties as
Senator, so that scant leisure was left him for literary labor; and it
was in this house that he sadly told a favorite comrade that the works
he had dreamed of writing were infinitely more numerous than those he
had found time to write. Driven from here by the unremitting invasion
of friends, admirers, strangers, men and women from all quarters of
the globe, bent on a sight of or an autograph from the only Hugo, he
took refuge in Avenue d'Eylau, away off at the other end of the town,
where only real friendship would take the trouble to follow him. He
made this last removal in 1880. This final home was as modest as any
of his childhood homes, and had just such a garden as theirs. Here he
passed five happy years, with cherished companionship within, and all
about him "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends."

  [Illustration: Victor Hugo.
   (From the portrait by Bonnat.)]

As a tribute to him, Avenue d'Eylau has become Avenue Victor-Hugo, and
his two-story-and-attic house--not one bit grander than the cottage
in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, in which began his literary
fame--remains unchanged under its new number 124, only its side garden
having been built over, the garden in the rear being left unspoiled.
At No. 140 of the avenue, the residence of M. Lockroy, is preserved
the original death-mask of the poet, taken by the sculptor, M. Dalou.
It is a most striking portrait, and one wishes that copies might be
permitted.

Here he died in 1885, and from here his body was carried by France to
the Panthéon, there to be placed among all her other glories by a
grateful country. Despite the ostentation of the pauper's hearse
decreed by this rich man, no more solemn and imposing spectacle has
been seen by eyes that have looked on many pageants, civil and
military, in many lands; even more impressive in the attitude of the
closely packed concourse--hushed, motionless, with bared heads--that
gazed all through that hot May day at the slow-moving _cortège_, than
in that magnificent retinue, escorting to his grave "The Sublime
Child," grown gray in the service of his country's letters.




THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS




THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS


The prehistoric savages, who settled, for safety from onslaught, on
the largest of the islands in the Seine, known to us as Île de la
Cité; the rabble of Gaulish fisherfolk, who came to camp here in
after-years; the little tribe of Parisii who later builded a fortified
hamlet on this sure ground, and bridged it with the mainland: all
these, looking, through the centuries, northwardly across the
transparent and unsullied stream, saw the flat river-bank opposite,
over beyond it a ring of low wooded hills, and between these, on
either hand, broad expanses of marsh, morass, and forest. That which
stretched to their right is our Marais. In it the veteran Camulogenus,
captaining the Parisii, hoped to mire down the Roman soldiers, once
already stuck in the mud along the Bièvre on the southern bank of the
Seine. But it is Labienus, that ablest of Cæsar's lieutenants, who
"marches with four legions to Lutetia. (This is the fortress of the
Parisii, situated on an island in the river Seine.)" And Labienus
knows the country as well as his trade, and skirts around the Marais,
and crosses the Seine at Auteuil to the solid ground he has chosen on
the plains of Grenelle. There he wins battle in the year 52 B.C., and
drives the Gauls in disorder to the high ground on which the Panthéon
now stands, and the Luxembourg Gardens lie. The Romans, in possession
of the island, rebuild the bridges, cut away by the Parisii, and
restore the town partly burned by them; a palace for the resident
Governors arises on the extreme western end of the island; and new
defences are constructed for the Gallo-Roman Lutetia. Four centuries
later, it was called his "dear and well-beloved Lutetia" by Julian,
and from that conviction he was never apostate. He loved it for its
soft air, its fair river, its honest wines coming from its own
vineyards. On the slope of its southern suburb stood out the massive
walls of the baths that bear his name; and his gardens, planted with
vines, reached to the river. Where he swam, we go dry-shod, when we
saunter through the Cluny; and we may sit, a little farther south, in
Rue de Navarre just off Rue Monge, in the stone seats of the Roman
arena, a perfect bit of loyal preservation of Lutetia.

The Romans meant to make their new town an important centre, and those
impassioned road-builders began to bring to it the highways, in the
making of which, and by means of which, they were easily masters of
their world. The Gauls had trodden footpaths through the forests and
over the marshes, and of these, the two most trodden on the northern
bank started from near the end of their only bridge, now replaced by
Pont Notre-Dame. That which went northerly to the southeastern corner
of the Halles of our Paris, there split into two branches; the one,
named the Voie des Provinces Maritimes, followed nearly the line of
present Rue Montmartre, and went, by way of Pontoise, to the
northwestern coast of Gaul; the other, named the Voie des Provinces du
Nord, ran from the Halles on a line between Rues Saint-Martin and
Saint-Denis, about where now Boulevard Sebastopol stretches. It was
the high road to Saint-Denis, Senlis, Soissons, and so away to the
north. The other main pathway turned toward the east, just above the
bridge-end, and went nearly parallel with the river-bank, along the
line of present Rue Saint-Antoine. This road, to Sens and Meaux and
thence eastwardly, was known as the Voie des Provinces de l'Est, and
later in life as the Voie Royale.

This pathway was diked by the Romans, and when sufficiently raised, it
was paved with stones. Even then it was often submerged, and the marsh
over which it went made more marshy, by frequent floods of the swollen
Seine, overwashing its slight banks; and by the ceaseless streams that
carried down through this bowl the waters of the encircling slopes of
Montmartre, Belleville, Chaumont, Ménilmontant. In our stroll through
the Marais, you will walk above one of these streams, serving as a
sewer to-day, and along the bank of still another, turned into the
Gare de l'Arsenal.

On the two sides of this raised road, bit by bit the bog was planted;
foot by foot the swamp was reclaimed; gardens were cultivated, farms
were tilled, flocks were fed; herdsmen's huts dotted the plain; on the
higher spots farmers' houses peeped from among the trees; and on the
slopes above, all around from Chaillot to Charonne, shone the white
walls of the villas--walls of marble from Italy--of great officials
and of wealthy traders. The Church came along this road from its
central seat at Sens, and, keen of eye, picked out choice sites for
chapels, convents, monasteries. Little by little the entire Marais was
levelled up as the surrounding hills were levelled down; yet keeping
so well its forests, that it gave good hiding for eight years to
Saint-Denis dodging Valerian's pursuit, until that day of the saint's
long and winding walk down the street of his name, his head carried in
his hands. This northern suburb grew more gradually, at first, than
its southern sister, whose sunny breast had enticements for gardeners
and for vine-growers. It was a strong man who woke the Marais to
unwonted life, and by his wall, encircling and securing it,
Philippe-Auguste quickened its sluggish suburban pulse into urban
animation. The northern settlements became _la Ville_, the island
being _la Cité_, and the southern suburb _l'Université_.

There was a beach or strand--_la grève_--near the middle of this
northern bank, at which were moored and unloaded the boats bringing to
the town light merchandise, such as grain, meats, stuffs, and fabrics.
All heavy goods--timber, stone, metals--came to the Port Saint-Paul,
in front of Quai des Célestins; still there under its old name, but
its old business long since gone to the bustling Port de Grenelle. On
the Grève gathered men out of place, wandering about while waiting for
work; whence comes the modern meaning of _grève_--a strike, when men
get out of place and are not anxious for a job. Here on the Grève, as
their common ground, met the men who carried goods by water from up
and down stream, and the men who carried goods by land, to and from
the provinces. They were strong and turbulent men, and they made two
mighty guilds, and these two, combined with other guilds, formed an
all-powerful confraternity. In the course of years, there came to its
head, as _Prévôt des Marchands_, that demigod of democracy, the
notable Étienne Marcel. He had his home, while living, on Place de
Grève, and in the river, when dead; to-day, in bronze he bestrides his
bronze horse between those two dwelling-places, facing the strand he
ruled and the city he tried to rule. It is he--none more worthy--who
shall marshal us on our way to the Marais.

For, when Jean II., "_le Bon_," was sent to his long captivity in
England from the field of Poictiers, won by the Black Prince in 1356,
it was the first Dauphin France had had, known later as Charles V.,
who acted as Regent in his father's absence. He was a sickly and a
studious youth, easily alarmed by the violence of these guilds, now
making one more savage assault on royal prerogatives, in a desperate
stroke to secure the right of the townsmen to rule their town. The
Dauphin was afraid of being trapped in the Louvre, and he took refuge
in the old Palace of the City. To him forces his way, one day, the
boisterous Marcel at the head of three thousand armed and howling men,
kills two of the royal marshals in the Presence, and places his own
cap of the town colors, red and blue--these were combined with the
Bourbon white to make the Tricolor, centuries later--on the head of
the terrified Dauphin, either to protect him, or in insolent token of
this new recruit to the faction. As soon as might be, the Dauphin got
away from his revolted citizens, and came back to his town only when
strong enough to hold it against them. Nor would he then trust himself
to a permanent residence in the Island-Palace, and it was allowed to
fall into disrepair through several successive reigns. Louis XII. made
partial restorations, and occasionally sojourned in his palace "in
mid-stream," that made him think of his Loire. Parliament already
owned the building then, by gift from Charles VII., and since then it
has always been known as the Palais de Justice. The returned Dauphin
took up his abode in the Hôtel d'Étampes, in the quarter of
Saint-Paul, outside Philippe-Auguste's wall; and, by successive
purchases, secured other neighboring _hôtels_ and their grounds. This
spacious _enceinte_, within its own walls, stretched from behind the
gardens of the Archbishop of Sens, on the river front, and from the
grounds of the Célestins, just east of them, on Port Saint-Paul--where
the Dauphin's new estate had a grand portal and entrance-way from the
quay and the river--away back to Rue Saint-Antoine on the north; and
from just outside the old wall, eastwardly to the open country. This
domain, and the suburbs that had grown beyond that old wall, toward
the north, now came to be embraced within a new enclosure. On the
southern side of the river there seemed no need for any enlargement
of the old enclosure.

This wall, known in history as the wall of Charles V., was partly
quite new, partly an extension or a strengthening of a wall begun by
Marcel in 1356; under the pretext of "works of defence of the kingdom
against the English," and carried on in offence of his royal master.
But before he had finished it, he came to his own end, opportunely for
everyone but himself. It is midnight of July 31, 1358, and he is
hastening, in darkness and stealth, to open his own gate of
Saint-Antoine for the entrance of the combined forces of the English
and of Charles the Bad, of Navarre. In Froissart's words: "The same
night that this should have been done, God inspired certain burgesses
of the city ... who, by divine inspiration, as it ought to be
supposed, were informed that Paris should be that night destroyed." So
they armed and made their way to Porte Saint-Antoine, "and there they
found the provost of merchants with the keys of the gates in his
hands;" and their leader, John Maillart, asked, "Stephen, what do you
here at this hour?" When Stephen told John not to meddle, John told
Stephen: "By God, you're not here for any good, at this hour, and I'll
prove it to you." And so, as his notion of proof, "he gave with an axe
on Stephen's head, that he fell down to the earth--and yet he was his
gossip." Thus died Stephen Marcel, the martyr of devotion to the
liberties of his fellow-citizens, in the eyes of many. To others of
us, he is the original of the modern patriot of another land, who
thanked God that he had a country--to sell; and his ignoble death
seems to be the just execution of a traitor. It is due to him to own
that he was a strong man, genuine and pitiless in his convictions, and
might have merited well of his town and his country, but that the good
in him was poisoned by his rapacity for power, and polluted by
personal hatred of the Dauphin. His naked body, before being thrown
into the Seine, lay exposed for days in front of the Convent of
Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, whose grounds stretched from
without the old wall, eastwardly along the northern side of Rue
Saint-Antoine. Through them was cut our present Rue Sévigné, and it
was on the spot made now by the corner of that street and Rue
Saint-Antoine, half way between the old gate and the new gate just
built by Marcel, that the crowd gathered to gaze on his corpse.

Froissart rightly claims, referring to Marcel's projected wall with
his customary delightful enthusiasm, that it was "a great deed to
furnish an arm, and to close with defence, such a city as Paris.
Surely it was the best deed that ever any provost did there, for else
it had been, after divers times, overrun and robbed by divers
occasions." It was a greater deed that was now done by Charles V., and
his Provost of Paris, Hugues Aubriot; and their new wall is well worth
a little journey along its line, easily traced on our Paris map.

We have already made a visit to Quai des Célestins, and have read the
tablet that marks the place where played Molière and his troupe, in
1645; and the other tablet that shows the site of Philippe-Auguste's
Barbeau tower, constructed toward 1200, and taking its name from the
great Abbey of Barbeau, whose extensive grounds bordered the
river-bank here. From this huge tower and its gateway, kept intact as
the starting-point at this end, the new wall turned at a right angle
to the fast crumbling old wall, and went eastwardly along the shore;
which they now banked up and planted with elms. That shore-line is now
Boulevard Morland--named from that brave colonel of chasseurs who was
killed at Austerlitz--and the land in front, as far as Quai Henri IV.,
was anciently the little Île des Javiaux, renamed Île Louvier in the
seventeenth century, when it served as a vast woodyard for the town.
The slight arm of the river that cut it off has been filled in, and
the island is now one with the mainland. At the corner of Boulevard
Bourdon--which records the name of a colonel of dragoons, who fell at
Austerlitz--the new wall turned, and followed what is now the middle
line of that boulevard to the present Place de la Bastille. Here was
the two-round-towered gateway built by Marcel, and called, as were
called all those gateways, _Bastilia_--a word of mediæval Latin,
meaning a small fortress, such as was formed by each of these gates
with its flanking towers. There were many of them opening into and
guarding the town, that of Saint-Denis being the only other one of the
size of this of Saint-Antoine; which was enlarged into the massive
fortress known to us as the Bastille.

Of all the wretched memories of the accursed old prison, we shall
awaken only one; that of Hugues Aubriot, its builder and its first
tenant. Made Provost of Paris by Charles V.--who, after his hapless
experience with Marcel, when Dauphin, would have no more Provost of
Merchants--Aubriot had many enemies among the guilds and among the
clerics. He was frank and outspoken of speech, humane to the
priest-despoiled and mob-harried Jews, for whom he had, like his royal
master, toleration if not sympathy, and to whom he returned their
children, caught and christened by force. So, on the very day of the
burial of his royal master, in September, 1380, Aubriot was arrested
for heresy, and soon sent to his own Bastille of Saint-Antoine, "_pour
faire pénitence perpétuelle, au pain de tristesse, et à l'eau de
douleur_." The Church sentence gives a poetic touch to prosaic bread
and water. Aubriot fed only a short time on these delicacies, for he
was rescued by the mob that, for the moment, idolized him, and led in
triumph to his home. That home, from which he speedily fled out of
Paris in terror of his rescuers, was given by Charles V. to this good
servant, and we may stop, just here, to look on what is left of it.

  [Illustration: The Hôtel du Prévôt.]

Under an arch at No. 102 Rue Saint-Antoine, we enter Passage
Charlemagne, and go through an outer into an inner court. In its
northwestern corner is a tower containing an old-time spiral
staircase. This is the only visible vestige of the palace of the
Provost of Paris, its unseen portions being buried under, or
incorporated with, the structures of the Lycée Charlemagne, just
behind us toward the east. The boundary railing, between this college
and the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, is exactly on the line
of Philippe-Auguste's wall. From the inner or city side of that wall,
the provost's palace, with its grounds, stretched to Rue Prévôt, then
Rue Percée; that name still legible in the carved lettering on its
corner with Rue Charlemagne. In that street, behind us as we stand
here, is the southern entrance of his grounds, whose northern line was
on Rue Saint-Antoine. This tower before us has been sadly modernized
and newly painted, but its fabric is intact, with its original,
square, wide-silled openings at each of the three landing-places of
the old staircase. These openings are within a tall, slender arch, a
timid attempt at the ogival, whose bolder growth we shall see
presently in the Hôtel de Sens.

Above this arch a superimposed story, its window cut in line with the
others below, has taken the place of the battlements. On either side
the tower joins a building obviously later than it in date, although
it has been claimed that all three structures are fifteenth-century
work. The high arch and the other decorations of the tower are
undoubtedly of that time, but they are, as undoubtedly, applied over
the small stones of a much more ancient fabric. This conviction is
reinforced by the sentiment that makes us see Charles the Wise come
into this court, with his good Aubriot, enter that low door, and climb
that staircase, looking out through those windows as he mounts. In the
year of that King's death there was born a future owner of this tower
and its palace. This was Pierre de Giac, a charming specimen of the
gang that helped John of Burgundy and Louis of Orleans in their ruin
of France--the only job in which they were ever at one. Pierre de
Giac, after betraying both sides, fell into the strong clutch of the
Duke of Richmond, by whom, after torture, he was tied in a bag and
flung into the Seine. His crony, Louis d'Orléans, had possession of
this property in the closing years of the fourteenth century, when he
instituted the order of the _Porc-Épic_ in honor of the baptism of his
eldest son, Charles the Poet. The family emblem which gave its name to
this order, gave it also to this _hôtel_, to which it still clings.

Going back to Place de la Bastille, on our map, we may follow the
course of the new town wall along the curve of the inner boulevards,
to Porte Saint-Denis; whence it took a straight southwesterly course,
parallel with present Rue Aboukir, through Place des Victoires and the
Bank of France, and diagonally across the gardens of the Palais-Royal,
to the gate of Saint-Honoré, nearly in the centre of our Place du
Théatre-Français. It was this gate and its protecting works that were
pounded by the "_canons et coulevrines_" of Joan of Arc, and it was
this portion of the wall which was assaulted by her at the head of her
men; an assault that would have succeeded, and so have given Paris to
the French, had she not been struck down by a crossbow bolt, so
striking panic to her followers. When you post your letters in the
outside southern box of the Post-office on the corner of Avenue de
l'Opéra and Place du Théâtre-Français, or when you look in at the
incubating chickens in the shop window alongside, you are standing, as
near as may be, on the spot where she fell wounded on September 8,
1429. Her tent was pitched, and her head-quarters fixed, on the outer
slope of the Butte des Moulins, a few feet north of where now stands
the apse of the Church of Saint-Roch. From Porte Saint-Honoré, the
wall went direct, across present Place du Carrousel, to the round Tour
de Bois on the river-shore, and from that tower a chain was swung
slantwise up-stream to the Tour de Nesle on the southern bank.

This great wall, when quite finished, was an admirable example of
mediæval mural masonry. Besides its round gate-towers, it was
strengthened by many square towers, and was crenellated, and had
frequent strong sentry-boxes and watch-towers between the battlements.
On the outside was a wide, deep ditch bank-full of water. All stood
intact until partly levelled by Louis XIII. in 1634, and entirely so
by Louis XIV. in 1666, during which thirty years the popular pun had
run: "_Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant._" It was about 1670
that the boulevards were laid out over the foundations of the wall,
its ditch filled in, and trees planted. Two of the gates were kept,
enlarged, and made into triumphal arches; and these Portes Saint-Denis
and Saint-Martin stand there to-day, dingy memorials of Ludovican
pride and pomposity. A century later, in 1770, every trace of wall and
moat was wiped away, the driveway was partly paved, and building
began; but it was not until 1830 that sidewalks were made, and that
grand mansions replaced the former shabby structures. We cannot put
hand on any stone of the wall itself, to-day.

Within the _enceinte_ thus made, our Marais was at length entirely
enclosed; away from its river-front, bordered by abbeys and
monasteries; through its streets, walled off by palaces and mansions;
and its other streets, packed with modest dwellings and shops; far
back to the gardens and the vineyards, and the waste fields not yet
tilled, that spread all around the inner zone of the wall. Within it,
too, was brought the vast domain of the Templars, covering the space
from this outer wall away south to Rue de la Verrerie, and between
Rues du Temple and Vieille-du-Temple. It was partly under cultivation,
partly left wild to forest and bog, this portion being known as the
Marais du Temple. Farther north were the buildings--palaces, priories,
chapels--all secure within their own crenellated wall, all commanded
and defended by the moated and towered citadel known as the Temple.

The order had been founded early in crusading days, in the beginning
of the twelfth century, by nine French gentlemen and knights, who,
clad in white robes marked with a red cross, devoted themselves to the
service and the safety of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Louis VII. gave
them this waste land late in the same century. The small godly body,
vowed to poverty and humility, grew large in numbers and appetite,
great in wealth and pride. Its knights were equal with princes, its
monks were bankers for kings, and all had become simply a gang of
sanctimonious brigands. A Capet saw the birth of the order, a Capet
thought it time to strangle it as it neared its two-hundredth
birthday. Philippe IV., "_le Bel_," less solicitous for the genuine
faith than for the good coin of the Templars, laid hands on them and
on it. He got rid of them by axe and stake and in other ways approved
of in that day, and parcelled out their lands; through which streets
were cut later, and building begun, when this new wall put them on its
safe side.

With the later history of the Temple we cannot concern ourselves, save
to say that it long served as a sanctuary, later as a prison, and that
its last stone was plucked away, six and a half centuries after it was
laid, early in the nineteenth century. The palace of the Grand Prior
stood exactly on the Rue du Temple front of the present Square du
Temple. That little garden was his garden, and on its other edge, just
at the junction of Rues des Archives and Perrée of to-day, rose the
Tower, so famous and so infamous in prison annals.

Safely settled in his Hôtel Saint-Paul, within his own wall--Marcel
quiet in his grave at last, the nobles curbed, the Jacquerie
crushed--the young Dauphin, who had been weak and dissembling, and who
was now grown, by long apprenticeship to his trade of royalty, into
the strong, prudent, politic Charles V., known in history as Charles
the Wise, made proclamation, on his accession in 1364, that
this--"_l'hôtel solennel des grands ébastements_"--should be
henceforth the royal residence. In the old Palace on the Island was
held the official court; the Louvre, partly rebuilt and brightened by
him, was kept for the occasional "_séjour, souper, et gîte_" of roving
royalty. Here in "Saint-Pol" was his home, from whose windows he
looked out, with keen, patient, far-sighted vision, over the Paris and
the France he had quelled and tranquillized.

The Hôtel Saint-Paul was a town in itself, of many mansions, big and
little, of _châteaux_ with their parks, of farms with gardens, of
orchards, fish-ponds, fowl-houses, a menagerie. Sauval goes with gusto
into details of the buildings and their apartments, the decorations,
furniture, and pavements; and the chronicle is appetizing of the
dinners and banquets given to embassies and to honored visitors.
Withal, pigeons perched on the carved balustrades, and guards lay on
straw in the halls. It was a simple patriarchal life led here by
Charles the Wise, and here begun by his son, Charles the Silly. A
pretty, light-minded child of eleven, on his father's death, he
remained a child through his dissolute and diseased early manhood, and
through his later years of spasmodic madness and of intermittent
reason, to his old age of permanent childishness.

While in Paris, this was his abode, and here he was left, almost a
prisoner to unconcerned servants, by his shameless wife, Isabeau de
Bavière. When she saw him, once in a way, he looked on her with
unknowing eyes, or with knowing eyes of horror. His only companion was
the low-born Odette de Champdivers, and with her he played the cards
that untrue tradition claims to have been invented for him. He prowled
about these halls, in filthy rags, eaten by ulcers and vermin, gnawing
his food with canine greed; he ranged through these grounds, finding
fellowship with the animals that were not let loose, but kept in
cages. You may hunt up the stone walls of those cages--originally on
pointed arches with short Romanesque pillars--and the stone
foundations of the royal stables, in the yards on the southern side of
Rue des Lions; a street whose name tells of these menageries, and that
seems to echo with their roarings. The alleyway of cherry-trees now
makes Rue de la Cerisaie, and Rue Beautreillis replaces the green
tunnels of vines on trellises, where were gathered the grapes--good as
are those of Thomery to-day--which produced the esteemed _vin de
l'hôtel Saint-Paul_. Along the farther edge of its grounds, just under
the old wall, ran the lane that is now Rue des Jardins; and Rue
Charles V. keeps alive the memory of the founder of Saint-Paul. In all
these streets, we are treading on the ground he loved.

After the wretched mad king died here in 1422, royalty came no more to
the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and the place ran to waste. It was no home for
the new Dauphin, come to his kingdom as Charles VII., by the grace of
Joan of Arc and of God. His boyish memories were of a dreary
childhood, between a mad father, a devilish mother who had hated him
from his birth, and princely relatives raging and wrestling over those
two for the power to misgovern France. Outside the royal madhouse,
Paris was a butcher-shop. Burgundians and Armagnacs were howling crazy
war-cries in every street, ambuscading and assassinating at every
corner, equally thirsty for blood, but both surpassed in that thirst
by the butchers and horse-knackers, led by Jean Caboche and called
Cabochians. All these factions, while intent solely on bloodshed, were
loud-mouthed with loyalty and patriotism. They were all alike, and we
may transfer to them and to their times the apt phrase of Joseph de
Maistre, concerning the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew: "_Quelques
scélérats firent périr quelques scélérats._" Almost every leader of
men in those days came to his end by arms and in arms, and death by
violence seemed the natural death. The town was a shambles; corpses,
mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the
streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black-death
and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came
marching on; the while _la danse Macabre_ whirled about the tombs in
all the cemeteries.

On the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Hôtel
Saint-Paul, stretched the grounds of the old _hôtel_ of Pierre
d'Orgemont, Bishop of Paris. This property had come to the crown by
purchase or by gift, and had been partly torn down, rebuilt, and its
grounds greatly enlarged, to make a _maison-de-plaisance_ for Charles
VI. The principal building had so many and such various shaped towers
and turrets that it was named the Palais des Tournelles. Viewed from a
distant height, as from the tower of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo, it had
the look of a set of giant chessmen. This was the place selected by
the Duke of Bedford for his residence during the English occupation of
Paris; and from here, after the death of his brother Henry V. of
England--and heir of France, as was then claimed--he reigned as Regent
for the little Henry VI. He enlarged the buildings and beautified the
grounds, in which he kept many rare birds. He kept, too, the rare
manuscripts brought together by Charles V. in the Louvre; and after
his death in Rouen--where he had helped burn The Maid--this library
was carried to England, when the English departed from France. It was
ransomed with coin, and brought back to Paris, by the two grandsons of
its original owner--Charles of Orleans, and his brother of Angoulême,
and became the nucleus of the Royal, now the National Library.

So, when the sentries in English uniforms had gone from the gates, and
the archers in Lincoln green were seen no more in the streets, Charles
VII. came back, made King of France by The Maid who had found him King
of Bourges, and whom he let the English burn for her pains. He entered
Paris in November, 1437, nearly twenty years after he had been carried
out from the town in the arms of Tanneguy Duchâtel. That quick-witted
provost, discovering that the Burgundians had got into the town by the
betrayed Porte de Buci, on the night of Saturday, May 28, 1418, had
hastened to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, had wrapped the sleeping boy in his
bedclothes, and had carried him up Rue Saint-Antoine to the Bastille,
and out into the country on the following day, and so to Melun, where
the King's son was safe.

During this first short stay of three weeks, the listless and sluggish
young King grew as fond as had been the Duke of Bedford of the
walled-in grounds of the Tournelles. They were very extensive,
covering the space bounded by present Rues Saint-Antoine,
Saint-Gilles, Turenne, and Boulevard Beaumarchais. Within this vast
enclosure were many buildings and outbuildings, and in the words of
Sauval: "_Ce n'étoit que galeries et jardins de tous côtés, sans
parler des chapelles._"

And henceforth, for more than a hundred years, the Tournelles, "_pour
la beauté et commodité du dit lieu_," was the favored abode of
royalty, when royalty favored Paris with infrequent visits. The sombre
shapes of Louis XI. and his ignoble comrades darkened its precincts,
at times. When he made his entry, already narrated, into the town
after his coronation at Rheims, he passed the night of August 31,
1461, in the old Island-Palace, and on the following day he installed
himself in "_son hôtel des Tournelles, près la Bastille de
Saint-Antoine_." Here he received, in September, 1467, a visit from
his second wife, Charlotte de Savoie, who came up the river from
Rouen. She was met, below the Island, by a boatful of choristers, who
"sang psalms and anthems after a most heavenly and melodious manner."
She landed on the Island, performed her devotions at Notre-Dame, and
took boat to the water-gate of Quai des Célestins opposite, and thence
made her way on a white palfrey to the Tournelles. The King's
physician, Dr. Coictier--most skilled in bleeding, in all possible
ways, his royal patient--had an astrological tower in the grounds, and
in the centre was a maze named "_Le Jardin Dædalus_." About these
grounds Louis prowled, seldom going beyond them, and then only by
night, and with one trusted gossip. Indeed, he was less like the King
of France here in his palace than anywhere else; camping rather than
residing, with a small retinue of old Brabant servitors, and a larder
filled mostly with cold victuals, says Michelet. It was Loches
occasionally, and Plessis-les-Tours habitually, that had the pleasure
of harboring the "universal spider"; in them both he spun his webs,
and waited gloating, and found "many cockroaches under the King's
hearthstone," as the saying went. And at last he died, triumphant and
wretched, at Plessis-les-Tours.

"_Le Petit Roi_," Charles VIII., hardly knew Paris; and when he
entered the town on February 8, 1492, with his young wife, Anne of
Brittany, who had been crowned at Saint-Denis the day before, the
populace was not agreeably impressed by his short stature, his bad
figure, his heavy head, his big nose, his thick lips always open, and
his great, blank, staring eyes. He was in curious contrast with the
bride--pretty, sprightly, vivacious, and "very knowing," wrote home
the Venetian Ambassador, Zaccaria Contarini. The gentle, weakly
King--so strange a scion of Louis XI.--made his home in Touraine. On
the terrace of Amboise, where he was born, we all know the little
door, leading to the old Haquelebac Gallery, against which he struck
his head as he started down to look on a game of tennis. There, on
April 7, 1498, in a sordid and filthy chamber, a remnant of the old
_château_ he was just then rebuilding, he lay for hours until his
death, so carrying out the curse of Savonarola, who had threatened
him with the anger of God, if he failed to return to Italy with his
army to cleanse the unclean Church with the sword.

  [Illustration: Anne de Bretagne.
   (From a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection.)]

"_Le bon Roi Louis, Père du Peuple, est mort_," is the doleful
pronouncement of the _crieurs du corps_, starting out from the
Tournelles before dawn of New Year's day, 1515. The kindly old fellow
has died in the night, a martyr to a young wife and to her fashionable
hours. All his life long, Louis had been subject to the fancies of
women, to his undoing. We meet him first, the young and ardent Duc
d'Orléans, the best horseman and swordsman in the court, riding out
from Plessis with the brave Dunois--both grandsons, with different
bars, of the murdered Louis d'Orléans--to snatch the girl Isabelle
from the escort of Quentin Durward. The duke has already taken the eye
of the capable Anne, eldest daughter of Louis XI., as Brantôme is
quick to note. Getting no return for her passion, the fury of a woman
scorned, backed by her father's malign humor, marries the handsome
prince to her younger sister, Jeanne--ugly and deformed and
uncharming. Freed by divorce from this childless union, on taking the
throne, Louis hastens to marry his former flame, Anne of Brittany, now
the widow of Charles VIII. This lady, fair in person and fairer in her
duchy, lively and not unlearned, a blameless yet imperious spouse,
gave him many happy years. The personal court he allowed "_sa
Bretonne_" outshone his own court, and glorified the gloomy
Tournelles. For all his clinging to her, she was taken from him when
only thirty-seven years of age; refusing to live, when she found, for
the first time, that her self-will was not allowed its own way. She
would have her daughter, Claude, marry Charles of Austria,
Emperor-to-be, and the powers in France would not have it, because
they were unwilling that Brittany should go, with its heiress, into
foreign hands. A marriage was arranged between Claude and the young
Duc d'Angoulême, who was to become François I., so keeping the rich
duchy for France. After Anne's death, her widower made a third
venture, and yet, the chronicler plaintively assures us, he had no
need of a new wife. This was Mary, sister of Henry VIII. of England,
who was glad to get her out of his country; and she was as glad to
return as soon as, on finding herself a widow, she could become the
wife of her first love, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. And so these
two were the grandparents of Lady Jane Grey.

Now the customary hour for dining in those days was from five to ten
in the morning, changing a little with the seasons. A French "Poor
Richard" of the period says:

     "_Lever à cinq, diner à neuf,
     Souper à cinq, coucher à neuf;
     Fait vivre d'ans nonnante et neuf._"

Montaigne owns that his dinner-hour of eleven in the morning was
unduly late, but then his supper came correspondingly late, never
before, and often after, six of the evening. Henri IV. dined at the
same belated hour, while François I. could not wait later than nine
o'clock. Once installed in the Tournelles, this young English bride of
Louis's must needs, among other innovations, introduce her own
country's customs into her husband's mode of life, as we are told in
"_la très joyeuse et plaisante histoire_" of the "Loyal Serviteur," of
Bayard: "His wife changed all his manner of living; he had been wont
to dine at eight, and he now dined at mid-day; he had been wont to go
to bed at six in the evening, and he now went to bed at midnight."
Moreover, she beguiled him into supping late and heavily. So these
changes, and other changes in his habits, brought him to his grave,
six weeks after his marriage. His Parisians gathered in Rue
Saint-Antoine, about the entrance of the Tournelles, in honest sorrow
for the loss of the big and benevolent old boy, whom they looked on
and loved as the Father of his People; indeed "one of the people,"
says Michelet, "without the soul of a king."

The Tournelles blazed out bravely for François I., the while the Hôtel
Saint-Paul found itself cut up and sold off in lots by him; the two
cases showing his way, all through life, of raising money by any
means, squeezing his subjects, starting France's national debt as he
did, all because of his puerile ambitions, his shallow levity, his
selfish waste. He did his best to justify Louis XII.'s shrewd prophecy
for him: "_Ce grand gars-là gâtera tout._" Recalling, one needy day,
that he owned Saint-Paul, "_un grand hôtel, fort vague et ruineux_,"
he soon got rid of the buildings and the land for coin, reserving one
large tract, along the eastern side under the wall, for the erection
of an arsenal. And so, with streets cut through the old domain, no
trace was left of Charles V.'s "_hôtel solennel des grands
ébastements_." As for the Tournelles, its new master's fondness for
all showy gimcrackery adorned it with furniture and fittings, and
notably with the tapestries turned out so sumptuously from the factory
at Tours, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, that they came
into vogue for decoration, in place of wall-paintings. No need to say
that the table at the Tournelles was profuse and its court
resplendent. There had been few women in the court before now, and it
was a garden without pretty flowers, as Brantôme puts it. Anne of
Brittany had brightened it a bit for Brantôme with some few _dames et
demoiselles_, but François crowded it with fair women, who brought
music and dancing and flirting. This big and brutal dilettante--study
his face in the countless portraits in the Louvre and at
Azay-le-Rideau--gave little of his time to the Tournelles, however.
Setting Pierre Lescot at work on the lovely western wing of his new
Louvre, he rushed over the land, building and beautifying at
Saint-Germain, Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Blois, Chambord, posing
always as the patron and prodrome of the Renaissance in France. At
least, he could say truly of himself, "_On verra qu'il y a un roi en
France_;" but besides the throne and his pet foolishnesses, he handed
down nothing worth owning to his son--that Henri II. of heavy fist and
light brain, slow of thought and of speech, cold, uncongenial,
commonplace. Yet the Tournelles was a cheerful home for him and for
his official family, when he could get away from the exclusive holding
of Diana of Poictiers and her family. His youngest daughter,
Marguerite de France, has sketched, in her "Mémoires," a most winning
picture of the place and of herself, a lovely maid of seven, playing
about the garden or sitting on her father's knee, helping him select a
suitor for her, from among the young swells at the court. That scene
took place only a few days before his death.

  [Illustration: Louis XII.
   (Water color, from a portrait by an unknown artist in a private
   collection.)]

To the Tournelles comes François Rabelais, in the "Contes Drôlatiques"
of Balzac, and gives to King and court that delicious sermon, worthy
of Rabelais himself. He has come along Rue Saint-Antoine from his home
in Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, a rural lane then, just outside
Philippe-Auguste's wall, on the extreme edge of the gardens of
Saint-Paul. In that paved and built-up street of to-day none of us can
fix on the site of his house, and the tablet on its corner, of Quai
des Célestins, tells us only that Rabelais died in a house in this
street on April 9, 1553. Charles Nodier, starting out from his
Librarian's rooms in the Arsenal Library, on his endless prowls about
old Paris, always stopped and took off his hat in front of No. 8 of
Rue des Jardins, in honor of the great French humorist. Ignorant of
his reason for the selection of this site, we may be content, in
imitation of this charming _flâneur_, to stand uncovered there, before
or near the last dwelling of "_le savant et ingénieux rieur_," whose
birthplace and whose statue at Chinon are worth a journey to see;
where, too, the local wine will be found as delicate and as individual
as when, sold by the elder Rabelais in the fourteenth century, it made
the money that sent his famous son to the great schools of the
capital. That son closed his life of congenial vagabondage, and of
many _métiers_, in this sedate country road, where he had passed three
blameless years, two of them as _curé_ of Meudon, resigning that
position in 1552. He was buried in the cemetery of old Saint-Paul, to
which we shall find our way later. Modern Paris has doubtless built
itself over the grave, as it certainly has over the last
dwelling-place, of the narrator of the adventures of Gargantua and
Pantagruel and the creator of Panurge.

The famous lists of the Tournelles extended along the southern edge of
its grounds, just beyond the present northern side of Rue
Saint-Antoine, Rue de Birague being cut through almost their middle
line. For more than a hundred years they had been the scene of many a
tournament, and not one of them had been so crowded or so brilliant as
that which began on June 28, 1559. The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, made
in the previous April with England and Spain, was to be celebrated,
and there were to be rejoicings over the recent marriage of Henry's
sister, Marguerite, with the Duc de Savoie, and of his eldest
daughter, Isabelle, with Philip II. of Spain. This girlish third wife
of the Spanish King was the heroine of the Don Carlos affair, which
has made so many dramas. To rejoice in royal fashion in those days,
men must needs fight and ladies must look on. So it came that the
King, proud of having shown himself "a sturdy and skilful cavalier"
during the two days' tilting, insisted on running a course with
Montgomery of the Scottish Guard, whose broken lance pierced Henri's
visor through the eye into the brain. He lay unconscious in the
Tournelles for eleven days, and there he died on July 10, 1559.

Those lists were never again used, the palace was never again
inhabited. All the bravery of the two last courts could not hide the
dry-rot of the wooden structures, and all its perfumes could not
sweeten the stenches from the open drains all about. Even the
hard-headed and strong-stomached Louise de Savoie, mother of François
I., had sickened in the place. So "_le misérable coup_," that freed
Catherine de' Medici from years of slighted wifehood, gave her an
excuse for leaving the malodorous and unhealthful Tournelles, with her
four sons and her unmarried daughter. A portion of the structures was
kept by her second son, Charles IX., for his birds and dogs, until his
mother got him to order its destruction by an edict dated January,
1565.

On his Pont-Neuf sits Henri IV. on his horse, and every Frenchman
looks up as he passes, with almost the same emotion felt by the
Frenchmen of Voltaire's day, at the effigy of the most essentially
French of all French kings. The statue faces "the symmetrical
structures of stone and brick," planned by him for his Place Dauphine,
in honor of the birth of his son. They are hardly altered since their
construction by his good friend Achille de Harlay, President of
Parliament, whose name is retained in the street behind the _place_
and in front of the Palace of Justice. The King looks out, a genial
grin between his big, ugly, Gascon-Bourbon nose and his pushing chin,
over his beloved Paris, well worth the mass he gave for it; for, from
the day he got control, it grew in form and comeliness for him. His
kindly, quizzical eyes seem to see, over the Island and the river, his
own old Marais, the quarter which held the _hôtel_ of his _menus
plaisirs_, and which it was his greater pleasure to rebuild and make
beautiful. And "_la perle du Marais_"--his Place Royale--deserves his
unchanging regard, almost unchanged as it is, since he planned it and
since its completion, which he never saw. It is the grand tangible
monument he has left to Paris, and speaks of him as does nothing else
in the town.

When he came into his capital on March 22, 1594, he found the
enclosure of the Tournelles _en friche_. Within a few days he gave a
piece of it, holding an old house, that fronted on Rue Saint-Antoine,
to his good Rosny, whom he made Duc de Sully a little later. This
Maximilien de Béthune had been the most faithful helper of Henri de
Navarre and he continued to be the most faithful servant of Henri IV.
He had many homely virtues, rare in those days, rare in any days. He
was courageous, honest, laborious; he did long and loyal service to
the State; he worked almost a miracle for the finances of the kingdom,
carrying his economies into every detail, even to the ordering of
costumes in black, to spare the expense of the richly colored robes in
vogue. A vigilant watch-dog, he was surly and snappish withal, and he
had a greedy grip on all stray bones that fell fairly in his way. His
wealth and power grew with his chances. He seems to have put something
of himself into his _hôtel_, which faces us at No. 143 Rue
Saint-Antoine. It bears on its lordly front an honesty of intention
that is almost haughty, with a certain self-sufficiency that shows a
lack of humor; all most characteristic of the man. Neither he nor his
abode appeals to our affections, howsoever they may compel our
respect.

  [Illustration: Sully.
   (From a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musée Condé at
   Chantilly.)]

Having got this well-earned gift of land from the King, he cleared
away the old buildings upon it, and erected this superb structure. His
architect was doubtless Jean du Cerceau, for the heaviness of his
early work is apparent in these walls, but their owner evidently
enforced his personal tastes on them. The façade, on the shapely
court, has its own touch of distinction, dashed by the touch of
pomposity that dictated, to the four secretaries employed on his
memoirs, his stock phrase, "Such was Sully!" This front is
over-elaborate. The main body and the two wings--which are a trifle
too long and too large, and so crowd and choke that main body--are all
heavily sculptured. On every side, stone _genii_ bear arms, stone
women pose as the seasons and the elements, stone masks and foliage,
whose carving is finer than the sculpture, crowd about the richly
chiselled windows. Yet those windows look down on the court in a most
commanding way; and the fabric, behind all its floridness, shows a
power in the rectitude of its lines that must needs be acknowledged.

  [Illustration: The Court of the Hôtel de Béthune. Sully's Residence.]

The garish windows of the restaurant on the ground floor glare
intrusively out on the old-time court, and a discordant note is struck
by the signs, all about its doorways, of the new-fangled industries
within--a water-cure, a boxing-school, a gymnasium. School-boys play
noisily in this court, and, in the garden behind, schoolgirls take
the air demurely. To reach their garden, we pass through a spacious
hall, along one side of which mounts a wide, substantial staircase,
its ceiling overloaded with panels and mouldings. Set in a niche in
the garden-wall is a bust of the Duke of Sully. This garden façade is
in severer taste than that of the front court, its wings are less
obtrusive, and its whole effect is admirable. The little garden once
made one with the garden of the Hôtel de Chaulnes behind, that faced
the Place Royale, to which Sully thus had entrance. That entrance may
be found through the two small doors of No. 7, Place des Vosges, and
behind that building is Sully's _orangerie_, in perfect preservation.

Having handsomely requited his servant and comrade, the King began, in
the very centre of the Tournelles, a great square with surrounding
structures. As soon as one of his pavilions was sufficiently finished,
he installed in it a colony of two hundred Italians, brought to France
for that purpose, skilled weavers and workers of silks shot with
silver and with gold, such as made Milan famous. And to this man
alone--who was, said a memorial of his Chamber of Commerce, pleading
for the planting of the mulberry, "nearly divine, never promising
without performing, never starting without finishing;" and who issued
edicts for that planting, in spite of Sully's opposition--does France
owe her mulberry plantations and her silkworms, as Voltaire truly
points out. It is commonly asserted that his "mason," for these
constructions of the Place Royale, was Androuët du Cerceau, whose
name is claimed for many buildings that would make his working-life
last for a century and more. This Jacques Androuët was so renowned in
his day, that much of the architecture of his sons and his grandson
was then, and is still, set down to him. That stern old Huguenot, born
in 1515, went from Paris along with the dwellers in "Little Geneva,"
and is last heard of, still in exile, as late as 1584. Perhaps his son
Baptiste joined him in 1585, when his convictions drove him, too, from
the court and the capital, as has been told in the chapter, "The
Scholars' Quarter." Baptiste came back to serve Henri IV. and Louis
XIII., and trained his son Jean in his trade. For much of the work of
this busy Jean his grandfather has the credit, as well as for other
work done by Jean's uncle Jacques, second of that name. The Pont-Neuf
is always ascribed to the great Androuët, who never saw one of its
stones in place. That bridge was begun by his son Baptiste in 1578,
and finished by his grandson Jean in 1607. He it was, if it were any
du Cerceau, who planned and began the Place Royale.

  [Illustration: The Hôtel de Mayenne.
   In the distance, the Temple Sainte-Marie, called the Church of the
   Visitation.]

We are fortunate in that we may see one example of the style of the
founder of this notable family, in the massive structure at No. 212
Rue Saint-Antoine, its side walls extending along Rue du Petit-Musc.
This street took its title from one of the numerous small _hôtels_
that made up the grand Hôtel Saint-Paul; and on its foundations--still
buried beneath these stones--was erected the present structure by
Androuët du Cerceau. It is the only entire specimen of his work in
Paris, and we may believe that he had done better work than this,
albeit it carries the authority of the old Huguenot. He began it for
Diane de Poictiers, and it was finished for an owner as heavy and as
stolid as its walls. This was Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Mayenne, the
eldest, the least brilliant, the most honest, of the famous brothers
of Guise. As Lieutenant-General of the League, he led its troops to
the defeats of Arques and Ivry. When Henri de Navarre became Henri IV.
of France, the only punishment he inflicted on his fat opponent was to
walk him, at a killing pace, about the grounds of Monceaux, while
listening to his protests of future submission: "I will be to you, all
my life long, a loyal subject and faithful servant. I will never fail
you nor desert you." So promised Mayenne, and he kept his word. He
lived here in this mansion, through sixteen years of honorable
employment in the Council of State, surviving Henry only a few months,
and dying in his bed, in pain and with patience. His house, once one
of the noisy hatching-places of the Holy League, is now a noisy school
for boys. Its well-set cornice has been mangled by the cutting through
it of the dormer windows, its grand staircase has been degraded, its
court, stern from du Cerceau's hand, has grown sullen, and its great
gardens are built over, all along Rue du Petit-Musc.

In accordance with the King's scheme for his Place Royale, its eastern
side was first built up at the crown's expense. The other sides were
divided into lots of similar size, and leased to men of the court, of
family, and of finance, on condition that they should begin to build
at once, each after the original plans. With this stipulation, and an
agreement to occupy their dwellings when finished, and to pay a yearly
rental of one crown of gold, they and their heirs forever were given
possession of these lots, as stated in the royal patent registered on
August 5, 1605. Thirty-six structures were planned for these private
dwellings, the two central pavilions on the northern and southern
sides being reserved for royalty; so that thirty-six crowns were to
come in as the entire annual revenue from the Place Royale; not an
exorbitant rental, since the _écu de la couronne_ of that day was
worth from seven to ten francs. Thus began that historic square, and
thus vanished, from off the face of the earth, the last trace of the
historic Tournelles.

Henry was more eager to hurry on the constructions than were his
tenants; only a few of whom, indeed, completed and occupied their
houses. There were other delays in building, not to be overcome by his
almost daily visits to the spot when in town, and by his appealing
letters from Fontainebleau to Sully, urging him to "_go and see_" if
the work were being pushed on. But it was still unfinished, when
Ravaillac's knife cut off all his plans. This plan, however, was
carried out by Marie de' Medici, who had made herself Queen-Regent by
lavish payments and promises. Her memories of the style of Northern
Italy influenced details of the new constructions, which were so far
finished in 1615 as to serve for the scene of the festivities, planned
by her as an expression of the joy that the Parisians did not know
they felt. The occasion was the marriage of her son, the
fourteen-year-old Louis XIII., with Anne of Austria, daughter of
Philip III. of Spain; and of her daughter, Isabelle, with the Spanish
Infante, afterward Philip IV. That was a great day for the Place
Royale. For this function its still uncompleted portions were hid by
scaffoldings, and all its fronts were draped with hangings and
festooned with flowers. One hundred thousand guests swarmed to see the
childish mummery of bearded men pranking as nymphs, the circus antics
of _ballets de chevaux_ by day, and the fireworks by night.

This first public appearance of the _place_ was, also, the last public
appearance of the Queen-Regent. There can be woven no romance about
this woman; fat and foolish, copious of emotion, impulsive of speech.
The pencil of Rubens cannot give grace to her affluent curves, and her
husband's strength could not stand against her "terribly robust" arms,
working briskly when she raged. Whatever may be our summing-up of this
man's morality, we must set down, to the credit of his account, his
hard case with the two women to whom fate had married him, each so
trying after her own fashion. Of sterner stuff than he, so far as that
sex goes, was Richelieu, the new ruler of the young King Louis XIII.
He would bear no more of Marie's meddling and muddling, and sent her
into exile in 1617. These two died in the same year, 1642, she in
poverty and neglect at Cologne, after having so long been "tossed to
and fro by the various fortunes of her life," says English Evelyn;
who, travelling on the Continent, notes the "universal discontent
which accompanied that unlucky woman, wherever she went."

We see her in our Place Royale only during this one day, but her son
and his minister are with us there to-day, as we stand in front of
that King's statue, in the centre of the square. This statue is a
reproduction of the original--melted down in 1792--erected by
Richelieu in 1639, not less for his own glorification, than to
immortalize the virtues of "Louis the Just, Thirteenth of that name."
He had a score of the virtues of a valet, indeed, and with them the
soul of a lackey. This present statue, placed here in the closing year
of the Bourbon Restoration, 1829, prettifies and makes complacent that
sombre and suspicious creature, the dismallest figure in his
low-spirited court. On his hair, flowing to his shoulders, rests a
laurel crown, and the weak lips, curved in an unwonted smile, not
twisted by his habitual stutter, are half hid by a darling mustache.
He sits his horse jauntily, clad in a long cloak and a skirt reaching
to his naked knees, and tries to be ostentatiously Roman with bare
arms and legs, his right hand pointing out across the square, from
which he tried in vain to drive the duellists.

We have already come here, under the guidance of Dumas, to witness one
famous duel in the time of Henri III. This spot had retained its vogue
for the aristocratic pastime, in spite of the repeated edicts and the
relentless punishments of Richelieu, under royal sanction and
signature. Fair women hung over the infrequent balconies, or peeped
from the windows, to view these duels and to applaud the duellists. A
keener interest was given to the probability of the death on the
ground of one combatant, by the certainty of the axe or the rope of
the public executioner for the survivor.

Windows and balconies are deserted now; there is no clash of steel in
the square, whose silence is in striking contrast with the sordid
strife of neighboring Rue Saint-Antoine; and these stately mansions,
dignified in their unimpaired old age, seem to await in patience the
return of their noble occupants. There has been no change in them
since, on their completion in 1630, they were regarded as the grandest
in all Paris, and there is hardly any change in their surroundings.
The commonplace iron railings of the square, put there at the same
time with the fountains, by Louis-Philippe, were the cause of hot
protest by Hugo and other residents of the quarter, who mourned the
loss of the artistic rails and gateway of seventeenth-century
fabrication. And Rue des Vosges has been cut through into the northern
side of the square, making a thoroughfare to Boulevard Beaumarchais,
such as was not planned originally. That plan provided for approach to
the _place_ only by the two streets under the two central pavilions,
north and south, now named Béarn and Birague. Those two pavilions,
higher than the others, were set apart for the King and Queen; and
over the central window of the southern one, the King, in medallion,
looks down. The stately fronts of red brick--new to Paris then--edged
with light freestone, and the steep roofs of leaded blue slate, broken
by great dormers reminiscent of Renaissance windows, are time-stained
to a delicate tricolor; and it pleases us to fancy the first Bourbon
King unconsciously anticipating the flag of the French Republic in the
colors of his Place Royale.

These tall windows, opening from floor to ceiling, were a novelty to
the Parisians of that day, the fashion having only just then been set
in the new Hôtel Rambouillet. Behind them, the spacious blue and
yellow _salons_ were hung with Italian velvets, or with Flemish and
French tapestries, interspaced with Venetian mirrors. Lebrun and his
like decorated the ceilings later, and the cornices were heavily
carved, and the furniture was in keeping with its surroundings. The
arcades of brick, picked out with stone ribs--a trifle too low and
heavy, it may be, for their symmetry with the otherwise perfect
proportions of these façades--were imitated from those of Italy, to
serve for shelter from sun, and for refuge from rain, to the strollers
who thronged them for over a century. To tell over their names, one
has merely to look down the list of the men who made themselves talked
about, through the whole of Louis XIII.'s and almost to the close of
Louis XIV.'s reign. Then there were the women, lovely or witty or
wicked, and those others, "_entre deux âges_," for whom the Marais
was noted. The creations of comedy are here, too, and Molière's
Mascarille and _le Menteur_ of Corneille are as alive as their
creators, under these arcades.

For this spot was not only the centre of the supreme social movement
of the capital during this long period, but it was the cradle of that
_bourgeois_ existence which grew absurd in its swelling resolve to
grow as big as that above it. The Hôtel Rambouillet, for all its
affectations, did some slight service to good literature and good
morals; it rated brains and manners above rank and money; it gave at
least an outside deference to decency. Molière himself, rebelling, had
to yield, and his early license became restraint, at least. In the
wild days of the Fronde, men and women were in earnest, and then came
the days when they were in earnest only about trifles; when the
"infinitely little" was of supremest importance, when shallow
refinements concealed coarseness, stilted politeness covered mutual
contempt, and the finest sentiments of a Joseph Surface in the _salon_
went along with unrestricted looseness outside. To seem clean was the
epidemic of the time, and its chronic malady was cant, pretence, and
pollution. And the _bourgeois_ imitated the noble; and, in the Place
Royale and about, Molière found his _Précieuses Ridicules_. Just a
little way from here, was a room full of them--that of Mlle. de
Scudéry.

Go up Rue de Beauce, narrowest of Marais streets between its old
house- and garden-walls, and you come to the passage that leads to the
Marché des Enfants-Rouges, the market and its surrounding space
taking the greater part of the site, and keeping alive the name, of
the admirable charity for children originated by the good Marguerite
de Navarre, sister of François I., and by him endowed at her urging.
The little orphans cared for in this institution were clad all in red,
and their pet popular name of "_Enfants Rouges_" soon took the place
of the official title of "_Enfants de Dieu_." On the corner of this
passage, you must stop to choose the abode of Mlle. de Scudéry from
one of the two ancient houses there, for it is certain that she lived
in one of these two, with a side door in the passage; and local legend
and topographic research have failed to fix on the true one. She has
told us that it stood alongside the Templars' grounds, in the midst of
gardens and orchards tuneful with birds, so that the lower end of the
street was called Rue des Oiseaux; and we find this narrow passage,
since then close shut in with houses, still tuneful to-day, but the
birds are kept in cages.

In this house Madeleine de Scudéry wrote her long and weary romance,
"Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus," the most widely read and the most
successful book of the day, from the money point of view. With this
money she paid the debts of her brother, Georges, a dashing
spendthrift with showy tastes; one of those chivalric souls, too fine
to work, but not too fine to sponge on his sister and to take pay for,
and put his name to, work done by her pen. Here she carried on the old
business of the Hôtel Rambouillet, where she had served her
apprenticeship before starting out for herself, and where she had
produced the poem by which she won her _nom de Parnasse_, "Sapho."
Here she was promoted to be the Tenth Muse, and sat enthroned amid her
admirers, who trooped in from all about the Marais, on every Saturday
for more than thirty years. As to the _causerie littéraire et galante_
of these reunions, we learn all about it, and laugh at it, in
Pellisson's "Chronique du Samedi." It is impossible to burlesque it;
Molière himself could not do it. He has taken entire sentences
concerning the education of woman from the "Grand Cyrus," and put them
into his "Femmes Savantes"; and it is simply a portrait that he drew
of Madelon, as she sat in this _salon_ a year or so before he put her
on the stage, awaiting the gifted authors of "La Carte du Royaume des
Précieuses." And Mascarille's fatuous swagger and strident voice--as
he walks the boards in Coquelin's skin--seem to come straight and
uncaricatured from Pellisson's pages. When the valet's voice,
quavering with complacency, shakes our midriff with his pronouncement:
"We attach ourselves only to madrigals," he is making a direct
quotation from the "Chronique."

Mlle. de Scudéry, while a _précieuse_ herself, was too genuine and
talented and good-hearted a woman to be ridiculous. She is really an
admirable example of the writing-woman of the seventeenth century, a
female Mignard in her pen-portraits. Dr. Martin Lister came to pay his
respects to the Tenth Muse, in this little house in 1698, and found
her over ninety years old, toothless, and still talking! One might
wish to have been present at this meeting, but may be content with
looking on the walls that harbored a worthy woman and her queer crowd
of adorers.

They came from all about the Marais, it has been said. At the time of
her death, in the first year of the eighteenth century, this quarter
had become the chosen abode of the real swells of Paris, and so the
only possible residence for all those who wished to be so considered.
Long before, a new member of the body politic had been born--the
_bourgeois_--and a place had to be found for him. The leisure he had
gained from bread-getting need no longer be given to head-breaking,
and for his vision there was a horizon broader than that of his
father, of dignity in man and comeliness in life. His first solicitude
was for his habitation, which must be set free from the rude strength
of the feudal fortresses in which the _noblesse_ had camped. He
levelled battlements into cornices, and widened loop-holes into
windows, open for sunlight and _à la belle étoile_. In this seemly
home, his thoughts threw off the obstruction imposed by centuries of
repression, and by the joyless dogmas of the Church. And so began that
multiform process that, at last, flamed up through the frozen earth,
and has been named the Renaissance.

Many of the new mansions of the _bourgeoisie_ were in Marais streets
that were still walled off by the shut-in grounds of the religious
bodies, whose unproductive dwellers avoided all taxation. "You see,
formerly, there were monasteries all about here," says light-hearted
Laigle in "Les Misérables"; "Du Breul and Sauval give the list of them
and the Abbé Lebeuf. They were all around here; they swarmed; the
shod, the unshod, the shaven, the bearded, the blacks, the grays, the
whites, the Franciscans, the Minimi, the Capuchins, the Carmelites,
the Lesser Augustins, the Greater Augustins, the Old Augustins. They
littered." These belated owls, blinking in the new sunlight and
fresher air, had now to find other dark walls for their flapping. The
zone of abbeys, stretching from the Bastille to the Louvre, began to
be cut into, and the grounds of the great _hôtels_ of the noblemen
came into the market as well. There had been hardly any opening-up of
this quarter, from the day when Charles V. ended his wall, to the day
when Henri IV. began his Place Royale. He had planned, also, a
monumental square at the top of the Templars' domain, to be called
Place de France, with a grandiose entrance, from which eight wide
streets, bearing the names of the great provinces of France, were to
radiate, to be crossed by smaller streets named from the lesser
provinces. For this scheme Sully had bought up, under cover of a
broker, an immense tract in this region, just as the King's death put
a sudden end to this project, along with all his other projects.

One man did much to make real the plan that had been put on paper
only. This was Claude Charlot, a Languedoc peasant, who had come to
the capital in wooden _sabots_, with no money, but with plenty of
shrewdness and audacity. By 1618 he had managed to acquire almost the
entire tract set aside by Sully, and through it he cut streets, the
principal one of which is called after him, while, of those called
after the provinces, some still keep their names and some have been
renamed.

Even during his mapmaking of the Marais--summarily stopped by
Richelieu's spoliation--this was yet a solitary and unsafe quarter,
through which its honest citizens went armed against footpads by day,
and by night stretched chains across the _coupe-gorges_ of its narrow
streets. It continued to grow slowly through the last years of the
seventeenth century, and these streets, with the Place Royale as their
centre, were in time lined by the _portes-cochères_ of rich
financiers, farmers-generals, and receivers of taxes, all swollen with
their pickings and stealings. They adorned their dwellings with carved
panels and painted ceilings, with sculptured halls and spacious stone
stairways; and many of them were rich in manuscripts and rare books,
and in collections of various sorts.

Of these mansions, a surprising proportion is still standing, given up
to business-houses, factories, and schools; for all of which uses
their capacious rooms readily lend themselves. Within these old walls,
face to face with the bustling streets, shouldered by structures of
yesterday, or in dignified withdrawal behind their courts, can be
found actual treasures of decoration and of carving, along with
invisible and intangible treasures of association. For the aspect of a
street, or the atmosphere of a house, tells to the intelligent
looker-on as much of its bygone inmates as of its bare masonry. And
kindly fate has left such relics plentifully scattered about the
Marais. In oldest Paris of the Island, and in that almost as old
suburb on the southern bank, one must prowl patiently to find
suggestive brick and stone. In those regions a concealed tower, or an
isolated _tourelle_ on the angle of a building, makes the whole joy of
a day's journey. Here, in the Marais, at every step you stumble on
history and tradition and romance.

For "the little province of the Marais" was far away from the capital,
and was let alone; or, rather, it was an unmolested island, washed
about and not washed over by the swift tide of traffic. The stormy
waves of insurrection have broken against its shores, and its
pavements have never been made into barricades in any of the recurring
revolutions, which have all been but interludes and later acts of the
Great Revolution, in the people's endeavor to carry on and complete
the main motive of that drama.

The vogue of the Marais began to fade away with the middle years of
the eighteenth century, when the old _noblesse de famille_ adopted the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the new _noblesse de finance_ migrated to
the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the gadding multitude sought the
arcades of the Palais-Cardinal, renamed Palais-Royal. A few ancient
families, poor and proud, remained to burrow in their ancestral homes,
and retired pensioned officials and _petits rentiers_ found a boon in
the small rentals of the big apartments. All these _locataires_,
preserving the old forms and keeping untarnished the old etiquette,
gave an air of dignified dulness to the Marais. Their dinner-hour was
at five o'clock, and after that solemn function, held in the hall hung
with family portraits or with dingy tapestry, their sedate prattle,
before going to bed at nine o'clock, would touch on the unhallowed
Edict of Nantes and on its righteous revocation; even as in a certain
London club of to-day, musty old gentlemen still lament, with subdued
dismay, "the murder of the Martyr, Charles Stuart." The sole diversion
of these ancient dames of the Marais was a stroll in the Place Royale,
arrayed in old-time costumes, their white hair dressed high above
their patrician brows.

Nowadays, under the horse-chestnuts and baby elms of its ground,
school-boys from the neighboring institutions romp on the grit, and
babies are wheeled about by their nurses, and on the benches sit faded
old men, blinking and inarticulate. They cling to the historic name of
the place, while to us of the real world it is known as Place des
Vosges; this title having been given it, in honor of the province of
that name, by Lucien Bonaparte, while he was Minister of the Interior.
The appellation was officially adopted by the Republic of 1848, and
once more, perhaps finally and for all time, by the Third Republic.




THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS

  [Illustration: The Place des Vosges.]




THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS


"_Dans cet hôtel est née, le 6 Fevrier, 1626, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal,
Marquise de Sévigné_:" so reads the tablet set in that wall, which
fronts on the square, of the house numbered 1 Place des Vosges, having
its entrance at No. 11 Rue de Birague. There is no name more closely
linked with the Marais than that of this illustrious woman. Born in
this house, baptized in its parish church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis,
she here grew up to girlhood; she was married in Saint-Gervais, her
daughter was married in Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs; and the greater
portion of her life was passed within this quarter. Her father was
killed in a duel a few months after her birth, at the age of seven she
lost her mother, and when only twenty-five years old, she found
herself a widow. After a short sojourn in the provinces with her son
and daughter, she came back, in 1655, to Paris and to the Marais. She
had casual and unsettled domiciles, for many years, in Rues de
Thorigny, Barbette, des Francs-Bourgeois, des Lions-Saint-Paul, des
Tournelles--all within our chosen district--before she settled in her
home of twenty years, the Carnavalet.

It is but a step away from this tablet above us, to the corner of
Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and Sévigné; the latter street, at that
time, bearing its original name of Culture-Sainte-Catherine, having
been opened through that portion under cultivation of the grounds of
the great monastery of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers. On the
corner of this new street and that of Francs-Bourgeois--then Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Catherine--a piece of the convent garden was bought by
Jacques de Ligneris, and thereon a house for his residence was
erected. Its plans were drawn by Pierre Lescot, it was built by Jean
Bullant, was decorated by Androuët du Cerceau, and its sculptures were
carved by Jean Goujon. And thus these walls, on which we are looking,
speak in mute laudation of four famous men. One more notable name may
be added to this list--that of François Mansart. He was called in, a
century or so after the completion of this mansion, for its renovation
and enlargement; and, to his lasting honor, he contented himself with
doing only what seemed to him to be imperatively demanded, and with
attempting no "improvements" nor "restoration" of the work of his
great predecessors. He knew what we have learned, that those words too
often mean desecration and ruin to all historic monuments in all
lands. During this interval, the building had come into the hands of
Françoise de la Baume, Dame de Kernévalec, whose Breton name,
corrupted to Carnavalet, has clung to it ever since. That name
suggested the pun of the _carnaval_ masks, carved in stone over the
arches of the wings in the court. They were done by a later hand than
that of Goujon, whose last work is to be seen about that window of
the Louvre, on which he was busy, when a bullet picked him off, a day
or two after the night of Saint Bartholomew. The tranquil elegance of
his chisel has adorned this almost perfect gateway with the graceful
winged figure in its keystone. It lifts and lightens the severe
dignity of the façade. And, in the court--its centre not unworthily
held by the bronze statue of Louis XIV., remarkable in its exquisite
details, found in the old Hôtel de Ville--we linger in joy before the
graceful flowing curves and the daylight directness of the Seasons of
this French Phidias. The figures on the wings are from a feebler
chisel than his. Of all the crowding memories of this spot, those of
the Marquise de Sévigné and of Jean Goujon are the most vivid and the
most captivating. The busts of these two, one on either side, greet us
at the head of the staircase leading to her apartments; she is alert
and winsome, he is sedate and thoughtful and a trifle too stern for
the most amiable of sculptors, as he shows himself here, rather than
the staunch Huguenot, killed for his convictions.

She was fifty-one years of age by the records when she came to live
here, in 1677, and half that age at heart, which she kept always
young. She had been so long camping about in the Marais, that she was
impatient to settle down in the ideal dwelling she had found, at last.
She writes to her daughter: "_Dieu merci, nous avons l'hôtel
Carnavalet. C'est une affaire admirable; nous y tiendrons tous, et
nous aurons le bel air. Comme on ne peut pas tout avoir, il faut se
passer des parquets, et des petites cheminées a la mode.... Pour moi,
je vais vous ranger la Carnavalette, car, enfin, nous l'avons, et j'en
suis fort aise._"

So she moved in, with her son and daughter, both dear to her. It was
to the daughter, however, that the mother's affluence of affection
flowed out, all through her life; and it may well be that this
veritable passion saved her from all other passions, during the years
of her long widowhood, when many a _grand parti_ fell at her feet. She
looked on them all alike, with pity for their seizure, and each of
them got up and walked away, unappeased. Yet hers was a rich nature,
wholesome and womanly withal, and there are potentialities of emotion
in the pouting lips and inviting eyes of the pretty pagan of this
bust. Nor was she a prude, and her way of quoting Rabelais and
listening to La Fontaine's verses would horrify us moderns of queasy
stomachs. She had ready pardon for the infidelities of her husband,
and later for the misdeeds of her scampish cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, "the
most dangerous tongue in France."

Above all, this real woman showed a masculine strength and loyalty of
friendship for men; showed it most markedly in her sympathy for those
who had fallen in the world. There is no finer example in the annals
of constancy than her devotion to the broken Fouquet, howbeit he may
have merited breaking. The spirit of her letters, at the time of his
disgrace and imprisonment, cannot be twisted into anything ignoble, as
Napoleon tried to do, on reading them in the State archives. He
sneeringly suggested that her sympathy with Fouquet was "_bien chaud,
bien vif, bien tendre, pour de la simple amitié_." So it was, indeed;
for her friendships were attachments, and warmth and tenderness
pulsate in all her letters; and these qualities will, along with their
unpremeditated spontaneity, keep them alive as long as letters live.
What else was in her letters has been told by Nodier, when he says
that they regulated and purified the language for ordinary use; and by
Jules Janin, who rightly claims that, from this Carnavalet, came the
purest and most perfect French hitherto heard in France.

In forming and housing the great collection of the History of Paris,
to which the Musée Carnavalet is devoted, new buildings about a trim
garden in the rear have been added to the original mansion, whose own
rooms have been subjected to as little change as possible. Madame de
Sévigné's apartment, on the first floor, is hardly altered, and her
bedroom and _salon_ have been especially kept inviolate. The admirable
mouldings, the curious mirrors, the old-fashioned lustre, remain as
she left them, when she went to her daughter at Grignan to die. In
this _salon_, and in the wide corridor leading to it, both now so
silent and pensive, she received all the men of her day worth
receiving; and it is here alone that we breathe the very atmosphere of
this incomparable creature.

We may join the early-goers among these men, who make their way to
another house, not far distant. There are temptations to stop before,
and explore within, the seventeenth-century mansions all along Rues
Sévigné and du Parc-Royal, but we pass on into Rue Turenne--once Rue
Saint-Louis, the longest and widest and foremost in fashion of Marais
streets, now merely big and bustling, with little left of its ancient
glory--until we come to its No. 58, on the corner of old Rue des
Douze-Portes, now named Ville-Hardouin, after the contemporary
chronicler of the Fifth Crusade. This modest house at the corner has
been luckily overlooked by the modern rebuilder of this quarter, who
has not touched its two stories and low attic above a ground floor,
its unobtrusive portal, its narrow hall, and its staircase; small and
quaint, in keeping with the cripple who was carried up and down for
many years. Paul Scarron lived here, in the apartment _au deuzième à
droite_, dubbed the "_Hôtel de l'Impécuniosité_" by his young wife,
who was the granddaughter of the Calvinist leader, Agrippa d'Aubigné,
and who was to be the second wife of Louis XIV. Sitting at her
scantily supplied supper-table here, the maid would whisper that a
course was lacking, and that an anecdote from the hostess must fill
the bill of fare instead. Goldsmith tells us, at the beginning of his
"Retaliation:"

     "Of old when Scarron his companions invited,
     Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united."

And, just here, it is curious to recall the fact that Goldsmith was
busied, during the last months of his life, on a translation of
Scarron's "Roman Comique," and his bethumbed copy was found on his
desk, after his death.

Scarron was always poor and always importunate, and yet he was "a
pleasant prodigy never before seen," he says of himself; rightfully
claiming that he was able "to sport with misery and jest in pain."
Paralyzed and still a prey to incurable torments, immovable in his
armchair except for his nimble fingers, he drove his pen merrily to
the making of comedies, tales, pamphlets, and the verse that, like
him, was impishly awry with mockery, as if chattered by "a wilderness
of monkeys." Letters, too, he wrote in this house, that give us
striking glimpses of the man and of his time. In them we discover that
"most terribly" was the sanctified slang then for the modern
abomination "awfully." Appeals for money make up much of his
correspondence, but there is never a hint of a loan in the charming
letters to the "_belle ange en deuil_," Madame de Sévigné; in which he
always assures her that she is a dangerous person, and that those who
look on her without due care, grow sick upon it immediately, and are
not long-lived. Mlle. de Lenclos was a favorite of his, too, and that
"_charmant objet, belle Ninon_," came to sit for hours beside his
invalid-chair. She made friends with the young wife, too, but
complained that she was "_trop gauche_" to learn gallantry, and was
"_vertueuse par faiblesse_." The large-minded lady frankly owns:
"_J'aurais voulu l'en guérir, mais elle craignait trop Dieu._" For all
that, the friendship then formed between the two women was never
broken, and when the widow Scarron came to position and power she
offered a place at court to her elder friend; an offer that was
refused, for the old lady never grew old enough to change her mode of
life. And there is little doubt that the younger woman often looked
back with longing to those wretched days that were so happy. She said
once, seeing the carp dying of surfeit in the Versailles pond: "_Elles
regrettent leur bourbe_," suggesting that, like them, she suffered
from satiety.

Years before his marriage, Scarron had lived with his sister in this
same little street of "Twelve Doors," and had grown very fond of the
"_beau quartier des Marests_." He asks: "Who can stay long from the
Place Royale?" When he returned to Paris in 1654--having married in
1652, and having made a long stay in Touraine--he came back to his
beloved Marais, and took a three-years' lease of this apartment. At
its termination the lease was probably renewed, for it is a
time-honored tradition that makes this old house the place of his
death, on October 14, 1660.

Between fifty and one hundred years later--the exact date is not to be
got at--the garret above was crowded with the pet dogs and cats and
birds of Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, who lived in filth among them,
seldom eating, never washing, always smoking. The big blond dramatist
had fallen a victim to poverty and melancholy, after a short career of
success on those boards which he stained with the blood of many
violent deaths. He had said that, since Corneille had taken heaven for
his own and Racine had seized upon earth, he could place his scenes
only in hell. He was rescued, and taken from this garret, by the
pension obtained through La Pompadour. That great lady was not
prompted by any comprehension of the sombre power of his tragedy, but
by a desire to wreak her spite against Voltaire by the exaltation of a
rival.

Scarron's widow was left in poor case, with only her husband's small
pension for support, and this was stopped by Colbert on the death of
Anne of Austria, in 1666. That Queen-Mother had endowed an institution
for poor girls and sick women, and with these "_Hospitalières de la
Place Royale_," Madame Scarron found shelter, having sold all that she
owned. In 1669 she was put in charge of the first child of the King
and Madame de Montespan, and we know all the rest, to the secret
marriage in 1685. Such of the buildings of the "_Hospitalières_" as
are left now form part of the Hôpital Andral, and their old roofs and
dormers and chimneys take our eye above the low wall as we turn into
Rue des Tournelles. In this street is the hospital's main entrance,
and through its gate we look across the garden, that stretches back to
the former entrance in Impasse de Béarn; now opened only to carry out
for burial the bodies of those dying in the hospital.

The line of walls along Rue des Tournelles was broken by only a few
isolated houses, when François Mansart selected a site here, and put
thereon his own dwelling, unpretending as the man himself, in contrast
with the grand mansions he had planned for his noble and wealthy
clients. This is his modest entrance-court, at No. 28 Rue des
Tournelles, and behind it is the simple façade of his _hôtel_. This
building probably formed his entire frontage, or it may have been the
_corps-de-logis_ of a more extensive structure, whose two wings
reached out toward the street at Nos. 26 and 30. This number 28,
whether the central or the entire body of the building, remains in
perfect preservation. At Mansart's death, in 1666, it came, along with
most of his property, to his sister's son, whom he had adopted, and
trained to be the architect known as Jules Hardouin Mansart. He gained
position and pay in the royal employ, more by this adoptive name than
by his abilities. As Superintendent of Buildings under Louis XIV. he
is responsible for most of the horrors of the palace of Versailles,
yet the dome of the Invalides proves him to have been capable of less
meretricious work.

On taking possession of his uncle's mansion, he had, as sole tenant of
his spacious and inviting first floor, Mlle. Anne Lenclos, popularly
christened Ninon de Lenclos, then fifty years of age. Her dwelling is
the end and object of this short walk, and together with the house
from which we started, and the one at which we stopped, it gives us a
complete picture of the social doings of the Marais at that period. We
are allowed to enter among the men with whom we have come, and we will
go in, let us say, with young de Sévigné, who finds his way here
frequently, from his _pied-à-terre_ in his mother's house, as his
father and his grandfather had found their way to Ninon's abode. Under
the stone balcony on the court-front we step up into a goodly hall,
from which rises a stone staircase, its outer end finely carved, its
steps well worn by many visitors through the years. An admirable
medallion looks down from the wall as we mount, and in the rooms above
we find carved panels and decorated ceilings, many of them done by
Lebrun and Mignard, probably for the fair tenant. They are so
carefully kept that canvas covers such of them as are feared to be
"_trop lestes_" for modern eyes, in the modest words of the ancient
_concierge_. Mansart put an excellent façade on his garden-front, and
its coupled Ionic columns, and balconies of wrought-iron railings, are
all there unmutilated. But the garden, then stretching to Boulevard
Beaumarchais, is now hidden under the shops that front on that
boulevard.

To these rooms and this garden thronged the same men whom we have seen
in the Sévigné and Scudéry _salons_, and these reunions were as
decorous as those, and perhaps somewhat more cheerful and more natural
in tone. For, while Ninon had the honor of being enrolled in the
"Grand Dictionnaire des Précieuses," published in 1661, and while she
had been presented at the Hôtel de Rambouillet at the early age of
seventeen, she had none of the pretensions nor the ridiculosities of
"Les Femmes Savantes." She was absolutely genuine, not ashamed to be
natural, quite ready to laugh or to cry with her friends. These
friends, drawn to her less by her beauty than by her charm, were held
always by her sunny amiability, her quick sympathies, her frank
_camaraderie_. She was the Clarisse of Mlle. de Scudéry's "Clélie;" an
_enjouée aimable_, who never denied herself the indulgence of any
caprice of head or of heart. Yet, as she laughingly confessed, while
she thanked God every night for the good wits given her, she prayed
every morning for better protection against the follies of her heart.
It is a faithful portrait that is given in the verse of her day:

     "_L'indulgente et sage Nature
     A formé l'âme de Ninon,
     De la volupté d'Épicure,
     Et de la vertu de Caton._"

Beyond most women of that time, she was really cultivated, in the best
meaning of that word; far different from the meaningless Culture with
a capital, of our time. She was fond of philosophy, withal, and took
turns with Plato and with Montaigne; and would speculate on the
problems of life either with Church dignitaries or with the epicurean
Saint-Évremond. And she captivated them all, men of all sorts,
beginning with her girlish years--when she dutifully obeyed her
father, who preached pleasure to her, rather than her mother, who
pushed her toward a convent--through all her long life of incredibly
youthful heart and body, to her amazing conquests when over sixty. A
portrait of her at about this age hangs in Knole House, Sevenoaks; her
hair, parted down the middle and plainly drawn back in modest fashion,
her alluring eyes and her ingenuous direct smile, give her the look of
a girl. Richelieu was her first admirer, Voltaire was the latest.
When brought to this house, where he celebrated Ninon's ninetieth
birthday in verse, young Arouet was only about twelve years old, as
was told in a preceding chapter. She was charmed with the youthful
genius, and, dying within a few weeks, in 1706, she left him two
thousand crowns for buying his beloved books.

From five until nine in the evening, Ninon was "at home" here, up to
her eighty-fourth year, in 1700. Before her visitors went away, they
sat down to a simple supper, served with no parade and at small
expense. Many of the guests, following the fashion of Scarron's
friends and of the persistent diners-out of that day, brought their
own _plats_. We get a glimpse of the simplicity of these suppers "_à
tous les Despréaux et tous les Racines_," and of the homely, social
ways of the _bourgeoisie_, in Voltaire's tiresome comedy "Le
Dépositaire."

We look about these rooms, in which we are standing, and wish we might
have seen Boileau and Racine here; we seem to see Molière, reading his
unacted and still unnamed play, and consulting his hostess as to
whether "Tartufe" will do for a title; and old Corneille, forgetting
to be shy and clumsy at her side; and Scarron, wheeled in his chair,
quicker in his scoffing for her quick catching of the point; and La
Rochefoucauld, less of a surly and egotistic _poseur_ in her presence,
content to sparkle as a boudoir Machiavelli; and Huyghens, fresh from
his discovery of the moons of Saturn, finding here a heavenly body of
unwonted radiance, and setting to work to write erotic verse mixed
with mathematics. The great Condé himself, proud, vain,
hardest-hearted of men, melts when he meets her; broken and decrepit,
he climbs out from his sedan-chair--"that wonderful fortification
against bad weather and the insults of the mud," says delicious
Mascarille--and approaches, hat in hand, the _calèche_ of that other
aged warrior, Ninon de Lenclos.

Through No. 23 of Boulevard Beaumarchais, which occupies the site of
her garden, we come out on that broad thoroughfare, passing on our
right the buildings covering the gardens that once countrified this
east side of Rue des Tournelles. We cannot now search among the houses
there for that one inhabited by the Abbé Prévost, some time between
1730 and 1740, while he was writing his enthralling story of "Manon
Lescaut." Almost at the end of the boulevard, men are sitting about
tin tables on the pavement, drinking good beer, on the very site of
the gate of Saint-Antoine. Just there, outside the gate, stood Lady de
Winter, pointing out to her two hired assassins her pet enemy,
d'Artagnan, as he rode out on the Vincennes road, on his way to the
siege of Rochelle. The gate abutted on the western side of the
Bastille, and its figures, carved by Jean Goujon for decorations of a
later day, may be seen in the Cluny Gardens.

Traced in the pavement of Place de la Bastille and across Rue
Saint-Antoine, you may follow the outlines of such portions of the
walls and towers of the great prison as are not hidden under the
houses at the two corners. When you ask for your number in the
omnibus office of the _place_, you are standing in the Bastille's
inner court. Across its outer eastern ditch and connected with the
wall of Charles V., was thrown a projecting bastion, the tower of
which stood exactly where now rises the Column of July. At the corner
of Rues Saint-Antoine and Jacques-Coeur, a tablet shows the site of
the gateway that gave entrance to the outer court, which led
southwardly along the line of the latter small street. By this gateway
the armed mob entered on July 14, 1789. Lazy Louis XVI., hard at work
on locks and other trifles at Versailles--having as yet no news from
Paris--writes in his diary for that day: "_Rien_"! That mob had found
the fortress as little capable of resistance as the throne that it
overturned a while later; both proved to be but baseless fabrics of an
unduly dreaded terror. Indeed, it was the power behind this prison
that was stormed on that day. There were plenty of prisons in Paris,
as fast and as secret as was the Bastille. This was more than a prison
to these people; it gloomed over their lives as its towers gloomed
over their street--a mysterious and menacing defiance, a dumb and
docile doer of shady deeds, a symbol of an authority feared and hated.
And so these people first tore away the tool, and then disabled the
hand that had held it. It was a stirring act in the drama, though a
trifle melodramatic.

"_Palloy le Patriote_," as he styled himself, takes the centre of the
stage just here, and, like all professional patriots, in all lands and
all times, he makes a good thing of his patriotism. He was the
contractor for demolishing the walls and for clearing the ground of
the wreckage, at a handsome price; and he doubled his wage by the sale
of the materials. Some of the stones went, queerly enough, to the
building of Pont de la Concorde; others of them may be seen in the
walls of the house on the western corner of Boulevard Poissonière and
Rue Saint-Fiacre, and of other houses in the town. With the stones not
fit for these uses, and with the mortar, he made numerous models of
the Bastille, which were purchased by the committees and sent as
souvenirs to the chief towns of the then newly created departments.
One of these models is in the Musée Carnavalet. So, too, the thrifty
Palloy turned the ironwork dug out into hat and shoe buckles, and the
woodwork into canes and fans and tobacco-boxes; all, at last, into
coin for his patriotic pocket. The gate of one of the cells was
removed, and rebuilt in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie; where it may be
seen by the inmates, who care nothing for a door more or less, but
never by the outsider, who would like to get in for a glimpse!

To "Palloy the Patriotic" and his gang of a thousand workingmen, rides
up on his white horse, one day, the first commander of the just
invented and organized National Guard--Lafayette, aptly named by
Mirabeau the "Cromwell-Grandison" of his nation. He looks over the
busy ground, and gives orders that the men shall receive a pint of
wine and a half-franc daily; but they got neither money nor wine, both
doubtless "conveyed, the wise it called," on the way, by Palloy or by
other "patriots." Lafayette carried away the great key of the
Bastille's great entrance-door, and sent it to George Washington by
Thomas Paine, when, a few years later, Paine got out of the Luxembourg
prison and out of France. It is one of the cherished relics at Mount
Vernon, and not one is more impressive and more appropriate in that
place, since it was the success of the American revolutionists that
inspirited those who opened the Bastille.

We pass along Rue Saint-Antoine, so commonplace and sordid to-day, so
crowded with history and tradition. It has seen, in its short length,
pageants of royalty and nobility, the hide-and-seek of romance, the
blood-letting of sharp blades, the carnage of the common people, such
as no other street of any other town has known. Its memories would
fill a fat volume.

The little temple of Sainte-Marie on our left, as we go--a reduced
imitation of Rome's Pantheon--is a design by François Mansart, and
while it has his grace of line and his other qualities, it is not a
notable work. Built on the site of the Hôtel de Boissy, wherein Quélus
died and his lover Henry wept, it was intended for the chapel of the
"_Filles de la Visitation_," and their name clings to it, although it
has been made over to the Protestant Church. To this convent fled
Mlle. Louise de la Fayette from Louis XIII.; who, ardent in the only
love and the only chase known in his platonic career, visited her here
until his confessor, Vincent de Paul, showed him the scandal of a King
going to a nunnery. So he had to leave her, secure under the veil and
the vows of the cloister. She became Soeur, and later Mère,
Angélique, of the Convent of Sainte-Madeleine, founded in 1651 by
Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I., which stood on the far-away
heights of Chaillot, where now is the museum of the Trocadéro. There
the sister and the sweetheart of Louis XIII. lived together for many
years.

A few steps farther, and we come to Rue Beautreillis; its pavement and
its houses on both sides, nearly as far as Rue Charles V., covering
the Cemetery of old Saint-Paul; which extended westerly toward Passage
Saint-Pierre, wherein we may find the stone walls, now roofed in with
wood, of the _charniers_. There had been a suburban cemetery outside
the old wall, which was brought within city limits by the new wall,
and served as the burial-ground of the prisoners who died in the
Bastille. It did not so serve, as is commonly asserted, for the
skeletons found in chains in the cells, when the prison was opened by
righteous violence, because no such skeletons were found. "The Man in
the Iron Mask" was buried in this ground, close alongside the grave of
Rabelais, dug exactly one hundred and fifty years earlier. Pass
through the two courts that lie in the rear of No. 17 Rue
Beautreillis, and you will find yourself in a large waste garden, in
one corner of which the persuasive _concierge_ points out the grave of
the "_Masque-de-Fer_." It may well be that she is not misled by
topographical pride, for this ground was certainly a portion of the
old burial-ground, and not impossibly that portion where Rabelais and
"Marchioly" were laid near together. This is the prisoner's name on
the Bastille's burial-register, and not far from his real name. For we
know, as surely as we shall ever know, that this prisoner of State was
the Count Ercolo Antonio Mattioli, Secretary of State of Charles IV.,
Duke of Mantua. The count had agreed to betray his trust and to sell
his master's fortress of Casali to the French representative; with
this in their possession, Pignerol belonging already to France, Louis
XIV. and Louvois would dominate all upper Italy. Mattioli took his
pay, and betrayed his paymaster; the scheme miscarried, and the
schemer deserved another sort of reward. His open arrest, or
execution, or any public punishment, meant exposure and scandal to the
Crown and the Minister and the Ambassador of France. So he was
secretly kidnapped, and became "The Man in the Iron Mask." At his
death, in 1703, his face was mutilated, lest there might be
recognition, even then; the walls of his cell were scraped and
painted, to obliterate any marks he might have put on them; his linen
and clothing and furniture were burned. Had Voltaire suspected the
results of modern research, he would not have put forth his theory, in
the second edition of his "Questions sur l'Encyclopédie," that this
prisoner was an elder brother of Louis XIV. Yet, but for Voltaire's
error, we should have lost those delightful pages of Dumas, wherein
Aramis carries off from the Bastille this elder brother and rightful
heir to the crown, leaving Louis XIV. in the cell, and at last
replaces his puppets in their original positions.

This Cemetery of Saint-Paul, dating back to Dagobert, when the
burial-grounds on the Island had become overpeopled, had its own small
chapel of the same name, which had fallen out of use and into ruin.
Charles V., bringing it within his enclosure of the Hôtel Saint-Paul,
rebuilt and enlarged it and made it the church of the royal parish.
All the daughters and the sons of France were thenceforth baptized
here, and it became the favorite church of the nobility. After Louis
XI.'s time, and the desertion of this quarter by royalty, the little
church lost its vogue. In 1794 it was appropriated and sold as
National Domain, and torn down soon after. Its site is covered by the
buildings on and behind the eastern side of Rue Saint-Paul, opposite
the space between Passage Saint-Paul and Rue Eginhard. This is the
small street selected by Alphonse Daudet for the shop of his
_brocanteur_ Leemans, to which comes the fascinating Sephora, of "Les
Rois en Exil." Daudet has overdone it in going so far for his local
color; the street is a noisome alley, entered by an archway from Rue
Saint-Paul, holding only two or three obscene junk-shops.

And now, passing the flamboyant Italian façade--a meretricious
imitation of the front of Saint-Gervais--of the Church of
Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, which has absorbed the name of old
Saint-Paul, we reach at last the ample space where the two streets of
Rivoli and of Saint-Antoine meet and so make one broad, unbroken
thoroughfare through the length of the town, from the place where the
Bastille was to the place now named Concorde. This grand highway has
existed only since the middle of the nineteenth century. The Consulate
and the First Empire had cut Rue de Rivoli along the upper edge of the
Tuileries Gardens as far easterly as Rue de Rohan; from there it was
prolonged, taking the line of some of the old, narrow streets and
piercing through solid masses of ancient buildings, in the last years
of Louis-Philippe; and was carried from the Hôtel de Ville to this
point by the Second Empire. All through earlier days, the route,
common and royal, from the Louvre and the Tuileries to the Hôtel
Saint-Paul, the Tournelles, the Bastille, and the Arsenal, was by way
of narrow Rue Saint-Honoré and its narrower continuation, Rue de la
Ferronerie, thence around by Rue Saint-Denis into Rue des Lombards,
and so along Rues de la Verrerie and Roi-de-Sicile to the old gate of
Saint-Antoine, that stood just behind us here at the end of Rue
Malher. Outside that gate was the country road leading to Vincennes,
which was transformed into the city street, known to us as Rue
Saint-Antoine, through the protection given by Charles V.'s new wall
and by his Bastille. There had been, long before, a Rue Saint-Antoine,
and it curves away here on our left, and is called Rue François-Miron,
so named in honor of that _Prévôt des Marchands_ in Henri IV.'s time,
who merits remembrance as an honest, high-minded, capable
administrator of his weighty office.

Thus this street of old Saint-Antoine was the thoroughfare--at first
from the entrance into the town by the old gate of Saint-Antoine, and
afterward from the new street of Saint-Antoine and its entrance gate
farther east--to the open space behind the Hôtel de Ville, alongside
Saint-Gervais, and so to the bridges and the Palace on the Island. It
was a street "marvellously rich" in shops, having no rival except in
Rue Saint-Denis. Its shopkeepers shouted, from their doors or from the
pavement in front, the merits of their wares to the throng swarming
always along. Their wares were worthy of the city that, with its
fast-growing population, equalled Venice herself in wealth, display,
and splendor, if we may trust the word of an exultant scribbling
citizen of the Paris of Charles V.

So, too, it was the grand highway for royal entries, for troops, for
ambassadors with their trains, for any parade that demanded display
and attracted spectators. Such an array came along here on August 26,
1660, when young Louis XIV. brought into his town his young bride,
Maria Theresa of Spain, each of them being just twenty-two years old.
It was the showiest pageant and the longest procession yet seen in
Paris, taking ten or twelve hours to pass. The bride--a slight,
pretty, girlish figure, in white satin and pearls, and a violet mantle
of velvet--leaned back on the crimson velvet of her huge gilded
chariot; at her right on horseback was the King, in cloth-of-gold and
black lace, his collars and ruffles of white point. In the resplendent
retinue nothing so blazed as the superb empty coach of the
Cardinal-Minister Mazarin, its panels painted by Lebrun, drawn by the
famous mules and escorted by the Mousquetaires. Less than a year later
Mazarin was carried through Paris in his hearse, caring no more for
mules or any tomfoolery.

The procession had entered the town under Claude Perrault's triumphal
arch at the end of the Vincennes Avenue, and through Porte
Saint-Antoine, cleaned up and sculptured afresh for this day, and so
by new Rue Saint-Antoine, along this present Rue François-Miron. It
was packed with spectators, among whom was La Fontaine, who sent a
long rhymed description of the show to his patron, Fouquet, not
omitting mention of the cardinal's mules. These, too, were spoken of
with fitting praise in a letter written to a friend by young Madame
Scarron--to be a widow, within a few weeks--who was also in the
throng. Years after, she confessed to the credulous King that on that
day she had first seen him and first loved him, and that she had never
ceased to love him since! We may not consider the Duchess of Orleans
unduly prejudiced when she refers to Madame de Maintenon as "that
hussy."

At No. 88 Rue François-Miron you may see an excellent balcony of that
period, solidly and richly wrought in iron, supported by captivating
stone dragons of fantastic design. There were similar balconies on the
front of the great mansion at No. 68--which was then No. 62--but of
these only a small one is still left over the portal. They were all
crowded with a most select mob of the elect on the day of this
procession. There was Anne of Austria, in her black mantle, looking
down on her son, her thoughts turning back to her own bridal
procession over the same route, and her own youthful blond beauty of
forty-five years before. By her side sat Henrietta of France, widow of
Charles I., and her daughter, Henrietta Anne of England. The girl may
have gazed with curiosity on the over-dressed fop riding at the
bride's left wheel. This was Philippe d'Orléans, who was to be her
husband, and was, through his complacent creatures, to poison her
within ten years from this day. In another balcony sat Mazarin, too
ill to take part in the procession.

The hostess of these great ladies was one Catherine Bellier, wife of
Pierre de Beauvais; and this house is the Hôtel de Beauvais. The
husband had been a pedlar or a shopkeeper, and had amassed sufficient
wealth from ribbons to enable him to buy his title. The wife had
served as first _femme-de-chambre_ to Anne of Austria, and had so
learned many secrets of that queer court, of its Queen-Mother, and of
her Cardinal. In that court there was no more unscrupulous creature
than this Catherine Bellier. The deliciously outspoken Duchess of
Orleans--the second wife of that Philippe we have just seen--describes
this woman as one-eyed and hideous, of profligate life, and apt in all
intrigue. To the day of her death she loved to appear in flamboyant
costumes at the court, where she was treated with distinction because
of what she knew. Anne of Austria gave her the stone for the
construction of this _hôtel_, and she used to visit her
waiting-woman and _confidente_ here. A popular verse of the day ran:

     "_Mercredi notre auguste Reine,
     Cette charmante Souveraine,
     Fut chez Madame de Beauvais;
     Pour de son admirable palais
     Voir les merveilles étonnantes,
     Et les raretés surprenantes._"

  [Illustration: The Hôtel de Beauvais.]

The design of the Hôtel de Beauvais, by Antoine Lepautre, is most
daring and original in its great interior oval court, embellished with
pilasters that are topped with finely carved stone masks. Despite the
unhallowed devotion to cleanliness which, with its whitewash, has
robbed it of its former lovely bloom of age, this court remains one of
the most impressive specimens of seventeenth-century domestic
architecture in all Paris. From the street we pass through an ample
gateway, its curved top surmounted by a great shell. The vestibule is
ornamented with escutcheons, alternating with the garlanded ox-skulls
of Roman-Doric decoration--mistaken by many for rams' heads, so as to
make a sculptor's pun on Bellier--all admirably carved in stone. The
noble staircase has Corinthian columns, and a massive stone balustrade
so perfectly pierced into fine lines of intertwisted tracery as to
give delicacy to it, thick and broad as it is. Cut in stone
escutcheons in the ceiling of this stairway are the intertwined
initials of the brand-new nobility that built it. The grand _salons_
of the first floor have been partitioned off into small rooms for
trade purposes. No character of any sort has been left to the
interior.

The ground on which we tread here, while a portion of the Marais of
old Paris, is not the Marais of modern Paris, as it is commonly
designated. Yet this region toward the river, built on during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after the opening up of the
grounds of the Hôtel Saint-Paul and the cutting of streets through
them, holds enticements in architecture and in story that tempt us to
turn our backs for a while on our own Marais.

Many of the streets here remain unmodernized and unspoiled, and here
are _hôtels_ as perfectly preserved as this Hôtel de Beauvais. At No.
26 Rue Geoffroy-Lasnier we stop in delight before an entrance-door
superbly carved and heavy with a glorious knocker--a lion's head
holding a great ring in its mouth. Above this door we read: "_Hôtel de
Châlons, 1625, et de Luxembourg, 1659._" The small court within,
diminished by modern stables on one side, retains on its other side an
ancient iron fountain. The façade of the miniature _hôtel_ giving on
this court is in well-balanced stone and brick; its shapely windows
are surrounded by male and female masks, and by delicate foliage
twining about the monograms of the aforetime exalted owners--all
elaborately carved in stone. The roof rises gracefully to its ridge,
and each gable end is surmounted by a well-wrought iron finial. There
is a modest garden behind, shut in and hid by the buildings about,
which hide, too, the simple and attractive stateliness of that rear
face of the Hôtel de Châlons. The enchanting isolation and the
singular charm of this concealed corner give us the feeling that here
is a bit of Bourges, gently dropped, tranquil and untroubled, into the
midst of these turbulent streets.

A little farther along, at No. 32 in this street of Geoffroy-Lasnier,
behind a commonplace house-front and a commonplace court, you shall
find a staircase, with an iron rail below and a wooden rail above,
that make a most uncommon and interesting picture.

Turning into Rue de Jouy, an altogether delightful old-time street, we
pass through a monumental gateway at No. 7 into a symmetrical court.
Facing us is the Hôtel d'Aumont, and it tells us more than is told by
any structure hereabout of the merits of François Mansart. This front
of two stories and of his own roof is faultless in proportion and
dainty in adornment. He has given it the stamp of the stately days of
the Grand Monarch by the four _oeils-de-boeuf_ above the perfect
cornice of the second floor, two on either side of the central window.
In the two corners of the court, at each angle of the building, are
round-fronted stone _perrons_, broad and low and inviting. That on our
left gives entrance to a small hall, the staircase in which carries an
exquisite wrought-iron rail that lifts and lightens the stone steps.
By them we mount to the chambers of the first floor, small as was the
custom then, with one grand central reception-room, excellent in its
proportions, its vaulted ceiling curiously carved in relief. All these
rooms are, by the good taste and generous spirit of the owners of the
property, kept in perfect condition, the furniture is of the period,
and the painting--done by Lebrun a century later than the ceiling on
which it is placed--is fresh and untarnished.

Mansart's commission for this construction came from that Duc d'Aumont
who was Maréchal of France and Governor of Paris under Louis XIII. A
descendant of the early fighters of old France, he seems to have been
one of those favorites of fortune who, in the phrase of Beaumarchais,
give themselves only the trouble to be born. At the age of ten he
began his career as a colonel of cavalry, and continued it through a
long line of lucky promotions in place and pay. Dying in 1704, he left
this _hôtel_ packed with furniture, paintings, _bibelots_, and curios,
and its stables filled with the carriages he had invented; an amazing
collection, requiring months for its sale by his heirs.

The _hôtel_ is now occupied by the Pharmacie Centrale of France, to
whose officials is due our gratitude for their rare and scrupulous
respect for this delightful relic. Over its spacious gardens behind
they have erected their immense laboratories and offices, which we may
enter under the great vaulted porch at No. 21 Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyères.
That once narrowest of the streets of old Paris, as quaint as its
name, given it by the branch of the Hyères nunnery having its seat
here, has become a broad and bustling thoroughfare. The plain rear
elevation of the _hôtel_ can be seen here from the little corner of
the garden that is still kept, and kept green by the choice plants of
the company. In it is a capital bust of Dorvault, physician, author,
founder of the Pharmacie Centrale. This may be the very bit of garden
noticed by Dr. Martin Lister, an English traveller in France at the
close of the seventeenth century. He dined with the Duc d'Aumont, and
records that, opening from the dining-room, was a greenhouse through
which his noble host led him into the garden.

Along through the rocky ravine that bears the name of Charlemagne, and
does him no honor, we pass, by way of Rue Saint-Paul, into the short
street that started in life as Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul, and has now taken
the name of Charles V. Here, among the ancient fronts, we are
attracted by that which is numbered 12, low and wide, with two floors
and dormers above. Through its entrance-door, capped by a well-carved
mask that smiles stonily down on us, we may enter the court by the
courtesy of the sister, who smiles sweetly. This building is occupied
by the girls' school of a sisterhood, whose youthful _communiantes_
happen to be forming in procession for a function to-day. They flutter
about in innocent white, in unconscious contrast with the great lady
and great criminal whom we have come to see. For this was the Hôtel
d'Aubray, and its most distinguished tenant was the Marquise de
Brinvilliers.

Let us look about the court and the little garden behind, both
embraced by the two wings of the structure. That wing on our right,
with round arches and a round tower at its end, is evidently of the
original fabric and intended for stabling. This wing on our left, now
extended by a new chapel, was, when built, meant to contain only this
staircase, whose wide and broad stone steps and well-wrought iron
balustrade mount gradually about a spacious central well. Here,
resting on the bench at its foot, we may recall what is known about
the strange and monstrous woman who once lived here.

She was Marie-Madeleine Dreux d'Aubray, and her father was an officer
of Louis XIV., appointed Civil Lieutenant of the Châtelet Prison. He
married her in 1651, when she was twenty-one, to the wealthy and
dissolute Marquis de Brinvilliers, who was not a model husband. She
was nothing loath, with her inborn instincts, to follow the example
set by him. Among her lovers, a certain Gaudin de Sainte-Croix was
much talked of; so much so that the lady's father, more powerful than
her husband, and doubtless more outraged by the shameless publicity of
the _liaison_, had Sainte-Croix taken from his daughter's carriage, as
they rode together, and put into the Bastille. There his cell-mate was
an Italian known only as Exili, a past-master in poisons, who boasted
that he had brought to death at least one hundred and fifty men and
women in Rome alone. He taught his trade to Sainte-Croix, who proved
to be an apt pupil, and who continued his studies after his release.
He took rooms with an apothecary in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and
fitted up a laboratory. There his Marquise visited him, and was
taught in her turn the use of his potions, among which the "manna of
Saint-Nicholas" became her favorite.

For she took pains and showed conscience in her experiments, mainly on
the patients in the hospitals, wherein she was a constant charitable
worker. Thus she soon learned to dispense her poisoned wafers with
scientific slowness and precision. But she was anxious that her
charity should begin at home. Her father failed gradually with some
obscure and unaccountable malady, and died in torment; and she nursed
him tenderly to the end. There were too many in her family for her
comfort, and her relatives outside had been too solicitous about her;
so some sickened and some died off, she caring for all and lamenting
each death. She had a sister, a Carmelite nun, who was never blinded
by the round, girlish face, appealing blue eyes, and beguiling ways
that bewitched so many. This woman guarded her own life and watched
over others of the family. The attempts made by the marchioness on her
husband's life were caused to fail, it is believed, by the attenuation
of the poisons mixed for her by Sainte-Croix, who doubtless feared
that he must marry the widow if he allowed her to become a widow. He
himself was found dead, in 1672, in his laboratory, poisoned by the
fumes of his devilish brews, through the breaking of the glass mask
worn at his work. The official search among his effects discovered a
casket, addressed to the marchioness at this dwelling; being opened,
its contents were found to be her own ardent love-letters to him, a
document detailing the doses and periods for the proper administration
of the poisons, and a choice assortment of preparations of opium,
antimony, sulphur. There was also a water-like liquid, unknown to
chemists, which was found to kill animals instantaneously, leaving no
lesions of any organ that could be traced by science. Sainte-Croix's
servant made a disclosure, and the marchioness, hearing of his arrest
and the finding of her package, made "confession by avoidance" by a
flight to England. She slipped down these stairs, out through that
doorway, and took coach around the corner for a northern port.

Colbert's brother was then Ambassador at the court of Saint James, and
between them her capture was planned; she got wind of it, and fled to
Liège, where she felt sure of safety in a convent. To her appears,
after a while, a handsome and susceptible young _abbé_, who allows
himself to be corrupted, and arranges for an elopement to a more
congenial refuge for lovers. She climbs gayly into his carriage, his
men surround it, and she is driven across the frontier into France and
to the Bastille. The _abbé_ was Desgrais, an eager police officer
detailed for this duty. He returned to her room in the convent, and
found scattered sheets of paper containing notes that began a
confession. This confession she was forced to complete and confirm by
the torture by water--repugnant to her coquetry, because it would
spoil her figure; "_toute mignonne et toute gracieuse_," had said an
adorer of her early days. She showed courage at the last, Madame de
Sévigné states, in the letters that were full of the trial and
execution. She was burned, having first been beheaded. "Her poor
little body was thrown, after her execution, into a good large fire,
and her ashes blown about by the wind; so that we may be breathing
her," Sévigné writes. This took place late in the afternoon of July
16, 1676--she was just over forty-five years of age--on Place de
Grève, to which she was carted in a tumbril, having stopped on the way
in front of Notre-Dame, and there, on her knees on the stones--her
feet bare, a rope around her neck, a consecrated lighted taper in her
uplifted hand--made to confess afresh.

  [Illustration: The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de
   Brinvilliers.]

The painter Lebrun was one of the great crowd that gathered to see her
go by, and he made a drawing, which you may see in the gallery of Old
French Designs in the Louvre. She half sits, half reclines, in her
tumbril, clad in a gown, its cowl drawn forward; her head is thrown
back; her thick chestnut hair brushed away from her face; her eyes are
wide and her mouth drawn with terror; her face is round, her lips are
thick; in her folded hands she holds a cross, and she stares straight
before her without seeing. At one side is the profile of a woman, very
lean and ugly, her expression full of horror as she bends forward to
gaze.

Turning from this street down through Rue Beautreillis, we pass the
end of Rue des Lions, on whose southern side we have already found
remains of the Hôtel des Lions du Roi. On its northern side is a row
of plaster-fronted houses, commonplace and shabby. In one of those
garrets there was living, shortly after 1830, a poor family of Jews
named Félix, lately arrived from the Canton Aarau in Switzerland.
Their two little girls went about the streets, singing and picking up
coppers. One day in the Place Royale, among those who stopped to
listen was a kindly eyed gentleman, who handed to the younger and
thinner of the two pinched children a piece of silver. "That is Victor
Hugo," said a woman in the crowd, as he went his way to his home in
the corner. That small singer was Élisa Rachel Félix, known to us as
the great Rachel.

Years after, when the world had given all that it could give to
Rachel, she returned, from a voyage to Egypt in search of health, to
the Place Royale to die. "It is on the way to Père-Lachaise," she
said, when, in 1857, she moved into the immense and superbly furnished
apartment on the first floor of No. 9, where her friends, she thought,
would have ample room for her burial service. It is only a step in
space from this garret to that palace. There, within a few
months--although her death came at the country-seat of Victorien
Sardou's father, whom she was visiting--that service was held, and
from there her body was borne to Père-Lachaise.

Going down Rue du Petit-Musc, we reach the Quai des Célestins, and
here on our left is the beginning of broad Boulevard Henri IV.,
cutting away, in its diagonal course through the grounds of the Hôtel
Saint-Paul, much history and romance. Nothing is left of the gardens
of the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, whose site is marked by a tablet on the
corner of the street of that name, at No. 10 Rue de la Cerisaie. This
tablet tells us that the _hôtel_ was the residence of the Czar Peter
the Great in 1717; the guest, during his short sojourn in Paris, of
the Maréchal de Villeroy, its owner then. We prefer to go back from
that visit over a hundred years to a more attractive presence in this
house. This was Gabrielle d'Estrées, beloved of Henry, who--for his
fondness for her and their two fine boys--would have made her his
wife, and have made them his legitimate successors, if he could have
had his way.

It was Sébastien Zamet who was their host in this "_palais d'amour du
roi_." The son of a shoe-maker of Lucca, he had found his fortune in
Paris, like so many of his countrymen in those days, and he built here
"a true fairy palace, such as romances describe," says Saint-Simon.
And here, walking in the garden after supper on the evening of April
9, 1599, the lovely Gabrielle was taken ill very suddenly. They
carried her to the Hôtel de Sourdis and put her in the care of her
aunt, with whom she had passed a portion of her girlhood in that
mansion. It stood within the precincts of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois,
its entrance on Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, where now is the end of Rue
Perrault. Here Gabrielle died, in agony, at six o'clock of the next
morning; poisoned, say Sismondi, Michelet, and the rest, but by whose
hand we shall never know. The Hôtel des Mousquetaires, that you will
find at No. 4 of Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, was then in existence, and so,
too, were many of these tall façades, with ancient, iron balconies
that look down on the narrow winding street, then a crowded
thoroughfare of old Paris. After Zamet's death his house was bought by
the Duc de Lesdiguières, Marshal and later Constable of France, from
whom it took its permanent name. We have already come here with
Boileau to see the veteran _Frondeur_, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de
Retz, whose last years were passed in this mansion, under the care of
one niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and comforted by another niece,
Madame de Sévigné.

On the quay, off on our left, the Célestins _caserne_ occupies a small
portion of the immense grounds of the Célestins Monastery. It was a
rich community, made so by the many gifts of kings, from Charles V.
down, to "_leurs bien aimés chapelains et serviteurs en Dieu_." These
pious beggars were not too proud to accept anything, and time fails to
tell of the splendors of their church, which became a museum of
monuments, tombs, statues, and was demolished in 1849, many of its
treasures having been destroyed during the Revolution. The godly
brethren are remembered in the name of the barracks and of the quay,
and to some of us, it must be owned, by the delectable dish of their
invention, _omelette à la Célestins_.

That long façade beyond, on Rue de Sully, belongs to the Arsenal, the
building alone left, its spacious gardens now under streets and
houses. We have come to its library with young Balzac, when he escaped
from his grinding drudgery and his dreary garret in Rue Lesdiguières.
We have driven here with Madame Récamier on the day before her death.
The most winning memory of the place is that of Charles Nodier, an
adorable man of genius, whose very defects were lovable, we are told
by the elder Dumas, who loved him. Nodier and Charles Lamb were
hissing, almost in the same year, each his own damned play. Many
others besides Dumas loved Nodier--Royalists and Republicans,
Classicists and Romanticists; and they crowded his _salon_ here of an
evening. For this was his official residence as Librarian, occupied by
him from his appointment in 1823 until his death in 1844. His historic
green drawing-room, where men were friendly who fought outside, and
the smaller rooms of his apartment on the first floor overlooking
Boulevard Morland, have been thrown into the library, and are now its
reading-rooms. They have kept their old-time panelling, carvings,
mouldings, but their walls, once decorated _en grisaille_, have been
toned to a uniform delicate gray-white.

This library was begun in 1785 by the Comte d'Artois, who purchased
the valuable books and manuscripts of Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis
d'Argenson, and of the Duc de la Vallière. Rooms in the Arsenal were
arranged for this collection, and it was named the "_Librairie de
Monsieur_;" the Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI. and of Louis
XVIII., having been the last "_Monsieur_" in France. His library has
grown to be the grandest in Paris after the Bibliothèque Nationale. It
contains the original archives of the Bastille--such as were saved,
when so many were scattered and destroyed at its taking--and it is
especially rich in dramatic literature and in manuscripts.

Here, above our heads as we stand in Rue du Petit-Musc, is the
tasteful, unspoiled side wall of the Hôtel de Lavallette, formerly the
Hôtel Fieubet. It was built by the younger Mansart, on the corner of
Saint-Paul's grounds, for the Chancellor of Maria Theresa, Gaspard de
Fieubet, and it became a gathering-place of the writers of those days.
They were courted by its owner, whose name is frequent in the letters
of Madame de Sévigné, and he himself turned his hand to rhyming, at
odd hours. Nearly two hundred years after he had gone, his mansion was
rescued from the sugar-refiners, who had degraded it to their uses, by
the Lavallette who has given it his name, and who "restored" it beyond
the recognition of its great architect, could he see it now. Its
façade behind the little court is overloaded with carvings, buttressed
by caryatides, surmounted by campaniles; it is a debauch of sculpture,
an orgy of ornamentation, under which the stately lines of the
original fabric are almost lost. They are quite hidden, on one side,
by a modern wing that has been thrust in on the court. All this
dishonor to architecture does not trouble the boys, whose big school
fills the building now, and who troop about the court in their black
jackets and trousers, their wide, white collars, their big, white
ties, pulling on reluctant gloves, as they line up on their unwilling
way to some church function.

We pass along the quay, glancing at the homelike and homely house
numbered 4, whose quiet dignity behind its court is in pleasing
contrast with the place just left. Here were the home and the studio
of Antoine-Louis Barye, and here he died on June 25, 1875.

On the quay at the corner of Rue Saint-Paul there stood until very
lately the entire and unspoiled _hôtel_ built for young Charles, Duc
de La Vieuville, in the last days of the Valois men. It was an
admirable specimen of the architecture of their time, as we may still
assure ourselves by a glance at the wing that is left within the court
entered from Rue Saint-Paul; a stone side wall toned to the glorified
grayness of age, pierced by tall, slender windows of graceful
proportions, and, above, the picturesque brick dormers of that period.

The last of the Valois women, Marguerite, had her home hard by here,
and its story begins just on this spot. When Charles V., to round out
and make entire his Saint-Paul estate, was taking in neighboring
_hôtels_ and outlying bits of land, he found, here where we find the
Hôtel de La Vieuville, the Paris seat of the archbishops of Sens.
Their palace on this corner, and its grounds extending along the
river-front and back along the east side of Rue Saint-Paul, up beyond
present Rue des Lions, cut out a goodly slice from this angle of the
royal domain. The King took this property, giving in exchange, to the
archbishop, the feudal fortress, the Hôtel d'Éstoménil, a little
farther west on the river-bank, at the meeting-place of several
country roads. Those roads are now the streets named Hôtel-de-Ville,
Figuier, Fauconnier, de l'Ave-Maria; and where they meet stands the
Hôtel de Sens, in almost the same state, as to its walls, as when they
were finished by the archbishop Tristan de Salazar. This
soldier-priest had rebuilt the old structure in the last years of the
fifteenth and the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and it
remains an authentic and authoritative document of the domestic
architecture of that period. The delicate ornamentation of its façade
has suffered, some few mutilations have despoiled the fabric, its
gardens are built upon, their great trees are gone, yet it stands,
time-stained and weather-worn, a most impressive example of that
Gothic strength and beauty whose frozen lines were just beginning to
melt under the fire of the upspringing Renaissance.

The noble arch of the ogival portal is, by a touch of genius, pinched
forward at its topmost point, and is there sliced away, so as to make
a snub-nosed protuberance that seems to lift up the whole front. Its
two high-peaked bartizan turrets are a trifle heavy, as we see them
hemmed in by other buildings, but their panelling and moulding plead
for pardon for any slight disproportion; and the one on the corner is
perfect in situation and in effect. The few windows of the front have
lost their stone-crossed mullions, some broken, some bricked up. The
great dormer window above, possibly of later construction, is a
prediction of the loveliness that was to come to dormers, such as we
see in the roofs of Rouen's Hôtel de Ville and of the _château_ of
Blois. The fine effect of the chimneys, once entirely of stone, has
been marred by cheap patching. As to the rest, the oddities and
irregularities of this façade are yet all in good taste and all
captivating. Within the groined porch we see, across the small court,
the main building meant for the archbishop's dwelling, and the solid
square tower meant for defence and for watching. Its entrance-door
tells, in its size and shape, the entire tale of feudal days. Away up
on one angle of this tower is an imitation sentry-box, battlemented
and supported by corbelled brackets. The interior of the buildings has
been defaced and degraded by the base usages to which it has been
subjected, yet traces are left of its past grandeur in some of the
rooms and halls.

  [Illustration: The Hôtel de Sens.]

These awaited in orderly and decorous silence, in their early days,
the coming of their owner from the mother-church at Sens. He came
along the banks of the Yonne and the Seine on his richly caparisoned
mule, his foot-servants in advance, his clerkly servitors and
ecclesiastics riding behind, and so he entered into this tranquil
court. Years later the place was noisy enough, when the religious wars
made it one of the meeting-places of the leaders of the Holy League.
On the very day when Henri IV. entered Paris, the Archbishop of Sens,
Cardinal de Pellevé, lay dying in this his palace, almost within
hearing of the triumphant Te Deum in Notre-Dame.

The King had been allowed his divorce by his childless wife,
Marguerite, and he in turn allowed her to return to Paris from her
long exile in Auvergne; ordering that this _hôtel_ should be
fittingly arranged for her residence, in 1605. We saw her last, a
charming child, in the gardens of the Tournelles. And now she comes
here, a worn wanton of nearly fifty-five, her wonted fires still
smouldering under the ashes. It is between these two appearances that
we like to look on her in the pages of Brantôme and on the canvas of
Clouet. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, has been aptly
dubbed the _valet-de-place_ of history; and yet a valet has the merit
of looking out of his own eyes from his own point of view. It was for
him that Marguerite wrote her "Mémoires," and to him she left them. In
after days, when exiled from the court he loved, able only to lick the
chops of memory, he wrote her _éloge_ in these glowing words: "If
there has ever been anyone in the world perfect in beauty, it is the
Queen of Navarre. All who have been, or shall be, near her, are ugly
beside her. If there is a miscreant who believes not in the miracles
of God, let him look upon her. Many believe that she is rather a
goddess of heaven than a princess of earth, and yet perhaps no goddess
was ever so lovely."

It is indeed a lovely creature, yet all of earth, whom we see in
Clouet's half life-size portrait in the _château_ of Azay-le-Rideau.
Her plentiful blond hair curves back above her fine brow, and her
bluish-gray eyes smile out with inviting mischievousness. Yet Brantôme
has to own that his goddess was easily first in the _escadron volant_
that sailed under her mother's flag, and we may guess what that meant
in the court "whose vices it would be repulsive to suggest, and whose
virtues were homicide and adultery."

In this Hôtel de Sens, Madame Marguerite held receptions, twice a
week, of men of letters and of the arts, with whom her learning
allowed her to converse on equal terms; and her kindliness allowed
them to feel at ease. For "from her behavior it could never be
discovered that she had once been the wife of the King." But the
wayward Margot made trouble for herself that ended her stay here after
a year or less. She came home from mass at the Célestins on the
morning of Wednesday, April 5, 1606, and as she was helped from her
coach by her newest favorite page of eighteen, he was killed by her
latest discarded favorite, already twenty. She sat in one of these
front windows the next day, having neither eaten nor drunk nor slept
meanwhile; she looked out on the beheading of the jaunty assassin;
that evening she left the Hôtel de Sens forever. For a while she
stayed at her hunting-lodge at Issy, already visited by us in former
pages, and then went to her last dwelling, on the southern bank in the
Pré-aux-Clercs, which looked out across the river at the Louvre, where
Henry was unhappy with her successor. The two women remained always
friendly, and were seen together in festivities and processions, and
the reigning Queen paid many a debt of the deposed Queen. To the last
she rouged to the eyes, and wore a flowing wig and low frocks, albeit
she had turned _dévote_, and had found a new idol in her confessor.
This was young Vincent de Paul, not yet canonized, whose chaste
ministrations made him adored by sinners elderly enough to repent.
There she died in the spring of 1615, at the age of sixty-three, the
last of the Valois name, leaving everything, mostly debts, to young
Louis XIII.

Later along in the seventeenth century, when the court end of the town
went to the west, and the Church dignitaries found this region too far
afield, this Hôtel de Sens was sold. Its new owners and tenants were
the merchants and financiers who crowded then to this quarter. They,
too, soon moved farther west, and the place had many strange
employments forced upon it. As early as 1692, the _messageries_ for
Dijon and Lyons rented it for their town head-quarters. By the middle
of the eighteenth century, the palace of the archbishops was degraded
to a livery stable and a horsedealer's lair, and the ancient arms of
Sens on its front and the escutcheons of Lorraine and Bourbon,
prelates of the Church, were covered by a great sign, "_Maison de
Roulage et de Commission_." From this court, in the words of the
advertisement of that date, "_Le Courrier de la Malle de Paris à Lyons
partit à cinq heures et demi du soir, 8 Floréal, an IV._"--which was
April 27, 1796.

  [Illustration: Marguerite de Valois.
   (From a portrait by an unknown artist, in the Musée de Montpellier.)]

That mail-coach was stopped near Lieussart, its driver killed, and a
large sum in assignats and gold carried off. For this crime one Joseph
Lesurques was arrested, and was recognized by several witnesses as the
robber. He had been an official in Douai, had saved money, and had
gone to Paris for the education of his children. Neither his record
nor his alibi sufficed to acquit him, the strongest of circumstantial
evidence convicted him, and he was executed on October 30, 1796. Two
years later the murderer and robber was captured in one Dubosc, who,
after a daring escape and recapture, went to the guillotine. By
Dubosc's conviction Lesurques was posthumously morally acquitted, but
his judicial rehabilitation has never been made, albeit his broken and
crazed children petitioned, courts debated, and Deputies chattered
through many long years. This true story, our last reminiscence of the
Hôtel de Sens, has been put on the French stage as "Le Courrier de
Lyons," and on the English stage as "The Lyons Mail."

We go on to the upper end of Rue Fauconnier, and across Rue
Saint-Antoine, to where begins Rue Pavée-au-Marais, a most ancient and
aristocratic street, filled with grand mansions in its best days and
in days not so long gone. It had taken its name as early as the middle
of the fifteenth century, when, first of all the Marais streets, it
was paved. It was known, unofficially and popularly, as _le petit
Marais_, so closely did it crowd, within its short and select limits,
the essential characteristics in architecture and atmosphere of the
great Marais. Now, wofully modernized, it holds one relic only, a
magnificent relic, that suggests to us, in its solitary dignity,
something of the lost glories of this street.

We cross Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, a main thoroughfare of old Paris, whose
odd name came from Charles, brother of Saint Louis, Count of Anjou and
Provence, and King of Naples and Sicily in 1265. His fortified abode
stood on the northern side of this street, at its eastern end just
within the old walls. It became, in after times, the _hôtel_ and then
the prison of La Force. Its entrance was over yonder, at the corner of
modern Rue Malher; and opposite, on the southern corner, was the stone
that served as the axeman's block for the Princess of Lamballe. Along
this pavement the small Gavroche led the two smaller Thénardier boys,
on his way to _his hôtel_--the plaster elephant in Place de la
Bastille. A wide avenue, bordered by modern constructions, is fast
taking the place of the old street and robbing it of all its
character.

Where Rue Pavée meets Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, stands the Hôtel
Lamoignon, formerly the Hôtel d'Angoulême. At that corner a square
turret juts out from above the ground floor, overhanging the pavement,
its supporting bracket cut under in shell-like curves. About the
stately court, entered from Rue Pavée, rise the imposing walls, those
of the wings of a little later date and a little more ornate than that
of the façade. This front is pre-eminently impressive in its height,
in the unusual loftiness of its floors and their windows, in the
single Corinthian pilasters, tall and slender and graceful, rising
from ground to cornice. They may serve us as a souvenir of Jean
Bullant's work in the _château_ of Ecouen and in his portion of
Chantilly. Above that cornice the dormer windows spring high under
their gabled ends. Beneath them, and over the entrance porch, and on
the side wall of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois--profusely decorating, but
not overloading, the spacious surfaces that carry them easily--we
trace without effort the unworn hunting-horns, the stags' heads, the
dogs in chase, the crescent and the initial H so interlaced as to form
an H and a D--all the carved emblems of Diane de France, for whom this
remarkable structure was planned and built, a little after 1580, by a
now unknown architect.

She was born of an Italian mother, during a stay in her country of the
son of François I., who was later Henri II. On coming to the throne,
in 1547, he legitimatized this daughter, then ten years of age, and
gave her education and position in France. She grew up to be a good
woman and a good wife to Horace Farnese, Duc de Castro, and to her
second husband, François, the eldest son of the Constable Montmorenci.
She spent her long life--which saw seven monarchs sitting on the French
throne--doing kindly acts, not one of which meant so much for the
France she loved as the reconciliation between Henri III. and Henri de
Navarre; possible through her, because the sceptic Béarnais took her
word for or against any written word of anyone. Dying in 1619, she
left this mansion to Charles, Duc d'Angoulême, son of Charles IX. and
Marie Touchet, the last of her many benefactions to him. He added
these wings, and placed in that on the northern side this stately
stone staircase, filling the width between the stone walls, with no
hand-rail to break its sweep. Nothing is left of the former grandeur
of the interior, which is given up to large industries and petty
handicrafts; even the vast and lofty chambers are cut up for trade
purposes by partitions and by interposed floorings.

In 1658 the Hôtel d'Angoulême became the Hôtel Lamoignon by purchase
of Guillaume de Lamoignon, a wealthy President of Parliament, and in
1684 it went to his son, Chrétien-François de Lamoignon. It was a
dwelling worthy of him and of his illustrious name, which it still
bears. In it he received the best society of that day--represented to
us by Racine, Boileau, Bourdaloue, Regnard, and others of their
kidney, all honored in finding a friend in this magistrate of ability,
probity, kindliness. It was to him that Boileau addressed his "Sixth
Epistle," and to him, when, as Master of Requests, it was his official
duty to forbid further performances of "Tartufe" after the first
night, Molière submitted without rancor. Perhaps his highest honor,
during a life of honors, was his refusal of an election to a
_fauteuil_ in the Académie Française.

On April 13, 1763, in this building was opened the first public
library of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris. One Antoine Moriau had been
for many years collecting, in his apartment on this second floor, some
14,000 volumes and 200 manuscripts, all left to the town at his death
in 1759. The municipality kept his rooms, and rented additional rooms
on this first floor, opening them to the public on Wednesdays and
Saturdays.

  [Illustration: The Hôtel Lamoignon.]

The _concierge_ or his wife, honored by the interest shown in their
splendid show-place, will conduct such curious strangers as may wish
around the corner into Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and through a
little gate on that street into a small back court. This is the shabby
remnant of Diane's and of Lamoignon's extensive gardens, which once
stretched to those of the Hôtel de La Force on the south, and
eastwardly to Rue Sévigné. From this spot you may see four or five
windows away up in the rear wall of the mansion, and you will be told
that these are the windows of Alphonse Daudet's former apartment,
wherein he wrote "Fromont jeune et Risler aîné." His large study on
the top floor had two high, wide windows, from which he saw the roofs
of all Paris on that side. Against the wall at one end of the room was
his shelf for standing at his work, and his wife's desk was at the
other end; while, between them, carrying the freshly written sheets,
trotted the little boy Léon, who is now a man, wielding his own good
pen. To him, in those days, the tall Flaubert and Tourgueneff were
"giants" by the side of his father, and of the other friends who used
to climb these many stairs to this _salon_ in the sky. Daudet has left
affectionate records of the old house. His "Rois-en-exil" was written
in a pavilion in the garden of Richelieu's old mansion, which stood in
the northwestern corner of the then Place Royale, now Place des
Vosges, where has been cut, through house and garden, the prolongation
of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Rue des Vosges.

The gentle artist, "handsome as a Hindoo god" in those days, says M.
Claretie, brought from his beloved _Midi_ a longing for space and air
and quiet, and all his abodes in the city were high above the street,
with ample breathing-space and unbroken horizon. His earliest Paris
home was at the very top of the furnished Hôtel du Senat, still at No.
7 Rue de Tournon. This was the wretched room to which he came back,
early one morning, from his first swell reception, his only dress-suit
drenched with the wet snow through which he had waded, owning no
overcoat. Then, for a while, he occupied an _entresol_ in No. 4 Place
de l'Odéon, in "_la maison A. Laissus_," one of the unaltered houses
of that historic place. His last home was on the third floor of No. 31
Rue Bellechasse, in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and one
of its delightful old gardens lay beneath his windows, giving him the
greenness and the tranquillity so dear to him.

The name of Madame Daudet may not be omitted from this record of the
illustrious women of the Marais, although now, in the maturity of her
distinction and elegance, she adorns another quarter of Paris. She has
made for herself an honored place among French women of letters, and
she helped her husband to his own place by her critical powers and her
sympathetic appreciation. She both tranquillized and stimulated him
through his earlier years of robust strength, and the later invalidism
that was yet filled with labor. Her son, who carried the father's
sheets across the room to her for approval or correction, has
dedicated his "Alphonse Daudet" to his mother, "who aided and
encouraged her husband alike in the hours of discouragement and of
hopefulness."

There are bits and fragments of vanished antiquity--portals, windows,
balconies, brackets, pitifully sundered from the grandeur they stand
for and suggest--scattered all about this portion of the Marais. Much
of this bygone grandeur was to be found in Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, a
street that had been a country road just outside the wall of
Philippe-Auguste, and, with the crumbling of the wall, had been
speedily built up with stately mansions. One of these, with a fund for
its support, was willed, in 1415, to the Grand Prior of France, in
trust for such burghers as were freed from all taxation by reason of
their extreme poverty. So it came that these _francs bourgeois_ gave
their name to the street. Here at No. 30 is a quaint low front, mostly
taken up by a spacious entrance-porch, decorated with finely cut
dragons; here at No. 31 is the superb portal of the Hôtel Jeanne
d'Albret; all that is left of the noble residence of that niece of
François I. who married the Duc de Clèves in 1541. It is more than a
century from that date before this _hôtel_ holds any history for us,
when it became tenanted by César Phébus d'Albret, Marshal of France; a
rich and frolicsome Gascon, a friend of Scarron, an especial friend of
young Madame Scarron. It was he who killed the Marquis de Sévigné in a
duel. The Duchesse d'Albret was an eminently proper person, a bit of a
_précieuse_, and her _salon_ here was a flimsy copy of that of the
Hôtel Rambouillet. Scarron's widow, poor and by no means unfriended,
found a temporary home in this house, after a short stay with her
life-long friend, Mlle. de Lenclos, before taking rooms in the
convent, where we have seen her.

When _la veuve_ Scarron, reincarnated in Madame de Maintenon, was
living in the grand establishment at Vaugirard, provided by the King
for his two children, she is said, by local tradition, to have had her
private apartment in the Marais, near where we stand. It was on the
first floor of the small and shabby house at No. 7 bis Rue du Perche,
and you are shown a ceiling in an upper room, that is claimed to have
been painted for the great lady. It is in four sunken squares, wherein
pose the four Seasons, in conventional attitudes and unconventional
raiment.

Let us stop here on the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois,
where it meets the end of a little street with the big name of des
Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, given to it by the great hospital and
monastery that occupied these grounds, through which this street was
afterward cut, when Philippe-Auguste gathered them just within the
safe-keeping of his wall. Just without that wall lay the Hôtel
Barbette, in the midst of its own wide lands. On this corner, we stand
just on the line of the wall, and look across Rue des Francs-Bourgeois
into a court, once the Alleé aux Arbalétriers, over whose entrance is
a tablet, recording the murder of Louis d'Orléans, near that spot--a
scene sketched in our first chapter. That maze of courts, crowded
close with ancient wooden structures, tempts us to search within it
for vestiges of the outbuildings of the Hôtel Barbette. And it is
worth while exploring the interior of the corner house, if only for
its mediæval staircase. Coming out by the courts opening into Rue
Vieille-du-Temple, we take a few steps to where it meets the southern
side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and we stand on the exact site of
the Porte Barbette of the old wall.

There, on the northeastern corner of the two streets, stands a most
ancient building well worth our regard. On the angle, reaching from
just above its ground floor to the cornice, is hung a five-sided
_tourelle_ of singular beauty. Its heavy supporting bracket is deeply
and handsomely corbelled out, and at each angle is a slim colonette,
delicately carved. The division line between its two stories is
defined by a fine moulding. In the first story is cut a small ogival
window, under a prettily crocketed head and a flat finial. This window
is iron grated, and its grim visage is softened by a flowering plant
set within. The panels of the lower story are plain, and those above
are decorated with a lace-like pattern, graceful and elegant, whose
lines and curves carry one's eye to the cornice. The plain façade of
the house in Rue Vieille-du-Temple has been degraded by modern
windows, while that in the other street remains most impressive, with
its gabled end. All in all, no such delightful specimen of
fifteenth-century Gothic as this Barbette turret can be found in our
Marais.

  [Illustration: The Tourelle of the Hôtel Barbette.]

Yet turret and structure are not, as is often stated, any portion of
the original Hôtel Barbette. That was built, at the end of the
thirteenth century, by Étienne Barbette, a man of wealth and
importance, the Provost of Paris under Philippe "_le Bel_," and his
Master of the Mint. The vast enclosure of his grandiose _hôtel_
covered all the ground, from the old wall northward to the line of the
present Rues de la Perle and du Parc-Royal; and eastwardly from this
Rue Vieille-du-Temple to the gardens of Saint-Catherine du
Val-des-Écoliers, near where now runs Rue Sévigné. This ample domain
sufficed for the _menus plaisirs_ of this lucky man, and was merely
his _petit séjour_. Under that blameless guise it served as the abode,
a little more than a century later, when rebuilt after the mob had
wrecked it, of Isabeau de Bavière, official wife of mad Charles VI.
Leaving him to the neglect of servants and to the companionship of
Odette, the Queen escaped boredom here, by her dinners and suppers,
balls and fêtes; here she invented, or first introduced, the
masquerades that were soon the rage of Polite Society. She amused
herself with other games, too; such as statecraft, in partnership with
her husband's younger brother, Louis d'Orléans. It was from the
Barbette that she mismanaged the kingdom, ground down the people with
intolerable taxes, pushed the marriage of her daughter Catherine with
Henry V. of England, plotted the shameful Treaty of Troyes, which made
France an appanage of the English crown, and gave Paris to English
troops.

After her husband's death, cast aside by Burgundy and England, she
found a drearier refuge in the Hôtel Saint-Paul than that to which she
had condemned him there. In its corners she hid while Joan the Maid
was undoing the evil work done by this shameless woman, and was
bringing back to Paris the son hated by this shameless mother. All
through those years she wept and moaned, witnesses have reported; left
alone, as she was, with the memories of her lusts and her treasons,
with the wreckage of the animal beauty, for which, and for no other
quality, she had been selected as the royal consort. Seven days after
she learned of the signing of the Treaty of Arras she died, "_et son
corps fut tant méprisé_," says Brantôme, that it was thrown into a
boat at the water-gate of Saint-Paul, and, after an unseemly service
in Notre-Dame, was sent by night down the Seine to Saint-Denis,
"_ainsi ni plus ni moins qu'une simple demoiselle!_"

Partly destroyed by fire and partly rebuilt, we find the Hôtel
Barbette, after another hundred years and more, in the hands of the
Comte de Brézé, Seneschal of Normandy. Aged, ugly, crippled, as we see
him in Hugo's verse, he is pleasantly remembered for the lovely widow
he left for Henri II., and for his lovely tomb left, for our joy, in
the cathedral of Rouen. When his widow, Diane de Saint-Vallier, became
Diane de Poictiers, Duchesse de Valentinois--an elderly siren of
thirty-seven, who was yet "_fort aymée et servie d'un des grands rois
et valeureux du monde_"--she wore always her widow's white and black,
and kept to the last that whiteness of skin and purity of complexion
that came, she claimed, from her only cosmetic, soap and water. Her
coldness of heart had much to do with it, to our thinking. Brantôme
saw her when she had come to sixty-two, and was struck by her
freshness, "_sans se farder_," as of thirty. He adds, with his
ever-green susceptibility: "_C'est dommage que la terre couvre ce beau
corps._" This property had gone, on her husband's death, in 1561, to
his and her two daughters; who profited by its vast extent and by the
example set by François I. in similar jobs, to open streets through
it, and divide it into parcels for selling. Those streets were named
Barbette and Trois-Pavilions, the latter now renamed Elzévir. And if
any remnant exists of the second Hôtel Barbette of Diane de Poictiers,
it is this corner house and its lovely turret.

By way of this corner, the body of Louis d'Orléans was carried to the
Church of the Blancs-Manteaux, in the street of that name just behind
us. It lay till morning in the nave, and about the bier gathered
royalty and nobility, all through the long November night. The church
is gone, and so, too, is his chapel in the Church of the Célestins;
and the monument, erected there by Louis XII. to his murdered
grandfather and his martyred grandmother, has been placed in the
Cathedral of Saint-Denis. The site of the Church of the
Blancs-Manteaux is covered by the great central establishment of the
Mont de Piété; its grounds are entirely built over; the street that
took the name of the monastery, once a perilous _coupe-gorge_, has
grown to be, not respectable, but characterless. We must be content
with the phantoms of Saint Louis's white-mantled monks, strolling in
their cloisters; later, grown fat and scampish, haunting the low
_cabarets_ of this mal-famed street, and rehearsing, within their own
precincts, those frenzied mysteries of the mediæval stage, that led to
the disbandment and the driving-out of the debauched order.

A step to the south from this street, along Rue Vieille-du-Temple,
brings us to the massive entrance-doors of No. 47. Their outer
surfaces are richly carved with masks and with figures; on their inner
side is an excellent bas-relief representing Romulus and Remus found
by the shepherd, when the wolf is giving them suck. About the court,
diminutive and dainty, the walls of the small _hôtel_ are adorned with
tasteful sculptures, and laden with dials, two of the sun and two of
the moon. These anomalous adornments came here through the caprice of
a Director of the Royal Observatory, who once occupied the house and
who wreaked his scientific humor in this odd fashion. This is the
Hôtel de Hollande, a rebuilt remnant of the large mediæval mansion of
Maréchal de Rieux. The street just in front of his _hôtel_, some
authorities insist, was the scene of the assassination of the Duc
d'Orléans. Reconstructed early in the seventeenth century, the
carvings, sculptures, and decorations of this elegant little _hôtel_
are excellent examples of late Renaissance. Unluckily, the bas-reliefs
and paintings of the interior may no longer be seen. Beyond this outer
court is a smaller court, containing an attractive structure of a
later date.

This Hôtel de Hollande has borne that name since, in the reign of
Louis XIV., it was the seat of the embassy representing Holland at his
court. This being officially Dutch soil, at that time, we may see
Racine coming through this entrance-doorway, in full wig and court
costume; coming to present his son for introductions at The Hague,
where the young man is to be a member of the French Embassy. We have
seen the letters sent to him there by his thrifty father. There is
another bit of history for us here. It was in this house that the firm
"Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie" started in business in 1776, with a
capital of 3,000,000 francs. The firm was composed of Caron de
Beaumarchais, with the governments of France and Spain for his silent
partners; the former putting in 2,000,000 francs, and the latter the
other million. The business of this house--and it did a lively
business while it lasted--was to supply, secretly and unknown to the
English officials in Paris, arms and equipments to the American
colonies.

Anne de Montmorenci, the great constable of France, in alliance,
against the Huguenots, with the Guises, his near neighbors in the
Marais, outfought Condé and Coligny at Saint-Denis in 1567, and died,
of the wounds he got in that battle, "in his own _hôtel_ in Rue
Saint-Avoie." So says the chronicle, and it tells us further that his
was the grandest mansion in the town, with most extensive grounds; far
surpassing in size and magnificence the Hôtels Lamoignon and
Carnavalet. It was sufficiently spacious for the large-minded John
Law, who established his bank in the building two centuries later.
When the crash came, and he sought more modest quarters, the State
took the building for its _bureaux_. Now, no stone of the structure
can be found, the street from which it had entrance--Saint-Avoie--is
merged in that portion of Rue du Temple which crosses Rue Rambuteau,
and this broad thoroughfare sweeps over the site of Montmorenci's
palace and his gardens.

Turning from Rue Rambuteau into Rue du Temple, we are face to face, at
No. 71, with a monumental gateway, richly carved, giving entrance to
an ample court. The stately walls surrounding this court have suffered
much from time, and more from man. The old façade of this wing on our
left is hidden behind a paltry new frontage for shops, and on the roof
of the central body before us a contemptible top story has been put.
The face of the original lofty attic, above the cornice, carried
pilasters in continuation of those below, and these have been brutally
mutilated by a line of low windows just over the cornice. For all
that, there is a majesty in the stately arcades of these lower
stories, and in the unspoiled lower walls, up which climb graceful
Corinthian pilasters from ground to cornice. They are similar to those
of the Hôtel Lamoignon, built before this Hôtel de Saint-Aignan was
transformed from a former structure by de Muet, who doubtless admired,
perhaps unconsciously imitated, the best features of the earlier
architecture. He has put, in this almost intact right wing, just such
a stone staircase, of easy grade and no hand-rail, as that we have
seen in the residence built for Diane de France.

There is hardly any history to detain us here, and the great names
that once resounded in this court make only far-away echoes now.
Claude de Mesme, Comte d'Avaux, a diplomat of the seventeenth century,
built this _hôtel_. At his death, it came to the Duc de Saint-Aignan,
a royal Purveyor at the head of Louis XIV.'s Council of Finance. He
was a relative of Madame de Scudéry, wife of the Georges whom we have
met in his sister's _salon_. Through his wife's influence with
Saint-Aignan, Georges was presented to the King, and succeeded in
obtaining a pension--useful to supplement such of his sister's
earnings as came in his way. His merits, for which the royal bounty
was granted, seem to have been of so momentous a literary character as
to be pronounced equal to those of Corneille!

When Olivier de Clisson--Constable of France after the death of his
comrade-in-arms, the mighty Duguesclin--brought back Charles VI.
victorious to Paris, after crushing the revolt in Ghent under Philip
van Artavelde, he found the Marais du Temple fast being reclaimed and
built upon. At one corner of the Templars' former wood-yard, on a
street to be named du Chaume, now merged in the southern end of Rue
des Archives, opposite the end of Rue de Braque, was the fortress-home
of his wife, Marguerite de Rohan, within the family enclosure. Here de
Clisson made his head-quarters, giving his name to the _hôtel_. Its
entrance, an ogival portal sunk beneath two impressive round turrets,
built of different sizes through some vagary, still remains; a most
impressive relic, imbedded in more recent walls.

  [Illustration: The Gateway of the Hôtel de Clisson.]

It was de Clisson, who, quite without his consent, gave the King one
of the several shocks which culminated in his madness. King and
Constable had supped together in the royal apartment of the Hôtel
Saint-Paul, and the Constable went on his way home. Lighted by the
main facts of the affair, we may easily track him. After crossing Rue
Saint-Antoine and passing through one of the narrow lanes to Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Catherine--now the eastern end of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois
--he should have kept along this street to this new home of his. Perhaps
the old soldier was not quite sure of his way, so soon after supper
and the plentiful _petit vin de l'hôtel Saint-Paul_, for he found
himself beyond his corner, up in Rue Sainte-Catherine, now Rue
Sévigné; and there, in front of a baker's shop opposite the spot where
now is the Carnavalet, he was set upon by a band of men led by Pierre
de Craon, a crony of Louis d'Orléans. They left the tough old warrior
in the baker's doorway, bleeding from many wounds, but not quite
killed. The King was summoned, came hastily in scanty clothing, and it
was long before he recovered from his affright. When he had rallied,
he started out to punish the assailant of his favorite captain, and it
was on his way to Brittany, with whose duke de Craon had taken refuge,
that the King received the final blow to his reason.

The history of the Hôtel de Clisson would weary us, were it told in
detail. We may jump to the year 1553, when it came to Anne d'Est, wife
of François de Lorraine, Duc de Guise. He and his family were
beginning to feel and to show their growing power, and he found these
walls not wide enough for his swelling consequence. He bought the
Hôtels de Laval and de la Roche-Guyon, whose grounds adjoined his own;
so adding to his estate, while others, following the example of
François I., were cutting up and selling their Paris lands. Soon the
Hôtel de Guise was made up of several mansions, rebuilt and run
together, within one enclosure, bounded by Rues de Paradis (now the
western end of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois), du Chaume (now des
Archives), des Quatre-Fils, and Vieille-du-Temple. The heirs of the
last Guise, who died in 1671, sold this property at the end of the
seventeenth century, and it came into the grasping hands of Madame de
Soubise; bought with the savings of the French peasants, squeezed from
them by Louis XIV.'s farmers of taxes, and by him poured into the lap
of this lady, one of the many ladies so turning an honest penny. Her
complaisant husband, François de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, began to
tear down much of the old work, and to replace it by new work, in
1706. For thirty years he kept the most skilful artists and artisans
of that day employed on the place within and without; and he left the
Hotel de Soubise much as we find it now. To him we owe this striking
_cour d'honneur_, square with curved ends, and framed in a colonnade
of coupled columns, that leads a covered gallery from the grand
entrance around to the portal of the main building. This is his façade
of three stories, with pediment, its columns both composite and
Corinthian. For general effect this court has no parallel in Paris.

A light elegant staircase, its ceiling delicately painted, leads to
the first floor, whose rooms retain some of their mouldings, their
wood-carvings, their decorated doorways and ceilings. Gone, however,
are the tapestries, "the most beautiful in the world and most esteemed
in Christendom, after those of the Vatican," Sauval assures us.

Vast and magnificent as was this palace, it did not suffice for the
son of this prince, the Cardinal Armand Gaston de Rohan, Bishop of
Strasburg, who, says Sauval, "was, in his prosperity, very insolent
and blinded." On the site of the demolished Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon he
built for himself the Palais Cardinal, now commonly known as the Hôtel
de Strasbourg. The library, great and precious, which he there
collected, together with his _hôtel_ and his blind insolence, came to
his grand-nephew, the Cardinal de Rohan of the Diamond Necklace, the
last cardinal of a family of cardinals.

At his death, in 1803, desertion and emptiness came to the Hôtel de
Strasbourg, as they had already come to the Hôtel de Soubise. The huge
size of the buildings rendered them unfit for private residences. At
length they were taken for the State by the Emperor, at the urging of
Daunou, Director of the Archives of France. By the decree of March 6,
1808, those archives took for their own the Hôtel de Soubise, and the
Hôtel de Strasbourg was given to the Imprimerie Impériale. No
after-revolution nor any change of rulers has troubled them. As their
contents grew, new structures have been added, over the gardens and on
the street behind, all done in good taste, all suggesting the uses for
which they are meant. The Imprimerie, entered from Rue Vieille-du-Temple,
through a court containing a statue of Gutenberg, does the work for
the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, for the Ministers and for the
Institute. Its _Bulletin des Lois_, issued to all the Communes of
France, carries to completion the mission meant for it when it was
begun by Louis XIII., Hugo asserts.

The archives of France must be studied and may not be described. This
amazing collection of manuscripts, charters, diplomas, letters, and
autographs begins with the earliest day of writing and of records in
France, and comes down through all the centuries. It is a spot for
unhurried and unhindered browsing during long summer days.

Just in this region is to be seen, better than anywhere, an aspect of
the Marais not yet seen in our historic strolling. It is the Marais of
to-day and of every day, the work-a-day Marais, whose heart is here in
this street of the Temple and the old street of the Temple. In them,
and in the streets that cross them, are numerous mansions of a bygone
time, with little to say to us in architecture, nothing at all to say
to us in history or letters. Side by side with them are tall buildings
and huge blocks of modern construction; new and old held and possessed
by factories, warehouses, show-rooms; their upper portions given over
to strange handicrafts, strangely met together. The making of
syphon-tops is next door on the same floor to the wiring of feathers,
as Daudet discovered. These narrow streets between the buildings, and
these walled-in courts within them, are hushed all through the
working-hours, save for the ceaseless muffled rumble of the machinery,
and the unbroken low murmur of the human toilers, both intent on their
tasks.

Suddenly at noon, these streets are all astir with an industrial,
unarmed mob, and the whole quarter is given over to an insurrection,
peaceful and unoffending. These workers are making their way to
restaurant or _rôtisserie_ or _cabaret_; some of them saunter along,
taking their breakfast "_sur le pouce_." The men, in stained blouses,
are alert, earnest, and self-respecting; the girls, direct of gaze,
frank of manner, shrill of voice, wear enwrapping aprons, that fall
from neck to ankle, and their hair, the glory of the French
working-woman who goes hatless, is dressed with an artless art that
would not dishonor a drawing-room. We can carry away with us, from
these last scenes, no more captivating memory than this of the most
modern woman of our Marais.




INDEX


     Abelard, Pierre, I., 75 _et seq._

     Amboise, Bussy d', II., site of his murder, 107

     Anne of Brittany, I., 36;
       built the still existing refectory of the Cordelier Convent, 230;
       II., wife and widow of Charles VIII., 186;
       marries Louis XII., 187

     Arsenal, the library of the, II., 250 _et seq._

     Artois, Robert, Comte d', I., 51, 55

     Aubriot, Hugues, Provost of Paris, builder of the Bastille, II., 174;
       tower and staircase of, 174 _et seq._


     Balzac, Honoré de, II., birthplace, 53;
       homes in Paris, 54, 60, 61, 62;
       site of type foundry, 58;
       mode of writing, 64-66;
       scenes and characters of, 76-80;
       marriage and death, 81 _et seq._

     Barras, Paul-François-Jean-Nicolas, Comte de, I., 256

     Barye, Antoine-Louis, II., home and studio of, 253

     Beaumarchais, de Pierre-Augustin Caron, I., birthplace and homes
       of, 217-218

     Béjart, Armande, I., wife and widow of Molière, 119;
       sketched, 122 _et seq._

     ---- Madeleine, sister or mother of Armande, friend of Molière,
         I., 117;
       opposes his marriage, 122

     Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, II., house at Passy, 71;
       in prison, 137

     Bernardins, monastery of the, I., modern use of its refectory, 45

     Béthune, Maximilien de (See Sully)

     Bièvre, the river, I., 21, 27, 43;
       II. 155-156

     Birch, George H., I., 9

     Blanche of Castile, I., house and stairway of, 27 _et seq._;
       widow of Louis VIII., 36

     Boccaccio, I., records Dante's visit to Paris, 83

     Boffrand, Germain, I, architect of Charles Lebrun's _hôtel_, 43

     Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, I., in the cloisters of Notre-Dame,
       75-76;
       offers to surrender his pension to Corneille, 142;
       sketch of, 178 _et seq._;
       studied in the Sorbonne, 183;
       site of his house at Auteuil, 186;
       lodgings in Paris, 188;
       final resting-place, 199

     Bonaparte, Napoleon, I., house visited by, when a lad, 258;
       early homes in Paris, 260-262

     Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, I., 14;
       "the strong and splendid," 143-144

     _Boulangerie générale des Hôpitaux et Hospices, la_, I., in its
       courtyard a wing of Sardini's villa, 41

     Boulevard Saint-Germain, I., 33, 46

     Boulevard Saint-Michel, I., 33

     Bourgogne, Charles "le Téméraire," Duc de, I., 62

     ---- Jean "sans-Peur," Duc de, I., 56 _et seq._

     ---- Marguerite, Duchesse de, I., 56 _et seq._

     ---- Philippe "le Bon," Duc de, I., 60 _et seq._

     ---- Philippe, "le Hardi," Duc de, I., 55 _et seq._

     Brinvilliers, Marie-Madeleine Dreux d'Aubray, Duchesse de, II.,
         residence of, in the Marais, 243;
       sketch of, 244 _et seq._;
       Lebrun's portrait of, in the Louvre, 247


     Calvin, John, I., studied in seminary of
         Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, 44;
       his only residence in Paris, 93

     _Candide_, I., referred to, 41

     Carlyle, Thomas, I., quoted, 59;
       on Diderot, 207;
       sees Talma in the Théâtre Français, 269

     Catherine de' Medici, I., referred to, 33, 42;
       II., 106

     Cerceau, Androuët du, II., Huguenot architect, existing specimens
       of his work, 198-199

     ---- Baptiste, du, I., house of, in the Huguenot quarter, 91

     ---- Jean du, II., architect of Sully's _hôtel_, 195

     Champeaux, Guillaume de, I., Master of Abelard, 77

     Chapelle, Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné, I., site of, 86

     ---- Sainte, la, I., referred to, 23

     Charles of Orleans, I., 60

     ---- II. (of France), I., wooden tower of, 31

     Charles V., "the Wise," I., 4, 51;
       II., in the Marais, 169;
       wall of, 171-178;
       his Hôtel Saint-Paul, 180-181

     ---- VI., I., drives the first pile of Pont Notre-Dame, 25;
       II., 181 _et seq._

     ---- VII., II., presents the Island Palace, _Palais de Justice_,
         to Parliament, 170;
       residence in the Tournelles, 184

     ---- VIII., II., enters Paris with Anne of Brittany, 186

     Charlot, Claude, II., opens streets through the Marais, 209-210

     Châteaubriand, François-Auguste, Vicomte de, I., describes Talma,
         268;
       II., homes in Paris, 30-37, 45

     Châtelet, le Grand, I., its site, 31;
       Molière imprisoned in, for debt, 116

     ---- le Petit, I., 31

     ---- Place du, I., 31

     Chaucer, Geoffrey, I., translated part of _Le Roman de la Rose_,
       85

     Chénier, André-Marie de, I., house in Paris, 240;
       II., memorial tablet and grave, 154

     ---- Joseph-Marie de, I., 242-243

     Chevreuse, Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de, I., her Hôtel de Luynes
         constructed under Racine's supervision, 151;
       II., her rôle in history and in Dumas, 115-116

     Chimæra, I., statue of the, in Cluny Museum, 97

     Church, Saint-Eustache, I., Lebrun's tomb of Colbert in, 44;
       Molière's second son baptized in, 106, 115

     ---- Sainte-Geneviève, I., one of the resting-places of the body
       of René Descartes, 100

     ---- Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, I., scene of Molière's marriage,
       115

     ---- Saint-Gervais, I., window of Jean Cousin, 48

     ---- Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, still unchanged, 82-83

     ---- Saint-Roch, I., Molière stands sponsor for a child in, 115;
       Corneille buried in, 143;
       bust of Charles Michel, Abbé de l'Épée, 210

     ---- Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, II., Scene of Adèle Hugo's baptism
       and of Balzac's funeral service, 139

     ---- Saint-Séverin, I., destroyed in 866, rebuilt in the 13th
       century, 82-83.

     _Cité, la_, I., 20, 36

     ---- _Île de la_, I., 15, 32, 75

     City, the (See _La Cité_)

     City, Island of the (See _Île de la_)

     Clagny, Abbé de, I., designer of the fountain of the Innocents, 50

     Clairon, Hippolyte, I., dwellings of, 161, 164

     "Clopinel," I., nickname of Jean de Meung, completer of _Le Roman
       de la Rose_, 85

     Cluny Museum, I., 21, 35

     Coictier, Dr., I., physician of Louis XI., well of, 35;
       II., astrological tower of, 187

     College of the Four Nations, I., founded by Cardinal Mazarin, 78,
       170

     _Confrérie de la Passion_, I., 64 _et seq._

     Conti, Prince de, I., friend and protector of Molière, Racine,
       Boileau, 108

     Cook, Theodore Andrea, quoted, I., 3

     Coppée, François, I., quoted, 14;
       remembers the Halles as they were in Molière's time, 107

     Corneille, Pierre, I., quoted, 47;
       statue of, at Rouen, and sketch of life, 138 _et seq._;
       apartment in Rue de Cléry, 139;
       personality, 147;
       Guizot's estimate of, 148

     ---- Thomas, I., 139, 142, 144, 149

     Cour du Commerce, I., 34;
       Sainte-Beuve's apartment in, 228;
       trial of the first guillotine, 231

     ---- de Rohan, I., stairway and ancient well, 34

     Cousin, Jean, I., worker in stained glass, his window in
       Saint-Gervais, 91

     Crusade, the Sixth, I., 51

     Crusaders, the, I., 78

     Cuvier, Georges, I., homes of, 255


     Dablin, II., friend of Balzac, 86

     Dagobert, I., stairway and tower of, 16 _et seq._

     Dante, I., 82 _et seq._

     Danton, Georges-Jacques, I., statue and site of house, 224

     Daudet, Alphonse, II., homes in the Marais, 263 _et seq._

     Delorme, Philibert, I., dies in the cloister of Notre-Dame, 76

     ---- Marion, II., house in the Marais, 140 _et seq._

     Descartes, René, I., site of his house, 100;
       portrait by Franz Hals, 100;
       body rests in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 101

     Deschamps, Eustace, I., ballad to Chaucer, 85

     Desmoulins, Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist, I., homes in Paris,
       225-227

     Dickens, Charles, II., description of George Sand, 26;
       description of Hugo and of his home, 147

     Diderot, Denis, I., in the Café Procope, 201 _et seq._;
       sketch of, 204 _et seq._;
       where he died, 209

     Dolet, Étienne, I., statue of, in Place Maubert, 94

     Dudevant, Mme. (See George Sand)

     Dumas, Alexandre, II., arrival in Paris, 91;
       contemporaries of, 93 _et seq._;
       homes in Paris, 97-98, 101-103;
       birth of Dumas _fils_, 98;
       statue and description of, 104;
       scenes and characters of his novels, 105 _et seq._

     Dunois, bastard of Louis d'Orléans, I., 35, 59

     Dupanloup, Bishop, I., Renan's master in the Seminary of St.
       Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, 44


     École des Beaux-Arts, II., 29

     "Encore un Tableau de Paris," Henrion's, I., 6

     Erasmus, I., residence of, in the Collège Montaigu, 95

     Estrées, Gabrielle d', II., scene of her sudden death, 249


     Fontenelle, I., describes Corneille, 147

     Force, La, I., prison of, 31, II., 138

     Fouquet, I., protector of Lebrun, 43

     François I., I., 1, 62, 65, II., _Maison de_, 159;
       II., 189

     Franklin, Benjamin, I., residences in Paris and Passy, 214-215

     Frémiet, I., bronze statue of Louis d'Orléans, 57

     Fulbert, Canon, I., uncle of Héloise, 75, 77


     Gambetta, Léon, I., at the Café Procope, 202

     Gautier, Théophile, I., verses for Corneille's birthday fête, 141

     Gobelins, I., factory of the, founded by a dyer named Gobelin,
       41-44

     Goujon, Jean, I., decorator of ancient fountain, 50;
       II., bust of, and specimens of his carving, 216-217

     Gringoire, I., alluded to, 87

     "Guillotine, la," I., its inventor, 231;
       sites of, 231, 233

     Guizot, François-Pierre-Guillaume, II., residence in the Scholars'
       Quarter, 5, 6


     Halles, les, I., 48

     Heine, Heinrich, II., his estimate of Hugo, 146

     Héloise, I., 75, 77

     Henley, W. E., I., quoted, 87

     Henri II., I., 4; II., fatally wounded in the lists of the
       Tournelles, 193

     Henri IV., I., 4. 24, 34, 68;
       II., statue of, 193;
       introduced mulberries and silkworms into France, 197;
       built up eastern side of the Place Royale at the crown's
         expense, 199

     Hôtel de Ville, I., the new, 48;
       II., first public library of, 262

     Hôtel-Dieu, I., 26

     Hôtel, d'Artois (see Hôtel de Bourgogne)

     ---- Barbette, I., 57;
       II. 267 _et seq._

     ---- de Beauvais, I., 9;
       II., impressive specimen of seventeenth century architecture,
         238 _et seq._

     ---- de Bourgogne, I., last remaining fragment, 51;
       in the reign of Louis XI., 61;
       use made of its donjon by Saint Vincent de Paul, 63;
       part of it used as a theatre by the Confraternity of the
         Passion, 65

     ---- de Bretagne, I., memories of, 232

     ---- de Choiseul-Praslin, I., now a Dominican school for girls,
       130

     ---- de Clermont-Tonnerre, I., 32

     ---- de Clisson, II., history of, 275 _et seq._

     ---- de Flandres, I., now the site of the General Post Office in
       Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, 56

     ---- de Hollande, II., 272

     ---- de Lauzun-Pimodan, II., 74-76

     ---- de Luynes, I., constructed under Racine's supervision, 151

     ---- de Navarre, I., existing remains of, 34-35

     ---- de la Reine Blanche, I., 27 _et seq._

     ---- Saint-Paul, I., 57;
       II., 180 _et seq._

     ---- de Strasbourg (_Palais Cardinal_), II., now the Imprimerie,
       279

     ---- des Tournelles, I., occupied by Louis XI., 61;
       II., by the Duke of Bedford during the English occupation of
         Paris, 183;
       by Charles VII. after the burning of Joan the Maid, 184;
       afterward the abode of royalty for more than a century, 185;
       François I. in the, 188-191

     Hôtel des Tournelles, lists of, II., Henri II. fatally wounded
       in, 193

     ---- des Ursins, I., 20

     _Hôtels-garnis_, I., do not antedate the Revolution, 9

     Huguenots, the, I., befriended by Marguerite of Navarre, 90-94;
       in the Scholars' Quarter, 90, 91

     Hugo, General, II., father of Victor, 126, 128, 157

     ---- Victor, I., "painful detail and inaccurate erudition" in his
         portraiture of mediæval Paris, 41;
       sarcasm on Cuvier, 255;
       II., describes Balzac's death and burial, 84-87;
       first Paris lodging, 125;
       later homes and schools, 127 _et seq._;
       visits Châteaubriand, 132;
       death of his mother, 133;
       marriage, 134;
       homes of married life, 135 _et seq._;
       friends, 136 _et seq._;
       visits Béranger in prison, 137;
       scenes and characters of, 150 _et seq._;
       final home, 160


     Île de la Cité, I., 15, 32, 75, 78;
       II., 165

     ---- des Javiaux, later Île Louvier, I., 21

     ---- Notre-Dame, I., 54

     ---- Saint-Louis, I., formed by the junction of Île Notre-Dame and
       Île aux Vaches, 21, 45 _et seq._

     Innocents, Cemetery of the, I., some of its vaults in perfect
       preservation, their present use, 49

     ---- Church of, I., built by Louis "le Gros," 50

     ---- fountain and square of the, 50

     Institute, the, I., site of the Tour de Nesle shown by a tablet
       on its eastern wall, 32

     Isabelle of Bavaria, I., wife of Charles VI., held her "unclean
         court" in Hôtel Barbette, 57;
       II., her abode in the Marais, 269


     James, Henry, I., quoted, 19, 26;
       II., 78

     Jean "le Bon," I., 55

     ---- "sans-Peur," I., procures the assassination of Louis
         d'Orléans, 58;
       himself assassinated, 59

     Joan the Maid, II., 177, 269


     La Fontaine, Jean de, I., friendship with Mme. de la Sablière,
         171-172;
       death and burial, 173;
       friends of, 174 _et seq._

     Lamartine, Alphonse de, II., residence of, in the Scholars'
         Quarter, 9;
       statue of, 10;
       his first visit to Hugo, 132-133

     Lang, Andrew, I., quoted, 89

     Laplace, Pierre-Simon, I., residences of, 253-254

     Latin Quarter (See Scholars' Quarter)

     Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, I., 253

     Lebrun, Charles, I., court painter and decorator, 43-45

     Lecouvreur, Adrienne, I., residence of, 162;
       where buried, 163

     Lemoine, Cardinal, I., College of, 93

     Lenclos, Ninon de, II., house of, in the Marais, 224 _et seq._

     Lenôtre, M. G., I., 10;
       his "Paris Révolutionnaire," 223

     Lescot, Pierre, I., the fountain _des Innocents_ wrongly
         ascribed to, 50;
       dies in the cloisters of Notre-Dame, 76

     "_Librairie de Monsieur_" (See Library of the Arsenal)

     Library of the Arsenal, the, II., 56, 250 _et seq._

     Littré, Maximilien-Paul-Émile, II., homes of, 18

     Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, I., quoted, 83

     Lorris, Guillaume de, I., began the Roman of the Rose, 85

     Louis VI., I., wall and towers of, 30-31

     Louis VII., II., gives site in the Marais to the Templars,
       179

     Louis IX. (Saint-Louis), I., 36

     Louis XI., I., entry into Paris on accession, 61;
       II., residence in the Tournelles, 185 _et seq._

     Louis XII., I., ancient well once his property, 34;
       patron of Pierre Gringoire, 67;
       II., in the Marais, 170;
       marries Anne of Brittany, 187;
       marries Mary, sister of Henry VIII. of England, 188

     Louis XIII., "the Just," I., opens building sites on Île
         Saint-Louis, 47;
       Vincent de Paul his confessor, 63;
       permits "Les Comédiens du Marais" to style themselves "La Troupe
         Royale," 68-69;
       II., marries Anne of Austria, 201;
       statue of, 202

     Louis XIV., II., enters Paris with his bride, 236-237;
       witness of his marriage procession, 237

     Louis XVI., I., institutes the "model prison" of La Force, 31

     Louis XVIII., II., why he pensioned Victor Hugo, 134-135

     Louis of Orleans, I., statue of, 57;
       assassinated, 58;
       his widow, 59;
       II., at the Hôtel Barbette with Isabelle of Bavaria, 269

     Lulli, musician, I., house of, still in perfect condition, 140

     Lutetia, I., Gallic and Roman, 20;
       Gallo-Roman wall of, 30;
       wall built by Louis VI., 31;
       II., 165-166


     Macaulay, Thomas Babington, I., "criticises" French names, 8

     Maison de la Reine Blanche, I., 27 _et seq._

     Maistre, Joseph de, II., quoted on the massacre of
       Saint-Bartholomew's Night, 183

     Mancini, Anne, Duchesse de Bouillon, niece of Mazarin, I., 167-168

     Mansart, François, II., house in the Marais, 225

     Mansart, Jules Hardouin, nephew of François, II., Superintendent
         of Buildings under Louis XIV., 224;
       specimens of his work, 225, 252

     Marais, the, II., Scarron's house in, 120;
       wall of Philippe-Auguste, 168;
       wall of Charles V., 171-178;
       wall of the Temple, 179;
       monasteries in, 209;
       relics of old houses in, 210-211, 238 _et seq._;
       Mme. de Maintenon's apartment in, 266

     Marat, Jean-Paul, I., Paris apartment of, 227

     Marcel, Étienne, I., statue of, 48;
       II., "Prévôt des Marchands," 169;
       Froissart's description of his death, 171;
       estimate of, 171-172

     Marcus Aurelius, I., compared with Saint Louis, 36

     Marguerite of Navarre. I., befriends the Huguenots, 90, 94

     Marguerite of Valois, divorced wife of Henri IV., II., home in the
         Marais, 253 _et seq._;
       Clouet's portrait of, 256

     Mattioli, Count Ercolo Antonio, II., probably the "Man in the Iron
       Mask," 233

     Mazarin, Cardinal, I., his College, now the Palais de l'Institut,
       170

     Medicine, School of, I., 78;
       present site of that of the fifteenth century, 80

     Mérimée, Prosper, II., homes of, 20

     Meung, Jean de, I., completes the Roman of the Rose;
       site of his house, 83

     Michel, Charles, Abbé de l'Épée, I., bust of, 210;
       statue of, by deaf-mute artist, 211-212

     Mirabeau, I., house where he died, 226

     Molière (Jean Poquelin), I., birthplace, 105;
       baptized at Saint-Eustache, 106;
       site of college, 108;
       imprisoned in the Grand Châtelet, 116;
       site of Paris theatres, 117;
       married in Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, 118;
       site of his widow's theatre, 119;
       fountain erected to his memory, 128;
       residence at Auteuil, 129 _et seq._;
       his arm-chair in the Theâtre Français, 133-134

     Monval, M., I., 10

     Morley, John, I., on Voltaire, 195;
       on Diderot, 203;
       on the Encyclopædia, 208


     Palais des Thermes, I., frigidarium of, in the Cluny Museum, 21

     Palissy, Bernard, I., homes in Paris, 91-92

     Palloy "le Patriote," II., contracts to demolish the Bastille
       walls, 229 et seq.

     Pascal, Blaise, I., commemorative tablet to, 96;
       site of experiments, 97;
       where buried, 98

     Philippe-Auguste, I., wall of, 28 _et seq._;
       II., 168;
       round towers of, 34;
       paves main streets of Paris, 38

     Place Dauphine, I., Mme. Roland's girlhood's home in, 243

     ---- de Grève, I., 23, 46

     ---- du Parvis-Notre-Dame, I., 27

     ---- Royale, II., 197 _et seq._

     ---- Saint-André-des-Arts, I., site of ancient church of that
       name, 158

     Pompadour, La, I., house of, unchanged, 208

     Portes, I., de Buci, 33, 58

     ---- Dauphine, 33

     ---- de Nesle, 32

     ---- Saint-Antoine, 52

     ---- Saint-Bernard, 32

     ---- Saint-Denis, 53

     ---- Saint-Jacques, 33, 85

     ---- Saint-Marcel, 88

     ---- Saint-Martin, 53

     ---- Saint-Victor, 88

     Ponts, I., d'Arcole, 27

     ---- des Arts, 54

     ---- au Change, 25

     ---- au Double, 27

     ---- Louis-Philippe, 47

     ---- aux Meuniers, 25

     ---- Neuf, 24, 33

     ---- Notre-Dame, 25

     ---- Petit-, 26-27, 82

     ---- Rouge, 86

     ---- Royal, 169

     ---- de la Tournelle, 46

     Pôternes, I., Barbette, 52

     ---- des Barrés, 52

     ---- Baudoyer, 52

     ---- Beaubourg, 53


     Quais, I., d'Anjou, 46

     ---- de Bourbon, 46

     ---- des Célestins, 52

     ---- Henri IV., 21

     ---- des Lunettes, 243

     ---- Malaquais, La Fontaine lived on, 169;
       house of the elder Visconti still intact, 169;
       Humboldt lived on, 170;
       Cardinal Mazarin the largest builder on, 170

     ---- d'Orléans, 46

     ---- II., de la Tournelle, 32, 54, 84

     Quinet, Edgar, II., house of, 13


     Rachel (Élisa-Rachel Félix), II., homes in the Marais, 247-248

     Racine, Jean, I., student in Collége d'Harcourt, 149;
       homes in Paris, 150 _et seq._;
       relations with Molière and Corneille, 152-153;
       his house in Rue Visconti, 160;
       family life, 165-166;
       death and burial, 167

     Racine, Louis, I., 160

     Récamier, Mme., II., homes of, 38-44

     Renan, Ernest, I., pupil of Dupanloup, in
         Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, 44;
       II., homes of, 22 _et seq._

     Richelieu, Cardinal, I., widened Paris streets, 5, 49;
       his theatre, 118-119

     Robespierre, Maximilien, I., homes in Paris, 235-236

     Rollin, Charles, historian, I., his residence unchanged, 99

     Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, I., traces of, in Paris, 205-206

     Rue, d'Arras, I., 35

     ---- du Bac, I., 9

     ---- Boutebrie, I., mediæval staircase, 80

     ---- de Braque, I., 53

     ---- de la Bucherie, I., 80

     ---- du Cardinal-Lemoine, I., 32, 35, 43

     ---- Cassini, II., site of Balzac's house in, 62

     ---- Chanoinesse, I., 16

     ---- du Cimetière-Saint-Benoît, I., retains some ancient houses, 86

     ---- Clovis, I., contains fragment of wall of Philippe-Auguste, 35,
       79

     ---- Dauphine, I., tablet at No. 44, 33

     ---- Descartes, I., cottages on the wall of Philippe-Auguste, 35

     ---- du Dragon, II., Hugo's house in, 133

     ---- des Écoles, I., bronze statue of Dante, 83

     ---- Étienne-Marcel, I., contains last fragment of the Hôtel de
       Bourgogne, 51

     ---- de Fer-à-Moulin, I., contains fragment of Scipio Sardini's
       villa, 41-42

     ---- de la Ferronerie, I., scene of Henri IV.'s assassination, 4,
       48, 106

     ---- François-Miron, II., balcony of the Louis XIV. period, 237

     ---- des Francs-Bourgeois, I., 52-53;
       II., relics of antiquity in, 260 _et seq._

     ---- Galande, II., houses of the time of Charles IX., 80

     ---- des Gobelins, I., country house of Blanche of Castile, 27-28

     ---- Guénégaud, contains a tower of Philippe-Auguste, I., 34;
       II., 120

     ---- des Innocents, I., vaults of Cemetery des Innocents in good
       preservation, 49

     ---- des Marais-Saint-Germain (now Visconti), house where Louis
       Racine was born, 160

     ---- de la Parcheminerie, I., superb façade, 80

     ---- de Poissy, I., refectory of the Bernardin convent, 65

     ---- Saint-André-des-Arts, site of the original Porte de Buci, 34


     Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné, I., chapel of the martyrs, 84

     ---- Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, I., where Calvin and Renan made their
       studies, 44

     ---- Paul, Cemetery of, II., 232-234

     Saint-Pierre, Henri-Bernardin de, I., 99, 100

     Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, I., room in the Cour du Commerce,
         228;
       II., his homes in Paris, 11, 12

     Sainte-Pélagie, I., prison of, 43

     Salle-des-Gardes, I., relic of the old palace, 24

     Salpêtrière, the, I., 21, 238

     Sand, George (Mme. Dudevant), II., homes in Paris, 27-29

     Sapeurs-Pompiers, I., its _caserne_ a specimen of thirteenth
       century architecture, 45

     Sardini, Scipio, I., villa of, 41-42

     Sardou, Victorien, I., collections of, 10, 26;
       relic of Corneille, 143;
       of Danton, 224

     Saxe, Maurice de, I., residences of, 162-163

     Scarron, Paul, II., house in the Marais, 220-222

     Scribe, Eugène, I., commemorative tablet of, 217

     Sellier, M. Charles, I., 10

     Sévigné, Mme. de, II., born in the Marais, 215;
       her fondness for the Carnavalet, 217-219

     Staël, Mme. de, II., 33

     Stairway, I., of la Reine Blanche, 27 _et seq._

     ---- I., of Dagobert, 17 _et seq._

     ---- I., of Jean "sans-Peur," 71, 72

     Sully, Duc de, I., 46;
       II., residence of, 56, 194-196

     Surville, Mme. Laure de, II., Balzac's letters to, 57;
       shelters Balzac's widow, 86


     Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe, II., house where he died, 21

     Talma, Joseph-François, I., homes in Paris, 266-267

     Taylor, Mlle. Blanche, I., 9

     Temple, the, II., rise and fall of, 179-180

     Terror, the, I., three famous victims of, 240-252;
       II., 138, 154

     Thackeray, William Makepeace, II., in Paris, 130-131

     Tocqueville, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, Comte de, II., residences
       in the Scholars' Quarter, 4, 5

     Tour Barbeau, I., 52

     ---- de l'Horloge, I., 24

     ---- Jean "sans-Peur," I., 51, 58, 69 _et seq._

     ---- de Nesle, I., 32, 54

     ---- "qui-fait-le-Coin," I., 54

     Tournelles, the, II., dwelt in by Bedford, 183;
       by Charles VII. and Louis XI., 184-185;
       by François I., 189-190;
       lists of, 192-193

     Turlupin, I., comedian of the Théâtre du Marais, 146


     _Ville, la_, I., 36

     Ville d'Avray, II., Balzac's house in, 69-71

     Villeparisis, II., home of Balzac's father, 58

     Villon, François, I., 20;
       sketch of, 86-87

     Visconti, Valentine, Duchesse d'Orléans, I., 57;
       incites Dunois to avenge his father's murder, 59

     Voie du Midi, the, I., now Rue Saint-Jacques, 31

     Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, I., baptized at
        Saint-André-des-Arts, 158, 193;
      sketch of, 193 _et seq._;
      at the Café Procope, 201






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