The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Stones of Paris in History and Letters,
Volume I (of 2), by Benjamin Ellis Martin and Charlotte M. Martin
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Title: The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume I (of 2)
Author: Benjamin Ellis Martin
Charlotte M. Martin
Release Date: January 25, 2013 [EBook #41914]
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.
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
On page 153, "corrival" should possibly be "co-rival".
On page 201, "Que ne fut rien" should possibly be "Qui ne fut rien"
On page 269, the phrase "with a strange, most ponderous, yet delicate
expression in the big, dull-glowing black eyes and it" possibly
contains a typo.
THE STONES OF PARIS
IN HISTORY AND LETTERS
[Illustration: Molière]
THE STONES OF PARIS
IN HISTORY AND LETTERS
BY
BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN
AND
CHARLOTTE M. MARTIN
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
MDCCCXCIX
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
TO
W. C. BROWNELL
IN CORDIAL TRIBUTE TO HIS
"FRENCH TRAITS"
CONTENTS
PAGE
Three Time-worn Staircases 11
The Scholars' Quarter of the Middle Ages 73
Molière and his Friends 103
From Voltaire to Beaumarchais 191
The Paris of the Revolution 221
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_From drawings by John Fulleylove, Esq. The portraits from photographs
by Messrs. Braun, Clément et Cie._
Molière (from the portrait by Mignard in the Musée Condé, at
Chantilly) Frontispiece
PAGE
The so-called Hôtel de la Reine Blanche (from a photograph
of the Commission du Vieux Paris) facing 28
Balcony of the Hôtel de Lauzun-Pimodan, on Île Saint-Louis 47
"Jean-sans-Peur," Duc de Bourgogne (from a painting by an
unknown artist, at Chantilly) facing 56
The Tower of "Jean-sans-Peur" 70
The Church of Saint-Séverin facing 74
Rue Hautefeuille, a Survivor of the Scholars' Quarter 81
The Interior of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre facing 82
Pierre de Ronsard (from a drawing by an unknown artist,
in a private collection) facing 88
Balcony over the Entrance of the Cour du Dragon 92
Clément Marot (from the portrait by Porbus le Jeune, in a
private collection) facing 94
René Descartes (from the portrait by Franz Hals, in the
Musée du Louvre) facing 100
The Stage Door of Molière's Second Theatre in Paris 114
The Stamp of the Comédie Française 121
The Molière Fountain facing 128
The Door of Corneille's Last Dwelling (from a drawing by
Robert Delafontaine, by permission of M. Victorien
Sardou) facing 142
Pierre Corneille (from the portrait by Charles Lebrun)
facing 148
Rue Visconti. On the right is the Hôtel de Ranes, and
in the distance is No. 13 facing 160
La Fontaine (from the portrait by Rigaud-y-Ros)
facing 176
Boileau-Despréaux (from the portrait by Largillière)
facing 184
Voltaire (from the statue by Houdon in the foyer of the
Comédie Française) facing 192
The Hôtel Lambert 198
The Seventeenth-century Buildings on Quai Malaquais,
with the Institute and the Statue of Voltaire facing 212
Charlotte Corday (from the copy by Baudry of the only authentic
portrait, painted in her prison) facing 222
The Refectory of the Cordeliers facing 230
The Carré d'Atalante in the Tuileries Gardens 236
The Girlhood Home of Madame Roland facing 244
No. 13 Quai Conti 258
Monogram from the former entrance of the Cour du Commerce,
believed to be the initials of the owner, one Girardot
(from a drawing by Robert Delafontaine, by permission
of M. Victorien Sardou) 269
INTRODUCTORY
This book has been written for those who seek in Paris something more
than a city of shows or a huge bazaar, something better than the
_cabaret_ wherein François I. found entertainment, and yet not
quite--still in Hugo's phrase--the library that Charles V. esteemed
it. There are many lovers of this beautiful capital of a great people,
who, knowing well her unconcealed attractions, would search out her
records and traditions in stone, hidden and hard to find. This
legitimate curiosity grows more eager with the increasing difficulties
of gratifying it in that ancient Paris that is vanishing day by day;
and, in its bewilderment, it may be glad to find congenial guidance in
these pages. In them, no attempt is made to destroy that which is new
in order to reconstruct what was old. In telling the stories of those
monuments of past ages that are visible and tangible, reference is
made only to so much of their perished approaches and neighbors as
shall suffice for full realization of the significance of all that we
are to see. This significance is given mainly by the former dwellers
within these walls. We shall concern ourselves with the human
document, illustrated by its surroundings. The student of history can
find no more suggestive relics of mediæval Paris than the still
existing towers and fragments of the wall of Philippe-Auguste, which
shall be shown to him; for us, these stones must be made to speak, not
so essentially of their mighty builder as of the common people, who
moved about within that enclosure and gave it character. In like
manner, the walls, which have sheltered soldiers, statesmen,
preachers, teachers, workers in art and letters, illustrious men and
women of all sorts and conditions, will take on the personality of
these impressive presences. When we stand beneath the roof of that
favorite personage in history, that spoiled child of romance, who
happens to be dear to each one of us, we are brought into touch with
him as with a living fellow-creature. The streets of Paris are alive
with these sympathetic companions, who become abiding friends, as we
stroll with them; and allow none of the ache, confessed to be felt in
such scenes, despite her reasoning, by Madame de Sévigné. Nor do they
invite, here, any critical review of their work in life, but consent
to scrutiny of their lineaments alone, and to an appreciation of their
personal impress on their contemporaries and on us. So that essays on
themes, historic, literary, artistic, can find no place in this
record. Indeed, labor and time have been expended "in hindering it
from being ... swollen out of shape by superfluous details, defaced
with dilettanti antiquarianisms, nugatory tag-rags, and, in short,
turned away from its real uses, instead of furthered toward them." In
this sense, at least, the authors can say in Montaigne's words, "_ceci
est un livre de bonne foy_."
In this presentation of people and places it has been difficult,
sometimes impossible, to keep due sequence both of chronology and
topography. Just as Mr. Theodore Andrea Cook found in the various
_châteaux_ of his admirable "Old Touraine," so each spot we shall
visit in Paris "has some particular event, some especial visitor,
whose importance overshadows every other memory connected with the
place." With that event or that visitor we must needs busy ourselves,
without immediate regard to other dates or other personages. Again, to
keep in sight some conspicuous figure, as he goes, we must leave on
one side certain memorable scenes, to which we shall come back. Each
plan has been pursued in turn, as has seemed desirable, for the sake
of the clearness and accuracy, which have been considered above all
else. The whole value of such records as are here presented depends on
the preliminary researches. In the doing of this, thousands of books
and pamphlets and articles have been read, hundreds of people have
been questioned, scores of miles have been tramped. Oldest archives
and maps have been consulted, newest newspaper clippings have not been
disregarded. Nothing has been thought too heavy or too light that
would help to give a characteristic line or a touch of native color. A
third volume would be needed to enumerate the authorities called on
and compared. Nor has any statement of any one of these authorities
been accepted without ample investigation; and every assertion has
been subjected to all the proof that it was possible to procure. Those
countless errors have been run to earth which have been started so
often by the carelessness of an early writer, and ever since kept
alive by lazy copiers and random compilers. These processes of sifting
are necessarily omitted for lack of space, and the wrought-out results
alone are shown. If the authors dare not hope that they have avoided
errors on their own part, they may hope for indulgent correction of
such as may have crept in, for all their vigilance.
It is easier, to-day, to put one's hand on the Paris of the sixteenth
century than on that of the eighteenth century. In those remoter days
changes were slow to come, and those older stones have been left often
untouched. A curious instance of that aforetime leisureliness is seen
in the working of the _ordonnance_ issued on May 14, 1554, by Henri
II. for the clearing away of certain encroachments made on the streets
by buildings and by business, notably on Rue de la Ferronerie; that
street being one of those used "for our way from our royal _château_
of the Louvre to our _château_ of the Tournelles." It was fifty-six
years later, to the very day, that the stabbing of Henri IV. was made
easy to Ravaillac, by the stoppage of the king's carriage in the
blockade of that narrow street, its obstructions not yet swept out, in
absolute disregard of the edict. From the death of the royal mason,
Charles V., who gave a new face and a new figure to his Paris, to the
coming of Henri IV., who had in him the makings of a kingly
constructor, but who was hindered by the necessary destruction of his
wars, there were two centuries of steady growth of the town outward,
on all sides, with only slight alterations of its interior quarters.
Many of these were transformed, many new quarters were created, by
Louis XIII., thus realizing his father's frustrated plans. Richelieu
was able to widen some streets, and Colbert tried to carry on the
work, but Louis XIV. had no liking for his capital, and no money to
waste for its bettering. His stage-subject's civic pride was unduly
swollen, when he said: "_À cette époque, la grande ville du roi Henri
n'était pas ce qu'elle est aujourd'hui._"
At the beginning of the eighteenth century we find Paris divided into
twenty quarters, in none of which was there any numbering of the
houses. The streets then got their names from their mansions of the
nobility, from their vast monasteries and convents, from their special
industries and shops. These latter names survive in our Paris as they
survive in modern London. The high-swinging street lanterns, that came
into use in 1745, served for directions to the neighboring houses, as
did the private lanterns hung outside the better dwellings. Toward the
middle of that century the city almanacs began a casual numbering of
the houses in their lists, and soon this was found to be such a
convenience that the householders painted numbers on or beside their
doors. Not before 1789 was there any organized or official numbering,
and this was speedily brought to naught during the Revolution, either
because it was too simple or because it was already established. To
this day, the first symptom of a local or national upheaval, and the
latest sign of its ending, are the ladder and paint-pot in the
streets of Paris. Names that recall to the popular eye recently
discredited celebrities or humiliating events, are brushed out, and
the newest favorites of the populace are painted in.
The forty-eight sections into which the Revolution divided the city
changed many street names, of section, and renumbered all the houses.
Each lunatic section, quite sure of its sanity, made this new
numbering of its own dwellings with a cheerful and aggressive
disregard of the adjoining sections; beginning arbitrarily at a point
within its boundary, going straight along through its streets, and
ending at the farthest house on the edge of its limits. So, a house
might be No. 1187 of its section, and its next-door neighbor might be
No. 1 of the section alongside. In a street that ran through several
sections there would be more than one house of the same number, each
belonging to a different section. "Encore un Tableau de Paris" was
published in 1800 by one Henrion, who complains that he passed three
numbers 42 in Rue Saint-Denis before he came to the 42 that he wanted.
The decree of February 7, 1805, gave back to the streets many of their
former names, and ordered the numbering, admirably uniform and
intelligible, still in use--even numbers on one side of the street,
odd numbers on the other side, both beginning at the eastern end of
the streets that run parallel with the Seine, and at the river end of
the streets going north and south. For the topographer all these
changes have brought incoherence to the records, have paralyzed
research, and crippled accuracy. In addition, during the latter half
of the nineteenth century, many old streets have been curtailed or
lengthened, carried along into new streets, or entirely suppressed and
built over. Indeed, it is substantially the nineteenth century that
has given us the Paris that we best know; begun by the great Emperor,
it was continued by the crown on top of the cotton night-cap of
Louis-Philippe, and admirably elaborated, albeit to the tune of the
cynical fiddling of the Second Empire. The Republic of our day still
wields the pick-axe, and demolition and reconstruction have been going
on ruthlessly. Such of these changes as are useful and guiltless are
now intelligently watched; such of them as are needlessly destructive
may be stopped in part by the admirable _Commission du Vieux Paris_.
The members of this significant body, which was organized in December,
1897, are picked men from the Municipal Council, from the official
committees of Parisian Inscriptions, and of Historic Works, from
private associations and private citizens, all earnest and
enthusiastic for the preservation of their city's monuments that are
memorable for architectural worth or historic suggestion. Where they
are unable to save to the sight what is ancient and picturesque, they
save to the memory by records, drawings, and photographs. The "Procès
Verbal" of this Commission, issued monthly, contains its illustrated
reports, discussions, and correspondence, and promises to become an
historic document of inestimable value.
The words _rue_ and _place_, as well as their attendant names, have
been retained in the French, as the only escape from the confusion of
a double translation, first here, and then back to the original by the
sight-seer. The definite article, that usually precedes these words,
has been suppressed, in all cases, because it seems an awkward and
needless reiteration. Nor are French men and French women disguised
under translated titles. If Macaulay had been consistent in his
misguided Briticism that turned Louis into Lewis, and had carried out
that scheme to its logical end in every case, he would have given us a
ludicrous nomenclature. "Bottin" is used in these pages as it is used
in Paris, to designate the city directory: which was issued, first, in
a tiny volume, in 1796, by the publisher Bottin, and has kept his name
with its enormous growth through the century.
The word _hôtel_ has here solely its original significance of a town
house of the noble or the wealthy. In the sense of our modern usage of
the word it had no place in old Paris. Already in the seventeenth
century there were _auberges_ for common wayfarers, and here and there
an _hôtellerie_ for the traveller of better class. During the absences
of the owners of grand city mansions, their _maîtres-d'hôtel_ were
allowed to let them to accredited visitors to the capital, who brought
their own retinue and demanded only shelter. When they came with no
train, so that service had to be supplied, it was "charged in the
bill," and that objectionable item, thus instituted, has been handed
down to shock us in the _hôtel-garni_ of our time. With the emigration
of the nobility, their stewards and _chefs_ lost place and pay, and
found both once more in the public hotels they then started. No
_hôtels-garnis_ can be found in Paris of earlier date than the
Revolution.
In their explorations into the libraries, bureaus, museums, and
streets of Paris, the authors have met with countless kindnesses. The
unlettered _concierge_ who guards an historic house is proud of its
traditions, or, if ignorant of them, as may chance, will listen to the
tale with a courtesy that simulates sympathy. The exceptions to this
general amenity have been few and ludicrous, and mostly the outcome of
exasperation caused by the ceaseless questioning of foreigners. The
_concierge_ of Châteaubriand's last home, in Rue du Bac, considers a
flourish of the wet broom, with which he is washing his court, a
fitting rejoinder to the inquiring visitor. That visitor will find
Balzac's Passy residence as impossible of entrance now as it was to
his creditors. The unique inner court of the Hôtel de Beauvais must be
seen from the outer vestibule, admission being refused by a surly
_concierge_ under orders from an ungenerous owner. The urbanity of the
noble tenant of the mansion built over the grave of Adrienne
Lecouvreur is unequal to the task of answering civil inquiries sent in
stamped envelopes. All these are but shadows in the pervading sunshine
of Parisian good-breeding. In making this acknowledgment to the many
who must necessarily remain unnamed, the authors wish to record their
recognition of the sympathetic counsel of Mlle. Blanche Taylor, of
Paris, and of George H. Birch, Esq., Curator of the Soane Museum,
London. Cordial thanks are especially given to the officials of the
Hôtel de Ville, in the bureau of the Conservation du Plan de Paris, to
M. Charles Sellier of the Musée Carnavalet, to M. Monval, Librarian of
the Comédie Française, to M. G. Lenôtre, and to M. Victorien Sardou,
for unmeasured aid of all sorts, prompted by a disinterestedness that
welcomes the importunate fellow-worker, and makes him forget that he
is a stranger and a foreigner.
THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES
THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES
We are to see a Paris unknown to the every-day dweller there, who is
content to tread, in wearied idleness, his swarming yet empty
boulevards; a Paris unseen by the hurried visitor, anxious to go his
round of dutiful sight-seeing. This Paris is far away from the crowd,
bustling in pursuit of pleasure, and hustling in pursuit of leisure;
out of sound of the teasing clatter of cab-wheels, and the tormenting
toot of tram-horns, and the petulant snapping of whips; out of sight
of to-day's pretentious structures and pompous monuments. To find this
Paris we must explore remote quarters, lose ourselves in untrodden
streets, coast along the alluring curves of the quays, cruise for
sequestered islands behind the multitudinous streams of traffic. We
shall not push ahead just to get somewhere, nor restlessly "rush in to
peer and praise." We shall learn to _flâner_, not without object, but
with art and conscience; to saunter, in the sense of that word,
humorously derived by Thoreau from _Sainte-Terre_, and so transform
ourselves into pilgrims to the spots sacred in history and legend, in
art and literature. In a word, if you go with us, you are to become
Sentimental Prowlers.
In this guise, we shall not know the taste of Parisine, a delectable
poison, more subtle than nicotine or strychnine, in the belief of
Nestor Roqueplan, that modern Voltaire of the boulevards. And we shall
not share "the unwholesome passion" for his Paris, to which François
Coppée owns himself a victim. Nor, on the other hand, shall we find
"an insipid pleasure" in this adventure, as did Voltaire. Yet even he
confesses, elsewhere, that one would "rather have details about Racine
and Despréaux, Bossuet and Descartes, than about the battle of
Steinkerk. There is nothing left but the names of the men who led
battalions and squadrons. There is no return to the human race for one
hundred engagements, but the great men I have spoken of prepared pure
and lasting pleasures for mortals still unborn." It is in this spirit
that we start, sure of seeking an unworn sentiment, and of finding an
undraggled delight, in the scenes which have inspired, and have been
inspired by, famous men and women. Their days, their ways, they
themselves as they moved and worked, are made alive for us once more
by their surroundings. Where these have been disturbed by
improvements, "more fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea," we get
curious suggestions from some forgotten name cut in the stone of a
street corner, from a chance-saved sign, a neglected _tourelle_, or a
bit of battered carving. And where the modern despoiler has wreaked
himself at his worst--as with the Paris of Marot, Rabelais,
Palissy--we may rub the magic ring of the archæologist, which brings
instant reconstruction. So that we shall seem to be walking in a vast
gallery, where, in the words of Cicero, at each step we tread on a
memory. "For, indeed," as it is well put by John Ruskin, "the greatest
glory of a building is not in its stones, or in its gold. Its glory is
in its _age_, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern
watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or
condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the
passing waves of humanity."
These stone and brick vestiges of the people of old Paris are to be
sought in its byways, narrow and winding; or hidden behind those broad
boulevards, that have newly opened up its distant quarters, on the
north or on the south. Sometimes these monuments have been brought
into full view across the grassed or gravelled spaces of recent
creation, so showing their complete and unmarred glory for the first
time in all the ages. Thus we may now look on Notre-Dame and the
Sainte-Chapelle, in dreamy surrender to their bedimmed beauty, that
persuades us that Paris can hold nothing in reserve more reverend in
comely old age. Yet, almost within touch of these two, stands a gray
tower, another sturdy survivor of the centuries. Between the northern
side of Notre-Dame and the river-bank, a happy chance has spared some
few of the streets, though fewer of the structures, of this earliest
Paris of Île de la Cité. This region recalls to us, by its
street-names in part, and partly by its buildings, its former
connection with the cathedral. In Rue des Chantres it lodged its
choristers, and Rue du Cloître-Notre-Dame records the site of the
clerical settlement, beloved by Boileau, wherein dwelt its higher
officials. Rue Chanoinesse has its significance, too, and we will stop
before the wide frontage of differing ages, whose two entrances, Nos.
18 and 20, open into the large courts of two mansions, now thrown into
one. This interior court was a garden until of late years, and while
grass and flowers are gone forever, it keeps its ancient well in the
centre and its stone steps that mounted to the _salons_. Those
_salons_, and the large court, and the smaller courts beyond--all
these courts now roofed over with glass--are piled high with every
known shape of household furniture and utensil in metal; notably with
the iron garden-chairs and tables, dear to the French. For this vast
enclosure is the storage _dépôt_ of a famous house-furnishing firm,
and is one more instance of the many in Paris of a grand old mansion
and its dependencies given over to trade.
By the courtesy of those in charge, we may pass within the spacious
stone entrance arch of No. 18, and pick our way through the ordered
confusion, past the admirable inner façade of the main fabric, with
its stately steps and portal and its windows above, topped by tiny
hoods, to a distant corner; where, in the gloom, we make out the base
of a square tower and the foot of a corkscrew staircase. We mount it,
spirally and slowly. The well-worn stone steps are narrow, and the
turn of the spiral is sharp, for this tower was built when homes were
fortresses, when space was precious, and when hundreds huddled within
walls that will hardly hold one thriving establishment of our day. In
this steep ascent, we get scant assistance from our hold on the rude
hand-rail, roughly grooved in the great central column--one solid
tree-trunk, embedded in the ground, stretching to the top of the
stairs. Experts assure us that this tree was fully five hundred years
old, when it was cut down to be made the shaft of this stairway,
nearly five hundred years ago. For this stone tower is evidently of
late fifteenth-century construction. The mediæval towers were round,
whether built upon their own foundations or rebuilt from Roman towers;
and they gave way to square towers when battering-rams gave way to
guns, in the fifteenth century. Yet this pile of masonry is known as
"_la tour de Dagobert_," and with no wish to discredit this legend,
cherished by the dwellers in this quarter, we may quote Brantôme
concerning certain local traditions of the Tour de Nesle: "_Je ne puis
dire si çela soit vrai, mais le vulgaire de Paris l'affirme._"
We can say, with certainty, that this tower was never seen by
Dagobert, for, long before this tree had sprouted from the ground, he
lived in the old Palace, the home of the early kings, at the other end
of the island. There he flourished, for the ten years between 628 and
638, in coarse splendor and coarser conviviality, his palace packed
with barbaric gold and silver, with crude wall paintings and curious
hangings. For this monarch made much of the arts of his day, whenever
he found leisure from his fighting and his drinking. Because of his
love of luxury, a century of cyclopædias has "curved a contumelious
lip" at his "corrupt court." On the other hand, he has been styled
"Saint Dagobert" by writers unduly moved to emotion by his gifts to
the churches at Saint-Denis, Rheims, Tours; and by his friendship for
certain bishops. But Rome, mindful of sundry other churches plundered
and destroyed by him, has not assented to this saintship. We may
accept his apt popular epithet, "_le bon_," which meant, in those
bellicose days, only merry or jovial; an easy virtue not to be denied
by priggish biographers to this genial ruffian. By turns, he devoted
himself to the flowing bowl in his palace there, and to building
religious edifices all over the face of France. And he has accentuated
the supremacy of the Church over all the warriors and the rulers of
his day, in the soaring majesty of the two towers that dominate the
buried outlines of his favorite church of Saint-Martin at Tours, solid
and lasting in their isolation. There the man is brought almost into
touch with us, while here only his name is recalled by this tower,
which he never saw.
The shadow-land of ancient French history, into which we have made
this little journey, is not darker than this narrow staircase, as we
creep dizzily upward, losing count of steps, stopping to take breath
at the infrequent windows, round-topped at first, then square and
small. It is with surprise that we realize, stepping out on the
tower-roof, that our standing-place is only five floors from the
ground; and yet from this modest height, overtopped by the ordinary
apartment house of Paris, we find an outlook that is unequalled even
by that from Notre-Dame's towers. For, as we come out from the
sheltering hood of our stair-way top, the great cathedral itself lies
before us, like some beautiful living creature outstretched at rest.
Words are impertinent in face of the tranquil strength of its bulk and
the exquisite delicacy of its lines, and we find refuge in the
affectionate phrase of Mr. Henry James, "The dear old thing!"
Beyond the cathedral square, over the bronze Charlemagne on his bronze
horse, glints the untravelled narrower arm of the Seine; we turn our
heads and look at its broader surface, all astir with little fidgetty
_bateaux-mouches_ and big, sedate barges. At both banks are anchored
huge wash-houses and bathing establishments. From this island-centre
all Paris spreads away to its low encircling slopes, to the brim of
the shallow bowl in which it lies. In sharp contrast with all that
newness, our old tower stands hemmed about by a medley of roofs of all
shapes and all ages; their red tiles of past style, here and there,
agreeably mellowing the dull dominant blue of the Paris slate. On
these roofs below jut out dormers, armed with odd wheels and chains
for lifting odd burdens; here on one side is an outer staircase that
starts in vague shadow, and ends nowhere, it would seem; far down
glimmers the opaque gray of the glass-covered courts at our feet. A
little toward the north--where was an entrance to this court, in old
days, from a gateway on the river-bank--is the roof that sheltered
Racine, along with the legal gentry of the Hôtel des Ursins. And all
about us, below, lies the little that is left of _la Cité_, the swept
and set-in-order leavings of that ancient network of narrow streets,
winding passages, blind alleys, all walled about by tall, scowling
houses, leaning unwillingly against one another to save themselves
from falling. This was the whole of Gallic Lutetia, the centre of
Roman Lutetia, the heart of mediæval Paris, the "Alsatia" of modern
Paris; surviving almost to our time, when the Second Empire let light
and air into its pestilent corners. Every foot of this ground has its
history. Down there, Villon, sneaking from the University precincts,
stole and starved and sang; there Quasimodo, climbing down from his
tower, foraged for his scant supplies; there Sue's impossibly dark
villany and equally impossible virtue found fitting stage-setting;
there, François, honest and engaging thief, slipped narrowly through
the snares that encompassed even vagabonds, in the suspicious days and
nights of the Terror.
The nineteenth century, cutting its clean way through this sinister
quarter, cutting away with impartial spade the round dozen churches
and the hundreds of houses that made their parishes, all clustered
close about the cathedral and the palace, has happily left untouched
this gray tower, built when or for what no one knows. It is a part of
all that it has seen, in its sightless way, through the changing
centuries of steady growth and of transient mutilation of its town. It
has seen its own island and the lesser islands up-stream gradually
alter their shapes; this island of the city lengthening itself, by
reaching out for the two low-shored grassy eyots down-stream, where
now is Place Dauphine and where sits Henri IV. on his horse. The
narrow channel between, that gave access to the water-gate of the old
Palace, has been filled in, so making one island of the three, and Rue
de Harlay-au-Palais covers the joining line. So the two islands on the
east--Île Notre-Dame and Île aux Vaches--have united their shores to
make Île Saint-Louis. The third island, most easterly of all--Île des
Javiaux of earliest times, known later as Île Louvier--has been glued
to the northern bank of the mainland, by the earthing-in of the thin
arm of the river, along the line of present Boulevard Morland, and
Quai Henri IV. And the two great islands as we know them--the
permanent outcome of all these topographical transformations--have
been chained to each other and to both banks, by numerous beautiful
bridges.
Our tower raised its head in time to see the gradual wearing away of
the mighty Roman aqueduct, that brought water to the Palais des
Thermes of the Roman rulers--whose immense _frigidarium_ is safe and
sound within the enclosure of the Cluny Museum--from the Bièvre, away
off on the southern outskirts. This aqueduct started at the point
where later was built the village of Arceuil--named from the mediæval,
or late, Latin _Arculi_--where was quarried the best stone that
builded old Paris; and curved with the valley of the Bièvre like a
huge railway viaduct, leaving that stream when it bent in its course
to the Seine near the Salpêtrière, and entering the town along the
easterly line of Rue Saint-Jacques, and so straight away to the baths.
This tower well remembers the new aqueduct, constructed massively on
the ruins of the Roman, between 1613 and 1633, from Rungis, still
farther south, to the Luxembourg Palace. Imperial and royal baths must
have pure water, while wells and rivers must perforce content the
townspeople. They had their aqueduct at last, however, laid, still
along the top of these others, during the Second Empire. It is worth
the little trip by rail to Arceuil to see the huge arches that climb
along the valley carrying these piled-up conduits.
Our old tower has seen the baby town creep, from its cradle on the
shore, up that southern slope to where on its summit it found the tomb
of its patron, Sainte Geneviève--one tower of her abbey still shows
gray above the garden-walls of Lycée Henri IV.--and thence, its
strength so grown as to burst its girdle of restraining wall, it
strode far afield. Roman and Christian settlements, with all their
greenery--palace, abbey, and school, each set within its spacious
gardens--gradually gave place to these serried shining roofs we see,
here and there pierced by church spires and punctuated by domes. And
on the northern bank, our tower has seen the rising tide of the
centuries swallow up the broad marshes along the shore and the wide
woodlands behind; bearing down Roman villa and temple, Christian
nunnery and monastery, washing away each successive breakwater of
wall, until it surged over the crest of the encircling hills, now
crowned by the imposing basilica of the Sacred Heart on Montmartre.
It may have been here in time to look down on the stately procession
escorting the little ten-year-old Henry IV., the new King of England,
from the Palace to the cathedral; wherein was celebrated the service
by which one English cardinal and two French bishops tried to
consecrate him King of France. It saw, when the ceremony was ended,
the turbulent mob of common French folk crowding about the boy-king
and his English escort as they returned, and ignominiously hustling
them into the Palace. Not many years later, on April 13, 1436, it
possibly saw the French soldiery march into Place de Grève, over the
bridge and through the streets behind, from their captured gate of
Saint-Jacques; and not many days thereafter, the English soldiery
hurrying along behind the northern wall from the Bastille to the
Louvre, and there taking boat for their sail to Rouen; the while the
Parisian populace, mad with joy on that wall, welcomed the incoming
friend and cursed the outgoing foe.
Our tower has watched, from its own excellent point of view, the three
successive fires in and about the Palace, in 1618, 1736, and 1776.
Between them, these fires carried away the constructions of Louis
XII., the vast Salle des Pas-Perdus, the ancient donjon, the spires
and turrets and steep roofs that swarmed about the Sainte-Chapelle,
whose slender height seems to spring more airily from earth to sky by
that clearance. Only that chapel, the Salle-des-Gardes, the corner
tower on the quay, the kitchens of Saint-Louis behind it, and the
round-capped towers of the Conciergerie, are left of the original
palace. The present outer casing of this Tour de l'Horloge is a
restoration of that existing in 1585, but the thirteenth-century
fabric remains, and the foundations are far earlier, in the view of
the late Viollet-le-Duc. Its clock dates from 1370, having been twice
restored, and its bell has sounded, as far as our tower, the passing
of many historic hours. It rang menacingly an hour later than that of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, which had been advanced by the
queen-mother's eagerness, on Saint Bartholomew's night. It was _en
carillon_ all of Friday, June 12, 1598, for the peace procured by
Henri IV. between Spain and Savoy; and the birth of his son was
saluted by its joyous chimes, at two o'clock of the afternoon of
Friday, September 28, 1601.
Nearly two years later--on Friday, June 20, 1603--our tower stared in
consternation, out over the end of the island, at the gallant Henry
treading jauntily and safely across the uncompleted arches of the
Pont-Neuf, from shore to shore. The new bridge was a wonder, and in
attempts to climb along its skeleton, many over-curious citizens had
tumbled into the river; "but not one of them a king," laughed their
king, after his successful stepping over. The bridge was built slowly,
and was at last ready for traffic on February 6, 1607, and has stood
so strong and stable ever since, that it has passed into a proverb as
the common comparison for a Frenchman's robust health. It is the only
bridge between the islands and either bank that has so stood, and this
tower has seen each of the others wrecked by fire or flood. The tall
wooden piles, on which the mediæval bridgeways were built, slowly
rotted, until they were carried away by the fierce current. And fire
found its frequent quarry in the tall houses that lined either side of
the roadway, shops on the lower floor, and tenants above.
Thus our tower doubtless heard, on Friday, October 25, 1499, the
wrenching and groaning of the huge wooden piles of Pont
Notre-Dame--its first pile driven down by temporarily sane Charles
VI.--as they bent and broke and tumbled into the Seine, with their
burden of roadway and of buildings; whereby so thick a cloud of dust
rose up from the water, that rescue of the inmates was almost
impossible. Among the few saved, on that calamitous holiday of
Saint-Crespin and Saint-Crespinien, was a baby found floating
down-stream in its cradle, unwet and unharmed. So, too, Pont aux
Meuniers and all its houses and mills fell in fragments into the
stream on December 22, 1596. It was a wooden bridge, connecting the
island end of Pont au Change diagonally with the shore of the
mainland. It is reported that the dwellers on the bridge were rich
men, many of them slayers and plunderers of the Huguenots on the
festival of Saint Bartholomew. So it was said that the weak hand of
city supervision, neglecting the bridge, was aided by the finger of
God, pushing it down!
The Petit-Pont dropped into the Seine no less than six times between
the years 1206 and 1393. The earliest Roman bridge, it had carried
more traffic than any later bridge, and had been ruined and
reconstructed time and again, until stone took the place of wood for
its arches and road-way and houses. But the wooden scaffoldings used
for the new construction were left below, and were the means of
sacrificing it to an old woman's superstition. On April 27, 1718, she
launched a _sébile_--a wooden bowl--carrying a bit of blessed bread
and a lighted taper, in the belief that this holy raft would stop
over, and point out, the spot where lay the body of her drowned son.
The taper failed in its sacred mission, and set fire to a barge loaded
with hay, and this drifted against the timbers under the arches, and
soon the entire bridge went up in flames. When again rebuilt, no
houses were allowed upon it. With the falling of all those bridges and
all that they held, the river-bed grew thick with every sort of
object, common and costly. Coins from many mints found their way
there, not only through fire and flood, but because the
money-changers, warily established on the bridges, dropped many an
illicit piece from their convenient windows into the river, rather
than let themselves be caught in passing counterfeits. This water
museum has been dragged from time to time, and the treasures have gone
to enrich various collections, notably that of M. Victorien Sardou.
With all helpless Paris, our tower watched the old Hôtel-Dieu--on the
island's southern bank, where now is the green open space between
Petit-Pont and Pont au Double--burning away for eleven days in 1772,
and caught glimpses of the rescued patients, carried across Place du
Parvis to hastily improvised wards in the nave of Notre-Dame.
Unscathed by fire, unmutilated by man, unwearied by watching,
"Dagobert's Tower" stands, penned in by the high old buildings that
shoulder it all around. Hidden behind them, it is unseen and
forgotten. The only glimpses to be got of its gray bulk are, one from
the neighboring tower of the cathedral, and another from the deck of a
river-boat as it glides under Pont d'Arcole; a glimpse to be caught
quickly, amid the quick-changing views of the ever-varied perspective
of the island's towers and buttresses, pinnacles and domes.
Far away from the island and its river, over the edge of the southern
slope, behind the distant, dreary, outer boulevards, we find another
ancient staircase. It is within the vast structure known as "_la
maison dîte de Saint Louis_," commonly called the "_Hôtel de la Reine
Blanche_." The modern boulevard, which gets its name from the
astronomer, philosopher, and politician, Arago, has made a clean sweep
through this historic quarter, but it has spared this mansion and the
legend, which makes it the suburban dwelling of Blanche of Castile.
Hereabout was all country then, and a favorite summer resort of the
wealthy citizens, whose modest cottages and showy villas clustered
along the banks of the Bièvre; a free and wilful stream in the early
years of the thirteenth century, often in revolt and sometimes
misleading the sedate Seine into escapades, to the disquiet of these
_faubourgs_. From its gardens, portly meadows smiled townward to
Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, crowded with its schools, and to the convent
gardens, snuggling close under the shelter of the southern wall of
Philippe-Auguste.
To-day, all this quarter is made malodorous by its many tanneries and
dye-works; they have enslaved the tiny Bièvre and stained it to a
dirty reddish brown; so that it crawls, slimy and sluggish and
ashamed, between their surly walls and beneath bedraggled bridges,
glad to sink into the Seine, under the Orleans railway station. Its
gardens and meadows are covered by square miles of stone, and the line
of the old wall is hidden behind and under modern streets. And this
so-called country home of Queen Blanche, become plain No. 17 Rue des
Gobelins, yet refuses, in its mediæval dignity, to regard itself as a
mere number in a street, and withdraws behind its wall, its shoulder
aslant, to express its royal unconcern for the straight lines of city
surveyors. These have not yet stolen all its old-time character from
the remaining section of the street, nor spoiled such of its old-time
façades as are left. This one at No. 19 demands our especial scrutiny,
by its significant portal and windows, and by the belief that it was
originally joined in its rear to No. 17, the two forming one immense
structure of the same style of architecture. When was its date, who
was its builder, what was its use, are undisclosed, so far, and we may
follow our own fancies, as we enter through the narrow gateway into
the front court of "Queen Blanche's house." Its main fabric on the
ground floor, with its low arched window, insists that it is
contemporary with the clever woman and capable queen, to whom legend,
wider than merely local, brings home this building. Yet its upper
windows, and the dormers of the wing, and the slope of the roof,
suggest a late fifteenth or an early sixteenth century origin; and the
cornice-moulding is so well worked out that it speaks plainly of a
much later date than the mediæval fortress-home. In a _tourelle_ at
either end is a grand spiral staircase, as in Dagobert's Tower, and,
like that, these turn on huge central oak trunks. Here, however, the
steps are less abrupt; the grooving of the hand-rail, while it
testifies to the stroke of the axe, is less rude; and daylight is
welcomed by wider windows. Each of the three floors, that lie between
the two staircase turrets, is made up of one vast hall, with no traces
of division walls. Whether or no a Gobelin once made usage of this
building, as has been claimed, it has now come into a tanner's
service, and his workmen tread its stairs and halls, giving a living
touch of our workaday world to these walls of dead feudalism.
[Illustration: The So-called Hôtel de la Reine Blanche.
(From a photograph of the Commission du Vieux Paris.)]
It was in 1200 that Blanche of Castile was brought to France, a girl
of twelve, for her marriage with little Louis, of the same ripe age.
His father, Philippe-Auguste, was a mighty builder, and Paris
flourished under him, her "second founder." In the intervals between
crusades against infidels and wars with Christians, he founded
colleges and gave other aid to the university on this bank; he pushed
on with his strong hand the building of Notre-Dame and of the old
Hôtel-Dieu on the island; he removed his residence from the ancient
Palace, there, to the Louvre on the northern bank, constructed by him
to that end--his huge foundation-walls, with some few capitals and
mouldings, may be seen deep down in the substructures of the present
Louvre--he shut in the unfenced cemetery of the Innocents from the
merry-makers who profaned it; he roofed and walled-in the open markets
in the fields hard by that burial-ground; and he paved the streets of
the _Cité_. To meet this last outlay, he was lavish with the money of
the citizens, notably of Gérard de Poissy, who was moved to donate
one-half of his entire fortune by the sight of the King, "sparing
neither pains nor expense in beautifying the town." Sparing himself no
pains for the bettering of his beloved capital, Philippe-Auguste
spared no expense to its worthy burghers, and in their purses he found
the funds for his great wall. This he planned and began, toward the
close of the twelfth century, when at home for awhile from the
warfaring, during which he had captured the "saucy Château-Gaillard"
of his former fellow-crusader, Richard the Lion-Hearted.
Around the early Lutetia on the island, with the river for its moat,
there had been a Gallo-Roman wall, well known to us all; and there was
a later wall, concerning which none of us know much. We may learn no
more than that it was a work of Louis VI., "_le Gros_," early in the
twelfth century, and that it enclosed the city's small suburbs on
both banks of the mainland. Where this wall abutted on the two
bridge-heads that gave access to the island, Louis VI. converted the
wooden towers--already placed there for the protection of these
approaches by Charles II., "_le Chauve_," in the ninth century--into
great gateways and small citadels, all of stone. They were massive,
grim, sinister structures, and when their service as fortresses was
finished, they were used for prisons; both equally infamous in cruelty
and horror. The Petit Châtelet was a donjon tower, and guarded the
southern approach to the island by way of the ancient main-road of the
Gaul and the Roman, known later as the Voie du Midi, and later again
as the Route d'Orléans, and now as Rue Saint-Jacques. This _châtelet_
stood at the head of Petit-Pont, on the ground where Quais
Saint-Michel and Montebello meet now, and was not demolished until
late in the eighteenth century. The Grand Châtelet ended the northern
wall where it met Pont au Change, and its gloomy walls, and conical
towers flanking a frowning portal, were pick-axed away only in 1802.
It had held no prisoners since Necker induced Louis XVI. to institute,
in La Force and other jails, what were grotesquely entitled "model
prisons." On the building that faces the northern side of Place du
Châtelet you will find an elaborate tablet holding the plan of the
dreary fortress and the appalling prison. When we stroll about the
open space that its destruction has left, and that bears the bad old
name, we need not lament its loss.
Then came the wall of Philippe-Auguste, grandly planned to enclose
the closely knit island _Cité_ and its straggling suburbs on either
bank, with all their gardens, vineyards, and fields far out; and
solidly constructed, with nearly thirty feet of squared-stone height,
and nearly ten feet of cemented rubble between the strong side faces.
Its heavy parapet was battlemented, numerous round towers bulged from
its outer side, the frequent gates had stern flanking towers, and the
four ends on both river-banks were guarded by enormous towers, really
small fortresses. The westernmost tower on this southern shore--with
which section of the wall, built slowly from 1208 to 1220, we are now
concerned--was the Tour de Nesle, and its site is shown by a tablet on
the quay-front of the eastern wing of the Institute. Alongside was the
important Porte de Nesle. Thence the wall went southwesterly, behind
the line made by the present Rues Mazarine and Monsieur-le-Prince;
then, by its great curve just north of Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques,
it safeguarded the tomb and the abbey of Sainte Geneviève, and so bent
sharply around toward the northeast, within the line of present Rues
Thouin, du Cardinal-Lemoine, and des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, to the
easternmost tower on Quai de la Tournelle, and its river-gate, Porte
Saint-Bernard. That gate, standing until the end of the eighteenth
century, had been titillated into a triumphal arch for Louis XIV., in
whose time this quay was a swell promenade and drive. It still retains
one of its grand mansions, the Hôtel Clermont-Tonnerre, at No. 27 on
the quay, with a well-preserved portal.
Of the stately sweep of this wall we may get suggestive glimpses by
the various tablets, that show the sites of the tennis courts made
later on its outer side, and that mark the places of the gates; such
as the tablet at No. 44 Rue Dauphine. The street and gate of that name
date from 1607, when Henri IV. constructed them as the southern outlet
from his Pont-Neuf, and named them in honor of the first _dauphin_
born to France since Catherine de' Medici's puny sons. This Porte
Dauphine took the place, and very nearly the site, of the original
Porte de Buci, which stood over the western end of our Rue
Saint-André-des-Arts, and was done away with in the cutting of Rue
Dauphine. There was a gate, cut a few years after the completion of
the wall, opening into the present triangular space made by the
meeting of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine and Boulevard Saint-Germain, and
this gate bore this latter name. Of the original gates, that next
beyond Porte de Buci was Porte Saint-Michel, a small postern that
stood almost in the centre of the meeting-place of Boulevard
Saint-Michel and Rues Monsieur-le-Prince and Soufflot. Next came the
important Porte Saint-Jacques, mounting guard over the street now of
that name, nearly where it crosses the southern side of new Rue
Soufflot, named in honor of the architect of the Panthéon. On that
southwest corner is a tablet with a plan of the gate. It was a gate
well watched by friends within, and foes without, coming up by this
easy road. Dunois gained it, more by seduction than force, and entered
with his French troops, driving the English before him, on the
morning of Friday, April 13, 1436; and Henry of Navarre failed to gain
it by force from the League, on the night of September 10, 1590. Stand
in front of Nos. 174 and 176 of widened Rue Saint-Jacques, and you are
on the spot where he tried to scale that gate, again and again.
More than suggestions of the wall itself may be got by actual sight of
sections that survive, despite the assertions of authorities that no
stone is left. At the end of Impasse de Nevers, within a locked gate,
you may see a presumable bit. In the court that lies behind Nos. 27
and 29 Rue Guénégaud is a stable, and deep in the shadow of that
stable lurks a round tower of Philippe-Auguste, massive and unmarred.
At No. 4 Cour du Commerce a locksmith has his shop, and he hangs his
keys and iron scraps on nails driven with difficulty between the
tightly fitted blocks of another round tower. Turn the corner into
Cour de Rohan--a corruption of Rouen, whose archbishop had his
town-house here--and you shall find a narrow iron stairway, that
mounts the end of the sliced-off wall, and that carries you to a tiny
garden, wherein small schoolgirls play on the very top of that wall.
Down at the end of Cour de Rohan is an ancient well, dating from the
day when this court lay within the grounds of the Hôtel de Navarre,
the property of Louis of Orleans before he became Louis XII. In style
it was closely akin to the Hôtel de Cluny, and it is a sorrow that it
is lost to us. Its entrance was at the present Nos. 49 and 51 of Rue
Saint-André-des-Arts, and the very ancient walls in the rear court of
the latter house may have belonged to the Hôtel de Navarre. When Louis
sold this property, one portion was bought by Dr. Coictier, who had
amassed wealth as the physician of Louis XI., and this well was long
known by his name. It has lost its metal-work, which was as fine as
that of the well once owned by Tristan l'Hermite, Coictier's crony,
and now placed in the court of the Cluny Museum.
Continuing along the course of the great wall, we find a longer
section, whereon houses have been built, and another garden. At the
end of the hallway of No. 47 Rue Descartes is a narrow stairway, by
which we mount to the row of cottages on top of the wall, and beyond
them is a small domain containing trees and bushes and flower-beds,
and all alive with fowls. Still farther, in a vacant lot in Rue
Clovis, which has cut deep through the hill, a broken end of the wall
hangs high above us on the crest, showing both solid faces and the
rubble between. Its outer face forms the rear of the court at No. 62
Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Still another section can be seen in the
inner court of No. 9 Rue d'Arras, its great square stones serving as
foundation for high houses. And this is the last we shall see of this
southern half of the wall of Philippe-Auguste.
When that monarch lay dying at Mantes, he found comfort in the thought
that he was leaving his Paris safe in the competent hands of his
daughter-in-law--whose beauty, sense, and spirit had won him
early--rather than in the gentle hold of his son, misnamed "_le_
_Lion_." He lived, as Louis VIII., only three years, and "_la reine
blanche_" (the widowed queens of France wore white for mourning, until
Anne of Brittany put on black for her first husband, Charles VIII.)
became the sole protector of her twelve-year-old son, on whom she so
doted as to be jealous of the wife she had herself found for him. She
ruled him and his hitherto unruly nobles, and cemented his kingdom,
fractured by local jealousies. He is known to history as Saint Louis,
fit to sit alongside Marcus Aurelius, in the equal conscience they put
into their kingly duties. Voltaire himself ceases to sneer in the
presence of this monarch's unselfish devotion to his people, and gives
him praise as unstinted as any on record.
His Paris, the Paris of his mother and his grandfather, was made up of
_la Cité_ on the island, under the jurisdiction of the bishop; the
northern suburb, _outre-Grand-Pont_ or _la Ville_, governed by the
_Prévôt des Marchands_; the southern suburb, _outre-Petit-Pont_ or
_l'Université_, appertaining to the "_Recteur_"; all ruled by the
_Prévôt_ of Paris, appointed by and accountable to the King alone.
Hugo's "little old lady between her two promising daughters" holds
good to-day, when the daughters are strapping wenches, and have not
yet got their growth. In all three sections, the priest and the
soldier--twin foes of light and life in all times and in all
lands--had their own way. They cumbered the ground with their
fortresses and their monasteries, all bestowed within spacious
enclosures; so walling-in for their favored dwellers, and walling-out
from the common herd outside, the air and sun, green sights, and
pleasant scents. There were no open spaces for the people of mediæval
days. Indeed, there were no "people," in our meaning of that word. The
stage direction, "Enter Populace," expresses their state. There were
peasants in the fields, toilers in the towns, vassals, all of
them--villains, legally--allowed to live by the soldier, that they
might pay for his fighting, and serve as food for his steel; sheep let
graze by the priest, to be sheared for the Church and to be burned at
the stake. This populace looked on at these burnings, at the cutting
out of tongues and slicing off of ears and hacking away of hands by
their lords, in dumb terror and docile submission. More than death or
mutilation, did they dread the ban of the Church and the lash of its
menacing bell. Their only diversion was made by royal processions, by
church festivals, by public executions. So went on the dreary round of
centuries, in a dull colorless terror, until it was time for the
coming of the short, sharp Terror dyed red. Then the White Terror,
that came with the Restoration, benumbed the land for awhile, and the
tricolored effrontery of the Second Empire held it in grip. Against
all royalist and imperial reaction, the lesser revolutions of the
nineteenth century have kept alive the essential spirit of the great
Revolution of 1789, inherited by them, and handed down to the present
Republic, that the assured ultimate issue may be fought out under its
Tricolor. France, the splendid creature, once more almost throttled by
priest and soldier, has saved herself by the courage of a national
conscience, such as has not been matched by any land in any crisis.
They who by the grace of God and the stupidity of man owned and
ordered these human cattle of the darkest ages, had their homes within
this new, strong town-wall; in fat monasteries, secluded behind garden
and vineyard; in grim citadels, whose central keep and lesser towers
and staircase turrets, stables and outer structures, were grouped
about a great court, that swarmed with men-at-arms, grooms, and
hangers-on. And so, endless walls scowled on the wayfarer through the
town's lanes, narrow, winding, unpaved, filthy. On a hot summer day,
Philippe-Auguste stood at his open window in the old Palace, and the
odor of mud came offensively to the royal nostrils; soon the main City
streets were paved. When a king's son happened to be unhorsed by a
peripatetic pig nosing for garbage, a royal edict forbade the presence
of swine in the streets; the only exceptions being the precious dozen
of the abbey of Petit-Saint-Antoine. There were no side-paths, and
they who went afoot were pushed to the wall and splashed with mud, by
the mules and palfreys of those who could ride. They rode, the man in
front, his lady behind, _en croupe_. Open trenches, in the middle of
the roadway, served for drainage, naked and shameless; the graveyards
were unfenced amid huddled hovels; and the constant disease and
frequent epidemics that came from all this foulness were fathered on a
convenient Providence! This solution of the illiterate and imbecile
could not be accepted by the shining lights of science, who showed
that the plague of the middle of the sixteenth century came from
maleficent comets, their tails toward the Orient, or from malign
conjunctions of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. Ambroise Paré, the most
enlightened man of his day, had the courage to suggest that there were
human and natural causes at work, in addition to the divine will. And
the common-sense Faculty of Medicine, toward the close of the
sixteenth century, indicted the drains and cesspools as the principal
origin of all maladies then prevalent.
The only street-lighting was that given fitfully by the forlorn
lanterns of the patrol, or by the torches of varlets escorting their
masters, on foot or on horse. Now and then, a hole was burned in the
mediæval night by a cresset on a church tower or porch, or shot out
from a _cabaret's_ fire through an opened door. When tallow candles
got cheaper, they were put into horn lanterns, and swung, at wide
intervals, high above the traffic. There, wind or rain put an untimely
end to their infrequent flicker, or a "thief in the candle" guttered
and killed it, or a thief in the street stoned it dead, for the snug
plying of his trade. The town, none too safe in daylight, was not at
all safe by night, and the darkness was long and dreary, and every
honest man and woman went to bed early after the sunset angelus.
Country roads were risky, too, and those who were unable to travel in
force, or in the train of a noble, travelled not at all; so that the
common citizen passed his entire existence within the confines of his
compact parish. Nor could he see much of his Paris or of his Seine;
he looked along the streets on stone walls on either side, and along
the quays at timbered buildings on the banks. These rose sheer from
the river-brink, and from both sides of every bridge, barring all
outlook from the roadway between; their gables gave on the river, and
from their windows could be seen only a little square of water,
enclosed between the buildings on both banks and on the neighboring
bridge. So that the wistful burgher could get glimpses of his river
only from the beach by the Hôtel de Ville, or from the occasional
ports crowded with boats discharging cargo.
These cargoes were sold in shops on ground floors, and the tenants
were thick on the upper floors, of dwellings mostly made of timber and
plaster, their high-fronted gables looking on the street. This was the
custom in all towns in the Middle Ages, and it is a striking change
that has, in our day, turned all buildings so that their former side
has come to the front. The old Paris streets, in which shops and
houses shouldered together compactly, already dark and narrow enough,
were further narrowed and darkened by projecting upper floors, and by
encroaching shop-signs, swinging, in all shapes and sizes, from over
the doorways. Each shop sold its specialty, and the wares of all of
them slopped over on the roadway. Their owners bawled the merits and
prices of these wares in a way to shock a certain irritable Guillaume
de Villeneuve, who complains in querulous verse, "They do not cease to
bray from morning until night." With all its growth in coming years,
the city's squalor grew apace with its splendor, and when Voltaire's
Candide came in, by way of Porte Saint-Marcel here on the southern
side, in the time of Louis XV., he imagined himself in the dirtiest
and ugliest of Westphalian villages. For all its filth and all its
discomfort, this mediæval Paris--portrayed, as it appeared three
hundred years later, in the painful detail and inaccurate erudition of
Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris"--was a picturesque town, its buildings
giving those varied and unexpected groupings that make an
architectural picture; their roofs were tiled in many colors, their
sky-lines were wanton in their irregularity, and were punctuated by
pointed turrets and by cone-shaped tower-tops; and over beyond the
tall town walls, broken by battlements and sentry-boxes, whirled a
grotesque coronet of windmill sails.
Turning from this attractive "_Maison de la Reine Blanche_," from this
quarter where her son Louis learned to ride and to tilt, and glancing
behind at the famous tapestry works, the Gobelins, of whose founder
and director we shall have a word to say later, we follow the avenue
of that name to Rue du Fer-à-Moulin. This little street, named for a
sign that swung there in the twelfth century, is most commonplace
until it opens out into a small, shabby square, that holds a few
discouraged trees, and is faced by a stolid building whose wide,
low-browed archway gives access to the court of the _Boulangerie
générale des Hôpitaux et Hospices_. This was the courtyard of the
villa of Scipio Sardini, whose name alone is kept alive by this Place
Scipion--all that is left of his gardens and vineyards. Yet his was a
notable name, in the days when this wily Tuscan was "_écuyer du Roi
Henri II._," and in those roaring days of swift fortunes for sharp
Italian financiers, under the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici. This
man amassed scandalous riches, and built his villa, mentioned by
Sauval as one of the richest of that time, here amid the country
mansions that dotted this southern declivity. Of this villa only one
wing still stands, and it is with unlooked-for delight that we find
this admirable specimen of sixteenth-century architecture, of a style
distinct from that of any other specimen in Paris. The façade, that is
left in the court of the _Boulangerie_, is made up of an arcade of six
semi-circular arches on heavy stone pillars, a story above of
plum-colored brick cut into panels by gray stone, its square-headed
windows encased with the same squared stone, and an attic holding two
dormers with pointed hoods. Set in the broad band between the two
lower floors, were six medallions, one over the centre of each arch;
of these six, only four remain. These contain the heads of warriors
and of women, boldly or delicately carved, and wonderfully preserved;
yet time has eaten away the terra-cotta, wind and wet have dulled the
enamel that brightened them. The buildings about this court and behind
this unique façade are commonplace and need not detain us. It was in
1614 that the General Hospital took the villa and enlarged it; in
1636, to escape the plague, the prisoners of the Conciergerie were
installed here; and it has served as the bakery for the civil
hospitals of Paris for many years.
We go our way toward our third staircase, not by the stupidly straight
line of Rue Monge, but by vagrant curves that bring us to the prison
of Sainte-Pélagie, soon to disappear, and to the Roman amphitheatre
just below, happily rescued forever. Here, in Rue Cardinal-Lemoine, we
slip under the stupid frontage of No. 49 to the court within, where we
are faced by the _hôtel_ of Charles Lebrun. We mount the stone steps
that lead up to a wide hall, and so go through to a farther court, now
unfortunately roofed over. This court was his garden, and this is the
stately garden-front that was the true façade, rather than that toward
the street; for this noble mansion--the work of the architect Germain
Boffrand, pupil and friend of Hardouin Mansart--was built after the
fashion of that time, which shut out, by high walls, all that was
within from sight of the man in the street, and kept the best for
those who had entry to the stiff, formal gardens of that day.
Pupil of Poussin, _protégé_ of Fouquet, friend of Colbert, Lebrun was
the favorite court painter and decorator, and the most characteristic
exponent of the art of his day; his sumptuous style suiting equally
François I.'s Fontainebleau, and Louis XIV.'s Versailles. He aided
Colbert in the founding of the Royal Academy of Painting and
Sculpture, and in the purchase by the State of the Gobelins. This
factory took its name from the famous dyer who came from Rheims, and
tinted the clear Bièvre with his splendid scarlet, says Rabelais; so
that it took the name of _la Rivière des Gobelins_, of which Ronsard
sings. The statesman and the artist in concert built up the great
factory of tapestries and of furniture, such as were suitable for
royal use. Made Director of the Gobelins and Chancellor of the
Academy, and making himself the approved painter of the time to his
fellow-painters and to the buying public, Lebrun's fortune grew to the
possession of this costly estate, which extended far away beyond
modern Rue Monge. The death of Colbert--whose superb tomb in
Saint-Eustache is the work of his surviving friend--left him to the
hatred of Louvois, who pushed Mignard, Molière's friend, into
preferment. And Lebrun, genuine and honest artist, died of sheer
despondency, in his official apartment on the first floor of the
factory, facing the chapel. His rooms have been cut up and given over
to various usages, and no trace can be found in the Gobelins of its
first director.
His body rests in his parish church, a few steps farther on, through
ancient Rue Saint-Victor, now curtailed and mutilated. Along its line,
before we come to the square tower of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, we
skirt the dirty yellow and drab wall of the famous seminary alongside
the church, and bearing its name. Its entrance is at No. 30 Rue de
Pontoise, and among the many famous pupils who have gone in and out
since Calvin was a student here, we may mention only Ernest Renan. In
1838, the director of the school being the accomplished Dupanloup,
this boy of fifteen came fresh from Brittany to his studies here. We
shall follow him to his later and larger schools, in other pages.
When Jean "le Moine," the son of a Picardy peasant, came to sit in a
cardinal's chair, and was sent to Paris as legate by Pope Boniface
VIII., he established a great college in the year 1303. For it he
bought the chapel, the dwellings, and the cemetery of the Augustins
that were all in fields of thistles. So came the name "_du
Chardonnet_" to the church now built on the ruins of Lemoine's chapel,
in the later years of the seventeenth century. Lebrun decorated one of
its chapels for the burial of his mother, and his own tomb is there
near hers. Some of his work still shows on the ceiling; and in an
adjacent chapel, in odd proximity, once hung a canvas from the brush
of Mignard. In striking contrast, the busts of the two men face each
other in the Louvre; that of Mignard is alert with intelligence in
face and poise of head, while Lebrun's suggests a somewhat slow-witted
earnestness.
From this short stay in the realm of Louis the Unreal, we go to the
island that bears the name of the Louis who was called a saint, but
who was a very real man. All the streets along here that take us to
the river, as far easterly as the one that bears the name of Cardinal
Lemoine, were cut through the grounds of his college and of the
Bernadins, an ancient foundation alongside. Of the buildings of this
vast monastery, the refectory remains, behind the wall on the western
side of Rue de Poissy. This characteristic specimen of thirteenth-century
architecture, but little spoiled by modern additions, is used for the
_caserne_ of the Sapeurs-Pompiers. Here, at the foot of the street on
the river-bank on our right, is the great space where Boulevard
Saint-Germain comes down to the quay, and where the old wall came down
to its great tower on the shore. On our left, as we cross broad Pont
de la Tournelle, we get an impressive view of Notre-Dame. And now we
find ourselves in a provincial town, seemingly far removed from our
Paris in miles and in years, by its isolation and tranquillity and
old-world atmosphere. Its long, lazy main street is named after the
royal saint, and its quays keep the titles of royal princes, Bourbon,
Orléans, Anjou. A great royal minister, Maximilien de Béthune, gives
his name to another quay, and his great master gives his to the new
boulevard crossing it. Henry often crossed his faithful Sully, but
they were at one in the orders issued, in the year before the King's
murder, for the sweeping away of the woodyards, that made this island
the storehouse of the town's timber, and for the construction of these
streets and buildings. The works planned by Henri IV. were carried out
by Marie de' Medici and Louis XIII. A concession was given for the
laying out of streets and for the buildings on this island, and for
the construction of a new stone bridge to the Marais, to the three
associates, Marie, Le Regrettier, Poultier, who gave their names to
the bridge and to two of the streets. There was already a small chapel
in the centre, the scene of the first preaching of the First Crusade,
and this chapel has been enlarged to the present old-time parish
church. Just within its entrance is the _bénitier_, filled with water
from the mouth of a marble cherub who wears a pretty marble "bang."
It came from the Carmelites of Chaillot, in souvenir of "Sister
Louise."
The sites on the island's banks, newly opened in the early years of
Louis XIII.'s reign, were in demand at once for the mansions of the
wealthy, and a precocious city started up. Corneille's _Menteur_, new
to Paris and the island, rhapsodizes in one of his captivating
flights, this time without lying:
"_J'y croyais ce matin voir une île enchantée,
Je la laissai déserte et la trouve habitée;
Quelque Amphion nouveau, sans l'aide des maçons,
En superbes palais à changé ses buissons._"
We shall come hither again, in company with Voltaire to one of these
palaces, with Balzac to another. In these high old houses in these old
streets dwelt old families, served by old retainers devoted to their
mistresses, who hugged their firesides like contented tabby-cats. They
had no welcome for intruders into their "Ville-Saint-Louis" from the
swell quarters on the other side of the river, and it used to be said
that "_l'habitant du Marais est étranger dans l'Île_."
[Illustration: Balcony of Hôtel de Lauzan-Pimodan on Île de
Saint-Louis.]
Pont Louis-Philippe--an absurdly modern issue from this ancient
quarter--carries us to the quay of the Hôtel de Ville, and we may turn
to look in at Saint-Gervais, its precious window as brilliant as on
the day it was finished by Jean Cousin. Passing in front of the
imperious statue of Étienne Marcel, staring at the river that was his
grave, we cross Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, once Place de Grève, when
it had in the centre its stone cross reached by high steps, and its
busy gallows close at hand. We forget its horrid memories in the sight
of the new Hôtel de Ville, of no memories, good or bad, to dash our
delight in this most nearly perfect of modern structures; perfect in
design, execution, and material, a consummate scheme carried out to
the last exquisite detail by architects, sculptors, and decorators,
all masters of their crafts.
Our direct road takes us through the Halles, their huge iron and glass
structures the lineal descendants of those heavy stone Halles, started
in the twelfth century here in the fields, when the small market on
the island no longer sufficed. Their square, dumpy pillars, and those
on which the houses all about were once supported, survive only in the
few left from the seventeenth-century rebuilding, now on the north
side of Rue de la Ferronerie. Standing in that arcade, we look out on
the spot where Ravaillac waited for the coming of Henri IV. The
wretched fanatic, worked on by whom we shall never know, had found
Paris crowded for the Queen's coronation, and had hunted up a room in
the "Three Pigeons," an inn of Rue Saint-Honoré, opposite the Church
of Saint-Roch. Here or in another tavern, while prowling, he stole
the knife. The narrow street was widened a little by Richelieu, and
few of its ancient buildings are left. Returning through this arcade,
once the entrance to the Cemetery of the Innocents, to Rue des
Innocents just behind, you will find many of the old _charniers_
absolutely unchanged. They form the low-ceilinged ground floor of
nearly all these buildings between Rue Saint-Denis and Rue de la
Lingerie. Perhaps the most characteristic specimen is that one used
for a _remise de voitures à bras_, a phrase of the finest French for a
push-cart shed! And under No. 15 of this street of the Innocents, you
may explore two of the cemetery vaults in perfect preservation. They
are come to less lugubrious usage now, and serve as a club-room for
the teamsters who bring supplies to the markets over-night, and for
the market attendants who wait for them. Their wagons unloaded, here
they pass the night until daylight shall bring customers, drinking and
singing after their harmless fashion, happily ignorant or careless of
the once grisly service of these caves. The attendants in the
_cabaret_ on the entrance floor, tired as they are by day, will
courteously show the cellars, one beneath the other. One must stoop to
pass under the heavily vaulted low arches, and the small chambers are
overcrowded with a cottage piano and with rough benches and tables;
these latter cut, beyond even the unhallowed industry of schoolboys,
with initials and names of the frequenters of the club, who have
scarred the walls in the same vigorous style. The demure _dame du
comptoir_ above assures you that you will be welcomed between
midnight and dawn, but bids you bring no prejudices along, for the
guests are not apt, in their song and chatter, to "_chercher la
délicatesse_"!
The Church of the Innocents, built by Louis "_le Gros_" early in the
twelfth century, had on its corner at Rues Saint-Denis and aux
Fers--this latter now widened into Rue Berger--a most ancient
fountain, dating from 1273. This fountain was built anew in 1550, from
a design of the Abbé de Clagny, not of Pierre Lescot as is claimed,
and was decorated by Jean Goujon. Just before the Revolution
(1785-88), when church and charnel-houses and cemetery were swept
away, this fountain was removed to the centre of the markets--the
centre, too, of the old cemetery--and has been placed, since then, in
the middle of this dainty little square which greets us as we emerge
from our _cabaret_. To the three arches it owned, when backed by the
church corner, a fourth has been added to make a square, and the
original Naiads of Goujon have been increased in number. Their fine
flowing lines lift up and lend distinction to this best bit of
Renaissance remaining in Paris. And here we are struck by the
ingenuity shown by making the water in motion a signal feature of the
decoration--another instance of this engaging characteristic of French
fountains.
A few steps farther north take us to Rue Étienne Marcel, cutting its
ruthless course through all that should be sacred, in a fashion that
would gladden the sturdy provost. For all its destructive instincts,
it yet has spared to us this memorable bit of petrified history, the
tower of "_Jean-sans-Peur_." At No. 20, on the northern side of this
broad and noisy street, amid modern structures, its base below the
level of the pavement, stands the last remaining fragment of the Hôtel
de Bourgogne; which, under its earlier name in older annals as the
Hôtel d'Artois, carries us back again to the thirteenth century, for
this was the palace-fortress built by the younger brother of Saint
Louis, Robert, Count of Artois. He it was who fell, in his "senseless
ardor," on the disastrous field of Massouah, in 1250; when the pious
King and his devoted captains were made captive by the Sultan of
Egypt, and released with heavy fines, so ending that Sixth Crusade.
The Hôtel d'Artois was a princely domain, reaching southward from the
wall of Philippe-Auguste to Rue Mauconseil, a road much longer then,
and extending from present Rue Saint-Denis to Rue Montorgueil, the two
streets that bounded the property east and west. Some of its
structures backed against the wall, some of them rested upon its
broken top. For the grounds and gardens enclosed within this northern
_enceinte_--completed between 1190 and 1208--stretched to its base,
leaving no room for a road on its inner side. Because of this plan,
and because this wall crumbled gradually, its broken sections being
surrounded and surmounted by crowding houses, no broad boulevards were
laid out over its line--as was done with its immediate successor, the
wall of Charles V.--and it is not easy to trace it through modern
streets and under modern structures. The only fragment left is the
tower in the court of the Mont-de-Piété, entered from Rue des
Francs-Bourgeois, and it is of build less solid than those we have
seen on the southern bank. In the pavement of the first court is
traced the line of the wall up to this tower. With this exception, we
can indicate only the sites of the towers and the course of the wall.
The huge Tour Barbeau was at the easternmost river end, on Quai des
Célestins, nearly at the foot of our Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. It
commanded Port Saint-Paul, chief landing-place of river boatmen, and
guarded the Pôterne des Barrés. That name was also given to the small
street--now Rue de l'Ave Maria--that led from this postern-gate. They
owe that name indirectly to Saint Louis. Returning from the Holy Land,
he had brought six monks from Mount Carmel, and housed them on the
quay, called now after their successors, the Célestins. The black
robes, striped white, of these six monks, made them known popularly as
"_les Barrés_." Our wall ran straight away from this waterside gate,
parallel with and a little to the west of present Rue des Jardins,
then a country road on its outer edge, to Porte Baudoyer, afterward
Porte Saint-Antoine, standing across the space where meet Rues
Saint-Antoine and de Rivoli. This was the strongest for defence of all
the gates, holding the entrance to the town, by way of the Roman and
later the Royal road from the eastern provinces. From this point the
wall took a great curve beyond the bounds of the built-up portions of
the town. The Pôterne Barbette, its next gate, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple,
just south of its crossing by Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, lost its old
name in this name taken from the Hôtel Barbette, built a century
later, outside the wall here. Next came the gate in Rue du Temple,
nearly half way between our Rues de Braque and Rambuteau. Through this
gate passed the Knights Templar to and from their great fortified
domain beyond. The Pôterne Beaubourg, in the street of that name, was
a minor gateway, having no especial history beyond that contained in
the derivation of its name, "_beaubourg_," from a particularly rich
settlement, just hereabout. Next we come to two most important gates,
Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, across those two streets, that guarded
the approaches by the great roads from Senlis and Soissons, and the
heart of the land, old Île de France, and from all the northern
provinces. Between the Saint-Denis gate and that at Rue Montorgueil,
lay the property of the Comte d'Artois, and he cut, for his royal
convenience, a postern in the wall that formed his northern boundary.
From this point our wall went in another wide curve to the river-bank,
within the lines of old Rues Plâtrière and Grenelle, the two now
widened into modern Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. The country road that
is now Rue Montmartre was guarded by a gate, opened a few years after
the completion of the wall, and its site shown by a tablet in the wall
of No. 30 of that street. A small gate was cut at the meeting of
present Rues Coquillière and Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. Nearly opposite
the end of this latter street, where Rue Saint-Honoré passes in front
of the Oratoire, was the last public gate on the mainland. Thence the
course was straight away to the river shore, as you may see by the
diagram set in lighter stone in the pavement of the court of the
Louvre. These stones mark also the huge round of the donjon of the old
Louvre, on whose eastern or town side the wall passed to the
river-side Tour-qui-fait-le-Coin. This tower was of the shape and size
of the opposite Tour de Nesle, which we have already seen at the point
where the southern wall came down to the shore; and between the two
towers, a great chain was slung across the Seine to prevent approach
by river pirates. Pont des Arts is almost directly over the dip of
that chain. So, too, the river was protected at the eastern ends of
the wall; the Barbeau tower was linked to the solitary tower on Île
Notre-Dame, and that again across the other arm of the Seine, to the
immense tower on Quai de la Tournelle. This island Tour Loriaux rose
from the banks of a natural moat made by the river's narrow channel
between Île Notre-Dame and Île aux Vaches, and this bank was afterward
further protected by a slight curtain of wall across the island, with
a tower at either end. Four centuries later, when this island wall and
its towers had long since crumbled away, that moat was filled up--Rue
Poulletier, the modernized Poultier, lies over its course--and the two
small islands became large Île Saint-Louis.
And now, we have seen _la Cité_, _la Ville_, _l'Université_, all
girdled about by Philippe-Auguste's great wall. The City could spread
no farther than its river-banks; the University was content to abide
within its bounds, even as late as the wars of the League; the Town
began speedily to outgrow its limits, and within two centuries it had
so developed that the capacious range of a new wall, that of Charles
V., was needed to enclose its bustling quarters. That story shall come
in a later chapter.
One hundred years after the death of Robert of Artois, his estate
passed, by marriage, to the first house of Burgundy, whose name it
took, and when that house became extinct, in the days of Jean "_le
Bon_," second Valois King of France, it came, along with the broad
acres and opulent towns of that duchy, into his hands, by way of some
distant kinship. This generous and not over-shrewd monarch did not
care to retain these much-needed revenues, and gave them, with the
resuscitated title of Burgundy, to his younger son, "recalling again
to memory the excellent and praiseworthy services of our right dearly
beloved son Philip, the fourth of our sons, who freely exposed himself
to death with us, and, all wounded as he was, remained unwavering and
fearless at the battle of Poictiers." From that field Philip carried
away his future title, "_le Hardi_." By this act of grateful
recognition, rare in kings, were laid the foundations of a house that
was to grow as great as the throne itself, to perplex France within,
and to bring trouble from without, throughout long calamitous years.
This first Duke Philip seems to have had the hardihood to do right in
those wrong-doing days, for he remained a sufficiently loyal subject
of his brother Charles V., and later a faithful guardian, as one of
the "_Sires de la Fleur-de-Lis_," of his nephew, the eleven-year-old
Charles VI. He married Margaret, heiress of the Count of Flanders, and
widow of Philippe de Rouvre, last of the old line of Burgundy, and she
brought, to this new house of Burgundy, the fat, flat meadows and the
turbulent towns of the Lowlands, and also the Hôtel de Flandres in the
capital, where now stands the General Post-office in Rue
Jean-Jacques-Rousseau.
Duke Philip, dying in 1404, bequeathed to his eldest son, John,
nick-named "_Jean-sans-Peur_," not only a goodly share of his immense
possessions, but also the pickings of a "very pretty quarrel" with
Louis de Valois, Duc d'Orléans. This quarrel was tenderly nursed by
John, who, as the head of a powerful independent house, and the leader
of a redoubtable faction, felt himself to be more important than the
royal younger brother. Ambitious and unscrupulous, calculating and
impetuous, he created the rôle on his stage, played with transient
success by Philippe-Égalité, four hundred years later. He rode at the
head of a brilliant train and posed for the applause of the populace.
He walked arm in arm with the public executioner, Capeluche, and when
done with him, handed him over to the gallows. Finding himself grown
so great, he schemed for sole control of the State. The one man in his
way was Louis of Orleans, the mad king's only brother, the lover of
the queen, and her accomplice in plundering and wasting the country's
revenues. He was handsome and elegant, open in speech and open of
hand, bewitching all men and women whom he cared to win. "_Qui veult,
peut_," was his braggart device, loud on the walls of the rooms of
Viollet-le-Duc's reconstructed Pierrefonds, whose original was built
by Louis. In its court you may see the man himself in Frémiet's superb
bronze, erect and alert on his horse. The horse's hoofs trample the
flowers, as his rider trod down all sweet decencies in his stride
through life. He was an insolent profligate, quick to tell when he had
kissed. In his long gallery of portraits of the women who, his swagger
suggested, had yielded to his allurements, he hung, with unseemly
taste, those of his lovely Italian wife, Valentine Visconti, and of
the Duchess of Burgundy, his cousin's wife; both of them honest women.
For this boast, John hated him; he hated him, as did his other
unlettered compeers, for his learning and eloquence and patronage of
poetry and the arts; he hated him as did the common people, who prayed
"Jesus Christ in Heaven, send Thou someone to deliver us from
Orleans."
[Illustration: "Jean-sans-Peur," Duc de Bourgogne.
(From a painting by an unknown artist, at Chantilly.)]
At last "_Jean-sans-Peur_" mustered his courage and his assassins to
deliver himself and France. Isabelle of Bavaria had left her crazed
husband in desolate Hôtel Saint-Paul, and carried her unclean court to
Hôtel Barbette--we shall see more of these residences in another
chapter--where she sat at supper, with her husband's brother, on the
night of November 23, 1407. It was eight in the evening, dark for the
short days of that "black winter," the bitterest known in France for
centuries. An urgent messenger, shown in to Orleans at table, begged
him to hasten to the King at Saint-Paul. The duke sauntered out,
humming an air, mounted his mule and started on his way, still
musical; four varlets with torches ahead, two 'squires behind. Only a
few steps on, as he passed the shadowed entrance of a court, armed
men--many more than his escort--sprang upon him and cut him down with
axes. He called out that he was the Duke of Orleans. "So much the
better!" they shouted, and battered him to death on the ground; then
they rode off through the night, unmolested by the terrified
attendants. The master and paymaster of the gang, who was watching,
from a doorway hard by, to see that his money was honestly earned,
went off on his way. A devious way it turned out to be, for, having
admitted his complicity to the Council, in his high and mighty
fashion, he found himself safer in flight than in his guarded topmost
room of this tower before us. He galloped away to his frontier of
Flanders, cutting each bridge that he crossed. It was ten years before
he could return, and then he came at the head of his Burgundian
forces, and bought the keys of Porte de Buci, stolen by its keeper's
son from under his father's pillow. Entering Paris on the night of
Saturday, May 28, 1418, on the following day, the Burgundians began
those massacres which lasted as long as there were Armagnacs to kill,
and which polluted Paris streets with corpses. Within a year, John,
lured to a meeting with the Dauphin, afterward Charles VII., went to
the bridge at Montereau, with the infinite precautions always taken by
this fearless man, and there he was murdered with no less treachery,
if with less butchery, than he gave to his killing of Louis of
Orleans.
Valentine Visconti, widow of Orleans, had not lived to see this
retribution. Her appeal to the King for the punishment of the assassin
was answered by pleasant phrases, and soon after, in one of his sane
intervals, was further answered by the royal pardon to Burgundy, for
that "out of faith and loyalty to us, he has caused to be put out of
the world our brother of Orleans." She had counted on the King's
remembering that, in the early years of his madness, hers had been the
only face he knew and the only voice that soothed him. She crept away
to Blois with her children, and with Dunois, her husband's son but not
her own. The others were not of the age nor of the stuff to harbor
revenge, and to him she said: "You were stolen from me, and it is
_you_ who are fit to avenge your father." These are fiery words from a
rarely gentle yet courageous woman, grown vindictive out of her
constancy to a worthless man. She is the one pure creature, pathetic
and undefiled, in all this welter of perfidy and brutality. "She
shines in the black wreck of things," in Carlyle's words concerning
another "noble white vision, with its high queenly face, its soft
proud eyes," of a later day. There, at Blois, she died within the
year.
It would carry us too far from this tower to follow the course of the
feud between the heirs of these two houses. "Philip the Good, Duke of
Burgundy, Luxembourg, and Brabant, Earl of Holland and Zealand, Lord
of Friesland, Count of Flanders, Artois, and Hainault, Lord of Salins
and Macklyn," was a high and puissant prince, and versatile withal.
"He could fight as well as any king going, and he could lie as well as
any, except the King of France. He was a mighty hunter, and could read
and write. His tastes were wide and ardent. He loved jewels like a
woman, and gorgeous apparel. He dearly loved maids-of-honor, and,
indeed, paintings generally, in proof of which he ennobled Jan van
Eyck.... In short, he relished all rarities, except the humdrum
virtues." Charles of Orleans, son of Louis, was of another kidney.
Spirited at the start, this prince was spoiled by his training, "like
such other lords as I have seen educated in this country," says
Comines; "for these were taught nothing but to play the jackanapes
with finery and fine words." Young Charles d'Orléans took his earliest
lessons in rhyme, and he rhymed through life, through his twenty-five
years of captivity in England, until he was old Charles, the pallid
figure-head of a petty, babbling, versifying court. And the quarrel
between the two houses came to nothing beyond the trifle of general
misery for France.
It was only when Burgundy came into collision with the crafty Dauphin
of France, the rebellious son of Charles VII., who had fled from his
father's court and taken refuge with Duke Philip the Good, that this
great house began to fail in power. When that Dauphin, become Louis
XI., made royal entry into Paris, this Hôtel de Bourgogne showed all
its old bravery. From its great court, through its great gate on Rue
Saint-Denis, into the space behind the town gate of that name, Duke
Philip rode forth on the last day of August, 1461, at his side his
son--then Comte de Charolais, known later as Charles "_le
Téméraire_"--to head the glittering array of nobles, aglow with silken
draperies and jewels, their horses' housings sweeping the ground, who
await the new King. Few of them are quite sure "how they stand" with
him, and they hardly know how to greet him as he enters, but they take
the customary oaths when they get to Notre-Dame, and thence escort him
to the old palace on the island. There they feasted and their royal
master pretended to be jolly, all the while speculating on the speedy
snuffing-out of these flashing satellites. On the morrow he took up
his residence in the Hôtel des Tournelles, almost deserted within, and
altogether without. For the populace crowded about this Hôtel de
Bourgogne, all eyes and ears for the sight and the story of its
splendors. Its tapestries were the richest ever seen by Parisians, its
silver such as few princes owned, its table lavish and ungrudging. The
duke's robes and jewels were so wonderful that the cheering mob ran
after him, as he passed along the streets, with his attendant train of
nobles and his body-guard of archers.
With his death died all the pomp and show of this palace. His son,
Charles the Bold, wasted no time in Paris from the fighting, for which
he had an incurable itch, but no genius. He kept this deserted house
in charge of a _concierge_ for his daughter Mary, "the richest heiress
in Christendom," who was promised to five suitors at once, and who
married Maximilian of Austria at last. Their grandson, the Emperor
Charles V., in one of the many bargains made and unmade between him
and François I.--the one the direct descendant of Louis of Orleans and
the other the direct descendant of John of Burgundy--gave up to the
French crown all that Burgundy owned in France, one portion of it in
Paris being this Hôtel de Bourgogne. By now this once most strongly
fortified and best defended fortress-home in all the town was fallen
into sad decay, its spacious courts the playground of stray children,
its great halls and roomy chambers a refuge for tramps and rascals. So
François, casting about for any scheme to bring in money, and greedy
to keep alive the tradition, handed down from Hugh Capet, that gave to
his crown all the ground on which Paris was built, sold at auction
this old rookery, along with other royal buildings and land in the
city, in the year 1543. This _hôtel_ was put up in thirteen lots, this
tower and its dependencies, Burgundian additions of the first years of
the fifteenth century, being numbered 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, and while all
the other structures were demolished, these were kept entire by the
purchaser, whose name has not come down to us. They may have been
"bid in" by the State, for they reappear as crown property of Louis
XIII.; and he gave "what was left of the donjon of the Hôtel d'Artois"
to the monks of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, in exchange for
a tract of their land on the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, just
west of Place Royale. By this barter it would seem that he intended to
carry out one of his father's cherished schemes, to be spoken of in a
later chapter.
In this donjon the good monks established "storehouses" for the poor,
a phrase that may be modernized into "soup-kitchens." These were under
the control of a certain "Père Vincent," who has been canonized since
as Saint Vincent de Paul. This peasant's son had grown up into a
tender-hearted priest, bountiful to the poor with the crowns he
adroitly wheedled from the rich. For he had guile as well as
loving-kindness, he was a wily and a jocular shepherd to his
aristocratic flock, he became the pet confessor of princesses and the
spiritual monitor of Louis XIII. So zealous was he in his schemes for
the relief of suffering men and women, and signally of children, that
Parliament expostulated, in fear that his asylums and refuges would
fill Paris with worthless vagrants and illegitimate children. His is
an exemplary and honored figure in the Roman Church, and his name
still clings to this tower; local legend, by a curious twisting of
tradition, making him its builder!
While its buyer, at the auction, is unknown to us, we do know to whom
was knocked down one lot, that holds records of deeper concern to us
than all the ground hereabout, thick as it is with historic
footprints. The plot on the southeasterly corner of the property,
fronting on Rue Mauconseil, was purchased by a band of players for a
rental in perpetuity. The Parliament of Paris had not recognized the
King's claim to all these ownerships, and would not give assent to
some of the sales; and this perpetual lease was not confirmed by that
body without long delay. We may let the players wait for this official
warranty while we see who they are, whence they come, and what they
play.
It was a religious fraternity, calling itself "_La Confrérie de la
Passion de Notre Seigneur, Jésus-Christ_," and it had been formed,
during the closing years of the fourteenth century, mainly from out of
more ancient companies. The most ancient and reputable of these was
"_La Basoche_," recruited from the law clerks of the Palais de
Justice, players and playwrights both. This troupe had enjoyed a long,
popular existence before it received legal existence from Philippe
"_le Bel_," early in that same fourteenth century. From its ranks,
reinforced by outsiders--among them, soon after 1450, a bachelor of
the University, François Villon--were enlisted the members of "_Les
Enfants sans Souci_." Other ribald mummers called themselves "_Les
Sots_." Men from all these bands brought their farcical grossness to
mitigate the pietistic grossness of our _Confrérie_, and this
fraternity soon grew so strong as to get letters-patent from Charles
VI., granting it permission for publicly performing passion-plays and
mysteries, and for promenading the streets in costume. Then the
privileged troupe hired the hall of Trinity Hospital and turned it
into a rude theatre, the first in Paris, the mediæval stage having
been of bare boards on trestles, under the sky or under canvas. On the
site of this earliest of French theatres are the Queen's fountain,
placed in 1732 on the northeast corner of Rues Saint-Denis and
Grenéta, and the buildings numbered 28 in the latter and 142 in the
former street. There, in 1402, the _confrères_ began the work that is
called play, and there they remained until 1545. Then, during the
construction of the new house, they took temporary quarters in the
Hôtel de Flandres, not yet cut up by its purchaser at the royal sale,
and settled finally, in 1548, in the Théâtre de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne.
By then an edict of François I. had banished from the stage all
personations of Jesus Christ and of all holy characters; such other
plays being permitted as were "profane and honest, offensive and
injurious to no one."
The name "mystery" does not suggest something occult and recondite,
even although the Greek word, from which it is wrongly derived,
sometimes refers to religious services; it carries back, rather, to
the Latin word signifying a service or an office. The plays called
"mysteries" and "moralities" were given at first in mediæval Latin,
or, as time went on, in the vernacular, with interludes in the same
Latin, which may be labelled Christian or late Latin. They were
rudimentary essays in dramatic art, uncouth and grotesque, in tone
with that "twilight of the mind, peopled with childish phantoms."
Hugo's description of the "_très belle moralité, le bon jugement de
Madame la Vierge_," by Pierre Gringoire, played in the great hall of
the Palais de Justice, is too long and labored to quote here; well
worth quoting is the short and vivid sketch, by Charles Reade, of the
"Morality" witnessed in puerile delight by the audience, among whom
sat Gérard, the father of Erasmus, at Rotterdam, in the same brave
days of Louis XI. of France and Philip the Good of Burgundy.
He shows us the clumsy machinery bringing divine personages, too
sacred to name, direct from heaven down on the boards, that they might
talk sophistry at their ease with the Cardinal Virtues, the Nine
Muses, and the Seven Deadly Sins; all present in human shape, and all
much alike. This dreary stuff was then enlivened by the entrance of
the Prince of the Powers of Air, an imp following him and buffeting
him with a bladder, and at each thwack the crowd roared in ecstasy.
So, to-day, the equally intelligent London populace finds joy in the
wooden staff of the British Punch. When the Vices had vented obscenity
and the Virtues twaddle, the Celestials with the Nine Muses went
gingerly back to heaven on the one cloud allowed by the property-man,
and worked up and down by two "supes" at a winch, in full sight of
everybody. Then the bottomless pit opened and flamed in the centre of
the stage, and into it the Vices were pushed by the Virtues and the
stage-carpenters, who all, with Beelzebub, danced about it merrily to
sound of fife and tabor. And the curtain falls on the first act. "This
entertainment was writ by the Bishop of Ghent for the diffusion of
religious sentiments by the aid of the senses, and was an average
specimen of theatrical exhibitions, so long as they were in the hands
of the clergy; but, in course of time, the laity conducted plays, and
so the theatre, we learn from the pulpit, has become profane."
The dulness of moralities and mysteries was relieved by the farces,
spiced and not nice, of the "_Sots_" and the "Basoche" on their
boards. They made fun of earthly dignitaries, ridiculing even kings.
Thus they represented Louis XII., in his Orleans thirst for
money--never yet quenched in that family--drinking liquid gold from a
vase. Their easy-going monarch took no offence, avowing that he
preferred that his court should laugh at his parsimony, rather than
that his subjects should weep for his prodigalities. To win applause,
in his rôle of "_le Père du Peuple_," he encouraged the "powerful,
disorderly, but popular theatre," and he patronized Pierre Gringoire,
whose plays drew the populace to the booths about the Halles. The poet
and playwright, widower of Hugo's happily short-lived Esmeralda, had
been again married and put in good case by the whimsical toleration of
Louis XI., if we may accept the dates of Théodore de Banville's
charming little play. That monarch, easily the first comedian of his
time, allowed no rivals on the mimic stage, and it languished during
his reign. Nor did it flourish under François I., whose brutal vices
must not be made fun of. Henri IV., fearless even of mirth, which may
be deadly, not only gave smiling countenance to this theatre, but gave
his presence at times; thus we read that, with queen and court, he sat
through "_une plaisante farce_" on the evening of January 12, 1607.
The Renaissance enriched the French stage, along with all forms of
art, bringing translations through the Italian of the classic drama.
The theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne became La Comédie Italienne, and
its records recall famous names, on the boards and in the audience,
throughout long and honorable years. The troupe was not free from
jealousies, and did not escape secessions, notably that of 1598, when
the heavy old men of the historic house cut adrift the light comedians
and the young tragedians, who had been recruited within a few years,
mainly from the country. Those who remained devoted themselves to the
"legitimate drama," yet found place for approved modern work, such as
that of young Racine. The seceders betook themselves to buildings on
the east side of Rue de Renard, just north of Rue de la Verrerie,
convenient to the crowded quarter of la Grève; but removed shortly to
the theatre constructed for them from a tennis-court in Rue
Vieille-du-Temple, in the heart of the populous Marais. You shall go
there, a little later, to see the classic dramas of a young man from
Rouen, named Corneille. These players called themselves "_Les
Comédiens du Marais_," and by 1620 had permission from Louis XIII. to
take the title of "_La Troupe Royale_." A few years later, perhaps as
early as 1650, all the Paris of players and playgoers began to talk
about a strolling troupe in the southern provinces and about their
manager, one Poquelin de Molière. How he brought his comedies and his
company to the capital; how he put them both up in rivalry with the
two old stock houses; how he won his way against all their opposition,
and much other antagonism--this is told in our chapter on Molière.
In the cutting up of the ancient domain of Robert of Artois, after the
royal sale, a short street was run north and south through the grounds,
and named François, since feminized into Rue Française. It lay between
the tower, whose lower wall may be seen in the rear of the court of
No. 8, and the theatre buildings, which covered the sites of present
Nos. 7 and 9 of this street and extended over the ground that now
makes Rue Étienne Marcel. The main entrance of the theatre was about
where now hangs the big gilt key on the northern side of that fragment
of Rue Mauconseil, still left after its curtailment by many recent
cuttings. Gone now is every vestige of the theatre and every stone of
the Hôtel de Bourgogne, except this tower of "_Jean-sans-Peur_."
[Illustration: The Tower of "Jean-sans-Peur."]
By happy chance, or through pious care, this precious fragment has
survived the centuries that looked with unconcern on things of the
past, and has come into the safe keeping of our relic-loving age. It
is an authentic document from the archives of the earliest
architecture of the fifteenth century, convincing in its proof of the
strength for defence of ducal homes in that day. Its massive stones
are scrupulously shaped and fitted, the grim faces of its quadrangular
walls are softened by wide ogival windows, its top is crowned all
around by a deep cornice. Above, the former corbelled machiolations,
heavy yet elegant, are debased into water-spouts, and a new roof has
been added. Only the southern and eastern sides of the oblong are
wholly disengaged, the other faces being mostly shut in by crowding
buildings. On the angle behind is a _tourelle_ supported by corbels,
and in the ogival door is a tympanum, in whose carvings we make out a
plane and a plumb-line. This was the device of John of Burgundy, worn
on his liveries, painted and carved everywhere. Louis of Orleans had
chosen a bunch of knotted fagots as his emblem, with the motto "_Je
l'ennuie_;" and Burgundy's arrogant retort was the plane that cut
through all that was not in plumb-line with his measurements, and the
motto in Flemish "_Ik houd_," meaning "_Je le tiens_."
The great hall within has been partitioned off into small rooms, fit
for the workingmen and their families formerly installed here; so that
its ancient aspect of amplitude and dignity is somewhat marred. We
"must make believe very much," to see either the sinner John mustering
here his assassins, who file out through that door to their rendezvous
with Orléans, or the saint Vincent gathering here his herd of hungry
children. Happily, the grand stairway, on one side, is unmutilated,
and it serves to bring home to us the ample magnificence of these
Burgundian dukes. Dagobert's stair crawls, through twisting darkness,
within its tower; Blanche's stair modestly suggests a venture toward
ease and elegance in life; here we mount the stairway of a feudal
_château_, broad and easy and stately, fitting frame for bejewelled
courtiers and iron-clad men-at-arms. Its one hundred and thirty-eight
steps, each a single stone, turn spaciously about the central column,
which does not reach to the tower top. Its upper section is carved
into a stone pot, from which springs a stone oak-tree to the centre of
the vaulted ceiling of the broad platform that ends the stairway, the
ribs of the vaulting outlined by carved branches and foliage. On each
floor below, a large chamber, deserted and dreary, opens on the
landing-place; from this upper stage a narrow staircase leads, through
the thickness of the wall and up through the _tourelle_ on the angle,
to the tiny chamber occupied by John of Burgundy, tradition tells us.
Here in his bedroom, that was an arsenal, at the top of his
impregnable tower, the fearless one found safety and sleep. We peep
out from his one small window, and far down we see the swarming length
of Rue Étienne Marcel, and hear the low pervasive murmur of Paris all
astir, accented by the shrill cries of the boys from the adjoining
school, at play in the courtyard of our tower. Their voices chase back
to their shadowy haunts all these companions of our stroll through the
ages, and call us down to our own time and to our Paris of to-day.
THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER OF THE MIDDLE AGES
[Illustration: The Church of Saint-Séverin.]
THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER OF THE MIDDLE AGES
On that river-bank of the City-Island which is called Quai aux Fleurs,
you will find a modern house numbered 11; and you will read, in the
gold letters of the weather-stained stone slab set in the front wall,
that here, in 1118, dwelt Héloise and Abelard. Their ideal heads are
carved over the two entrance doors. This is the site of the pleasant
residence occupied by Canon Fulbert, looking across its own garden and
the beach to the river--one of the dwellings in the cloisters that
were set apart for the clergy and clerks of the cathedral, and of the
many parish churches clustering about it. The chapter of Notre-Dame
owned nearly all this end of the island eastwardly from the boundaries
of the old Palace, and had built up this clerical village of about
three dozen small houses, each within its garden and clump of acacias,
all sequestered and quiet. You may see one of these houses, still
owned by the cathedral, and happily left unchanged, at No. 6 Rue
Massillon. Its low two stories and tiled roof on the court keep their
old-time look, and within is a good staircase, with a wooden railing
of the days before wrought iron came into use. Boileau-Despréaux has
mounted this staircase, for he certainly visited this abode of the
Abbé Ménage, who had literary and scientific _salons_ here, on
Wednesday evenings. Boileau himself lived in these cloisters for many
years, and here he died; and here had died Philibert Delorme and
Pierre Lescot. These and many another, not connected with the Church,
sought this quarter for its quiet. It was quiet enough, shut in as it
was by its own walls, that made of it a _cité_ inside the City of the
Island. The two gates at the western ends of present Rues du
Cloître-Notre-Dame and Chanoinesse, with two others on the shore, were
safely closed and barred at nightfall, against all intrusion of the
profane and noisy world without. So greedy for quiet had the dwellers
grown, that they would not permit the bridge--the Pont-Rouge, the
seventeenth-century predecessor of Pont Saint-Louis--to step straight
out from Saint Louis's island to their own, lest the speed of traffic
should perturb them; they made it turn at an angle, until it set its
twisted foot on the retired spot where now Rues des Ursins and des
Chantres meet in a small open space. The southern shore by the side of
the cathedral was given up to the Archbishop's palace and garden; and
the piece of waste land, behind the cathedral and outside the wall,
known as Le Terrain, was in 1750 banked up into the quay at the end of
the present pretty garden. All around the northern and eastern sides
of the original Notre-Dame, stretched the Gothic arched cloisters, and
in them the Church taught what little it thought fit its scholars
should learn.
Here, toward the end of the eleventh century, Pierre Abelard was an
eager pupil of Guillaume de Champeaux; and early in the next century,
here and in the gardens of Saint-Geneviève, he was a honey-tongued
teacher. He lodged in the house of Canon Fulbert, in whose niece of
seventeen--less than half his own age--he found an ardent learner, not
alone in theology. Here, on this spot, she taught herself that
devotion to the poor-spirited lover who was so bold-spirited a
thinker; a devotion, that, outlasting his life by the twenty years of
her longer life, found expression in her dying wish, put into verse by
Alexander Pope:
"May one kind Grave unite each hapless Name,
And graft my Love immortal on thy Fame."
He died at the Priory of Saint-Marcel near Châlons, whose prior sent
the body, at her request, to Héloise, then Abbess of the Convent at
Nogent-sur-Seine, and famed as a miracle of erudition and piety. She
was buried in the grave she there dug for him, and in 1800, when her
convent was destroyed, leaving no stone, the tomb and its contents
were removed to the Museum of French Monuments in Paris, and in 1817
they were placed in Père-Lachaise.
We willingly lose sight of Abelard's sorry story in face of his
splendid powers. These came into play at a period of mental and
spiritual awakening, brought about by unwonted light from all quarters
of the sky. Theological questions filled the air; asked, not only by
priests and clerks, but by the silly crowd and by wistful children,
and by gray-headed men sitting on school benches. The Crusades,
failing in material conquest, had won the Holy Land of Eastern
Learning; and Constantinople, lost later to the Christian world, gave
to it fleeing Greek scholars, carrying precious manuscripts, Byzantine
logic and physics, all through Europe. Pious soldiers, coming home
with wealth; stay-at-home churchmen, who had amassed riches; royalty,
anxious to placate Rome--all these built colleges, founded
scholarships, endowed chairs, subsidized teachers.
From the cloisters on the island--the cradle of the University, as the
Palace at the other end of the island was the cradle of the Town--from
the new cathedral that Abelard had not seen, the schools stepped over
to the mainland on the south. There, on the shore, were built the
College of the Four Nations, and the School of Medicine, alongside
that annex of the old Hôtel-Dieu, which was reached by the little
bridge, that went only the other day, and that led from the central
structure on the island. From this shore the scholars' quarter spread
up the slope to the summit of Mont-Sainte-Geneviève. There teachers
and scholars met in the cloisters of the great abbey, that had grown
up around the tomb of the patron saint of Paris, where now stands the
Panthéon. Of the huge basilica, its foundations laid by Clovis--who
had paid for a victory by his baptism into Christianity--there is left
the tower, rising, aged and estranged, above the younger structures of
the Lycée Henri IV. Its foundations under ground are of Clovis, its
lower portion is of eleventh-century rebuilding, its upper portion of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The plan of his cloisters,
and some of its stones, are kept in the arches of the college court,
to which one enters from No. 23 Rue Clovis. And, in the street named
for his wife, Clotilde, you may see the massive side wall of the abbey
refectory, now the college chapel.
Around about the southern side of the abbey, and around the schools on
the slope below, that were the beginning of the University,
Philippe-Auguste threw the protecting arm of his great wall. Within
its clasp lay the _Pays Latin_, wherein that tongue was used
exclusively in those schools. This language, sacred to so-called
learning and unknown to the vulgar, seemed a fit vehicle for the lame
science of the doctor, and the crippled dialectics of the theologian,
both always in arms against the "new learning." It was not until the
close of Henri IV.'s reign, that it was thought worth while to use the
French language in the classes. All through the Middle Ages, this
University was a world-centre for its teaching, and through all the
ages it has been "that prolific soil in which no seeds, which have
once been committed to it, are ever permitted to perish." While _la
Cité_ was the seat of a militant Church, and _la Ville_ the
gathering-place of thronging merchants, this hill-side swarmed with
students, and their officials were put to it to house them properly
and keep them orderly. They got on as best they might, ill-lodged,
ill-fed, ill-clad, often begging, always roistering, in the streets.
By day the sedate burghers of the other quarters trembled for their
ducats and their daughters, and found peace only when night brought
the locking of the gate of the Petit-Châtelet, and the shutting up in
their own district of the turbulent students.
Turbulent still, the students of our day, of every land and all
tongues--except Latin--stream through the streets of the Latin
Quarter, intent on study, or on pleasure bent. Only the Revolution has
ever thinned their ranks, what time the Legislative Assembly nearly
wrecked the parent University, with all its offspring throughout
France. Napoleon rescued them all, and by his legislation of 1806 and
1808, the University has been builded solidly on the foundations of
the State. The ancient scholars' quarter, unlighted and undrained and
unhealthful, is almost all gone; its narrow, tortuous streets are
nearly all widened or wiped out; open spaces and gardens give it
larger lungs; its dark, damp, mouldy colleges have made way for
grandiose structures of the latest sanitation. Yet the gray walls of
the annex of the Hôtel-Dieu still gloom down on the narrow street; the
fifteenth-century School of Medicine, its vast hall perverted to base
uses, is hidden behind the entrance of No. 15 Rue de la Bucherie; and
above the buildings on the west side of Rue de l'Hôtel-Colbert rises
the rotunda of its later amphitheatre. Rue Galande retains many of its
houses of the time of Charles IX., when these gables on the street
were erected. Except for the superb façade at No. 29 Rue de la
Parcheminerie--a municipal residence dating from about the middle of
the eighteenth century--that venerable street remains absolutely
unaltered since its very first days, when the parchment-makers took it
for their own. Some of their parchment seems to be still on sale in
its shop windows. In the ancient house No. 8 Rue Boutebrie you will
find as perfect a specimen of a mediæval staircase, its wooden rail
admirably carved, as is left in Paris. And the street of the Mountain
of Sainte-Geneviève still winds, stonily steep, up the slope.
[Illustration: Rue Hautefeuille, a Survivor of the Scholars' Quarter.]
Nothing of Rue du Fouarre, as it was known to Rabelais and Dante, is
left but its name in the broadened curtailment of this most ancient
street. That name comes from the old French word meaning "forage," and
was given to it at the time when the wealthier students bought near
there and brought into it the trusses of hay and straw, which they
spread on the floor for seats during the lectures, the reader himself
being seated on a rude dais at the end of the hall. The forage market
is still held, not far away, in Place Maubert. And the churches of
Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and of Saint-Séverin are unchanged, except by
age, since those days when their bells were the only timekeepers for
lecturers and lectured; giving signal, throughout the day, for the
divisions of the classes, until vespers told that the working-day was
done. The schools opened with the early mass at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre,
then the chapel adjoining the Hôtel-Dieu, now an exquisite relic of
simple twelfth-century Gothic. Still older had been Saint-Séverin, a
chapel of the earliest years of the monarchy, destroyed by the Normans
when they camped just here in 866, besieging the island city and
making their onslaught on the wooden tower that guarded the abutment
of the Petit-Pont on the mainland. The twelve heroes, who held that
tower against the Norman horde, are commemorated by the tablet in the
wall of Place du Petit-Pont. Saint-Séverin was rebuilt in the thirteenth
century, and its vast burial-ground on the south covered by the
buildings and the street of la Parcheminerie. So that of the University
seen by Dante, we can be sure only of the body of Saint-Séverin--its
tower was built in 1347--and of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, and the
buildings that are glued to it.
[Illustration: The Interior of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.]
Dante's bronze figure looks pensively down from the terrace of the
Collége de France on all the noise and the newness of modern Rue des
Écoles. The date of his short stay in Paris cannot be fixed, but it
was certainly after his exile from Florence, therefore not earlier
than 1302, and probably not later than 1310, his own years being a
little less, or a little more, than forty. There can be no doubt as to
his having visited Paris, for Boccaccio, his admirer and biographer,
records the fact; told him perhaps by the elder Boccaccio, who lived
in the capital--where his famous son was born--and who probably met
the expatriated poet there. And in the tenth canto of "_Paradiso_," we
find these words in Longfellow's translation:
"It is the light eternal of Sigieri,
Who, reading lectures in the street of straw,
Did syllogize individious verities."
This closing line, meaning that Sigier of Brabant had the courage to
speak truths that were unpopular, explains why he was Dante's favorite
lecturer. In Balzac's pretty fragment of romance, in which the great
Frenchman makes so vivid the presence of the great Italian, the home
of the latter is in one of the small houses on the extreme eastern end
of the City Island--such as the modest dwelling in which died
Boileau-Despréaux, four centuries later. From there, Balzac has Dante
ferried over to Quai de la Tournelle, and so stroll to his lectures.
But Dante's home was really in that same street of straw, to which he
had come from his quarters away south on the banks of the Bièvre, too
far away from the schools. He had taken up his abode in that rural
suburb, on first coming to Paris, as did many men of letters, of that
time and of later times, who were drawn to the pleasant, quiet country
without the walls.
There was one among these men to whose home, tradition tells us, Dante
was fond of finding his way, after he had come to live in the narrow
town street. The grave figure goes sedately up Rue Saint-Jacques,
always the great southern thoroughfare, passing the ancient chapel of
the martyrs, Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné, and the home and shelter for
poor students in theology, started by the earnest confessor of Saint
Louis, Robert de Sorbon. The foundations of his little chapel, built
in 1276, were unearthed in 1899 during the digging for the new
Sorbonne; and its walls are outlined in white stone in the gray
pavement of the new court. Not a stone remains of the old Sorbonne,
not a stone of the rebuilt Sorbonne of Richelieu, except his chapel
and his tomb; well worth a visit for the exquisite beauty of its
detail. But the soul of the historic foundation lives on, younger than
ever to-day, in its seventh century of youth. Through Porte
Saint-Jacques, Dante passes to the dwelling, just beyond, of Jean de
Meung, its site now marked by a tablet in the wall of the house No.
218 Rue Saint-Jacques. No doubt it was a sufficiently grand mansion in
its own grounds, for it was the home of the well-to-do parents of the
poet, whose lameness gave him the popular nickname of "_Clopinel_,"
preferred by him to the name by which he is best known, which came
from his natal town. In this home, a few years earlier, he had
finished his completion of "Le Roman de la Rose," one of the earliest
of French poems, a biting satire on women and priests, begun by
Guillaume de Lorris. "_Clopinel_" carried on the unfinished work to
such perfection, that he is commonly looked on as the sole author.
Dante admired the work as fully as did Chaucer, who has left a
translation into English of a portion:--so admirable a version that it
moved Eustace Deschamps to enthusiasm in his ballad to "_le grand
translateur, noble Geoffroi Chaucer_." And Dante liked the workman as
well, his equal in genius, many of their contemporaries believed; and
we shall not aggrieve history, if we insist on seeing the grim-visaged
Florentine and the light-hearted Gaul over a bottle of _petit vin de
Vouvray or de Chinon_--for the vineyards of this southern slope of
Paris had been rooted up by the builder early in the twelfth
century--in the low-browed living-room, discussing poetry and
politics, the schism in the Church, the quarrel between the French
King and his spiritual father of Rome.
Behind us in Rue Saint-Jacques, beneath the new Sorbonne, we have left
the site of the chapel of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné. The entrance to
its cloisters and gardens was opposite Rue du Cimetière-Saint-Benoît,
a short street, now widened, that retains a few of its ancient houses,
the cemetery at its farther end being entirely builded over. This
entrance-gate is standing in the gardens of the Cluny Museum, and we
see it as it was first seen by the boy François Villon, and last seen
when he fled under it, after killing a priest in the cloisters. He got
his name from the worthy canon of Saint-Benoît, Guillaume de Villon,
who took in the waif and gave him a roof and food, and tried to give
him morals; and it is by his name that the poet is known in history
rather than by the other names, real or assumed, that he bore during
his shifty life. He lived here with his "more than father," as the
young scamp came to own that the canon had been; whose house in the
cloister gardens, named "_la Porte Rouge_," was not far from the house
of the canon Pierre de Vaucel, with whose niece François got into his
first scrape. Loving her then, he libelled her later in his verse.
Full of scrapes of all sorts were his thirty short years of life--he
was born in the year of the burning of Joan the Maid, and he slips out
of sight and of record in 1461--and it needed all his nimble wits to
keep his toes from dangling above ground and his neck from swinging in
a noose. They did not keep him from poverty and hunger and prison.
Parliament, nearly hanging him, banished him instead from Paris, and
the footsore cockney figure is seen tramping through Poitou, Berri,
Bourbonnais. Louis XI. finds him in a cell at Meung and, sympathizing
with rascality that was not political, sets him free and on foot
again; so playing Providence to this starveling poet as he did to
Gringoire. And from Meung, François Villon steals out of history,
leaving to us his "Small" and "Large Testament," a few odes and
sonnets, with bits of wholly exquisite song. No French poet before him
had put _himself_ into his verse, and it is this flavor of personality
that gives its chiefest charm to his work. We are won by the graceless
vagabond, who casts up and tells off his entire existence of merriment
and misery, in the words of Mr. Henley's superb translation:
"Booze and the blowens cop the lot."
He seems to be owning to it, this slight, alert figure of bronze in
Square Monge, as he faces the meeting-place of wide modern streets.
The spaciousness of it all puzzles him, who prowled about the darkest
purlieus, and haunted the uncleanest _cabarets_, of the old University
quarter. He is struck suddenly quiescent in his swagger; his face,
slightly bent down, shows the poet dashed with the reprobate; his
expression and attitude speak of struggling shame and shamelessness.
His right hand holds a manuscript to his breast, his left hand clasps
the dagger in his belt. Behind, on the ground, lie the mandolin of the
poet-singer and the shackles of the convict. It is a delightfully
expressive statue of François Villon, by his own election one of the
"_Enfants sans Souci_," and by predestination a child of grievous
cares.
From Square Monge it is but a step to the tablet that marks the place
of Porte Saint-Victor, on the northern side of the remnant left of the
street of that name. It is but a step in the other direction to the
tablet on the wall of No. 50 Rue Descartes, which shows the site of
Porte Saint-Marcel, sometimes called the Porte Bordée. Through either
of these gates of the great wall one might pass to the home of a poet,
a hundred years after Villon had gone from sight; like him, born to
true poetry, but unlike him who was born to rags, Pierre de Ronsard
was born to the purple. He was a gentleman of noble lineage, he had
been educated at the famous Collége de Navarre, the college at that
period of Henri III. and of the Duke of Guise, _le Balafré_--its site
and its prestige since taken by the École Polytechnique--he had
entered the court of the Duke of Orleans as a page, he had gone to
Scotland as one of the escort of Madeleine of France, on her marriage
with James V. He was counted among the personal friends of Mary Stuart
and of Charles IX., and by him was selected always as a partner in
tennis. That King visited Ronsard here, and so, too, did his brother
Henri III. Tasso found his way here, while in Paris in 1571, in the
train of Cardinal Louis d'Este. It seems that nothing in all France
was to Tasso's taste, except the windmills on Montmartre; easily in
view, at that day, from the Louvre, at whose windows he watched the
ceaseless whirling of their sails, which mitigated his boredom. Twenty
years earlier, Rabelais was fond of ferrying across the river, from
his home in Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, to prowl about his once
familiar haunts in this quarter, and to drop in on Ronsard and Baïf,
the leaders of the school of "learned poets." They lived in Rue des
Fossés-Saint-Victor, the street formed over the outer ditch of the
wall, now named Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Their house and grounds, just
at the corner of present Rue des Boulangers, have been cut through and
away by the piercing of Rue Monge. Here, Ronsard looked across the
meadows to the Seine, while he strolled in the gardens, book in hand,
eager "to gather roses while it is called to-day," in the words of Mr.
Andrew Lang's version of the "Prince of Poets." For Ronsard's
deafness, which had cut short his adroit diplomatic career, had given
him quicker vision for all beauty; and his verse, Greek and Latin and
French, trips to the music made in him by the sights and scents of
summer, by roses and by women, by the memories of "shadow-loves and
shadow-lips." And, still rhyming, this most splendid of that
constellation--those singers, attuned to stately measure, called the
Pleiades--died in the year 1585, soon after his sixtieth birthday.
[Illustration: Pierre de Ronsard.
(From a drawing by an unknown artist, in a private collection.)]
From here we go straight away over the hill of Sainte-Geneviève and
through Porte Saint-Michel--nearly at the meeting-place of Rues
Soufflot and Monsieur-le-Prince and Boulevard Saint-Germain--to the
house, also in the fields outside the wall, where dwelt Clément Marot,
a poet who sang pleasantly of the graces of life, too, but who had a
more serious strain deep down. The "_Cheval d'Airan_"--so was the
house named--was a gift to the poet from François I. "for his good,
continuous, and faithful services." These services consisted chiefly
in the writing of roundelays and verses, in which "he had a turn of
his own," says Sainte-Beuve; a turn of grace and of good breeding, and
no passion that should startle the King's sister, good Marguerite of
Navarre, who had made him her groom of the chamber. He had been a
prisoner at Pavia with the King, and his life had been spent in the
camp and the court. At Ferrara, in 1534, he had met his
fellow-countryman Calvin, and returned to Paris to prove his
strengthened convictions in the new heresies by those translations of
the psalms, which carried comfort to Calvin and to Luther, and which
have given to their writer his permanent place in French literature.
During this period he lived in this grand mansion, the site of which
is exactly covered by the houses No. 27 Rue de Tournon and No. 30 Rue
de Condé. And from here Marot went into exile, along with the
well-to-do Huguenots, who clung together in this quarter outside the
wall. "_Nous autres l'appelons la Petite Genève_," said d'Aubigné, and
that appellation held for a long time. Its centre was the short,
narrow lane in the marshes, named later Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain,
and now Rue Visconti, wherein the persecuted sect had their hidden
place of worship. On its corner with the present Rue de Seine was the
home of Jean Cousin, that gentleman-worker in stained glass--the sole
handicraft allowed to men of birth--who has left for our joy that
exquisite window in the Church of Saint-Gervais. At the western end of
the lane was the residence built for himself by Baptiste du Cerceau,
son of the illustrious Jacques Androuët, and as stanch as was his
father for the faith. His great mansion took up the whole end of the
block, on the ground covered now by the equally large building that
makes 32 Rue Jacob, 21 Rue Bonaparte, and 23 and 25 Rue Visconti. A
portion of this latter structure may be of the sixteenth century.
Baptiste du Cerceau, a Huguenot by birth and bringing-up, had yet
joined Henri III.'s famous "Forty-Five," in 1575, when he was only
twenty years old. For ten years he served that King as soldier and
architect, and then, rather than attend mass or conform against his
convictions, he left King and court and home in 1585. He came back
with Henri IV. as royal architect, to find that his elegant residence
had fallen into ruin.
[Illustration: Balcony over the Entrance of the Cour du Dragon.]
When Bernard Palissy, released from his dungeon in Bordeaux, came to
Paris, he was made "Worker in Earth and Inventor of Rustic Figulines,"
for the new abode in the Tile Fields, beyond the Louvre, that was
planned for the Queen-Mother, Catherine de' Medici. "Bernard of the
Tuileries," as he was known, in order to be near his work, lodged on
the northern side of Rue Saint-Honoré, just east of present Rue de
Castiglione. Later he removed to Rue du Dragon, nearly opposite the
little street now named in his honor, and so became one of the colony
of "_la Petite Genève_." Here he worked as he worked always in his
passion for perfection in ornamental pottery, giving to it all "my
affection for pursuing in the track of enamels," in his own quaint
words. For his single-mindedness in praising his Creator, and in
making worthy images of His creations, he was looked on as a
"_huguenot opiniâtre_," and hated by the powers of the Church and
State, who, failing to burn him, because of the mercy of the Duke of
Mayenne, cast him into the Bastille. With all Paris hungry, during the
siege of the League by Henry of Navarre, the prisoners took their
turn, and this old man renewed the experience of his youth, when he
had starved himself for his beloved enamels. And so, at the age of
eighty, in the year of the stabbing by Jacques Clément of the most
Christian King, Henri III., Bernard Palissy died in his cell
"naturally," the report said. A medallion of the great potter may be
seen over the entrance of a house in Rue du Dragon, and his statue
stands in the little garden of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, not far away.
He is in his workman's garb, gazing down at a platter on which he has
stamped his genius in clay.
We have seen John Calvin, fresh from Picardy, a student at the Collége
du Cardinal-Lemoine, in Rue Saint-Victor, and this is his only
residence in Paris known to us. Appointed Curé of Pont l'Evêque, at
the age of sixteen, he was induced by a daring relative to read the
Bible, and the ultimate result was Calvinism, as it has been
interpreted by his bigoted disciples. The immediate result was his
persecution by the Sorbonne, and his flight to Ferrara, about the year
1534. There he met with welcome and protection, as did many a
political fugitive of the time, from Renée, the reigning duchess, as
kindly a creature as was her father, Louis XII. of France. But her
goodwill could not prevail against the ill-will of the Church, and
Calvin was forced to find his way finally to Switzerland, to live
there for thirty useful years. Marot, who was with Calvin in Ferrara,
went back to Paris, still countenanced at court; but no favor of king
or king's sister could save a sinner who would eat meat during Lent;
and in 1543 Marot was forced to flee to Italy, and died in Turin in
1544. He lives less in his special verse than in his general
influence, along with Rabelais and Montaigne, in the formation of
French letters. These three cleansed that language into literature, by
purging it of the old Gallic chaos and clumsiness of form.
So the Church made a desert, and called it peace, and "Little Geneva"
was at last laid waste, and those leaders, who escaped the cell and
the stake, were made refugees, because they had been insurgents
against enslaved thought. But they left behind them him who has been
styled the "Martyr of the Renaissance," Étienne Dolet. Here, in Place
Maubert, this bronze figure on the high pedestal, which he somehow
makes serve as a Protestant pulpit, looks all the martyr, with his
long, stubborn neck, his stiff spine of unbending conviction, his
entire attitude of aggressive devotion to principle. In life he was so
strong and so genuine that he made friends almost as many as enemies.
That glorious woman, Marguerite of Navarre--whose absurd devotion to
her brother Francis is only a lovable flaw in her otherwise faultless
nature--stood by Dolet as she stood by so many men who had the courage
to study and think and speak. She saved him from execution, when he
had killed a man in self-defence at Lyons, and she should have been
allowed to sit at table with the friends who gave him a little dinner
in the _Pays Latin_ to celebrate his escape. Among those about the
board were Marot, Rabelais, Erasmus, Melancthon, tradition says, and
says no more. We are told nothing about the speechmakers, and we can
only guess that they were terribly in earnest. Dolet was soon again in
arrest for printing books forbidden by the Church; his trial resulted
in an acquittal. Soon again he was arrested for importing the
forbidden literature, and escaped from prison. Rearrested, he was
speedily convicted, and on August 3, 1546, he was burned in Place
Maubert, on the spot where they have put his statue.
[Illustration: Clément Marot.
(From the portrait by Porbus le Jeune, in a private collection.)]
It was during one of his visits in later life to Paris that Erasmus
came to be among these _convives_; perhaps at the time he was
considering, before declining, the offer of François I. to make him
the head of the great Collége Royal, planned--and no more than
planned--by the King on the site of the Hôtel de Nesle, where Mazarin
afterward placed his College of the Four Nations, now the seat of the
Institute. Many years before this visit, some time between 1492 and
1497, Erasmus had lived in Paris, a poor and unhappy student in the
Collége Montaigu. It had earned the nickname of "_Collége des
Haricots_," because of the Lenten fare lavished on its inmates--beans,
stale eggs, spoiled fish, and that monotony broken by frequent fasts.
Erasmus had a Catholic conscience, as he owns, but a Lutheran stomach
withal, and this semi-starvation, with the filth and fleas in the
rooms, sickened him and drove him home to cleanly and well-fed
Flanders. From this college, he says in his "Colloquia," "I carried
nothing but a body infected with disease, and a plentiful supply of
vermin." A few years later young Rabelais suffered similar horrors at
the same college, and has cursed its memories through Grangousier's
capable lips. This "galley for slaves" was indeed used as a prison
during the Revolution, and was torn down in 1845, to give place to
the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.
From Place Maubert we walk up Rue Monge--named from the great _savant_
of the First Empire--and down to the seventeenth century, to where, on
the corner of Rue Rollin, we find the tablet that records the scene of
Blaise Pascal's death in 1662. He lived and died in the house of his
sister, in the fields just beyond Porte Saint-Marcel. Thirty-one years
before, he had left Auvergne for Paris, a precocious lad of eight,
already so skilled in mathematics and geometry that he produced his
famous treatises while still in his teens, and at the age of
twenty-three was known for his abilities throughout Europe. No man
dying, as he did, not yet forty years of age, has left so distinct and
permanent an impress on contemporary, and on later, thought.
He gained the honor of being hated by the Church, and the Jesuits
named him "_Porte d'Enfer_." His only answer was the philosophic
question, "How can I _prove_ that I am not the gate of Hell?" This
many-sided genius invented the first calculating machine and the first
omnibus. The line was started on March 18, 1662, and ran from the
Palace of the Luxembourg to the Bastille. Its route was probably by
Rue de la Harpe--almost all gone under Boulevard Saint-Michel--across
Petit-Pont and the Island and Pont Notre-Dame, to Place de Grève, and
thence by Rues François-Miron and Saint-Antoine, to the gate and the
prison at the end.
It was long a matter of dispute between the towers of
Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie and Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas--this
latter much nearer his home--as to which one had been selected by
Pascal for the experiments he made, to prove his theory of atmospheric
pressure, and to refute the theory of his opponents. Within a few
years this question has been answered by an old painting, found in a
curiosity shop, which represents Pascal, barometer in hand, standing
on the top of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, beside the statue of the
Chimæra, that has been carried to the Cluny Museum. This figure alone
would fix the spot, but, in addition, the picture gives a view of old
Paris that could be seen only from this point of view. This elegant
isolated tower--all that is left of a church dating from the
beginnings of Christian construction, and destroyed during the
Revolution--was itself erected late in the fifteenth and early in the
sixteenth century, and shows the last effort of mediæval Gothic in
Paris. It is now used as a weather observatory. Pascal's statue, by
Cavelier, has been placed under the great vaulted arch that forms its
base, and all about, in the little park, are instruments for taking
and recording all sorts of atmospheric changes.
It may have been while driving between this tower and his sister's
house, that Pascal's carriage was overturned on Pont-Neuf, and he
narrowly escaped death by falling or by drowning. From that day he
gave up his service to science, and gave himself up solely to the
service of God. Into his "Thoughts" he put all his depth of
reflection and his intensity of feeling, all his force and finish of
phrase. Yet, always behind this Christian philosopher, we are
conscious of the man of feeling, who owns that he could be drawn down
from his high meditations, and could be drawn up from his profound
melancholy, by "_un peu de bon temps, un bon mot, une louange, une
caresse_."
His body was laid in the Abbey Church of Sainte-Geneviève, and was
removed, on the destruction of that edifice in 1807, to its successor
in tradition and sentiment, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. It rests at the
base of one of the outer pillars of the Lady Chapel, opposite the spot
of Racine's final sepulture. The two tablets from their original tombs
have been set in the pillars of the first chapel on the southern side
of the choir, just behind the exquisite rood-screen.
When aged Rue Rollin was quite young it was christened Rue
Neuve-Saint-Étienne, and it was bordered by cottages standing in their
own gardens, looking down the slope across the town to the river, this
being the highest street on the hill-side. Its length has been
lessened by Rue Monge, and that portion left to the east of the new
street is now Rue de Navarre. Rue Monge was cut through the crest of
the hill, so that one must mount by stone steps to the old level of
the western end of Rue Neuve-Saint-Étienne, named anew in honor of the
scholar and historian, who has given his name also to the great
college, since removed from this quarter to Boulevard Rochechouart,
away off on the northern heights. Charles Rollin was an earnest
student, an unusually youthful Rector of the University, and
principal of the College of Beauvais in 1696, and a writer of history
and _belles-lettres_ of great charm but little weight. He was, withal,
an honest soul, somewhat naïve, of simple tastes and of quiet life. So
he came to this secluded quarter, when a little over seventy, and here
he died in 1741. His cottage is numbered 8 in the street, and is
occupied by the school of Sainte-Geneviève, whose demure maidens do no
violence to his tranquil garden in which they stroll. For their use a
small pavilion has been built in the rear of the garden, but there is
no other change. The two Latin lines, inscribed by him in praise of
his rural home within the town, remain on an inner wall of his cottage
at your left as you enter.
Fifty years later another writer found a quiet home in this same
street. Hidden behind the heavy outer door of No. 4, a roomy mansion
built in 1623 by a country-loving subject of Louis XIII., is a tablet
that tells of the residence here, from 1781 to 1786, of Jacques-Henri
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. A man of finer qualities and subtler charm
than Rollin, his work is of no greater weight in our modern eyes, for
with all the refinement of imagination and the charm of description
that made his pen "a magic wand" to Sainte-Beuve, his emotional
optimism grows monotonous, and his exuberant sensibility flows over
into sentimentality. In the court of his house is an ancient well, and
behind lies a lovable little garden, with a rare iron rail and
gateway. This traveller in many lands, this adorer of nature, took
keen delight in his outlook, from his third-story windows, over this
garden and the gardens beyond, to the Seine. Here in 1784 he wrote
"Studies from Nature," an instantaneous success, surpassed only by the
success of "Paul and Virginia," published in 1786. Possibly no book
has ever had such a vogue. It was after reading this work, in Italy,
that the young Bonaparte wrote to Bernardin: "Your pen is a painter's
brush." Yet his reading of the manuscript, before its publication, in
the _salon_ of Madame Necker, had merely bored his hearers, and the
humiliated author had fled from their yawns to this congenial
solitude.
The narrow street has suffered slight change since those days, or
since those earlier days, when René Descartes found a temporary home,
probably on the site of present No. 14, a house built since his day
here. That was between 1613, when he first came from Brittany, and
1617, when he went to the Netherlands. But there can be found no trace
of the stay in this street, nor of the secluded home in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, of the founder of Cartesian philosophy--the first
movement in the direction of modern philosophy--the father of modern
physiology, as Huxley claims, and of modern psychology, as its
students allow. His wandering life, in search always of truth, ended
in 1650, at the court of Christina of Sweden. His body was brought
back to France by the ambassador of Louis XIV., and placed in the old
Church of Sainte-Geneviève. In 1793, the Convention decreed its
removal to the recently completed and secularized Panthéon, and from
there it was carried for safe keeping, along with so many others, to
the Museum of French Monuments. In 1819 it found final resting-place
in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the third chapel on the southern side of
the choir. The man himself lives for us on the wonderful canvas of
Franz Hals in the gallery of the Louvre.
[Illustration: René Descartes.
(From the portrait by Franz Hals, in the Musée du Louvre.)]
The Paris of the north bank has its slope, that looks across the Seine
to this southern slope, and that has come to be its Scholarly Quarter.
The high land away behind the lowlands stretching along the northern
bank was taken early by the Romans for their villas, and then by
nobles for their _châteaux_, and then by the _bourgeoisie_ for their
cottages. As _la Ville_ grew, its citizens gave all their thought to
honest industry and to the honest struggle for personal and municipal
rights, so that none was left for literature. When its time came, the
town had spread up and over these northern heights, and men of letters
and of the arts were attracted by their open spaces and ample outlook.
So large a colony of these workers had settled there, early in the
nineteenth century, that some among them gave to their hill-side the
name of "_la Nouvelle Athènes_." Its vogue has gone on growing, and it
is crowded with the memories of dead pen-workers, and with the
presence of living pen-workers. So, too, are the suburbs toward the
west, and this Scholars' Quarter on the southern bank, which is barely
touched on in this book, given so greatly as it is to history,
archæology, architecture, and other arts. All this wide-spread
district awaits the diligent pen that has given us "The Literary
Landmarks of London," to give us, as completely and accurately, "The
Literary Landmarks of Paris."
MOLIÈRE AND HIS FRIENDS
MOLIÈRE AND HIS FRIENDS
In the early years of the seventeenth century there stood a low, wide,
timbered house on the eastern corner of Rues Saint-Honoré and des
Vieilles-Étuves. To the dwellers in that crowded quarter of the Halles
it was known as "_la Maison des Singes_," because of the carved wooden
tree on its angle, in the branches of which wooden monkeys shook down
wooden fruit to an old wooden monkey at its foot. This house, that
dated from the thirteenth century surely, and that may have been a
part of Queen Blanche's Paris, was torn down only in 1800, and a slice
of its site has been cut off by Rue Sauval, the widened and renamed
Rue des Vieilles-Étuves. The modern building on that corner, numbered
92 Rue Saint-Honoré, is so narrow as to have only one window on each
of its three floors facing that street. Around the first story, above
the butcher's shop on the entrance floor, runs a balcony with great
gilt letters on its rail, that read "_Maison de Molière_." High up on
its front wall is a small tablet, whose legend, deciphered with
difficulty from the street, claims this spot for the birthplace of
Molière. This is a veracious record. The exact date of the birth of
the eldest son of Jacques Poquelin and Marie Cressé, his wife, is
unknown, but it was presumably very early in January, 1622, for, on
the fifteenth of that month, the baby was baptized "Jean Poquelin," in
his father's parish church of Saint-Eustache--a new church not quite
completed then. The name "Baptiste" was, seemingly, added a little
later by his parents.
On this corner the boy lived for eleven years; here his mother died,
ten years after his birth, and here his father soon married again; he
removed, in 1633, to a house he had inherited, the ground floor of
which he made his shop of upholstery and of similar stuffs, the family
residing above. It was No. 3 Rue de la Tonnellerie, under the pillars
of the Halles, possibly, but not certainly, on the site of the present
No. 31 Rue du Pont-Neuf. In a niche, cut in the front wall of this
modern building, has been placed a bust of Molière and an inscription
asserting that this was his birthspot, a local legend that harms no
one, and comforts at least the _locataire_.
Hereabout, certainly, the boy played, running forward and back across
the market. On its northern side, near the public pillory, was another
house owned by his father, on the old corner of Rue de la Réale, and
its site is now covered by the pavement of modern Rue Rambuteau. It is
pleasant to picture the lad in this ancient quarter, as we walk
through those few of its streets unchanged to this day, notably that
bit of Rue de la Ferronerie, so narrow that it blocked the carriage of
Henri IV., a few years before, and brought him within easy reach of
the knife of Ravaillac as he sprang on the wheel.
François Coppée, not yet an old man, readily recalls the square squat
columns of the old Halles, and, all about, the solid houses supported
by pillars like the arcades of Place des Vosges; all just as when
young Poquelin played about them. Plays, as well as play, already
attracted him; he loved to look at the marionettes and the queer
side-shows of the outdoor fairs held about the Halles; and his
grandfather, Louis Cressé, an ardent playgoer, often took him to laugh
at the funny fellows who frolicked on the trestles of the Pont-Neuf,
and at the rollicking farces in the Théâtre du Marais. No doubt he
saw, too, the tragedies of the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and
this observant boy may well have anticipated the younger Crébillon's
opinion, that French tragedy of that day was the most absolute farce
yet invented by the human mind. For this was a little while before the
coming of Corneille with true tragedy.
This son of the King's upholsterer cared nothing for his father's
trade, and not much for books. He learned, early, that his eyes were
meant for seeing, and he not only saw everything, but he remembered
and reflected; showing signs already of that bent which gave warrant,
in later life, for Boileau's epithet, "Molière the Contemplator."
He was sent, in 1636, being then fourteen years old, to the Collége de
Clermont, named a little later, and still named, Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
Rebuilt during the Second Empire, it stands on its old site behind
the Collége de France, in widened Rue Saint-Jacques. Here, during his
course of five years, he was sufficiently diligent in such studies as
happened to please him; and was prominent in the plays, acted by the
scholars at each prize-giving. He made many friendships with boys who
became famous men; with one, just leaving school as he came, who
especially stood his friend in after life--the youthful Prince de
Conti, younger brother of the great Condé. And this elder brother
became, years after, the friend and protector of the young
actor-playwright, just as he was of some others of that famous group,
Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau. All these, along with all men eminent in
any way, were welcomed to his grand seat at Chantilly, and were
frequent guests at his great town-house, whose _salon_ was a rival to
that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. His mansion, with its grounds,
occupied the whole of that triangular space bounded now by Rues de
Vaugirard, de Condé, and Monsieur-le-Prince. At the northern point of
that triangle, nearly on the ground now covered by the Second Théâtre
Français, the Odéon, stood the prince's private theatre; wherein
Molière, by invitation, played the rôles of author, actor, manager.
Molière's customary rôle in this great house was that of friend of the
host, who wrote to him: "Come to me at any hour you please; you have
but to announce your name; you visit can never be ill-timed."
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin betook himself early to the boards for which
he was born, from which he could not be kept by his course at college
or at law. He studied law fitfully for a while; sufficiently, withal,
to lay up a stock of legal technicalities and procedure, which he
employed with precision in many of his plays. So, too, he took in, no
doubt unconsciously, details of his father's business; and his
references, in his stage-talk, to hangings, furniture, and costumes,
are frequent and exact.
The father, unable to journey with the King to Narbonne in the spring
of 1642, as his official duties demanded, had his son appointed to the
place, and the young man, accompanying the court and playing
_tapissier_ on this journey, saw, it is said, the execution of
Cinq-Mars and de Thou. In the provinces at this time, or it may have
been in Paris earlier, he met, became intimate with, and soon after
joined, a troupe of strolling players, made up of Joseph Béjart, his
two sisters Madeleine and Geneviève, and other young Parisians.
This troupe was touring in Languedoc early in 1642, and was rather
strong in its talent and fortunate in its takings; in no way akin to
that shabby set of barnstormers satirized by Scarron in his "Roman
Comique." We cannot fix the date of Poquelin's _début_ in the company,
but we know that--with the unhallowed ambition of the born and
predestined comedian--he began in tragedy, and that he was greeted by
his rural audiences with hootings, punctuated by the pelting of fried
potatoes, then sold at the theatre door. And we know that the troupe
came north to Rouen in the autumn of 1643, playing a night or two in
the natal town of Corneille. It is a plausible and a pleasing fancy
that sees the glory of French dramatic art of that day, at home on a
visit to his mother, receiving free tickets for the show, with the
respects of the young recruit to the stage, the glory of French
dramatic art at no distant day. The troupe had gone to Rouen and to
other provincial towns only while awaiting the construction of their
theatre in the capital, contracted for during the summer. At last, on
the evening of December 31, 1643, it raised its first curtain to the
Parisian public, under the brave, or the bumptious, title of
"l'Illustre Théâtre."
To trace, from his first step on Paris boards, the successive sites of
Molière's theatres is a delightful task, in natural continuation of
that begun in an earlier chapter, where those theatres in existence
before his time were pointed out. In England, we know, stage-players
were "strollers and vagabonds" by statute; not allowed to play within
London's walls. All their early theatres were outside the City limits.
The Globe, the summer theatre of Shakespeare and his "fellows"--"whereon
was prepared scaffolds for beholders to stand upon"--was across the
Thames, on Bankside, Southwark. So, too, were the Hope, the Rose, the
Swan. The Curtain was in Shoreditch, Davenant's theatre in Lincoln's
Inn Fields, and the Blackfriars theatre on Ludgate Hill, just without
the old wall.
The early playhouses of Paris were built--but for another reason--on
the outer side of the town wall of Philippe-Auguste, and their
seemingly unaccountable situations are easily accounted for by
following on either bank the course of that wall, already plainly
mapped out in preceding pages.
This magnificent wall of a magnificent monarch had lost much of its
old significance for defence with the coming of gunpowder, and a new
use was found for it, in gentler games than war, as the town outgrew
its encircling limits. In the Middle Ages, tennis--the oldest
ball-game known--was a favorite sport of kings and of those about
them. It was called _le jeu de paume_, being played with the hand
until the invention of the racket; the players standing in the ditch
outside the wall, against which the ball was thrown. Beyond the ditch
was built the court for onlookers, the common folk standing on its
floor, their betters seated in the gallery. When the game lost its
vogue, these courts were easily and cheaply turned into the rude
theatres of that day, with abundant space for actors and spectators;
those of low degree crowding on foot in the body of the building,
those who paid a little more seated in the galleries, those of high
degree on stools and benches at the side of the stage, and even on the
stage itself. This encroachment on the stage, within sight of the
audience, grew to such an abuse that it was done away with in 1759,
and the scene was left solely to the players.
Where a tablet is let into the wall of the present Nos. 12 and 14 Rue
Mazarine, then named the Fossé-de-Nesle--the ancient outer ditch of
the old wall--a roomy playhouse had been contrived from a former
tennis-court owned by Arnold Mestayer, a solid citizen of the town,
captain of the Hundred Musketeers of Henri IV.'s day. This was the
theatre taken by the Béjart troupe and named "l'Illustre Théâtre."
Here young Poquelin made his first bow to Paris. The building stood on
the sites of the present Nos. 10, 12, and 14 Rue Mazarine, its only
entrance for spectators reached by an alley that ran along the line
between Nos. 14 and 16, and so through to Rue de Seine, to where the
buildings extended over the ground now covered by Nos. 11 and 13.
These latter houses are claimed by local legend for Molière's
residence, and it may well be that the rear part of the theatre served
as sleeping-quarters for the troupe. The interior of No. 11 is of very
ancient construction, its front being of later date. In the wall
between it and No. 9--a low wooden structure, possibly a portion of
the original fabric--is hidden the well that served first the
tennis-players and then the stage-players. There is no longer any
communication between these houses in Rue de Seine and those in Rue
Mazarine. These latter were built in 1830, when the street was
widened, that portion of the old theatre having been demolished a few
years earlier.
It was in June, 1644, that the name Molière first appears, signed--it
is his earliest signature in existence--among the rest of the company,
to a contract with a dancing man for the theatre. How he came to
select this name is not known, nor was it known to any of his young
comrades; for he always refused to give his reasons. What is known, is
that it was a name of weight even then, proving that, within the first
six months of the theatre's existence, his business ability had made
him its controlling spirit. But his abilities as manager and as actor
could not bring success to the theatre. Foreign and civil wars made
the State poor; wide-spread financial troubles made the people poor;
that cruelly cold winter froze out the public. "_Nul animal vivant
n'entra dans notre salle_," are the bitterly true words, put into the
mouth of the young actor-manager, by an unknown writer of a scurrilous
verse.
He and the troupe were liberated from their lease within the year,
and, early in 1645, they migrated over the river to the _Jeu de Paume
de la Croix-Noire_. On either end of the long, low building at No. 32
Quai des Célestins is a tablet; the western one showing where stood
the Tour Barbeau that ended the wall on this river-bank; that at the
eastern end marking the site of this theatre, just without the wall.
It had an entrance on the quay-front for the boatmen and other water-side
patrons, another in Rue des Barrés for its patrons coming by coach.
Molière lodged in the house--probably a portion of the theatre--at the
corner of the quay and of Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul--that country
lane wherein had died Rabelais, nearly a century earlier. Little Rue
des Barrés, already seen taking its name from the barred or striped
gowns of the monks who settled there, is now Rue de l'Ave-Maria, and
at its number 15 you will find the stage entrance of this theatre,
hardly changed since it was first trodden by the players from over the
river. There is the low and narrow door, one of its jambs bent with
the weight of the more modern structure above, and beyond is the
short alleyway, equally narrow, by which they passed to the stage. At
its inner end, where it opens into a small court, is the stone rim of
a well, half hidden in the wall. It is the well provided in each
tennis-court for the players, and handed on, with the court itself,
for the use of the actors. Molière has leaned over this well-curb to
wash away his rouge and wrinkles. It is an indisputable and attractive
witness of his early days. In Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, where he
knelt at the altar for his marriage and stood at the font with his
son; in Saint-Eustache, where he carried his second son for baptism;
in Saint-Roch, where he wrote his name as godfather of a friend's
daughter--within these vast and dim aisles, his bodily presence is
vaguely shadowed forth; _here_ we can touch the man.
[Illustration: Stage Door of Molière's Second Theatre in Paris.]
What sort of plays were presented at this house we do not know, the
only record that remains referring to the production of "Artaxerxes"
by one Mignon. Whatever they played, neither the rough men of the quay
and of Port Saint-Paul, nor the _bourgeoisie_ of the Marais, nor the
fine folk of Place Royale, crowded into the new theatre.
During this disastrous season, the troupe received royal commands to
play at Fontainebleau before the King and court, and later, by
invitation of the Duc de l'Éperon, at his splendid mansion in Rue de
la Plâtrière--that mansion in which lived and died La Fontaine, half a
century later. Neither these fashionable flights, nor the royal and
noble patronage accorded to the troupe, could save it from failure and
final bankruptcy. Molière, the responsible manager, was arrested for
the theatre's poor little debt for candles and lights. He was locked
up for a night or two in the dismal prison of the Grand Châtelet, once
the fortress of Louis "le Gros," torn down only in 1802, on whose site
now sparkles the fountain of Place du Châtelet. From this lock-up,
having petitioned for release to M. d'Aubray, Civil Lieutenant of the
town and father of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, Molière was released
by the quickly tendered purse of Léonard Aubry, "Royal Paver and
Street Sweeper," who, when filling in the Fossé-de-Nesle and laying
out over it the present Rue Mazarine a year before, had made fast
friends with the young actor. "For his good service in ransoming the
said Poquelin," the entire troupe bound itself to make Aubry whole for
his debt.
Now they cross the river again to their former Faubourg Saint-Germain,
taking for their house the _Jeu de Paume de la Croix-Blanche_, outside
the wall on the south side of the present Rue de Buci, between the
_carrefour_ at its eastern end and Rue Grégoire-de-Tours. Here they
played, still playing against disaster, from the end of 1645 to the
end of 1646, and then they fled from Paris, fairly beaten, and betook
themselves to the southern provinces. We cannot follow their
wanderings, nor record their ups and downs, during the twelve years of
their absence. In the old play-bills we find the names of Béjart
_aîné_ and of his brother Louis, of their sisters Madeleine and
Geneviève. Toward the end of their touring they added to the family,
though not to the boards, Armande, who had been brought up in
Languedoc, and who was claimed by them to be their very young sister,
and by others to be the unacknowledged daughter of Madeleine.
Molière, the leader and manager of the troupe from the day they
started, was then only twenty-five years of age, not yet owning or
knowing his full powers. These he gained during that twelve years'
hard schooling and rude apprenticeship, so that he came back to the
capital, in 1658, master of his craft, with a load of literary luggage
such as no French tourist has carried, before or since.
Under princely patronage, won in the provinces, his troupe appeared
before Louis XIV., the Queen-Mother, and the entire court, on October
24, 1658, in a theatre improvised in the Salle des Gardes of the old
Louvre, now known as the Salle des Caryatides. The pieces on that
opening night were Corneille's "Nicomède" and the manager's "Le
Docteur Amoureux." In November, the "_troupe de Monsieur_"--that title
permitted by the King's brother--was given possession of the theatre
in the palace of the Petit-Bourbon. It stood between the old Louvre,
with which it was connected by a long gallery, and the Church of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, and was torn down in 1660 to make place for
the new colonnade that forms the present eastern face of the Louvre.
The dainty Jardin de l'Infante covers the site of the stage, just at
the corner of the Egyptian Gallery.
In this hall Molière's company played for two years, on alternate
nights with the Italian comedians, presenting, along with old standard
French pieces--for authors in vogue held aloof--his provincial
successes, as well as new plays and ballets invented by him for the
delectation of the _Grand Monarque_. From this time his remaining
fifteen years of life were filled with work; his brain and his pen
were relentlessly employed; honors and wealth came plentifully to him,
happiness hardly at all.
While at this theatre Molière lived just around the corner on Quai de
l'École, now Quai du Louvre, in a house that was torn away in 1854 for
the widening of present Rue du Louvre. Many of the buildings left on
the quay are of the date and appearance of this, his last bachelor
home.
Driven from the Petit-Bourbon by its hurried demolition in 1660,
Molière was granted the use and the privileges of the _Salle_ of the
former Palais-Cardinal, partly gone to ruin and needing large
expenditure to make it good. It had been arranged by Richelieu, just
before his death, for the presentation of his "Mirame." For the great
cardinal and great minister thought that he was a great dramatist too,
and in his vanity saw himself the centre of the mimic stage, as he
really was of the world-stage he managed. He is made by Bulwer to say,
with historic truth: "Of my ministry I am not vain; but of my muse, I
own it." His theatre in his residence--willed at his death to the
King, and thenceforward known as the Palais-Royal--was therefore the
only structure in Paris designed especially and solely for playhouse
purposes. It stood on the western corner of Rues Saint-Honoré and de
Valois, as a tablet there tells us. During the repairs Molière took
his troupe to various _châteaux_ about Paris, returning to open this
theatre on January 20, 1661. This removal was the last he made, and
this house was the scene of his most striking successes.
It is not out of place here to follow his troupe for a while after his
death, and so complete our record of those early theatres. His widow,
succeeding to the control of the company, was, within three months,
compelled to give up the Cardinal's house to Lulli, the most popular
musician of that day, and a scheming fellow withal. The unscrupulous
Florentine induced the King to grant him this Salle des Spectacles for
the production of his music. The opera held the house until fire
destroyed it in 1763, when a new "Academy of Music" was constructed on
the eastern corner of the same streets; this, also, was burned in
1781. Above the tablet recording these dates on this eastern-corner
wall is a fine old sun-dial, such as is rarely seen in Paris, and
seldom noticed now.
The widow Molière, being dispossessed, found a theatre in Rue
Mazarine, just beyond her husband's first theatre, "in the
Tennis-Court where hangs a Bottle for a Sign." For it had been the
_Jeu de Paume de la Bouteille_, and now became the Théâtre Guénégaud,
being exactly opposite the end of that street. Within the structure at
No. 42 Rue Mazarine may be seen the heavy beams of the front portion
of its fabric, where was the entrance for the public. The space
behind, now used for a workshop, with huge pillars around its four
sides, served for the audience, and the stage was built farther
beyond. On the court of this house, and on the contiguous court of No.
43 Rue de Seine, stood a large building, whose first floor was taken
by Madame Molière, and in its rear wall she cut a door to give access
to her stage. The entrance for the performers was in the little
Passage du Pont-Neuf, and under it there are remains of the
foundations of the theatre. Here, in May, 1677, the widow took the
name of Madame Guérin on her marriage with a comedian of her company.
And we feel as little regret as she seems to have felt for her loss of
an illustrious name. In the words of a derisive verse of the time:
"_Elle avoit un mari d'esprit, qu'elle aimoit peu;
Elle prend un de chair, qu'elle aime davantage._"
[Illustration: COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE 1680]
This was the first theatre to present to the general public "lyric
dramas set to music," brought first to France by Mazarin for his
private stage in the small hall of the Palais-Royal, where they were
presented as "_Comédies en Musique, avec machines à la mode
d'Italie_." They bored everybody, the fashion for opera not yet being
set. On October 21, 1680, by letters-patent from royalty, the troupe
of the Théâtre Guénégaud was united to that of the Hôtel de
Bourgogne, and to the combined companies was granted the name of
Comédie Française, the first assumption of that now time-honored
title. The theatre became so successful that the Jansenists in the
Collége Mazarin--the present Institute--made an uproar because they
were annoyed by the traffic and the turmoil in the narrow street, and
succeeded in driving away the playhouse in 1688. After a long search,
the Comédie Française found new quarters in the _Jeu de Paume de
l'Étoile_, built along the outer edge of the street made over the
ditch of the wall, named Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, now Rue de
l'Ancienne-Comédie. At its present No. 14, set in the original front
wall of the theatre, between the second and third stories, a tablet
marks the site; above it is a bas-relief, showing a Minerva reclining
on a slab. She traces on paper, with her right hand, that which is
reflected in the mirror of Truth, held in her left hand. At the rear
of the court stands the old fabric that held the stage. Since those
boards were removed to other walls--the story shall be told in a later
chapter--the building has had various usages. It now serves as a
storehouse for wall-paper. During the Empire it was taken for his
studio by the artist Antoine-Jean Gros, the successor of David and the
forerunner of Géricault; so standing for the transition from the
Classic to the Romantic school. It is not true that he killed himself
in this studio. He went out from it, when maddened by the art critics,
and drowned himself in the Seine in the summer of 1835.
It was a great bill with which the Comédie Française opened this house
on the night of April 18, 1689, for it was made up of two
masterpieces, Racine's "Phèdre" and Molière's "Le Médecin Malgré Lui."
A vast and enthusiastic audience thronged, with joyous clatter,
through narrow Rues Mazarine and Dauphine, coming from the river. The
Café Procope, recently opened just opposite the theatre, was crowded
after the performance, the drinkers of coffee not quite sure that they
liked the new beverage. And so, at the top of their triumphs, we leave
the players with whom we have vagabondized so long and so
sympathetically.
Molière, at the height of his career, had married Armande Béjart, he
being forty years of age, she "aged twenty years or thereabout," in
the words of the marriage contract, signed January 23, 1662. No one
knows now, very few knew then, whether the bride was the sister or the
daughter of Madeleine Béjart, Molière's friend and comrade for many
years, who doubled her rôle of versatile actress with that of
provident cashier of the company. She was devoted to Armande, whom she
had taken to her home from the girl's early schooling in Languedoc,
and over whom she watched in the _coulisses_. She fought against the
marriage, which she saw was a mistake, finally accepted it, and at
her own death in 1672 left all her handsome savings to the wife of
Molière.
In the cast of the "École des Maris," first produced in 1661, appears
the name of Armande Béjart, and, three months after the marriage,
"Mlle. Molière"--so were known the wives of the _bourgeoisie_,
"Madame" being reserved for _grandes-dames_--played the small part of
Élise put for her by the author into his "Critique de l'École des
Femmes." Henceforward she was registered as one of the troupe, the
manager receiving two portions of the receipts for his and her united
shares. She was a pleasing actress, never more than mediocre, except
in those parts, in his own plays, fitted to her and drilled into her
by her husband. She had an attractive presence on the boards, without
much beauty, without any brains. Her voice was exquisite, opulent in
tones that seemed to suggest the heart she did not own. For she was
born with an endowment of adroit coquetry, and she developed her gift.
She was flighty and frivolous, evasive and obstinate, fond of
pleasures not always innocent. Her spendthrift ways hurt Molière's
thrifty spirit, her coquetry hurt his love, her caprices hurt his
honor. His infatuation, a madness closely allied to his genius,
brought to him a fleeting happiness, followed by almost unbroken
torments of love, jealousy, forgiveness. In his home he found none of
the rest nor comfort nor sympathy so much needed, after his prodigious
work in composing, drill-work in rehearsing, and public work in
performing at his theatre, and at Versailles and Fontainebleau. He
got no consolation from his wife for the sneers of venomous rivals,
enraged by his supremacy, and for the stabs of the great world, eager
to avenge his keen puncturing of its pretence and its priggishness.
And while he writhed in private, he made fun in public of his
immitigable grief, and portrayed on the stage the betrayed and
bamboozled husband--at once tragic and absurd--that he believed
himself to be. These eleven years of home-sorrows shortened his life.
On the very day of his fatal attack, he said to the flippant minx,
Armande: "I could believe myself happy when pleasure and pain equally
filled my life; but, to-day, broken with grief, unable to count on one
moment of brightness or of ease, I must give up the game. I can hold
out no longer against the distress and despair that leave me not one
instant of respite."
The church ceremony of their marriage had taken place on February 20,
1662, at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, as its register testifies. He had
already left his bachelor quarters on Quai de l'École, and had taken
an apartment in a large house situated on the small open space opposite
the entrance of the Palais-Royal, the germ of the present _place_
of that name. His windows looked out toward his theatre, and on the two
streets at whose junction the house stood--Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre
and Saint-Honoré. The first-named street, near its end on Quai du
Louvre, held the Hôtel de Rambouillet, which was a reconstruction of
the old Hôtel de Pisani, made in 1618, after the plan and under the
eye of the Marquise de Rambouillet. She is known in history, as she
was known in the _salons_ of her day, by her sobriquet of
"Arthénice"--an anagram coined by Malherbe from her name Catherine.
Hither came all that was brilliant in Paris, and much that pretended
to be brilliant; and from here went out the grotesque affectations of
the _Précieuses Ridicules_. The mansion--one of the grandest of that
period--having passed into other hands, was used as a Vauxhall d'Hiver
in 1784, as a theatre in 1792, and was partly burned in 1836. The
remaining portion, which served as stables for Louis-Philippe, was
wiped away, along with all that end of the old street, by the Second
Empire, to make space for the alignment of the wings of the Louvre.
The buildings of the Ministry of Finance cover a portion of the
street, and the site of Molière's residence, in the middle of the
present Place du Palais-Royal, is trodden, almost every day of the
year, by the feet of American women, hurrying to and from the Museum
of the Louvre or the great shop of the same name.
After a short stay in their first home, Molière and his wife set up
housekeeping in Rue de Richelieu. It is not known if it was in the
house of his later domicile and death. Their cook here was the famous
La Forêt, to whom, it is said, Molière read his new plays, trying
their effect on the ordinary auditor, such as made up the bulk of the
audiences of that time. Servants were commonly called La Forêt then,
and the real name of this cook was Renée Vannier. Within a year,
domestic dissensions came to abide in the household, and it was moved
back to its first home, where Madeleine had remained, and now made one
of the _ménage_. To it came a new inmate in February, 1664, a boy,
baptized at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, having the great monarch for a
godfather, and for a godmother Henrietta of England, wife of the
King's brother, Philippe d'Orléans, and poisoned by him or his
creatures a few years later, it is believed. These royal sponsors were
represented at the christening by distinguished State servants, the
whole affair giving ample proof of this player's position at the time.
A little later, we have hints that the small family was living farther
east in Rue Saint-Honoré, at the corner of Rue d'Orléans, still near
his theatre, in a house swept away when that street was widened into
Rue du Louvre. From this house was buried, in November, 1664, the
child Louis, the burial-service being held at Saint-Eustache, their
parish church, Molière's baptismal church, his mother's burial church.
Here, too, in the following year, August, 1665, he brought to the font
his newly born daughter, Esprit-Madeleine. In October of this same
year he took a long lease of an apartment in their former house on the
corner of Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, and there they stayed for seven
years, removing once more, and for the last time, in October, 1672, to
Rue de Richelieu.
Where now stands No. 40 of that street, René Baudelet, Tailor to the
Queen by title, had taken a house only recently builded, and from him
Molière rented nearly every floor. His lease was for a term of six
years, and he lived only four and a half months after coming here. The
first floor was set apart for his wife, whose ostentatious furnishing,
including a bed fit for a queen, is itemized in the inventory made
after her husband's death. He took for his apartment the whole second
floor, spaciously planned and sumptuously furnished; for he, too, was
lavish in his expenditure and loved costly surroundings. His plate was
superb, his wardrobe rich, his collection of dramatic books and
manuscripts complete and precious. His bedroom, wherein he died, was
on the rear of the house, and its windows looked over the garden of
the Palais-Royal, to which he had access from his terrace below, and
thence by steps down to a gate in the garden wall. Thus he could get
to his theatre by way of those trim paths of Richelieu's planning, as
well as by going along the street and around the corner. You must bear
in mind that the galleries of the Palais-Royal, with their shops, were
not constructed until 1784, and that Rues de Valois and Montpensier
were not yet cut; so that the garden reached, on either side, to the
backs of the houses that fronted on Rues de Richelieu and des
Bons-Enfants. Many of the occupants had, like Molière, their private
doors in the garden wall, with access by stone steps. One of these
staircases is still left, and may be seen in Rue de Valois, descending
from the rear of the Hôtel de la Chancellerie d'Orléans, whose Doric
entrance-court is at No. 19 Rue des Bons-Enfants.
The house now numbered 40 Rue de Richelieu and 37 Rue Montpensier was
erected soon after 1767, when the walls that had harbored Molière were
torn down to prevent them from tumbling down. The present building has
an admirable circular staircase climbing to an open lantern in the
roof. The houses on either side, numbered 37 _bis_ and 35 Rue
Montpensier, retain their original features of a central body with
projecting wings, and so serve to show us a likeness of Molière's
dwelling. Their front windows look out now on the grand fountain of
the younger Visconti's design, erected to Molière's memory in 1844, at
the junction of Rue de Richelieu and old Rue Traversière, now named
Rue Molière. This fountain, flowing full and free always, as flowed
the inspiration of his Muse, is surmounted by an admirable seated
statue of the player-poet by Seurre, the figures of Serious and of
Light Comedy, standing at his feet on either side, being of Pradier's
design. And in Rue de Richelieu, a little farther south, at the
present Nos. 23 and 23 _bis_--once one grand mansion, still intact,
though divided--lived his friend Mignard, and here he died in 1795.
The painter and the player had met at Avignon in 1657-8, and grew to
be life-long friends, with equal admiration of the other's art.
Indeed, Molière considered that he honored Raphael and Michael Angelo,
when he named them "_ces Mignards de leur âge_." Certainly no such
vivid portrait of Molière has come down to us as that on the canvas of
this artist, now in the gallery at Chantilly. It shows us not the
comedian, but the man in the maturity of his strength and beauty.
His blond _perruque_, such as was worn then by all gallants, such as
made his Alceste sneer, softens the features marked strongly even so
early in life, but having none of the hard lines cut deeper by worry
and weariness. The mouth is large and frank, the eyes glow with a
humorous melancholy, the expression is eloquent of his wistful
tenderness.
[Illustration: The Molière Fountain.]
Early in 1667 we find Molière leasing a little cottage, or part of a
cottage, at Auteuil, for a retreat at times. He needed its pure air
for his failing health, its quiet for his work, and its distance from
the disquiet of his home with Armande and Madeleine. He had laid by
money; and his earnings, with his pension from the King--who had
permitted to the troupe the title of "His Majesty's Comedians"--gave
him a handsome income. He was not without shrewdness as a man of
affairs, and not without tact as a courtier. Success, in its worst
worldly sense, could come only through royal favor in that day, and no
man, whatever his manliness, seemed ashamed to stoop to flatter.
Racine, La Fontaine, the sterling Boileau, the antiquely upright
Corneille, were tarred, thickly or thinly, with the same brush.
Auteuil was then a tranquil village, far away from the town's turmoil,
and brought near enough for its dwellers by the silent and swift
river. Now it is a bustling suburb of the city, and the site of
Molière's cottage and grounds is covered by a block of commonplace
modern dwellings on the corner of Rue Théophile Gautier and Rue
d'Auteuil, and is marked by a tablet in the front wall of No. 2 of
the latter street. It has been claimed that this is a mistaken
localization, and that it is nearly opposite this spot that we must
look for his garden and a fragment of his villa, still saved. The
conscientious pilgrim may not fail to take that look, and will ring at
the iron gate of No. 57 Rue Théophile Gautier. It is the gate of the
ancient _hôtel_ of Choiseul-Praslin, a name of unhappy memory in the
annals of swell assassins. The ducal wearer of the title, during the
reign of Louis-Philippe, stabbed his wife to death in their town-house
in the Champs Élysées, and poisoned himself in his cell to save his
condemnation by his fellow-peers of France. The ancient family mansion
has been taken by "_Les Dominicaines_," who have devoted themselves
for centuries to the education of young girls, and have placed here
the Institution of Saint Thomas of Aquinas.
A white-robed sister graciously gives permission to enter, and leads
the visitor across the spacious court, through the stately rooms and
halls--all intact in their old-fashioned harmony of proportion and
decoration--into the garden that stretches far along Rue de Rémusat,
and that once spread away down the slope to the Seine. Here, amid the
magnificent cedar trees, centuries old, stands a mutilated pavilion of
red brick and white stone or stucco, showing only its unbroken porch
with pillars and a fragment of the fabric, cut raggedly away a few
feet behind, to make room for a new structure. Over the central door
are small figures in bas-relief, and in the pediment above one reads,
"_Ici fut la Maison de Molière._" It would be a comfort to be able to
accept this legend; the fact that prevents is that the pavilion was
erected only in 1855 by the owner of the garden, to keep alive the
associations of Molière with this quarter!
It is in his garden, behind the wall that holds the tablet, that we
may see the player-poet as he rests in the frequent free hours, and
days withal, that came in the actor's busy life then. Here he walks,
alone or with his chosen cronies: Rohault, his sympathetic physician;
Boileau, a frequent visitor; Chapelle, who had a room in the cottage,
the quondam schoolfellow and the man of rare gifts; a pleasing
minor-poet, fond of fun, fonder of wine, friendly even to rudeness,
but beloved by all the others, whom he teased and ridiculed, and yet
counselled shrewdly. He sympathized with, albeit his sceptic spirit
could not quite fraternize with, the sensitive vibrating nature of
Molière, that brought, along with acutest enjoyment, the keenest
suffering. In this day-and-night companionship, craving consolation
for his betossed soul, Molière gave voice to his sorrows, bewailing
his wife's frailties and the torments they brought to him--to him,
"born to tenderness," as he truly put it, but unable to plant any root
of tenderness in her shallow nature--loving her in spite of reason,
living with her, but not as her husband, suffering ceaselessly.
This garden often saw gayer scenes of good-fellowship and feasting,
and once a historic frolic, when the _convives_, flushed with wine,
ran down the slope to the river, bent on plunging in to cool their
blood, and were kept dry and undrowned by Molière's steadier head and
hand. His _ménage_ was modest, and his wife seldom came out from their
town apartment, but his daughter was brought often for a visit from
her boarding-school near by in Auteuil. He was beloved by all his
neighbors, to whom he was known less by his public repute than by his
constant kindly acts among them. It was not the actor-manager, but the
"_tapissier valet-de-chambre du Roi_," then residing in Auteuil, who
signed the register of the parish church, as god-father of a village
boy on March 20, 1671; just as he had signed, in the same capacity,
the register of Saint-Roch on September 10, 1669, at the christening
of a friend's daughter, Jeanne Catherine Toutbel. These signatures
were destroyed when all the ancient church registers, then stored in
the Hôtel de Ville, were burned by the Commune.
On the night of Friday, February 16, 1673, while personating his
_Malade Imaginaire_--its fourth performance--Molière was struck down
by a genuine malady. He pulled through the play, and, as the curtain
went down at last, he was nearly strangled by a spasm of coughing that
broke a blood-vessel. Careful hands carried him around to his bedroom
on the second floor of No. 40, where in a few days--too few, his years
being a little more than fifty--death set him free from suffering.
This fatal crisis was the culmination of a long series of recurrent
paroxysms, coming from his fevered life and his fiery soul, that "o'er
informed the tenement of clay," in Dryden's phrase. And his heart had
been crushed by the death of his second boy, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste-Armand,
in October of the previous year. Then, on the physical side, he had
been subjected throughout long years to constant exposure to draughts
on the stage, and to sudden changes within and without the theatre,
most trying to so delicate a frame. His watchful friend, Boileau, had
often urged him to leave the stage before he should break down.
Moreover, it distressed Boileau that the greatest genius of his time,
as he considered Molière, should have to paint his face, put on a
false mustache, get into a bag and be beaten with sticks, in his
ludicrous rôle of comic valet. But all pleading was thrown away. The
invalid maintained that nothing but his own management, his own plays,
and his own playing, kept his theatre alive and his company from
starvation; and so he held on to the end, dying literally in harness.
His wife appeared too late on the last scene, the priest who was
summoned could not come in time, and the dying eyes were closed by two
stranger nuns, lodging for the time in the house.
The arm-chair, in which sat the _Malade Imaginaire_ on the last night
of his professional life, is treasured among the relics of the Théâtre
Français. It is a massive piece of oak furniture, with solid square
arms and legs; the roomy back lets down, and is held at any required
angle by an iron ratchet; there are iron pegs in front for the little
shelf, used by the sick man for his bottles and books. The brown
leather covering is time-worn and stitched in spots. It is a most
attractive relic, this simple piece of stage property. Its exact copy
as to shape, size, and color is used on the boards of the Théâtre
Français in the performances of "Le Malade Imaginaire." And, with
equal reverence, they kept for many years in the ancient village of
Pézénas, in Languedoc--where the strolling troupe wintered in 1655-6,
playing in the adjacent hamlets and in the _châteaux_ of the
_seigneurie_ about--the big wooden arm-chair belonging to the barber
Gély, and almost daily through that winter occupied by Molière. Upon
it he was wont to sit, in a corner, contemplating all who came and
went, making secret notes on the tablets he carried always for
constant records of the human document. It has descended to a
gentleman in Paris, by whom it is cherished.
The _curé_ of Saint-Eustache, the parish church, refused its sacrament
for the burial of the author of "Tartufe." "To get by prayer a little
earth," in Boileau's words, the widow had to plead with the King; and
it was only his order that wrung permission from the Archbishop of
Paris for those "maimed rites" that we all know. They were accorded,
not to the player, but, as the burial register reads, to the
"_Tapissier valet-de-chambre du Roi_." Carried to his grave by night,
he was followed by a great concourse of unhired mourners, of every
rank and condition; and to the poor among them, money was distributed
by the widow. The grave--in which was placed the French Terence and
Plautus in one, to use La Fontaine's happy phrase--was dug in that
portion of the cemetery of the Chapel of Saint-Joseph, belonging to
Saint-Eustache, that was styled consecrated by the priesthood. This
cemetery going out of use, the ground, which lay on the right of the
old road to Montmartre, was given to a market. This, in its turn, was
cleared away between 1875 and 1880, and on the site of the cemetery
are the buildings numbered 142 and 144 Rue Montmartre, 24 and 26 Rue
Saint-Joseph. Over the grave, as she thought, the widow erected a
great tombstone, under which, tradition says, Molière did not lie.
Tradition lies, doubtless, and Armande's belated grief and posthumous
devotion probably displayed themselves on the right spot. The stone
was cracked--going to bits soon after--by a fire built on it during
the terrible winter a few years later, when the poor of Paris were
warmed by great out-of-door fires. The exact spot of sepulture could
not be fixed in 1792, when the more sober revolutionary sections were
anxious to save the remains of their really great men from the
desecrations of the Patriots, to whom no ground was consecrate, nor
any memories sacred. Then, in the words of the official document, "the
bones which seemed to be those of Molière" were exhumed, and carried
for safe keeping to the Museum of French Monuments begun by Alexandre
Lenoir in 1791, in the Convent of the Petits-Augustins. Its site is
now mostly covered by the court of the Beaux-Arts in Rue Bonaparte.
Those same supposed bones of Molière were transferred, early in the
present century, to the Cemetery of Père-Lachaise, where they now lie
in a stone sarcophagus. By their side rest the supposed bones of La
Fontaine, removed from the same ground to the same museum at the same
time; La Fontaine having really been buried, twenty-two years after
Molière's burial, in the Cemetery of the Innocents, a half-mile from
that of Saint-Joseph!
Our ignorance as to whether these be Molière's bones, under the
monument in Père-Lachaise, is matched by our unacquaintance with the
facts of his life. And we know almost as little of Molière the man, as
we know of the man called Shakespeare--the only names in the modern
drama which can be coupled. We have no specimens of the actual
manuscript, and few specimens of the handwriting, of either. The
Comédie Française has a priceless signature of Molière given by Dumas
_fils_, and there are others, it is believed, on legal documents in
notaries' offices, but no one knows how to get at them.
His portraiture by pen, too, would have been lost to us, but for an
old lady who has left a detailed and vivid description of "Monsieur
Molière." This Madame Poisson was the daughter of Du Croissy, whose
name appears in the troupe's early play-bills; and the wife of Paul
Poisson, also an actor with Molière, and with his widow. Madame
Poisson died in 1756, aged ninety-eight, so that she was an observant
and intelligent girl of fifteen at the time of Molière's death. In her
recollections, written in 1740, she says that he was neither stout nor
thin; in stature he was rather tall than short, his carriage noble,
his leg very fine, his walk measured, his air most serious; the nose
large, the mouth wide, the lips full, his complexion dark, his
eyebrows black and heavy, "and the varied movements he gave
them"--and, she might have added, his whole facial flexibility--"made
him master of immense comic expression."
"His air most serious," she says; it was more than that, as is proven
by hints of his companions, and shown by strokes in the surviving
portraits. All these go to assure us of his essential melancholy. Not
only did he carry about with him the traditional dejection of the comic
actor, but he was by character and by habit contemplative--observant
of human nature--as well as introspective--peering into his own
nature. The man who does this necessarily grows sad. Molière's sadness
was mitigated by a humor of equal depth, a conjunction rare in the
Latin races, and found at its best only in him and in Cervantes. This
set him to writing and acting farces; and into them he put sentiment
for the first time on the French stage. There is a gravity behind his
buffoonery, and a secret sympathy with his butts. So, when he came to
write comedy--that hard and merciless exposure of our common human
nature, turned inside out for scorn--he left place for pity in his
ridicule, and there is no cruelty in his laughter. His wholly sweet
spirit could not be soured by the injustices and insolences that came
into his life. If there was a bitter taste in his mouth, his lips were
all honey. "_Ce rire amer_," marked by Boileau in the actor's
Alceste, was only his stage assumption for that character. The inborn
good-heartedness that made his comedy gracious and unhostile, made his
relations with men and women always kindly and generous. You see that
sympathy with humanity in Mignard's portrait, and in the bust in the
foyer of the Comédie Française, made by Houdon from other portraits
and from descriptions. Under the projecting brow of the observer are
the eyes of the contemplator, shrewd and speculative, and withal
infinitely sorrowful, with the sadness of the man who knew how to
suffer acutely, mostly in silence and in patience; and this is the
face of the man who made all France laugh!
* * * * *
PIERRE CORNEILLE stands in bronze on the bridge of his natal town,
Rouen, where he stood in the flesh of his twenty-eight years, among
other citizens who went to welcome Louis XIII. and his ruler,
Richelieu, on their visit in 1634. The young advocate by profession
and poet by predilection presented his verses in greeting and in honor
of the King, and was soon after enrolled one of the small and select
band of the Cardinal's poets. With the Cardinal's commission and a
play or two, already written when only twenty-three, he made his way
to Paris. For nearly thirty years, the years of his dramatic triumphs,
Corneille lived alternately in Paris and in Rouen, until his mother's
death, in 1662, left him free to make his home in the capital. In that
year he settled in rooms in the Hôtel de Guise, now the Musée des
Archives, whose ducal owner was a patron of the Théâtre du Marais,
close at hand. At his death, in or about 1664, Corneille sent in a
rhymed petition for rooms in the Louvre, where lodging was granted to
men of letters not too well-to-do. His claim was refused, and he took
an apartment in Rue de Cléry during that same year. It was a workman's
quarter, and none of its houses were very grand, but that of Corneille
is spoken of as one of the better sort, with its own _porte-cochère_.
Pierre's younger brother, Thomas, came to live in the same house. And
from this time on, the two brothers were never parted in their lives.
They had married sisters, and the two families dwelt in quiet
happiness under the common roof. This house in Rue de Cléry cannot be
fixed. It may be one of the poor dwellings still standing in that old
street, or it may no longer exist. It is the house famous in anecdotal
history for owning the trap-door in the floor between the
working-rooms of the brothers, which Pierre--at loss for an adequate
rhyme--would lift up, and call to Thomas, writing in his room below,
to give him the wished-for word.
This dull street formed the background of a touching picture, when, in
1667, Corneille's son was brought home, wounded, from the siege of
Douai. The straw from the litter was scattered about the street as the
father helped them lift his boy to carry him into the house, and
Corneille was summoned to the Châtelet, for breaking police
regulations with regard to the care of thoroughfares; he appeared,
pleaded his own cause, and was cast in damages!
Here in 1671, Corneille and Molière, in collaboration, wrote the
"tragedy-ballet 'Psyche'"; this work in common cementing a friendship
already begun between the two men, and now made firmer for the two
years of Molière's life on from this date. The play was begun and
finished in a fortnight, to meet the usual urgency of the King in his
amusements. Molière planned the piece and its spectacular effects, and
wrote the prologue, the first act, and the first scenes of the second
and third acts; Corneille's share being the rest of the rhymed
dialogue and the songs. It was set to music by Lulli--"the
incomparable Monsieur Lulli," as he was called by Molière--whose
generous laudation of the musician was not lessened by his estimate of
the man. For Lulli was not an honest man, and he prospered at the
expense of his fellows. His magnificent home was built by money
borrowed from Molière, whose widow was repaid as we have seen. Lulli's
_hôtel_ is still in perfect condition as to its exterior, at the
corner of Rues des Petits-Champs and Sainte-Anne. This latter front is
the finer, with its pilasters and composite capitals, its masks carved
in the keystones of the low _entresol_ windows, and the musical
instruments placed above the middle window of the first grand floor.
They make a pretty picture, not without a touch of the pathetic--and
M. Gèrôme has put it on canvas--as they sit side by side, planning and
plotting their play: Molière at the top of his career, busy,
prosperous, applauded; Corneille past his prime and his popularity,
beginning to bend with age and to break in spirit. He had, by now,
fallen on evil days, which saw him "satiated with glory, and famished
for money," in his words to Boileau. Richelieu may not have done much
for him, but he had been at least a power in his patronage, and his
death, in 1642, had left the old poet with no friend at court, albeit
the new minister, Mazarin, had put him on the pension list. His
triumphs with "Le Cid" and "Les Horaces" had not saved him from--nor
helped him bear--the dire failures of "Attila" and of "Agésilas."
Poetry had proved a poor trade, royalty had forgotten him, Colbert's
economies had left his pension in arrears along with many others, and
finally, after Colbert's death, the new minister, Louvois, had
suppressed it entirely. Against the earlier default he had made
patient and whimsical protest in verse; each official year of delay
had been officially lengthened to fifteen months; and Corneille's Muse
was made to hope that each of the King's remaining years of reign
might be lengthened to an equal limit!
The contrast between the two figures--the King of French Tragedy
shabby in Paris streets, the King of French people resplendent at
Versailles--is sharply drawn by Théophile Gautier in his superb
verses, read at Corneille's birthday fête at the Comédie Française, on
June 6, 1851. Gautier had not been able to find any motive for the
lines, which he had promised to prepare for Arsène Houssaye, the
director, until Hugo gave him this cue.
The faithful, generous Boileau--the man called "stingy," because of
his exactness, which yet enabled him always to aid others--offered to
surrender his own well-secured and promptly-paid pension in favor of
his old friend; a transfer not allowed by the authorities, and the
King sent a sum of money, at length, to Corneille. It came two days
before the poet's death, when he might have quoted, "I have no time to
spend it!" There is extant a letter from an old Rouen friend of his
who, visiting Paris in 1679, describes a walk he took with Corneille,
then aged seventy-three. In Rue de la Parcheminerie--that ancient street
on the left bank of the Seine, which we have already found to be less
spoiled by modern improvements than are its neighbors--Corneille sat
down on a plank by a cobbler's stall, to have one of his worn shoes
patched. That cobbler's stall, or its direct descendant, may be seen
in that street, to-day. Corneille counted his coppers and found just
enough to pay the cobbler's paltry charge; refusing to accept any coin
from the proffered purse of his friend, who, then and there, wept in
pity for such a plight for such a man.
[Illustration: The Door of Corneille's Last Dwelling.
(From a drawing by Robert Delafontaine, by permission of M. Victorien
Sardou.)]
Age and poverty took up their abode with him--as well as his more
welcome comrade, the constant Thomas--in his next dwelling. We cannot
be sure when they left Rue de Cléry, and we find them first in Rue
d'Argenteuil in November, 1683, the year of Colbert's death. That old
road from the village of Argenteuil had become, and still remains, a
city street absolutely without character or temperament of its own; it
has not the merit even of being ignoble. And the Corneille house at
No. 6, as it was seen just before its destruction, was a gloomy and
forbidding building. It had two entrances--as has the grandiose
structure now standing on its site--one in Rue d'Argenteuil, on which
front is a tablet marking this historic scene of the poet's death, and
the other in Rue de l'Évêque. That street was wiped out of existence
by the cutting of Avenue de l'Opéra in 1877-8, which necessitated the
demolition of this dreary old house. Its most attractive relic is now
in the possession of M. Victorien Sardou, at his country house, at
Marly-le-Roi, in the _porte-cochère_, with its knocker. Every guest
there is proud to put his hand on the veritable knocker lifted so
often by Corneille's hand.
That hand had lost its fire and force by this time, and the poet's
last months were wretched enough in these vast and desolate rooms on
the second floor, so vast and desolate that he was unable to keep his
poor septuagenarian bones warm within them. Here came death to him on
Sunday, October 1, 1684. They buried him in his parish church,
Saint-Roch, a short step from his home; and on the western pillar
within the entrance a tablet to his memory was placed in 1821. The
church was so short a step, that, feeble and forlorn as he was, he had
found his way there early of mornings during these last years. And in
his earlier years, when living in Rue de Cléry, he had often hurried
there, drawn by the strong and splendid Bossuet, whose abode was
either in Rue Sainte-Anne hard by, or in the then new mansion still
standing in Place des Victoires. Here in the church, as we stand
between Corneille's tablet and Bossuet's pulpit, the contrast is
brought home to us of the two forms of eloquence that most touch men:
that of this preacher burning with ancient Hebraic fire, and that of
this dramatist glowing with the white-heat of classicism.
After the burial, the bereft Thomas removed to rooms in Cul-de-sac des
Jacobins, only a little way from his last home with Pierre. This blind
alley has now been cut through to the market of Saint-Honoré, and
become a short commonplace street, named Saint-Hyacinthe. Twenty years
the younger of the two, Thomas was, during his life, and has been in
his after-renown, unduly overshadowed by his imperishable brother. He
had a rare gift of versification, and a certain skill in the putting
together of plays. Of them he constructed a goodly lot, some few of
them in collaboration. His "Timocrate," played for eighty consecutive
nights at the Théâtre du Marais, was the most popular success on the
boards of the seventeenth century. His knack in pleasing the public
taste was as much his own as was his mastery of managers, by which he
got larger royalties than any playwright of his day. He was a
competent craftsman, too, in more weighty fabrications, and turned
out, from his factory, translations and dictionaries, which have
joined his plays in everlasting limbo.
All the early theatrical productions of Pierre Corneille were
originally put on the stage of the Théâtre du Marais, which had been
started by seceders from the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, as has
been told in our first chapter. After a temporary lodgment in the
quarter of the Hôtel de Ville, it was soon permanently housed in the
recast tennis-court of the "_Hôtel Salé_." There it remained until
1728, when Le Camus bought the place and turned the theatre into
stables. Where stands modern No. 90 in the widened Rue Vieille-du-Temple
was the public entrance of the theatre. The "_Hôtel Salé_," the work
of Lepautre, is still in perfect condition behind the houses of Rue
Vieille-du-Temple. Its principal portal is at Rue Thorigny, 5, with a
side entrance in Rue Saint-Gervais-des-Coutures. Known at first as the
Hôtel Juigné, it was popularly renamed, in the seventeenth century,
the "_Hôtel Salé_," because its rapacious owner, Aubray de Fontenay,
had amassed his wealth by farming out the salt tax--that most exacting
and irritating of the many taxes of that time.
Through a lordly arch in Rue Thorigny, we pass into the grand court,
and find facing us the dignified façade, its imposing pediment carved
with figures and flowers. Within is a stately hall, made the more
stately by the placing at one end of a noble chimney-piece, a copy of
one at Versailles. In the centre a superb staircase rises, wide and
easy, through a sculptured cage, to the first floor; its old
wrought-iron railing is of an exquisite pattern; nothing in all Paris
is nearer perfection than this staircase, its railing, and its
balustrade. In the rooms above, kept with reverence by the
bronze-maker who occupies them, admirable panelling and carvings are
found. The façade on the gardens--now shrunk from their former
spaciousness to a small court--is most impressive, with ancient
wrought-iron balconies; in its pediment, two vigilant dogs watch the
hands that move no more on the great clock-face between them.
The Théâtre du Marais had been established here by the famous
Turlupin, made immortal in Boileau's verse, who, with his two comic
_confrères_--baker's boys, like the brothers Coquelin of our day--kept
his audiences in a roar with his modern French farces _farcied_ with
old Gaulish grossness. It was he who invented the comic
valet--badgered and beaten, always lying and always funny--who was
subsequently elaborated into the immortal Sganerelle by Molière. He,
while a boy, had sat in this theatre, watching Turlupin; and when he
had grown into a manager, he is said to have bought some of the stage
copies of these farces, when Turlupin's death disbanded his troupe.
These "_Comédiens du Marais_" were regarded with a certain
condescension not unmingled with disdain by their stately _confrères_
left at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, who were shocked when Richelieu,
becoming bored by their dreary traditional proprieties, sent for
Turlupin and his troupe to give a specimen of their acting in his
palace. And the great cardinal actually laughed, a rare indulgence he
allowed himself, and told the King's Comedians that he wished they
might play to as good effect!
Still, the Théâtre du Marais was not entirely given over to farce, for
it alternated with the tragedy of the then famous Hardy; and Mondory,
the best tragedian of the day, was at one time the head of the
troupe. Mondory had brought back from a provincial tour, in 1629, the
manuscript of "Mélite," by a young lawyer of Rouen, named Corneille.
This piece was weak, but it was not a failure. And so, when the author
came to town, his tragedies were played at this theatre and drew
crowds to the house. There they first saw the true tragic Muse herself
on the French boards. Those rough, coarse boards of that early theatre
he planed and polished, with conscience and with craft, and made them
fit for her queenly feet; and through her lips he breathed, in sublime
tirades, his own elevation of soul, to the inspiration of that shabby
scene. For the first time in the French drama, he put skill into the
plot, art into the intrigue, taste into the wit; in a word, he gave to
dramatic verse "good sense"--"the only aim of poetry," Boileau
claimed--and showed the meaning and the value of "reason" on the
stage; and for the doing of this Racine revered him.
As to Corneille's personality, we are told by Fontenelle--his nephew,
a man of slight value, a better talker than writer, an unmoved man,
who prided himself on never laughing and never crying--that his uncle
had rather an agreeable countenance, with very marked features, a
large nose, a handsome mouth, eyes full of fire, and an animated
expression. Others who saw Corneille say that he looked like a
shopkeeper; and that as to his manner, he seemed simple and timid, and
as to his talk, he _was_ dull and tiresome. His enunciation was not
distinct, so that in reading his own verses--he could not recite
them--he was forcible but not graceful. Guizot puts it curtly and
cruelly, when he writes that Corneille was destitute of all that
distinguishes a man from his equals; that his appearance was common,
his conversation dull, his language incorrect, his timidity ungainly,
his judgment untrustworthy. It was well said, in his day, that to know
the greatness of Corneille, he must be read, or be seen in his work on
the stage. He has said so in the verse that confesses his own defects:
"_J'ai la plume féconde et la bouche stérile,
Et l'on peut rarement m'écouter sans ennui,
Que quand je me produis par la bouche d'autrui._"
In truth, we must agree with Guizot, that the grand old Roman was
irrevocably doomed to pass unnoticed in a crowd. And he was content
that this should be. For he had his own pride, expressed in his words:
"_Je sais ce que je vaux._" He made no clamor when Georges de Scudéry
was proclaimed his superior by the popular voice, which is always the
voice of the foolish. And when that shallow charlatan sneered at him
in print, he left to Boileau the castigation that was so thoroughly
given. His friends had to drive him to the defence of his "Cid" in the
Academy, to which he had been elected in 1647. His position with
regard to the "Cid" was peculiar and embarrassing; it was Richelieu,
the jealous playwright, who attacked the successful tragedy, and it
was Richelieu, the all-potent patron, who was to be answered and put
in the wrong. The skirmish being ended, with honor to Corneille, he
retired into his congenial obscurity and his beloved solitude. And
there the world left him, alone with his good little brother Thomas,
both contented in their comradeship. For in private life he was easy
to get on with, always full of friendliness, always ready of access to
those he loved, and, for all his brusque humor and his external
rudeness, he was a good husband, father, brother. He shrank from the
worldly and successful Racine, who reverenced him; and he was shy of
the society of other pen-workers who would have made a companion of
him. His independent soul was not softened by any adroitness or tact;
he was clumsy in his candor, and not at home in courtier-land; there
was not one fibre of the flunky in his simple, sincere,
self-respecting frame; and when forced to play that unwonted rôle, he
found his back not limber enough for bowing, his knees not
sufficiently supple to cringe.
[Illustration: Pierre Corneille.
(From the portrait by Charles Lebrun.)]
And in what light he was looked upon by the lazy pensioned lackeys of
the court, who hardly knew his face, and not at all his worth, is
shown by this extract from one of their manuscript chronicles:
"_Jeudi, le 15 Octobre, 1684. On apprit à Chambord la mort du bonhomme
Corneille._"
* * * * *
JEAN RACINE came to Paris, from his native La Ferté-Milon in the old
duchy of Valois--by way of a school at Beauvais, and another near
Port-Royal--in 1658, a youth of nineteen, to study in the Collége
d'Harcourt. That famous school was in the midst of the Scholars'
Quarter, in that part of narrow, winding Rue de la Harpe which is now
widened into Boulevard Saint-Michel. On the site of the ancient
college, direct heir of its functions and its fame, stands the Lycée
Saint-Louis. The buildings that give on the playground behind, seem to
belong to the original college, and to have been refaced.
Like Boileau-Despréaux, three years his senior here, the new student
preferred poetry to the studies commonly styled serious, and his
course in theology led neither to preaching nor to practising. He was
a wide and eager reader in all directions, and developed an early and
ardent enthusiasm for the Greeks and the Latins.
As early as 1660 he had made himself known by his ode in celebration
of the marriage of Louis XIV.; while he remained unknown as the author
of an unaccepted and unplayed drama in verse, sent to the Théâtre du
Marais.
Racine's Paris homes were all in or near the "_Pays Latin_," for he
preserves its ancient appellation in his letters. On leaving college,
in 1660-61, he took up quarters with his uncle Nicolas Vitart, steward
and intendant of the Duchesse de Chevreuse, and secretary of her son
the Duc de Luynes. Vitart lived in the Hôtel de Luynes, a grand
mansion that faced Quai des Grands-Augustins, and stretched far back
along Rue Gît-le-Coeur. It was torn down in 1671. La Fontaine had
lodgings, during his frequent visits to Paris at this period, a little
farther west on Quai des Grands-Augustins, and he and Racine, despite
the eighteen years' difference of age, became close companions. La
Fontaine made his young friend acquainted with the _cabarets_ of the
quarter, and Racine studied them not unwillingly. Just then, too,
Racine doubtless met Molière, recently come into the management of the
theatre of the Palais-Royal. An original edition of "Les Précieuses
Ridicules," played a while before this time at the Hôtel du
Petit-Bourbon, bears on its title-page "_Privilège au Sr. de Luyne_."
This was Guillaume de Luyne, bookseller and publisher in the Salle des
Merciers of the Palais de Justice; and at his place, a resort for
book-loving loungers, we may well believe that the actor-manager made
acquaintance with the young poet, coming from his home with the Duc de
Luynes, within sight across the narrow arm of the river.
Not as a poet was he known in this ducal house, but as assistant to
his uncle, and the probable successor of that uncle, who tried to
train him to his future duties. Among these duties, just then, was the
construction of the new Hôtel de Luynes for the Duchesse de Chevreuse.
This is the lady who plays so prominent a rôle in Dumas's authentic
history of "The Three Musketeers." The _hôtel_ that was then built for
her stands, somewhat shorn of its original grandeur, at No. 201
Boulevard Saint-Germain, and you may look to-day on the walls
constructed under the eye of Jean Racine, acting as his uncle's
overseer. This uncle was none too rigid of rule, nor was the
household, from the duchess down, unduly ascetic of habit; and young
Racine, "nothing loath," spent his days and eke his nights in somewhat
festive fashion. His anxious country relatives at length induced him
to leave the wicked town, and in November, 1661, he went to live at
Uzés, near Nîmes, in Languedoc. Here he was housed with another uncle,
of another kidney; a canon of the local cathedral, able to offer
church work and to promise church preferment to the coy young cleric.
Racine was bored by it all, and mitigated his boredom, during the two
years he remained, only by flirting and by stringing rhymes. The
ladies were left behind, and the verses were carried to the capital,
on his return in November, 1663. He showed some of them, first to
Colbert and then to Molière, who received the verse with scant praise,
but accepted, paid for, and played "La Thébaïde"--a work of promise,
but of no more than promise, of the future master hand. It was at this
period, about 1664, that Racine, of his own wish, first met Boileau,
who had criticised in a kindly fashion some of the younger poet's
verses. Thus was begun that friendship which was to last unmarred so
many years, and to be broken only by Racine's death.
With Corneille, too, Racine made acquaintance, in 1665, and submitted
to him his "Alexandre." He was greatly pleased by the praise of the
author of the "Cid"; praise freely given to the poetry of the play,
but along with it came the set-off that no talent for tragedy was
shown in the piece. It was not long before the elder poet had to own
his error, and it is a sorrow to record his growing discontent with
the younger man's triumphs. Racine believed then and always, that
Corneille was easily his master as a tragic dramatist; a belief shared
with him by us of to-day, who find Corneille's tragedies as
impressive, his comedies as spirited, as ever, on the boards of the
Comédie Française; while Racine's tragic Muse seems to have outlived
her day on those boards, and to have grown aged and out of date, along
with the social surroundings amid which she queened it.
Racine's reverence for his elder and his better never wore away, and
on Corneille's death--when, to his place in the Academy, his lesser
brother Thomas was admitted--it fell to Racine, elected in 1673, to
give the customary welcome to the new Academician, and to pay the
customary tribute to his great forerunner. He paid it in words and in
spirit of loyal admiration, and no nobler eulogy of a corrival has
been spoken by any man.
On his return to town, in 1663, Racine had found his uncle-crony
Vitart living in the new Hôtel de Luynes, and in order to be near him
he took lodging in Rue de Grenelle. It was doubtless at the eastern
end of that street, not far from the Croix-Rouge--a step from Boileau
in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, and not far from La Fontaine on Quai
Malaquais. Here he stayed for four years, and in 1667 he removed to
the Hôtel des Ursins. This name had belonged to a grand old mansion on
the north bank of Île de la Cité, presented by the City of Paris to
Jean Juvénal des Ursins, _Prévôt des Marchands_ under Charles VI. In
the old prints, we see its two towers rising sheer from the river,
and behind them its vast buildings and spacious grounds extending far
away south on the island. According to Edouard Fournier, a painstaking
topographer, all this structure was demolished toward the end of the
eighteenth century, and over its site and through its grounds were cut
the three streets bearing its name of des Ursins--Haute, Milieu,
Basse. Other authorities claim that portions of the hotel still stand
there, among them that portion in which Racine lived; his rooms having
remained unaltered up to 1848. The street is narrow and dark, all its
buildings are of ancient aspect, and on its south side is a row of
antiquated houses that plainly date back to Racine's day and even
earlier. It is in one of these that we may establish his lodgings.
The house at No. 5, commonly and erroneously pointed out as his
residence, is of huge bulk, extending through to Rue Chanoinesse on
the south. No. 7 would seem to be still more ancient. No. 9 is simply
one wing of the dark stone structure, of which No. 11 forms the other
wing and the central body, massive and gloomy, set back from the
street behind a shallow court, between these wings. In the low wall of
this court, under a great arch, a small forbidding door shuts on the
pavement, and behind, in a recess, is an open stairway leading to the
floor above. No. 13 was undoubtedly once a portion of the same fabric.
All these street windows are heavily barred and sightless. These three
houses evidently formed one entire structure at first, and this was
either an outlying portion of the Hôtel des Ursins, or a separate
building, erected after the demolition of that _hôtel_, and taking the
old name. In either case, there can be no doubt that these are the
walls that harbored Racine. The tenants of his day were mostly men of
the law who had their offices and residential chambers here, by reason
of their proximity to the Palais de Justice. With these inmates Racine
was certainly acquainted--the magistrates, the advocates, the clerks,
of whom he makes knowing sport in his delightful little comedy, "Les
Plaideurs." It was played at Versailles, "by royal command," before
King and court in 1668. This was not its original production, however;
it had had its first night for the Paris public a month earlier, and
had failed; possibly because it had not yet received royal approval.
Molière, one of the audience on that first night, was a more competent
critic of its quality, and his finding was that "those who mocked
merited to be mocked in turn, for they did not know good comedy when
they saw it." This verdict gives striking proof of his innate loyalty
to a comrade in trade, for he and the author were estranged just then,
not by any fault of Molière, and he had the right to feel wronged, and
by this unasked praise he proved himself to be the more manly of the
two.
The piece was an immediate success at Versailles. The _Roi Soleil_
beamed, the courtiers smiled, the crowd laughed. The players,
unexpectedly exultant, climbed into their coaches as soon as they were
free, and drove into town and to Racine, with their good news. This
whole quiet street was awakened by their shouts of congratulation,
windows were thrown open by the alarmed burghers, and when they
learned what it meant, they all joined in the jubilation.
Racine lived here from 1667 to 1677, and these ten years were years of
unceasing output and of unbroken success. Beginning with his
production of "Andromaque" in the first-named year, he went, through
successive stage triumphs, to "Phèdre," his greatest and his last play
for the public stage, produced on New Year's Day of 1677, at the Hôtel
de Bourgogne. It was on these boards that almost all his plays were
first given.
Then, at the age of thirty-seven, at the top of his fame, in the
plenitude of his powers, he suddenly ceased to write for the stage.
This dis-service to dramatic literature was brought about by his
forthcoming marriage, by his disgust with the malice of his rivals, by
his weariness of the assaults of his enemies, by his somewhat sudden
and showy submission to the Church--that sleepless assailant of player
and playwright. He hints at the attitude of the godly in his preface
to "Phèdre," assuring them that they will have to own--however, in
other respects, they may or may not esteem this tragedy--that it
castigates Vice and punishes Badness as had no previous play of his.
Doubtless he was hardened in this decision, already made, by the hurt
he had from the reception of this play in contrast with the reception
of a poorer play for which his own title was stolen, which was
produced within three nights of his piece, and was acclaimed by the
cabal that damned the original. Nor was it only his rivals and
enemies who decried him. "_Racine et le café passeront_," was La
Harpe's contemptuous coupling of the playwright with the new and
dubious drink, just then on its trial in Paris. His _mot_ has been
mothered on Madame de Sévigné, for she, too, took neither to Racine
nor to coffee. And a century later it pleased Madame de Staël to
prove, to her own gratification, that his tragedies had already gone
into the limbo of out-worn things.
Racine's whole life--never notably sedate hitherto, with its frequent
escapades and its one grand passion--was turned into a new current by
his love match with Catherine de Romenet. On his marriage in June,
1677--among the _témoins_ present were Boileau-Despréaux and Uncle
Vitart, this latter then living in the same house with his
nephew--Racine ranged himself on the side of order and of domestic
days and nights. He gave proof of a genuine devotedness to his wife; a
good wife, if you will, yet hardly a companion for him in his work at
home and in the world outside. It is told of her, that she never saw
one of his pieces played, nor heard one read; and Louis, their
youngest son, says that his mother did not know what a verse was.
The earliest home of the new couple was on Île Saint-Louis. Neither
the house nor its street is to be identified to-day, but both may
surely be seen, so slight are the changes even now since that
provincial village, in the heart of Paris, was built up from an island
wash-house and wood-yard under the impulse of the plans prepared for
Henri IV., by his right hand, Sully. And in this parish church,
Saint-Louis-en-l'Île--a provincial church quite at home here--we find
Racine holding at the font his first child, Jean-Baptiste, in 1678.
Two years later he moved again, and from early in 1680 to the end of
1684 we find him at No. 2 Rue de l'Eperon, on the corner of Rue
Saint-André-des-Arts. Here his family grew in number, and the names of
three of his daughters, Marie-Catherine, Anne, and Élisabeth--all born
in this house--appeared on the baptismal register of his parish church,
Saint-André-des-Arts. This was the church of the christening of
François-Marie Arouet, a few years later. The Place Saint-André-des-Arts,
laid out in 1809, now covers the site of that very ancient church,
sold as National Domain in 1797, and demolished soon after.
This residence of Racine was left intact until within a few years,
when it was replaced by the Lycée Fénelon, a government school for
girls. There they read their "Racine," or such portions as are
permitted to the Young Person, not knowing nor caring that on that
spot the author once lived.
From here he removed, at the beginning of the year 1685, to No. 16 Rue
des Maçons. That street is now named Champollion, and the present
number of his house cannot be fixed. It still stands on the western
side of the street, about half way up between Rue des Écoles and Place
de la Sorbonne; for none of these houses have been rebuilt, and the
street itself is as secluded and as quiet as when Racine walked
through it. Here were born his daughters Jeanne and Madeleine, both
baptized in the parish church of Saint-Séverin--a venerable sanctuary,
still in use and quite unaltered, except that it has lost its
cloisters. And in this home in Rue des Maçons he brought to life two
plays finer than any of their forerunners, yet, unlike them, not
intended for public performance. "Esther" was written in 1689 to
please Madame de Maintenon, and was performed several times by the
girls at her school of Saint-Cyr; first before King and court, later
before friends of the court and those who had sufficient influence to
obtain the eagerly sought invitation. "Athalie," written for similar
semi-public production, two years later, failed to make any
impression, when played at Versailles by the same girls of Saint-Cyr.
After two performances, without scenery or costumes, it was staged no
more, and had no sale when published by the author. Yet Boileau told
him that it was his best work, and Voltaire said that it was nearer
perfection than any work of man. Indeed, "Athalie," in its grandeur
and its simplicity, may easily outrank any production of the French
pen during the seventeenth century. And, as literature, these two
plays are almost perfect specimens of Racine's almost perfect art and
diction; of that art, wherein he was so exquisite a craftsman; of that
diction, so rich, so daring, so pliable, so passionate, yet
restrained, refined, judicious.
In May, 1692, we learn by a letter to Boileau, Racine was still in Rue
des Maçons, but he must have left it shortly after, for in November of
this year he brought to be christened, in Saint-Sulpice, his youngest
child, Louis. This is the son who has left us an admirable biography
of his father, and some mediocre poems--"La Religion" and "La Grâce"
being those by which he is best known. So that Saint-Sulpice was,
already in November, 1692, the church of his new parish; and the house
to which he had removed in that parish, wherein the boy was born,
stands, quite unchanged to-day, in Rue Visconti. That street was then
named Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, having begun life as a country
lane cut through the low marshy lands along the southern shore. It
extends only from Rue de Seine to Rue Bonaparte, then named Rue des
Petits-Augustins. Near its western end, at the present number 21, the
Marquis de Ranes had erected a grand mansion; and this, on his death
in 1678, was let out in apartments. It is asserted that it is the
house of whose second floor Racine became a tenant. Within the great
concave archway that frames the wide entrance door is set a tablet,
containing the names of Racine, of La Champmeslé, of Lecouvreur, and
of Clairon, all of whom are claimed to have been inhabitants of this
house. That tablet has carried conviction during the half-century
since it was cut and set, about 1855, but its word is to be doubted,
and many of us believe that the more ancient mansion at No. 13 of the
street was Racine's home. Local tradition makes the only proof at
present, and the matter cannot be absolutely decided until the lease
shall be found in that Parisian notary's office where it is now filed
away and forgotten. We know that Mlle. Lecouvreur lived in the
house formerly tenanted by Racine, and that she speaks of it as being
nearly at the middle of the street, and this fact points rather to No.
13 than to No. 21. And we know that Mlle. Clairon had tried for a long
time to secure an apartment in the house honored by memories of the
great dramatist and the great actress; for whose sake she was willing
to pay the then enormous rental of 200 francs. But the tablet's claim
to La Champmeslé as a tenant is an undue and unpardonable excess of
zeal. Whatever Racine may have done years before in his infatuation
for that bewitching woman, he did not bring her into his own dwelling!
[Illustration: Rue Visconti.
On the right is the Hôtel de Ranes, and in the distance is No. 13.]
She had come from Rouen, a young actress looking for work, along with
her husband, a petty actor and patcher-up of plays; for whose sake she
was admitted to the Théâtre du Marais. How she made use of this chance
is told by a line in a letter of Madame de Sévigné, who had seen her
play Atalide in "Bajazet," and pronounced "_ma belle fille_"--so she
brevets her son's lady-love--as "the most miraculously good
_comédienne_ that I have ever seen." It was on the boards of the Hôtel
de Bourgogne that she showed herself to be also the finest
_tragédienne_ of her time. She shone most in "Bajazet," and in others
of Racine's plays, creating her rôles under his admiring eye and under
his devoted training. He himself declaimed verse marvellously well,
and had in him the making of a consummate comedian, or a preacher, as
you please. La Champmeslé was not beautiful or clever, but her stature
was noble, her carriage glorious, her voice bewitching, her charm
irresistible. And La Fontaine sang praises of her _esprit_, and this
was indeed fitting at his age then. She lived somewhere in this
quarter, when playing in the troupe of the widow Molière at the
Théâtre Guénégaud. When she retired from those boards, she found a
home with her self-effacing husband in Auteuil, and there died in
1698.
The first floor in the right wing of the court of both 13 and 21 is
said to be the residence of Adrienne Lecouvreur. She had appeared in
1717 at the Comédie Française, in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, and had
won her place at once. The choice spirits of the court, of the great
world, of the greater world of literature, were glad to meet in
fellowship around her generous and joyous table. Among them she found
excuse for an occasional caprice, but her deepest and most lasting
passion was given to the superb adventurer, Maurice de Saxe. His
quarters, when home from the wars--for which her pawned jewels
furnished him forth--were only a step down Rue Bonaparte from her
house, on Quai Malaquais. They were at No. 5, the most ancient mansion
left on the quay, with the exception of No. 1, hid behind the wing of
the Institute. He died at Chambord on November 30, 1750, and at this
house, May 17, 1751, there was an auction of his effects.
There came a time when the meetings of these two needed greater
secrecy, and he removed to Rue de Colombier, now named Rue Jacob. The
houses on the north side of this ancient street had--and some of them
still have--gardens running back to the gardens of the houses on the
south side of Rue Visconti. These little gardens had, in the dividing
fence, gates easily opened by night, for others besides Adrienne and
Maurice, as local legend whispers. Scribe has put their story on the
stage, where it is a tradition that the actress was actually poisoned
by a great lady, for the sake of the fascinating lover. He stood by
her bedside, with Voltaire and the physician, when she was dying in
1730, at the early age of thirty-eight, in one of the rooms on this
first floor over the court. Voltaire had had no sneers, but only
praise for the actress, and smiles for the woman whose kind heart had
brought her to his bedside, when he was ill, where she read to him the
last book out, the translation of the "Arabian Nights." He was stirred
to stinging invective of the churlish priest of Saint-Sulpice, who
denied her church-burial. In the same verse he commends that good man,
Monsieur de Laubinière, who gave her body hasty and unhallowed
interment. He came, by night, with two coaches and three men, and
drove with the poor body along the river-bank, turning up Rue de
Bourgogne to a spot behind the vast wood-yards that then lined the
river-front. There, in a hole they dug, they hid her. The fine old
mansion at No. 115 Rue de Grenelle, next to the southeast corner of
Rue de Bourgogne, covers her grave. In its garret, thrown into one
corner and almost forgotten, is a marble tablet, long and narrow, once
set in a wall on this site, to mark the spot so long ignored--as its
inscription says--where lies an actress of admirable _esprit_, of
good heart, and of a talent sublime in its simplicity. And it recites
the efforts of a true friendship, which got at last only this little
bit of earth for her grave.
Yet a few years further on, the same wing on the court of this dingy
old house sparkled with the splendid personality of Hippolyte Clairon,
who outshines all other stars of the French stage, unless it be
Rachel. Here she lived the life of one of those prodigal princesses,
in whose rôles she loved to dazzle on the boards of the Comédie
Française, where she first appeared in 1743. It was her public and not
her private performances that shocked the sensitive Church into a
threat of future terrors for her. When, in the course of a theatrical
quarrel, she refused to play, she was sent to prison, being one of
"His Majesty's Servants," disobedient and punishable. She preferred
possible purgatory to present imprisonment, and went back to her duty.
To this house again came Voltaire, as her visitor this time, along
with Diderot and Marmontel and many such men. Garrick came, too, when
in Paris--came quietly, less eager to proclaim his ardent admiration
for the woman than his public and professional acclamation of the
actress in the theatre. Her parts all played, she left the stage when
a little past forty, and, sinking slowly into age and poverty and
misery, she died at the age of eighty in 1803.
All these flashing fireworks are dimmed and put to shame by the gentle
glow and the steadfast flame of the wood-fire on Racine's home
hearthstone. It lights up the gloomy, mean street, even as we stand
here. He was, in truth, an admirable husband and father, and it is
this side of the man that we prefer to regard, rather than that side
turned toward other men. Of them he was, through his over-much
ambition, easily jealous, and, being sensitive and suspicious as well,
and given to a biting raillery, he alienated his friends. Boileau
alone was too big of soul to allow any estrangement. These two were
friends for almost forty years, in which not one clouded day is known.
The letters between them--those from 1687 to 1698 are still
preserved--show the depth of Racine's manly and delicate feeling for
his friend, then "in his great solitude at Auteuil." They had been
appointed royal historiographers soon after Racine's marriage in 1677,
and, in that office, travelled together a good deal, in the Ghent
campaign of 1678 and again with the army in other fields. They worked
together on their notes later, and gathered great store of material;
but the result amounted to nothing, and they were posthumously lucky
in that their unfinished manuscript was finally burned by accident in
1726.
Whether with Boileau in camp, or alone in the Luxembourg campaign of
1683--Boileau being too ill to go--or at Namur in 1692, or with the
King and court at Fontainebleau, Marly, Versailles, in these royal
residences where he had his own rooms, wherever he was, Racine never
seemed to cease thinking of his home, that home in Rue des Maçons when
he first went away, and for the last seven years of his life in Rue
Visconti. When absent from home he wrote to his children frequently,
and when here he corresponded constantly with his son, who was with
the French Embassy at The Hague. To him he gave domestic details and
"trivial fond records" of what his mother was doing, of the colds of
the younger ones, and of the doings of the daughter in a convent at
Melun. He sends to this son two new hats and eleven and a half _louis
d'or_, and begs him to be careful of the hats and to spend the money
slowly.
Yet he was fond of court life, and, an adroit courtier, he knew how to
sing royal prowess in the field and royal splendor in the palace. He
had a way of carrying himself that gave seeming height to his slight
stature. His noble and open expression, his fine wit, his dexterous
address, his notable gifts as a reader to the King at his bedside,
made him a favorite in that resplendent circle. And he was all the
more unduly dejected when the _Roi Soleil_ cooled and no longer smiled
on him; he was killed when Madame de Maintenon--"Goody Scarron," "Old
Piety," "the hag," "the hussy," "that old woman," are the usual pet
epithets for her of delicious Duchesse d'Orléans--who had liked and
had befriended him, saw the policy of showing him her cold shoulder,
as she had shown it to Fénelon. From this shock, Racine, being already
broken physically by age and illness, seemed unable to rally. As he
sank gradually to the grave he made sedulous provision for his family,
dictating, toward the last, a letter begging for a continuance of his
pension to his widow, which, it is gladly noted, was afterward done.
He urged, also, the claim of Boileau to royal favor: "We must not be
separated," he said to his amanuensis; "begin your letter again, and
let Boileau know that I have been his friend to my death."
His death came on April 21, 1699. His body lay one night in the choir
of Saint-Sulpice, his parish church, and then it was carried for
burial to the Abbey of Port-Royal. On the destruction of that
institution, his remains were brought back to Paris, in 1711, and
placed near those of Pascal, at the entrance of the lady-chapel of
Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. Racine's epitaph, in Latin, by Boileau, the
friend of so many men who were not always friendly with one another,
is cut in a stone set in the first pillar of the southern aisle of the
choir.
* * * * *
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE began to come to Paris, making occasional
excursions from his native Château-Thierry, in Champagne, toward 1654,
he being then over thirty years of age. A little later, when under the
protection and in the pay of the great Fouquet, his visits to the
capital were more frequent and more prolonged. He commonly found
lodgings on Quai des Grands-Augustins, just around the corner from
young Racine, and the two men were much together during the years 1660
and 1661. La Fontaine made his home permanently in the capital after
1664, when he arrived there in the train of the Duchesse de Bouillon,
born Anne Mancini, youngest and liveliest of Mazarin's many dashing
nieces. Her marriage with the Duc de Bouillon had made her the feudal
lady of Château-Thierry, and if she were not compelled to claim, in
this case, her privilege as _châtelaine_ over her appanage, it was
because there was ampler mandate for the impressionable poet in the
caprice of a wilful woman. Incidentally, in this flitting, he left
behind his provincial wife. He had taken her to wife in 1647, mainly
to please his father, and soon, to please her and himself, they had
agreed on a separation. They met scarcely any more after his definite
departure. There is a tradition that he chatted, once in a _salon_
somewhere, with a bright young man by whom he found himself attracted,
and concerning whom he made inquiry of the bystanders, who informed
him that it was his son. Tradition does not record any attempt on his
part to improve his acquaintance with the young stranger, or to show
further interest in his welfare.
He did not entirely desert his country home, for the duchess carried
him along on her autumnal visits to Château-Thierry. He took advantage
of each chance thus given him to realize something upon his patrimony,
that he might meet the always pressing claims on his always overspent
income.
He writes to Racine during one of these visits, in 1686: "My affairs
occupy me as much as they're worth it, and that's not at all; and the
leisure I thus get is given to laziness." He almost anticipated in
regard to himself the racy saying of the Oxford don of our day of
another professor: "Such time as he can save from the adornment of
his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties." But La Fontaine
neglected not only his duties all through life, but, more than all
else, did he neglect the care of his dress. A portion of the income he
was always anticipating came from his salary at one time, as gentleman
in the _suite_ of the dowager Duchesse d'Orléans, that post giving him
quarters in the Luxembourg. These quarters and his salary went from
him with her death. For several years after coming to town with the
Duchesse de Bouillon he had a home in the duke's town-house on Quai
Malaquais.
This quay had been built upon the river-front soon after the death, in
1615, of Marguerite de Valois, Henri IV.'s divorced wife. The streets
leading from Quais Malaquais and Voltaire, and those behind, parallel
with the quays, were cut through her grounds and through the fields
farther west. This was the beginning of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. To
save the long detour, to and from the new suburb, around by way of
Pont-Neuf, a wooden bridge was built in 1632 along the line of the
ferry, that had hitherto served for traffic between the shore in front
of the Louvre and the southern shore, at the end of the road that is
now Rue du Bac. The Pont Royal has replaced that wooden bridge. One of
the buildings that began this river-front remains unmutilated at the
corner of Quai Malaquais and Rue de Seine, and is characteristic of
the architecture of that period in its walls and roofs and windows
clustering about the court. It was the many years' dwelling of the
elder Visconti, and his death-place in 1818. The house at No. 3 was
erected early in the nineteenth century, on the site of Buzot's
residence, as shall be told in a later chapter. In it Humboldt lived
from 1815 to 1818. The associations of No. 5 have already been
suggested. The largest builder on the quay was Cardinal Mazarin, whose
college, to which he gave his own name, and to which the public gave
the name Collége des Quatre-Nations, is now the Palais de l'Institut.
He paid for it with money wrung from wretched France, as he so paid
for the grand _hôtel_ he erected for another niece, Anne Marie
Martinozzi, widow of that Prince de Conti who was Molière's school
friend. On the ground that it covered was built, in 1860-62, the wing
of the Beaux-Arts at Nos. 11 and 13 Quai Malaquais. That school has
also taken possession of the Hôtel de Bouillon of the cardinal's other
niece, almost alongside. It had been the property of the rich and
vulgar money-king Bazinière, whom we shall meet again, and he had sold
it to the Duc de Bouillon. The pretty wife of this very near-sighted
husband had the house re-decorated, and filled it with a marvellous
collection of furniture, paintings, _bric-à-brac_. She filled it,
also, by her open table twice a day, with thick-coming guests, some of
whom were worth knowing. The _hôtel_ came by inheritance in 1823 to M.
de Chimay, who stipulated, in making it over to the Beaux-Arts, in
1885, that its seventeenth-century façade should be preserved, and by
this agreement we have here, at No. 17 Quai Malaquais, an admirable
specimen of the competence of the elder, the great Mansart. It is
higher than he left it, by reason of the wide, sloping roof, with many
skylights toward the north, placed there for the studios within, but
its two well-proportioned wings remain unchanged, and between them the
court, where La Fontaine was wont to sit or stroll, has been laid out
as a garden. While living here he brought out the first collection of
his "Contes" in 1665, and of his "Fables" in 1668. His "Les Amours de
Psyché," written in 1669, begins with a charming description of the
meetings in Boileau's rooms of the famous group of comrades.
From this home he went to the home of Madame de la Sablière, with
whom, about 1672, he had formed a friendship which lasted unbroken
until her death. This tender and steadfast companionship made the
truest happiness of La Fontaine's life. For twenty years an inmate of
her household, a member of her family, he was petted and cared for as
he craved. In her declining years she had to be away from home
attending to her charitable work--for she followed the fashion of
turning _dévote_ as age advanced--and then he suffered in unaccustomed
loneliness. His tongue spoke of her with the same constant admiration
and gratitude that is left on record by his pen, and at her death he
was completely crushed.
When he was invited by Madame de la Sablière and her poet-husband to
share their home, they were living at their country-place, "_La Folie
Rambouillet_," not to be mistaken for the Hôtel de Rambouillet.
Sablière's _hôtel_, built by his father, a wealthy banker, was in the
suburb of Reuilly, on the Bercy road, north of the Seine, not far from
Picpus. The Reuilly station and the freight-houses of the Vincennes
railway now cover the site of this splendid mansion and its extensive
grounds. Here Monsieur de la Sablière died in 1680, and his widow,
taking La Fontaine along, removed to her town-house. This stood on the
ground now occupied by the buildings in Rue Saint-Honoré, nearly
opposite Rue de la Sourdière. In the court of No. 203 are bits of
carving that may have come down from the original mansion. Here they
dwelt untroubled until death took her away in 1693. It is related that
La Fontaine, leaving this house after the funeral, benumbed and
bewildered by the blow, met Monsieur d'Hervart. "I was going," said
that gentleman, "to offer you a home with me." "I was going to ask
it," was the reply. And in this new abode he dwelt until his death,
two years later.
Berthélemy d'Hervart, a man of great wealth, had purchased, in 1657,
the Hôtel de l'Éperon, a mansion erected on the site of Burgundy's
Hôtel de Flandre. M. d'Hervart had enlarged and decorated his new
abode, employing for the interior frescoes the painter Mignard,
Molière's friend. The actor and his troupe had played here, by
invitation, nearly fifty years before La Fontaine's coming. It stood
in old Rue Plâtrière, now widened out, entirely rebuilt, and renamed
Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau; and on the wall of the Central Post-office
that faces that street, you will find a tablet stating that on this
site died Jean de la Fontaine on April 13, 1695.
Madame d'Hervart was a young and lovely woman, and as devoted to the
old poet as had been Madame de la Sablière. She went so far as to try
to regulate his dress, his expenditure, and his morals. Congratulated
one day on the splendor of his coat, La Fontaine found to his surprise
and delight that his hostess had substituted it--when, he had not
noticed--for the shabby old garment that he had been wearing for
years. She and her husband held sacred, always, the room in which La
Fontaine died, showing it to their friends as a place worthy of
reverence.
He was buried in the Cemetery of Saints-Innocents, now all built over
except its very centre, which is kept as a small park about the
attractive fountain of Saints-Innocents. The Patriots of the
Revolution, slaying so briskly their men of birth, paused awhile to
bring from their graves what was left of their men of brains. Misled
by inaccurate rumor, they left La Fontaine's remains in their own
burial-ground, and removed what they believed to be his bones from the
graveyard of Saint-Joseph, where he had not been buried, along with
the bones they believed to be those of Molière, who _had_ been buried
there. These casual and dubious remains were kept in safety in the
convent of Petits-Augustins in present Rue Bonaparte, until, in the
early years of the nineteenth century, they were removed for final
sepulture to Père-Lachaise.
No literary man of his time--perhaps of any time--was so widely known
and so well beloved as La Fontaine. He attracted men, not only the
best in his own guild, but the highest in the State and in affairs.
Men various in character, pursuits, station, were equally attached to
him; the great Condé was glad to receive him as a frequent guest at
Chantilly; the superfine sensualist, Saint-Évremond, in exile in
England, urged him to come to visit him and to meet Waller. He nearly
undertook the journey, less to see Saint-Évremond and to know Waller,
than to follow his Duchesse de Bouillon, visiting her sister, the
Duchess of Mazarin, in her Chelsea home. It was at this time that
Ninon de Lenclos wrote to Saint-Évremond: "You wish La Fontaine in
England. We have little of his company in Paris. His understanding is
much impaired."
Racine, eighteen years his junior, looked up to La Fontaine as a
critic, a counsellor, and a friend, from their early days together in
1660, through long years of intimacy, until he stood beside La
Fontaine's bed in his last illness. He even took an odd pleasure in
finding that he and La Fontaine's deserted country wife had sprung
from the same provincial stock. Molière first met La Fontaine at Vaux,
the more than royal residence of Fouquet, at the time of the royal
visit in 1661. La Fontaine wrote a graceful bit of verse in praise of
the author of "Les Fâcheux," played for the first time before King and
court during these festivities, and the two men, absolutely opposed in
essential qualities, were fast friends from that time on. "They make
fun of the _bonhomme_," said the ungrudging player once, "and our
clever fellows think they can efface him; but he'll efface us all
yet."
It is needless to say that La Fontaine was beloved by Boileau, the
all-loving. That kindly ascetic was moved to attempt the amendment of
his friend's laxity of life, and to this blameless end dragged him to
prayers sometimes, where La Fontaine was bored and would take up any
book at hand to beguile the time. In this way he made acquaintance
with the Apocrypha, and became intensely interested in Baruch, and
asked Boileau if he knew Baruch, and urged him to read Baruch, as a
hitherto undiscovered genius. During his last illness, he told the
attendant priest that he had been reading the New Testament, and that
he regarded it as a good, a very good book.
In truth, his soul was the soul of a child, and, childlike, he lived
in a world of his own--a world peopled with the animals and the plants
and the inanimate objects, made alive by him and almost human. He
loved them all, and painted them with swift, telling strokes of his
facile pen. The acute Taine points out that the brute creations of
this poet are prototypes of every class and every profession of his
country and his time. His dumb favorites attracted him especially by
their unspoiled simplicity, for he loathed the artificial existence of
his fellow-creatures. With "a sullen irony and a desperate
resignation" he let himself be led into society, and he was bored
beyond bearing by its high-heeled decorum. It is said that he
cherished, all his life long, a speechless exasperation with the
King, that incarnation of pomposity and pretence to his untamed Gallic
spirit. Yet this malcontent had to put on the livery of his
fellow-flunkies, and his dedication, to the Dauphin, of his "Fables,"
is as fulsome and servile as any specimen of sycophancy of that
toad-eating age.
Yet, able to make trees and stones talk, he himself could not talk, La
Bruyère tells us; coloring his portraiture strongly, as was his way,
and rendering La Fontaine much too heavy and dull, with none of the
skill in description with his tongue that he had with his pen. He may
be likened to Goldsmith, who "wrote like an angel and talked like poor
Poll." Madame de Sablière said to him: "_Mon bon ami, que vous seriez
bête, si vous n'aviez pas tant d'esprit!_" Louis Racine, owning to the
lovable nature of the man, has to own, too, that he gave poor account
of himself in society, and adds that his sisters, who in their youth
had seen the poet frequently at their father's table in Rue Visconti,
recalled him only as a man untidy in dress and stupid in talk. He gave
this impression mainly because he was forever dreaming, even in
company, and so seemed distant and dull; but, when drawn out of his
dreams, no man could be more animated and more delightful.
[Illustration: La Fontaine.
(From the portrait by Rigaud-y-Ros.)]
So he was found by congenial men, and so especially by approving
women. These took to him on the spot, women of beauty and of wit, and
women commonplace enough. To them all his prattle was captivating,
devoid as it was of the grossness so conspicuous in his poems. He
depended on women in every way all through his life; they catered to
his daily needs, and they provided for his higher wants; they helped
him in his money troubles, they helped him in all his troubles. And he
requited each one's care with a genuine affection, not only at the
time, but for all time, in the record he has left of his gratitude and
his devotion to these ministering women. His verse is an unconscious
chronicle of his loves, his caprices, his inconstancies, and his
loyalties. Nor did a woman need to be clever and cultivated to be
bewitched by his inborn, simple sweetness. A matter-of-fact nurse,
hired to attend him during an illness which came near being fatal,
said to the attending priest: "Surely, God could not have the courage
to damn a man like that."
This memory he has left is brought pleasantly home to the passer-by in
Rue de Grenelle by the sign of a hotel, a quiet clerical house,
frequented by churchmen and church-loving provincials visiting Paris.
The sign bears the name "_Au bon La Fontaine_," in striking proof of
the permanent place in the common heart won by this lovable man.
He was content to drift through life, his days spent, as he put it in
his epitaph on "Jean," one-half in doing nothing, the other half in
sleeping. He had no library or study or workroom, like other
pen-workers; he lived out of doors in the open air, and wandered
vaguely, tasting blameless epicurean delights. Some of us seem to see,
always in going along Cours la Reine, that quaint figure, comical and
pathetic, as he was seen by the Duchesse de Bouillon on a rainy
morning, when she drove to Versailles. He was standing under a tree on
this wooded water-side, and on her return on that rainy evening he was
standing under the same tree. He had dreamed away the long day there,
not knowing or not caring that he was wet. He explained, once when he
came late--inexcusably late--to a dinner, that he had been watching a
procession of ants in a field, and had found that it was a funeral; he
had accompanied the _cortége_ to the grave in the garden, and had then
escorted the bereaved family back to its home, as bound by courtesy.
This genuine poet, of dry, sly humor and of unequalled suppleness of
phrase, was by nature a gentle, wild creature, and by habit a docile,
domesticated pet, attaching himself to any amiable woman who was
willing to give him a warm corner in her heart and her house. And how
such women looked on him was prettily and wittily put by one of them:
"He isn't a man, he is a _fablier_"--a natural product of her own
sudden inspiration--"who blossoms out into fables as a tree blossoms
out with leaves."
* * * * *
NICOLAS BOILEAU began his acquaintance with Molière by his tribute of
four dainty verses to the author of "L'École des Femmes," and the
friendship thus formed was broken only by the death of Molière, to
whose memory Boileau inserted his magnificent lines in the "Epître à
Monsieur Racine." It was Boileau who criticised the early verse of
young Racine, so justly and so gently, that the two men were drawn
together in an amity that was never marred. It was Boileau who, after
nearly forty years of finding him out by the distrustful Racine, was
acknowledged to be "noble and full of friendship." It was Boileau who
sang without cessation praises of Racine to Louis XIV., and who
startled the nimble mediocrity of his majesty's mind by the assertion
that Molière was the rarest genius of the Grand Monarch's reign and
realm. It was Boileau who made, in his fondness for La Fontaine, the
unhappy and hopeless attempt to reform his friend's loose living, and
in so doing nearly led to the undoing of La Fontaine's goodwill for
him. It was Boileau, prompted by compassion for Corneille's
impoverished old age, who offered to surrender his own pension in
favor of the distressed veteran of letters. It was Boileau who found
Patru forced to sell his cherished books that he might get food, and
it was Boileau who bought them, on condition that Patru should keep
them and look after them for their new owner. It was Boileau who tried
to work a miracle in his comrade Chapelle by weaning him from his
wine-bibbing; and when Chapelle found the lecture dry, and would
listen to it only over a bottle or two, it was Boileau who came out of
the _cabaret_ the tipsier of the pair. It was Boileau who was known to
every man who knew him at all--and he was known to many men of merit
and demerit--as a loyal, sincere, helpful, unselfish friend. It was of
Boileau that a perplexed woman in the great throng at his burial said,
in the hearing of young Louis Racine: "He seems to have lots of
friends, and yet somebody told me that he wrote bad things about
everybody."
Those friends could have explained the puzzle. They mourned the
indulgent comrade who was doubled with the stern satirist. The man, so
rigid in morals and austere of life, was tolerant to the foibles of
his friends, tender in their troubles, open-handed for their needs.
The writer, so exacting in his standard and severe in his judgment,
was cruel only with his pen. Trained critic in verse, rather than
inspired poet, Boileau had an enthusiasm for good work in others equal
to his intolerance of bad. He loathed the powdered and perfumed
_minauderies_ of the drawing-room poetasters, and he loved the swift
and sure stroke of Molière's "_rare et fameux esprit_." It was in
frank admiration that he demanded of his friend: "_Enseigne-moi où tu
trouves la rime!_" For this impeccable artist in words, who has left
his profession of faith in the power of a word in its right place, had
to reset and recast, file and polish, to get the perfection he craved.
And so this bountiful admirer was easily an unsparing censor. Sincere
in letters as in life, he insisted on equal sincerity from his
fellow-workers, and would not let them spare their toil or scamp their
stint. He watched and warned them; his reproof and his approval
brought out better work from them; and he may well be entitled the
Police President of Parnassus of his country and his day.
Boileau's sturdy uprightness of spine stood him in good stead in that
great court where all men grew sleek and servile, and where no
pen-worker seemed able to escape becoming a courtier. His caustic
audacity salted his sycophancy and made him a man apart from the herd
of flatterers. His thrust was so suave, as well as sharp, that the
spoiled monarch himself accepted admonition from that courageous
cleverness. "I am having search made in every direction for Monsieur
Arnauld," said Louis, when eager in his pursuit of the Jansenists.
"Your Majesty is always fortunate; you will not find him," was
Boileau's quick retort, received with a smile by the King. When money
was needed for Dr. Perrault's new eastern façade of the Louvre and for
its other alterations, the King naturally economized in the incomes of
other men. The pensions of literary men--in many instances the sole
source of their livelihood--were allowed to lapse; that of Boileau was
continued by an order that his name should be entered on the Louvre
pay-roll as "an architect paid for mason's work." His mordant reply to
the questioning pay-clerk was: "Yes, I am a mason." His masonry in the
stately fabric of French literature stands unmarred to-day; coldly
correct, it may be, yet elegant, faultless, consummate.
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was long believed to have been born in the
country and to have played in the fields as a child, and so to have
got his added name _des préaux_; but it is now made certain that the
house of his birth, in 1636, was in Rue de Jérusalem, a street that
led to the Sainte-Chapelle, from about the middle of the present Quai
des Orfèvres. The only field he knew lay at the foot of his father's
garden at Crosne, where the lad was sometimes taken. Fields and
gardens had never anything to say to this born cockney, and there is
not a sniff of real country air in all his verse. The street of his
birth was one of the narrow, dark streets of oldest Paris, on Île de
la Cité; and the house, tall and thin, had its gable end on the court
of the old Palais de Justice. The earliest air breathed by this baby
was charged with satire, it would seem. For the room of his birth had
been occupied, nearly half a century earlier, by Jacques Gillot, the
brilliant canon of Sainte-Chapelle. In this room assembled in secret
that clever band of talkers and writers, who planned and wrote "La
Ménippée"; the first really telling piece of French political satire,
so telling, in its unbridled buffoonery, that it gave spirit to the
arms that shattered the League, and helped to put Henry of Navarre on
the throne of France.
After his father's death, young Nicolas kept his home with his elder
brother Jérôme, who had succeeded to the paternal mansion, and who
gave the boy a sort of watch-tower, built above the garrets, in which
he could hardly stand upright. The house, the court, the old palace,
were long since swept away, and with them went all the melodramatic
stage-setting of Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris" and Sue's "Mystères de
Paris." Only the Sainte-Chapelle is left of the scenes of Boileau's
early years.
He was sent for a while to Collége d'Harcourt, where young Racine
came a little later, and was then put to the study of law, the family
trade; passing by way of Beauvais College to the Sorbonne. He is known
to have pleaded in but one case, and then with credit to himself.
Still the law did not please him, any more than did the dry theology
and the pedantic philosophy that he listened to on the benches of the
Sorbonne. He was enamoured early of poetry and romance, and soon
affianced himself to the Muse. This was his only betrothal, and he
made no other marriage. He was born an old bachelor, and he soon
sought bachelor quarters, driven by the children's racket from his
nephew's house--also in the Cour du Palais--where he had found a home.
This nephew and this house were well known to Voltaire when a boy, as
he tells us in his "Épître à Boileau":
"_Chez ton neveu Dongois je passai mon enfance,
Bon bourgeois, qui se crut un homme d'importance._"
It is first in the year 1664 that we can place with certainty
Boileau's residence in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, in that small apartment
which fills a larger place in the annals of literary life than any
domicile of that day, perhaps of any day. It was the gathering-place
of that illustrious quartette--
"The goodliest fellowship of famous knights
Whereof this world holds record."
Molière comes from his rooms in Rue Saint-Honoré, or from his theatre;
crossing the Seine by the Pont-Neuf, and passing along Rues Dauphine
and de Bucy, and through the Marché Saint-Germain; moody from domestic
dissensions, heavy-hearted with the recent loss of his first-born.
Once among his friends, he listens, as he always listened, talking but
little. La Fontaine saunters from the Hôtel de Bouillon, by way of Rue
des Petits-Augustins--now Rue Bonaparte--and of tortuous courts now
straightened into streets. Sitting at table, he is yet in his own land
of dreams, until, stirred from his musing, his fine eyes brighten, and
he chatters with a curious blending of simplicity and _finesse_.
Racine steps in from his lodging in Rue de Grenelle, hard by; the
youngest of the four, he, unlike those other two, is seldom silent,
and gives full play to his ironical raillery. Next above him in age is
the host; shrewd, brusque, incisive of speech and manner. So he shows
in Girardon's admirable bust in the Louvre. The enormous wig then worn
cannot becloud the bright alertness of his expression, or over-weigh
the full lips that could sneer and the square chin, so resolute. These
comrades talked of all sorts of things, and read to one another what
each had written since they last met; read it for the sake of honest
criticism from the rest, and with no other thought. For never were
four men so absolutely without pose, without any pretence of
earnestness, while immensely in earnest all the time. In "Les Amours
de Psyché," La Fontaine assures us that they did not absolutely banish
all serious discourse, but that they took care not to have too much of
it, and preferred the darts of fun and nonsense that were feathered
with friendly counsel. Best of all, his fable makes plain that there
were no cliques nor cabals, no envy nor malice, among the men that
made this worshipful band.
[Illustration: Boileau-Despréaux.
(From the portrait by Largillière.)]
Their table served rather to sit around than to eat from, for their
suppers were simple, and the flowing bowl was passed only when
boisterous Chapelle or other _bon-vivant_ dropped in. For others were
invited at times, men of the world, the court, and the camp. And
Boileau was the common centre of these excentric stars, and when each,
in his own special atmosphere of coolness, swayed from the others'
vicinage, Boileau alone let no alienation come between him and any one
of them. For each, he was what Racine had found him, "the best friend
and the best man in the world."
The house was near a noted _cabaret_, to which they sometimes
resorted, at the Saint-Sulpice end of the street. The _cabaretier_ was
the illustrious Cresnet, made immortal in Boileau's verse. For the
poet was no prude, and enjoyed the pleasures of the table so far as
his health permitted; and, a trained gastronomic artist, he knew how
to order a choicely harmonized repast. His street is widened, his
house is gone, and no one can fix the spot. Yet the turmoil of that
crowded thoroughfare of to-day is deadened for us by the mute voices
of these men.
We have noted Boileau's camp-following with Racine, in their rôles of
royal historiographers--in 1678 and later--but he was not strong
enough for these excursions, even though they were made a picnic for
the court. He was never at home on a horse, and yet out of place in
the mud, and he could not enjoy the laughter he caused in either
attitude, before or after he was thrown; laughter that is recorded in
the letters of Madame de Sévigné.
It was probably because of Molière's taking a country place at Auteuil
that Boileau began to make frequent excursions to that quiet suburb
about 1667, and went to live in his tiny cottage there in 1685. "He
had acquired it," to use his biographer's words, "partly by his
Majesty's munificence, and partly by his own careful economy," so that
he was opulent, for a poet. His purchase papers were made out by the
notary Arouet--Voltaire's father--who drew up Boileau's pension papers
in 1692, and who did much notarial work for the Boileau family. The
cottage stood exactly on the ground now covered by the rear wing of
the Hydropathic Establishment, at No. 12 Rue Boileau, Auteuil. Here he
spent the spring and summer months of many a year, always alone, but
with a hand-shake and a smile for his many visitors, men of birth as
well as men of brains. Hither Voltaire certainly came, when a lad
living with Dongois, for he says, in his pleasant rhymed epistle to
Boileau:
"_Je vis le jardinier de ta maison d'Auteuil._"
To this same "_laborieux valet_," to this same
"_Antoine, gouverneur de mon jardin d'Auteuil_,"
Boileau wrote his letter in verse in 1695. The widow Racine came,
too, for frequent outings with her children, who loved the garden and
adored Boileau, for the peaches he picked for them and the ninepins he
played with them. Louis Racine, a sort of pupil of his, says that the
old poet was nearly as skilful at this game as in versifying, and
usually knocked over the entire nine with one ball. And when he went
to town, no warmer welcome met the crusty old bachelor than in Rue des
Marais-Saint-Germain, still the dwelling-place of Racine's family.
In great mansions, too, he had long been cordially received. He was a
visitor at that of Madame de Guénégaud, which has given its site to
the Hôtel de la Monnaie, and its name to the street alongside. He was
fond of meeting kindred spirits and kindly hosts in the _hôtel_ of the
great Condé and his younger brother Conti. He was one of the select
set that sat about the table of Lamoignon, every Monday, at his home
in the Marais, to be visited by us later. And whenever old Cardinal
Retz came to town, Boileau hastened to the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, of
which no stone stands in the street of its name. Here the
white-headed, worn-out old fighter, compelled to live in retirement,
after the storms and scandals of his active life, was made at home by
his admirable niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and here he was encircled
by admiring men and women. Here, writes Madame de Sévigné, his other
niece, who came often to sit with him, Boileau presented to Retz early
copies of "Le Lutrin," and of "L'Ars Poétique."
Boileau could not live in the country in winter, and even in summer he
had to go often into town to get the care of his trusted physician.
For he was an invalid from boyhood, and all his life an uncomplaining
sufferer. But he hurried back, whenever permitted, to the pure air and
the congenial solitude of his small cottage, where three faithful
servants cared for him; not as would have cared the wife, whom he
ought to have had, all his friends said, and so, too, he thought
sometimes. He grew lonely as life lengthened, and as he saw his
cronies passing away, fast and faster, old Corneille being the last of
them to go.
His winters in the great city were spent in lodgings on the island, in
the cloisters of Notre-Dame. Their quiet had always attracted him, as
he avows in the verse that quivers with his nervous irritability,
caused by the noises of the noisiest of towns. He cries, "Does one go
to bed to be kept awake?" Indeed, he had rooms in the cloisters as
early as 1683, keeping them for town quarters, in the official
residence of l'Abbé de Dreux, his old friend, a canon of Notre-Dame.
To this address Racine sent him a letter as late as 1687. The
ecclesiastical settlement within the cathedral cloisters, and its only
remaining cottage, have been spoken of in an earlier chapter. The
cloisters themselves survive only in the name of the street that has
been cut through their former site.
In 1699 we find Boileau living with his confessor, the Abbé Lenoir,
also a canon of the cathedral, who had the privilege of residing
within the cloisters. This house stood exactly where now is the
southern edge of the fountain behind Notre-Dame, above Le Terrain and
the Seine. His rooms were on the first floor, his bed in an alcove,
and his windows looked out on the terrace over the river, as we learn
by the amiable accuracy of the lawyer who drew up his will. Here
Boileau lived through painful years of breaking bodily health, but
with unbroken faculties. He yearned for his old home at Auteuil, and
yet he was too feeble to go so far. He had sold his cottage to a
friend, under the condition that a room should be reserved always for
his use. That use never came. One day toward the end, he summoned up
strength to drive to the beloved place; but all was changed, he
changed most of all, and he hurried home to his lonely quarters, where
death found him at ten o'clock in the morning of March 2, 1711.
His devoted servants were requited for years of faithful service by
handsome legacies, then the relatives were provided for, and no friend
was forgotten. The remainder of his fortune went to the "_pauvres
honteux_" of six small parishes in the City. A vast and reverent
concourse of mourners of every rank followed his coffin to its first
resting-place. This was in the lower chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle, as
he had ordered; the church of his baptism, and of the burial of his
mother and father. By a strange chance, his grave had been dug under
that very reading-desk which had suggested to him the subject of his
most striking production, the heroic-comic poem "Le Lutrin." Early in
the Revolution his remains were removed, to save them from fortuitous
profanation by the "Patriots," to the Museum of French Monuments
established in the convent of the Petits-Augustins, in the street of
that name, now Rue Bonaparte. In 1819 his bones were finally placed in
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where, in the chapel of Saint-Peter and
Saint-Paul, they are at rest behind a black marble tablet carved with
a ponderous Latin inscription.
FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS
[Illustration: Voltaire.
(From the statue by Houdon in the foyer of the Comédie Française.)]
FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS
"_Dans la cour du Palais, je naquis ton voisin_," wrote Voltaire to
Boileau, in one of those familiar rhymed letters that soften the
austere rhetoric of the French verse of that day. The place of
Voltaire's birth, nearly sixty years after that of Boileau, was in the
same Street of Jerusalem, at its corner with the Street of Nazareth,
and it was only thus as a baby that he came ever in touch with the
Holy Land. On November 22, 1694, the day after his birth, he was
carried across the river to Saint-André-des-Arts--no one knows why his
baptism was not in the island church of the parish--and there
christened François-Marie Arouet. His earlier years were passed in the
house of Boileau's nephew Dongois, whose airs of importance did not
escape the keen infant eyes, as we have seen in the same letter in
verse in our preceding chapter. Then he was sent to Lycée
Louis-le-Grand, whither we have gone with young Poquelin, seventy
years earlier. The college stands in its new stone on its old site in
widened Rue Saint-Jacques.
We hear of no break in the tranquil course of young Arouet's studies,
beyond the historic scene of his presentation to Mlle. Ninon de
Lenclos at her home in the Marais, to which we shall go in a later
chapter. This was in 1706, when she owned to ninety years of age at
least, and she was flattered by the visit of the youth of twelve, and
by the verse he wrote for her birthday. Dying in that year, she left a
handsome sum to her juvenile admirer, to be spent for books. So,
"_secondé de Ninon, dont je fus légataire_," the lad was strengthened
in his inclination for the career of literature he had already planned
for himself, and in his disinclination for the legal career planned
for him by his father. The elder Arouet was a flourishing
notary--among his clients was the Boileau family--who considered his
own the only profession really respectable. He placed his boy, the
college days being done, with one Maître Alain, whose office was near
Place Maubert, between Rues de la Bucherie and Galande, a quarter
crowded then with notaries and advocates, now all swept into limbo.
But young Arouet spent too many of his days and nights with the
congenial comrades that met in the Temple; "an advanced and dangerous"
troop of swells and wits and pen-workers, light-heartedly bent on fun,
amid the general gloom brought by Marlborough's victories, and by
Madame de Maintenon's persistence in making Paris pious. Father Arouet
sent his son away to The Hague; the first of his many journeys,
enforced and voluntary. When allowed to return in 1715, he lost no
time in hunting up his old associates; and soon, stronger hands than
those of his father settled him in the Bastille, in punishment for
verse, not written by him, satirizing the Regent and his daughter,
Duchesse de Berri. There he spent his twenty-third year, utilizing his
leisure to plan his "Henriade," and to finish his "Oedipe." When set
free, he came out as Voltaire. Whether he took this new name from a
small estate of his mother, or whether it was an anagram of _Arouet
fils_, is not worth the search; enough for us that it is the name of
him, who was to become, as John Morley rightly says, "the very eye of
eighteenth-century illumination," and to whom we may apply his own
words, used magnanimously of his famous contemporary, Montesquieu;
that humanity had lost its title-deeds, and he had recovered them.
Once again in the world, he produced his "Oedipe" in 1718, with an
immediate and resounding success, which was not won by his succeeding
plays between 1720 and 1724. It was during this period that he
spasmodically disappeared from Paris, reappearing at Brussels,
Utrecht, The Hague; "_jouant à l'envoyé secret_," as was his mania
then and in later years. During one of these flittings as an
ambassador's ghost, he met Rousseau, and they were close friends until
the day when Rousseau, showing to Voltaire his "Letter to Posterity,"
was told that it would never reach its address! That gibe made them
sworn enemies. In Paris, during these years, Voltaire had no settled
home. We have seen him in the _salon_ of Mlle. Lecouvreur, in Rue
Visconti, and we have seen him there, a sincere mourner at her
death-bed. It has been told in an earlier chapter, how that fine
creature had sat by Voltaire's sick-bed, careless of her own danger
from the small-pox, with which he was stricken in November, 1723. He
frequented many haunts of the witty and the wicked during these years,
and a historic scene in one of these has been put on canvas by Mr.
Orchardson. One evening in the year 1725, Voltaire was a saucy guest
at the table of the Duc de Sully, descendant of Henri IV.'s great
minister, in the noble mansion in Rue Saint-Antoine, to be visited by
us later. On going out, he was waylaid and beaten by the lackeys of
the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, who desired to impress by cudgels the
warning that, while princes are willing to be amused at the table
where sit "only princes and poets," the poets must not presume on the
privilege. In the painting, Voltaire reappears in the room to the
remaining guests, dishevelled and outraged. Later he challenged Rohan,
whose reply came in an order of committal to the Bastille. After two
weeks in a cell, Voltaire's request to go to England in exile was
gladly accorded by the government.
We all know well the Voltaire of an older day, in his statues beside
the Institute and within that building, beside the Panthéon, in Square
Monge, and in the _foyer_ of the Théâtre Français. To see him at this
younger day, we must turn into the court-yard of the Mairie of the
Ninth Arrondissement at No. 6 Rue Drouot--an ancient and attractive
family mansion. In the centre of the court is a modern bronze, showing
"the ape of genius" at the age of twenty-five, a dapper creature with
head perked up and that complacent smile so marked in all his
portraits. This smirk may be due less to self-satisfaction than to
that physical peculiarity, claimed by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his
own case, which is caused by the congenital shortening of the levator
muscles of the mouth. The statue's right hand rests jauntily on the
hip, in the left hand is a book, and the left skirt of the long coat
is blown back, showing the sword that was worn by young philosophers
who would be young bloods. The pedestal holds two bas-reliefs; the
youth in Ninon's _salon_, the patriarch at Ferney, and cut in it are
his words: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent
him."
During his years in England, Voltaire made acquaintance with all the
notable men of letters then living, and with William Shakespeare in
his works. In them he tolerantly found much merit, but always styled
their author a barbarian. Those barbarisms and savageries he civilized
and smoothed to his pattern, for his "Brutus" is an unconscious echo
of "Julius Cæsar," his "Zaïre" a shadow of "Othello." He refused to
call on Wycherly "the gentleman," as Wycherly insisted, but was glad
to meet Wycherly the playwright. Nor did Voltaire turn his back on men
and women of fashion, but used them so cleverly as to enable him to
carry home to France a small fortune, from the subscriptions to his
English edition of the "Henriade." He was shrewd in money matters, and
a successful speculator for many years. We first hear of him again in
Paris in 1729, getting army contracts and making money in queer ways.
Yet all through life his pen was always busy, and in this same year
it is at work in a grand apartment of the Hôtel Lambert. This was the
mansion of M. du Châtelet, husband--officially only--of "_la sublime
Émilie_," with whom Voltaire had taken up his abode. The Hôtel Lambert
remains unchanged at the eastern end of Île Saint-Louis, looking, from
behind its high wall and its well-shaded garden, at its incomparable
prospect. Its entrance at No. 2 Rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Île opens on a
grand court and an imposing façade. "This is a house made for a king,
who would be a philosopher," wrote Voltaire to his august
correspondent Frederick the Great. He himself was neither king of this
realm nor proved himself a philosopher in its grotesque squabbles.
Madame du Châtelet was as frankly unfaithful to him as to her husband,
who was frequently called in to reconcile the infuriated lovers. She
was a woman of unusual abilities as well as of unusual indelicacies,
with an itch for reading, research, and writing, her specialties being
Newton and mathematics.
[Illustration: The Hôtel Lambert.]
In 1733 this queer couple found it to their comfort to quit Paris, where
Voltaire was ceaselessly beset by the suspicions of the powers that
regulated thought in France. They moved about much, to Voltaire's
discomfort, living sometimes at Cirey, on the borders of Champagne and
Lorraine, with or without the complaisant du Châtelet; sometimes in a
mansion taken by Voltaire in Paris. This stood on the corner of two
streets no longer existing, Rues du Clos-Georgeau and Traversière-Saint-
Honoré, at No. 25 of the latter; and its site now lies under the
roadway of new Avenue de l'Opéra. The cutting of this avenue has left
unchanged only the northern end of Rue Traversière, and this has been
renamed in honor of Molière. To place Voltaire's residence in the old
mansion at the new number 25 in this street, as a recent topographer
has done, is an ingenuous flight of fancy.
Here Voltaire went back to live after death had taken "_la sublime
Émilie_" from him, from her other lover, and from her husband. This
legal husband was less inconsolable than Voltaire, whose almost
incredible reproach to the third man in the case makes Morality hold
her hand before her face--peeping between the fingers, naturally--while
Immorality shakes with frank laughter. On the second floor of this
house, Voltaire remained, "_de moitié avec le Marquis du Châtelet_;"
the first floor, which had been her own, being thenceforward closed to
them both. Here he tried to find companionship with his selfish and
stolid niece, Madame Denis, and with his _protégé_ Lekain. He
transformed the garret into a private theatre, for the production of
his plays, free from the royal or the popular censor; and for the
training of Lekain in the part of Titus, in "Brutus." That promising,
and soon accepted, actor made his _début_ at the Théâtre Français in
September, 1750, and his patron was not among the audience. From this
house, Voltaire went frequently across the river to visit Mlle.
Clairon in her apartment in Rue Visconti, so well known to him when
tenanted by Mlle. Lecouvreur, twenty years earlier. And from this
house, wherein he came to be too desolate and lonely, Voltaire went
forth from France in 1751, to find a still more uncongenial home at
Potsdam. With his queer life there, and his absurd quarrels with
Frederick the Great, this chronicle cannot concern itself.
"_Café à la Voltaire_" is the legend you may read to-day on a pillar
of the Café Procope, in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, directly opposite
the old Comédie Française. We have seen the mixed delight and doubt
with which coffee was first sipped by the Parisians of the end of the
seventeenth century, but it won its way, and in 1720 the Sicilian
Procope opened this second Paris _café_. It soon became the favorite
resort by night of the playwrights and play-actors, and the swells
among the audience, of the playhouse across the street. Gradually the
men of letters, living in and visiting the capital, made this _café_
their gathering-place of an afternoon; so that, on any day in the
middle years of the eighteenth century, all the men best worth knowing
might be found here. Their names are lettered and their atrocious
portraits painted on its inner walls. In the little room on the left,
as you walk in on the ground floor, they treasure still, while these
lines are written, Voltaire's table. He sat here, near the stage that
produced his plays, sipping his own special and abominable blend of
coffee and chocolate. With him sat, among the many not so notable,
Diderot, d'Alembert, Marmontel, Rousseau, with his young friend
Grimm--hardly yet at home in Paris, not at all at home with its
language--and Piron, Voltaire's pet enemy, who wrote his own epitaph:
"_Ci-gît Piron,
Que ne fut rien,
Pas même Académicien._"
Here, on an evening in 1709, sat Alain-René Le Sage, awaiting in
suspense the verdict on his "Turcaret," brought out in the theatre
opposite, after many heart-breaking delays; for the misguided author
had convinced himself that his title to fame would be founded on this
now-forgotten play, rather than on his never-to-be-neglected "Gil
Blas"!
During the Revolution, while the Café de la Régence, which faces the
present Comédie Française, was the pet resort of the royalist writers,
this Café Procope was the gathering-place of the Republican penmen;
and they draped its walls in black, and wore mourning for three days,
when word came across the water in 1790 of the death of Benjamin
Franklin, the complete incarnation to them of true republicanism.
Toward the unlamented end of the Second Empire, a small group of young
American students was to be found, of an evening, in the Café Procope,
harmlessly mirthful over their beer. After a while, they were content
to sit night after night in silence, all ears for the monologue at a
neighboring table; a copious and resistless outburst of argument and
invective, sprinkled with Gallic anecdote and with _gros mots_, and
broken by Rabelaisian laughter, from a magnificent voice and an ample
virility. They were told that the speaker was one Léon Gambetta, an
obscure barrister, already under the suspicion of the police of the
"lurking jail-bird," whom he helped drive from France, within a few
years.
The old house is to-day only a pallid spectre of its aforetime
red-blooded self, and is nourished by nothing more solid than these
uncompact memories. Loving them and all his Paris, its kindly
proprietor tries to revitalize its inanimate atmosphere by his
"_Soirées littéraires et musicales_." In a room upstairs "ancient
poems, ancient music, old-time song," are listened to by unprinted
poets, unplayed dramatists, unhung painters. Some of them read their
still unpublished works. The _patron_ enjoys it all, and the waiters
are the most depressed in all Paris.
Denis Diderot gives the effect in his work, as Gambetta did in the
flesh, of a living force of nature. When, at that same table, Diderot
opened the long-locked gate, the full and impetuous outflow swept all
before it, submerged and breathless. In his personality, as vivid as
that of Mirabeau, we see a fiery soul, a stormy nature, a daring
thinker, a prodigious worker. His head seemed encyclopædic to Grimm,
his life-long friend; and Rousseau, first friend and later enemy,
asserted that in centuries to come that head would be regarded with
the reverence given to the heads of Plato and of Aristotle. Voltaire
could imagine no one subject beyond the reach of Diderot's activity.
Arsène Houssaye names him "the last man of the day of dreaming in
religion and royalty, the first man of the day of the Revolution." And
John Morley, looking at him from a greater distance than any of these,
and with keener eyes, ranks him higher as a thinker than either
Rousseau or Voltaire. As thinker, essayist, critic, cyclopædist,
Diderot is indeed the most striking figure of the eighteenth century.
Rugged, uncouth, headlong, we see him, "_en redingote de peluche grise
éreintée_," in the philosophers' alley of the Luxembourg garden,
strolling with more energy than others give to striding. Striking and
strong he is in the exquisite bust by Houdon in the Louvre, yet with a
refinement of expression and a delicacy of poise of the head that are
very winning. This effect might have been gained by a Fragonard
working in the solid.
Here, under the trees where meet Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rues de
Rennes and Bonaparte, it is the student whom we see in bronze, leaning
forward in his chair, a quill pen in hand, his worn face bent and
intent. This spot was selected for the statue because just there
Diderot resided for many years. His house was at No. 12 Rue Taranne,
on the corner of Rue Saint-Benoît, and it was torn down when the
former street was widened into the new boulevard. Here, young Diderot,
refusing to return to the paternal home at Lancres, when he left the
Collége d'Harcourt--the school of Boileau and Racine--lived in a
squalid room, during his early days of uncongenial toil in a lawyer's
office and of all sorts of penwork that paid poorly--translations,
sermons, catalogues, advertisements. Here he was hungry and cold and
unhappy; here, in 1743, he married the pretty sewing-girl who lived in
this same house with her mother, and who became a devoted and faithful
wife to a trying husband. For her he had the only clean love of his
not-too-clean life. From this garret he poured forth prose, his chosen
form of expression, when poetry was the only vogue, and it is by his
persistence, perhaps, that prose has come to the throne in France. And
it was while living here that he originated the art-criticism of his
country; clear and thorough, discriminating and enthusiastic. Earlier
notices of pictures had been as casual as the shows themselves; begun
in 1673, under Colbert's protection and the younger Mansart's
direction, in a small pavilion on the site of the present Théâtre
Français, having one entrance in Rue de Richelieu, another in the
garden, into which the pictures often overflowed. When Diderot wrote
his notices for Grimm, the exhibitions had permanent shelter in the
halls of the Louvre. In 1746, still in this house, he published his
"Philosophic Thoughts" and other essays that were at first attributed
to Voltaire, and that at last sent the real author to Vincennes. There
he was kept for three maddening months by an outraged "Strumpetocracy"
and a spiteful Sorbonne, on its last legs of persecution for opinion.
You may go to this prison by the same road his escort took, now named
Boulevard Diderot, with unconscious topographic humor.
To visit "great Diderot in durance," Grimm and Rousseau came by this
road; stopping, before taking the Avenue de Vincennes, at a farm-house
on the edge of Place du Trône--now, Place de la Nation--where the
sentimentalist quenched his thirst with milk. That was the day when
Rousseau picked up the paradox, from Diderot, which he elaborated into
his famous essay, showing the superiority of the savage man over the
civilized man. There is as slight trace to be found of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau in the Paris of to-day as in the minds of the men of to-day.
We see him first, in 1745, at the Hôtel Saint-Quentin of our Balzac
chapter, carrying from there the uncomely servant, Thérèse le Vasseur.
After this he appears fitfully in Paris through many years. In 1772 he
is in Rue Plâtrière--a street now widened and named for him--on the
fourth floor of a wretched house opposite the present Post-office.
There he was found by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre--as thin-skinned and
touchy as Rousseau, yet somehow the two kept friendly--with his
repulsive Thérèse, whom he had made his wife in 1768. This preacher of
the holiness of the domestic affections had sent their five children
to the foundling hospital, according to his own statement, which is
our only reason for doubting that he did it. Bernardin found him, clad
in an overcoat and a white _bonnet_, copying music; of which Rousseau
knew nothing, except by the intuition of genius. For those who wish,
there are the pilgrimages to the Hermitage at Montmorenci, occupied by
him in 1756, and nearly forty years later by a man equally attractive,
Maximilien Robespierre; and to Ermenonville, the spot of Rousseau's
death in 1778. It is easier to stroll to the Panthéon, where, on one
side, is a statue of the author of "Le Contrat Social" and "Émile,"
which gives him a dignity that was not his in life. This tribute from
the French nation was decreed by the National Convention of _15
Brumaire, An II_, and erected by the National Assembly in 1791.
Durable as its bronze this tribute was meant to be, at the time when
he was deified by the nation; since then, his body and his memory have
been "cast to the dogs; a deep-minded, even noble, yet wofully
misarranged mortal." While acknowledging his impress on his generation
as an interpreter of moral and religious sentiment, and without
denying the claim of his admirers, that he is the father of modern
democracy, we may own, too, to a plentiful lack of liking for the man.
Released and returned to his wife in Rue Taranne, Diderot lost no time
in beginning again that toil which was his life. With all his other
work--"Letters on the Blind, for the use of those who can see," dramas
now forgotten, an obscene novel that paid the debts of his
mistress--he began and carried out his Encyclopædia. "No sinecure is
it!" says Carlyle: "penetrating into all subjects and sciences,
waiting and rummaging in all libraries, laboratories; nay, for many
years fearlessly diving into all manner of workshops, unscrewing
stocking-looms, and even working thereon (that the department of 'Arts
and Trades' might be perfect); then seeking out contributors, and
flattering them, quickening their laziness, getting payment for them,
quarrelling with bookseller and printer, bearing all miscalculations,
misfortunes, misdoings of so many fallible men on his single back." On
top of all, he had to bear the spasmodic persecution of the Government
instigated by the Church. The patient, gentle d'Alembert, with his
serenity, his clearness, and his method, helped Diderot more than all
the others. And so grew, in John Morley's words, "that mountain of
volumes, reared by the endeavor of stout hands and faithful," which,
having done its work for truth and humanity, is now a deserted ruin.
As he brought it to an end after thirty years of labor, Diderot found
himself grown old and worn, and the busiest brain and hand in France
began to flag. By now, he stood next in succession to the King,
Voltaire. Yet, for all the countless good pages he has written, it has
been truly said that he did not write one great book. Other urgent
creditors, besides old age, harassed him, and he had to sell his
collection of books. They were bought by the Empress Catharine of
Russia, at a handsome value, and she handsomely allowed him to retain
them for her, and furthermore paid him a salary for their care. Grimm
urged on her, in one of his gossiping _feuilles_, that have given
material for so much personal history, the propriety of housing her
library and its librarian properly, and this was done in the grand
mansion now No. 39 Rue de Richelieu. We have come to this street with
Molière and with Mignard, and there are other memories along this
lower length, to which a chapter could be given. We can awaken only
those that now belong to No. 50. Here lived a couple named Poisson,
and on March 19, 1741, they gave in marriage to Charles Guillaume le
Normand their daughter Jeanne-Antoinette, a girl of fifteen. That
blossom ripened and rottened into La Pompadour. The house is quite
unchanged since that day. In a large rear room on its first floor, in
the year 1899, future chroniclers will be glad to note that Moncure
D. Conway made an abbreviation of his noble life of Thomas Paine for
its French translation. His working-room was in the midst of the
scenes of Paine's Paris stay, but not one of them can be fixed with
certainty.
The house numbered 39 of this street is occupied by the "_Maison
Sterlin_," a factory of artistic metal-work in locks and bolts and
fastenings for doors and windows. It is an attractive museum of fine
iron and steel workmanship, ancient and modern. There, in a case, is
preserved the superbly elaborate key of Corneille's birth-house in
Rouen. The brothers Bricard have had the reverent good taste to retain
the late seventeenth-century interior of their establishment, and you
may mount by the easy stairs, with their fine wrought-iron rail, to
Diderot's dining-room on the first floor, its panelling unaltered
since his death there, on July 31, 1784. He had enjoyed, for only
twelve days, the grandest residence and the greatest ease his life had
known. They had been made busy days, of course, spent in arranging his
books and pictures. Sitting here, eating hastily, he died suddenly and
quietly, his elbows on the table. On August 1st his body was buried in
the parish church of Saint-Roch, and the tablet marking the spot is
near that commemorating Corneille, who had been brought there exactly
one hundred years before.
This church is eloquent with the presence of these two, with the voice
of Bossuet--"the Bible transfused into a man," in Lamartine's
phrase--and with the ping of Bonaparte's bullets on its porch; yet
there is a presence within, less clamorous but not less impressive
than any of these. In the fourth chapel, on your left as you enter, is
a bronze bust of a man, up to which a boy and a girl look from the two
corners of the pedestal. This is the monument of Charles Michel, Abbé
de l'Épée, placed above his grave in the chapel where he held services
at times, and the boy and girl stand for the countless deaf-and-dumb
children to whom he gave speech and hearing. The son of a royal
architect, with every prospect of preferment in the Church, with some
success as a winning preacher, his liberal views turned him from this
career. His interest in two deaf-mute sisters led him to his
life-work. There were others in England, and there was the good
Pereira in Spain, who had studied and invented before him, but it is
to this gentle-hearted Frenchman that the world of the deaf and dumb
owes most for its rescue from its inborn bondage. He gave to them all
he had, and all he was; for their sake he went ill-clad always, cold
in winter, hungry often. He had but little private aid, and no
official aid at all. He alone, with his modest income, and with the
little house left him by his father, started his school of instruction
for deaf-mutes in 1760.
The house was at No. 14 Rue des Moulins, a retired street leading
north from Rue Saint-Honoré, and so named because near its line were
the mills of the Butte de Saint-Roch--where we are to find the
head-quarters of Joan the Maid. One of these mills may be seen to-day,
re-erected and in perfect preservation, at Crony-sur-Ourcq, near
Meaux, and above its doorway is the image of the patron-saint, to whom
the mill was dedicated in the fifteenth century. This quarter of the
town had become, during the reign of Louis XIV., the centre of a
select suburb of small, elegant mansions, tenanted by many illustrious
men. On the rear of his lot the good _abbé_ built a small chapel, and
in it and in the house he passed nearly thirty years of
self-sacrifice, ended only by his death on December 23, 1789. When the
Avenue de l'Opéra was cut in 1877-8, his street was shortened and his
establishment was razed. At the nearest available spot, on the wall of
No. 23 Rue Thérèse, two tablets have been placed, the one that fixes
the site, the other recording the decree of the Constituent Assembly
of July, 1789, by which the Abbé de l'Épée was placed on the roll of
those French citizens who merit well the recognition of humanity and
of his country. And, in 1791, amid all its troubled labors, the
Assembly founded the Institution National des Sourds-Muets of Paris,
on the base of his humble school. The big and beneficent institution
is in Rue Saint-Jacques, at its intersection with the street named in
his honor. And it is an honor to the Parisians that they thus keep
alive the memory of their great men, so that, in a walk through their
streets, we run down a catalogue of all who are memorable in French
history. In the vast court-yard, at that corner, under a glorious
elm-tree, is a colossal statue of the _abbé_, standing with a youth to
whom he talks with his fingers. It is the work of a deaf-mute, Félix
Martin, well named, for he is most happy in this work.
Like the Abbé de l'Épée, and for as many years--almost thirty of his
half-voluntary, half-enforced exile--Voltaire had devoted himself in
his own way to the bettering of humanity, crippled mentally and
spiritually. He had given vision to the blind, hearing to the deaf,
voice to the speechless. He took in the outcast, and cherished the
orphan. With his inherent pity for the oppressed, and his deep-rooted
indignation with all cruelty, he had made himself the advocate of the
unjustly condemned; and none among his brilliant pages will live
longer than his impassioned pleadings for the rehabilitation of the
illegally executed Jean Calas. And now he comes back from Ferney,
through all the length of France, in a triumphal progress without
parallel, welcomed everywhere by exultant worshippers. At four in the
afternoon of February 10, 1778, his coach appears just where his
statue now stands at the end of Quai Malaquais, then Quai des
Théatins. He wears a large, loose cloak of crimson velvet, edged with
a small gold cord, and a cap of sable and velvet, and he is "smothered
in roses." His driver makes his way slowly along the quay, through the
acclaiming crowd, to the home of "_la Bonne et Belle_," the girl he
had rescued from a convent and adopted, now the happy wife of the
Marquis de Villette. Their eighteenth-century mansion stands on the
corner of Rue de Beaune and present Quai Voltaire, unaltered in its
simple stateliness. Here Voltaire is visited by all Paris that was
allowed to get to him. Mlle. Clairon is one of the first, on her knees
at the bedside of her old friend, exhausted by his triumph. She is no
longer young, and shows that she owns to fifty-five years, by her
retired life at the present numbers 34 and 36 Rue du Bac. There she
has her books and her sewing and her spendthrift Comte Valbelle
d'Oraison, who lives on her.
[Illustration: The Seventeenth-century Buildings on Quai Malaquais,
with the Institute and the Statue of Voltaire.]
D'Alembert and Benjamin Franklin are among his visitors, and the
dethroned Du Barry, and thirty _chefs_, each set on the appointment of
cook for the master. He goes to the Academy, then installed in the
Louvre, and to the Comédie Française, temporarily housed in the
Tuileries, the Odéon not being ready. There his "Irène," finished just
before leaving Switzerland, is produced, and at the performance on the
evening of March 30th he is crowned in his box, his bust is crowned on
the beflowered stage, and the palms and laurels and plaudits leave him
breath only to murmur: "My friends, do you really want to kill me with
joy?" That was the last seen of him by the public. He had come to
Paris, he said, "to drink Seine water"; and either that beverage
poisoned him, or the cup of flattery he emptied so often. One month
after that supreme night, on May 30, 1778, at a little after eleven at
night, he died in that corner apartment on the first floor. For thirty
years after it was unoccupied and its windows were kept closed.
Almost his last words, as he remembered what the Church had meant to
him, and what it might mean for him, were: "I don't want to be thrown
into the roadway like that poor Lecouvreur." That fate was spared his
wasted frame by the quickness of his nephew, the Abbé Mignot. Here, at
the entrance-gate in Rue de Beaune, this honest man placed his uncle's
body, hardly cold, in his travelling carriage, and with it drove
hastily, and with no needless stops, to Scellières in Champagne. There
he gave out the laudable lie of a death on the journey, and procured
immediate interment in the nave of his church, under all due rites.
The grave was hardly covered before orders from the Bishop of Troyes
arrived, forbidding the burial. The trick would have tickled the
adroit old man. His body was allowed to rest for thirteen years, and
then it was brought back in honor to Paris. A great concourse had
assembled, only two weeks earlier, at the place where the Bastille had
been, hoping to hoot at the royal family haled back from Varennes.
Now, on July 11, 1791, a greater concourse was stationed here, to look
with silent reverence on this _cortége_, headed by Beaumarchais, all
the famous men of France carrying the pall or joining in the
procession. They entered by the Vincennes road, passed along the
boulevards, crossed Pont Royal to stop before this mansion, and went
thence to the Panthéon. There his remains lay once more in peace,
until the Bourbons "de-Panthéonized" both Voltaire and Rousseau.
Benjamin Franklin had come to visit Voltaire here on the quay, by way
of the Seine from Passy, in which retired suburb he was then living.
The traces he has left in the capital are to be found in two
inscriptions and a tradition. We know that he had rooms, during a part
of the year 1776, in Rue de Penthièvre, and his name, carved in the
pediment of the stately façade of the house numbered 26 in that
street, is a record of his residence in it or on its site. There is
another claimant to his tenancy for a portion of this same year. The
American who happens to go to or through Passy, on a Fourth of July,
will have opportune greeting from the Stars and Stripes, draped over
the doorway of the old-fashioned building, more a cottage than a
mansion, now numbered 21 Rue Franklin. Its owners do this each year,
they tell you, in honor of the great American who occupied the cottage
in 1776. Their claim is the more credible, inasmuch as the street has
been given his name since his day there, when it was Rue Basse. In the
following year he went farther afield, and for nine years he remained
in a villa in the large garden, now covered by the ugly École des
Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne, at the corner of Rues Raynouard and
Singer. The Historical Society of Passy and Auteuil has placed a
tablet in this corner wall, recording Franklin's residence at this
spot from 1777 to 1785. His friend, M. Ray de Chaumont, occupied only
a portion of his Hôtel de Valentinois, and gave up the remaining
portion to Franklin for his residence and his office, eager to show
his sympathy for the colonies and his fondness for their envoy. Only
John Adams, when he came, was shocked in all his scrupulosity to find
an American agent living rent-free! In this garden he put up the
first lightning-conductor in France, and in this house he negotiated
the treaty that gave the crown's aid to the colonies and made possible
their independence. To this spot came the crowd to catch a glimpse of
the homely-clad figure, and men of science and letters to learn from
him, and ladies from the court to caress him. And it may have been
here that he made answer to the enamoured _marquise_, in words that
have never been topped for the ready wit of a gallant old gentleman.
The _cortége_ that accompanied Voltaire's remains to the Panthéon was
headed, it has been said, by Beaumarchais; fittingly so, for
Beaumarchais was then heir-presumptive to the dramatic crown, and his
"Figaro" had already begun to laugh the nobility from out of France.
Louis XVI. saw clearly, for once, when he said: "If I consent to the
production of the 'Marriage of Figaro,' the Bastille will go." He did
consent, and it was played to an immense house on April 27, 1784, in
the Comédie Française, now the Odéon. That night the old order had its
last laugh, and it rang strangely and sadly. Yet in this comedy, that
killed by ridicule--the most potent weapon in France--once played a
queen that was, and once a queen that was to be. On August 19, 1785,
on the stage of the Little Trianon at Versailles, the Comte
d'Artois--brother to Louis XIV., later to be Charles X.--appeared as
the Barber, to the Rosina of Marie Antoinette. And, in the summer of
1803, during the Consulate, when Malmaison was the scene of gayeties,
a theatre was constructed in the garden, and on its boards, Hortense
(soon after Queen of Holland) made a success as Rosina.
Playwriting was merely a digression in the diversified career of this
man of various aptitudes, whose ups and downs we have no excuse for
dwelling on, as we trace him through Paris streets. There is no tablet
to mark his birth, on January 24, 1732, in the house of his father,
Caron, the watchmaker of Rue Saint-Denis, opposite the old Cemetery of
the Innocents, nearly at Rue de la Ferronerie. Pierre-Augustin Caron
he was christened, and it was in his soaring years that he added "de
Beaumarchais." This quarter is notable in that it was the scene of the
birth and boyhood of four famous dramatists--of Molière, as we have
seen, and of Regnard, as we shall see; of Beaumarchais and of Eugène
Scribe. To record this latest birth, on December 24, 1791, a tablet is
set in the wall of No. 32 Rue Saint-Denis, at the corner of Rue de la
Reynie, only a few steps south of the Caron house. It is a plain,
old-style house of four stories and a garret, and has become a shop
for chocolates and sweets. It has on its sign, "_Au Chat Noir_"; black
cats are carved wherever they will cling on its front and side, and a
huge, wooden, black cat rides on the cart that carries the chocolate.
Beaumarchais had a residence at No. 6 Rue de Condé in 1773, and at the
Hôtel de Hollande, Rue Vielle-du-Temple 47, in 1776. We shall go there
later. On the wall of the house, No. 2 Boulevard Beaumarchais, a
tablet marks the site of his great mansion and its spacious gardens.
These covered the entire triangle enclosed by Rues Amelot, Daval, and
Roquette. He had found the money for this colossal outlay, not in his
plays, but in all sorts of mercantile transactions, some of them
seemingly shabby. It is claimed that he lost large sums in supplying,
as the unavowed agent of the crown, war equipment to the struggling
American colonies. His palace went up in sight of the Bastille, then
going down. The Parisians came in crowds to see his grounds, with
their grottoes, statues, and lake; and he entertained all the swelldom
of France. There, one day in 1792, the mob from the too-near Faubourg
Saint-Antoine came uninvited, and raided house and grounds for hidden
arms and ammunition, not to be found. The owner went to the Abbaye
prison and thence into exile and poverty. Returning in 1796, he spent
his last years in a hopeless attempt to gather up remnants of his
broken fortunes, a big remnant being the debt neglected and rejected
by the American Congress. The romance of this "Lost Million" cannot be
told here. Beaumarchais died in this house in 1799, and was buried in
the garden. When the ground was taken for the Saint-Martin Canal in
1818, his remains were removed to Père-Lachaise. The grave is as near
that of Scribe as were their birthplaces. His name was given to the
old Boulevard Saint-Antoine in 1831, and in 1897 his statue was placed
in that wide space in Rue Saint-Antoine that faces Rue des Tournelles.
The pedestal is good, and worthy of a more convincing statue of this
man of strong character and of contrasting qualities. And at the
Washington Head-quarters at Newburgh-on-Hudson, and at the various
collections of Revolutionary relics in the United States, you will
find cannon that came from French arsenals, and that, it was hinted,
left commissions in the hands of Caron de Beaumarchais.
THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION
[Illustration: Charlotte Corday.
(From the copy by Baudry of the only authentic portrait, painted in
her prison.)]
THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION
It is no part of the province of this book to reconstruct the Paris of
the Revolution, nor is there room for such reconstruction, now that M.
G. Lenôtre has given us his exhaustive and admirable "Paris
Révolutionnaire." Despite the destruction of so much that was worth
saving of that period, there yet remain many spots for our seeing. The
cyclone of those years had two centres, and one of them is fairly well
preserved. It is the Cour du Commerce, to which we have already come
in search of the tower and wall of Philippe-Auguste. Outside that
wall, close to the Porte de Buci, there had been a tennis-court, which
was extended, in 1776, into a narrow passage, with small dwellings on
each side. The old entrance of the tennis-court was kept for the
northern entrance of the new passage, and it still remains under the
large house, No. 61 Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. The southern entrance of
the passage was in the western end of Rue des Cordeliers, now Rue de
l'École-de-Médecine. In 1876, exactly one hundred years after the
construction of this Cour du Commerce, its southern half and its
southern entrance were cut away by modern Boulevard Saint-Germain, on
the northern side of which a new entrance to the court was made. At
the same time the houses on the northern side of Rue de
l'École-de-Médecine were demolished, and replaced by the triangular
space that holds the statues of Danton and Paul Broca among its trees.
Those houses faced, across the street, whose narrowness is marked by
the two curbstones, the houses, of the same age and the same style,
that are left on the southern side of this section of the modern
boulevard. One of the houses then destroyed had been inhabited by
Georges-Jacques Danton. It stood over the entrance of the court, and
his statue--a bronze of his own vigor and audacity--has been placed
exactly on the spot of that entrance, exactly under his
dwelling-place. The pediment of this entrance-door is now in the
grounds of M. Victorien Sardou, at Marly-le-Roi. Danton's apartment,
on the first floor above the _entresol_, had two _salons_ and a
bedroom looking out on Rue des Cordeliers, while the dining-room and
working-room had windows on the Cour du Commerce. Here in 1792 he had
his wholesome, peaceful home, with his wife and their son; and to them
there sometimes came his mother, or one of his sisters, for a visit.
In the _entresol_ below lived Camille Desmoulins and his wife in 1792.
The two young women were close friends, and M. Jules Claretie has
given us a pretty picture of them together, in terrified suspense on
that raging August 10th. Lucile Desmoulins knew, on the next day, that
the mob had at least broken the windows of the Tuileries, for someone
had brought her the sponges and brushes of the Queen! And on the
12th, Danton carried his wife from here to the grand _hôtel_ in Place
Vendôme, the official residence of the new Minister of Justice. His
short life in office being ended by his election to the Convention in
the autumn of that year, he returned to this apartment; to which,
three months after the death of his first wife in that same year, he
brought a youthful bride. And here, on March 30, 1794, he was
arrested. Before his own terrible tribunal his reply, to the customary
formal questions as to his abode, was: "My dwelling-place will soon be
in annihilation, and my name will live in the Panthéon of history." He
spoke prophetically. The clouds of a century of calumny have only
lately been blown away, and we can, at last, see clearly the heroic
figure of this truest son of France; a "Mirabeau of the
_sans-culottes_," a primitive man, unspoiled and strong, joyous in his
strength, ardent yet steadfast, keen-eyed for shams, doing when others
were talking, scornful of phrasemongers, and so genuine beside the
petty schemers about him that they could not afford to let him live.
Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist Desmoulins had, in his queer and not
unlovable composition, a craving for a hero and a clinging to a strong
nature. His first idol was Mirabeau. That colossus had died on April
2, 1791, and Desmoulins had been one of the leaders in the historic
funeral procession that filled the street and filed out from it four
miles in length. Mont-Blanc was then the street's name, and for a few
days it was called Rue Mirabeau, but soon took its present name,
Chaussée-d'Antin, from the gardens of the Hôtel d'Antin, through which
it was cut. The present No. 42, with a new front, but otherwise
unchanged, is the house of Mirabeau's death, in the front room of its
second floor. Mirabeau's worthy successor in Camille's worship was
Danton, near whom he lived, as we have seen, and with whom he went as
secretary to the Ministry of Justice. After leaving office, Camille
and his wife are found in his former bachelor home in Place du
Théâtre-Français, now Place de l'Odéon. The corner house there, that
proclaims itself by a tablet to have been his residence, is in the
wrong; and that tablet belongs by right to the house on the opposite
corner, No. 2 Place de l'Odéon and No. 7 Rue Crébillon. From his end
windows in this latter street, when he had lived there as a bachelor,
Camille could look slantwise to the windows of an apartment at No. 22
Rue de Condé, and he looked often, attracted by a young girl at home
there with her parents. There is still the balcony on the front, on
which Lucile Duplessis ventured forth, a little later, to blow kisses
across the street. At the religious portion of their marriage, in
Saint-Sulpice on December 29, 1790, the _témoins_ of the groom were
Brisson, Pétion, Robespierre. The last-named had been Camille's
schoolfellow and crony at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and remained his
friend as long as it seemed worth while. The wedding party went back
to this apartment--on the second floor above the _entresol_--for the
_dîner de noces_. Everything on and about the table--it is still
shown at Vervins, a village just beyond Laon--was in good taste, we
may be sure, for Desmoulins was a dainty person, for all his tears
over Marat; his desk, at which he wrote the fiery denunciations of "Le
Vieux Cordelier," had room always for flowers. It was here that he was
arrested, to go--not so bravely as he might--to prison, and then to
execution with Danton, on April 5, 1794. His Lucile went to the
scaffold on the 12th of the same month, convicted of having conspired
against the Republic by wandering about the gardens of the Luxembourg,
trying to get a glimpse of her husband's face behind his prison
window. To us he is not more visible in this garden than he was to
her, but in the garden of the Palais-Royal he leaps up, "a flame of
fire," on July 12, 1789, showing the Parisians the way they went to
the Bastille on the 14th.
In the same section with Danton and Desmoulins, and equally vivid with
them in his individuality, we find Jean-Paul Marat. His apartment,
where lived with him and his mistress, Simonne Evrard, his two
sisters, Albertine and Catherine--all three at one in their devotion
to his loathsome body--was in a house a little easterly from Danton's,
on the same northern side of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine. It was at
this house that Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday d'Armans, on July 13,
1793, presented herself as "_l'ange de l'assassination_," in
Lamartine's swelling phrase. She had driven across the river, from the
Hôtel de la Providence. In our Dumas chapter we shall try to find her
unpretending inn, and shall find only its site. In the Musée Grévin,
in Paris, you may see the _baignoire_ in which Marat sat when he
received Charlotte Corday and her knife--a common kitchen-knife,
bought by her on the day before at a shop in the Palais-Royal. The
bath is shaped like a great copper shoe, and on its narrow top,
through which his head came, was a shelf for his papers.
The printing-office of Marat's "L'Ami du Peuple," succeeded in 1792 by
his "Journal de la République Française," was in that noisiest corner
of Paris, the Cour du Commerce. It was in that end of the long
building of two low stories and attic, numbered 6 and 8, now occupied
by a lithographer. After Marat's death, and that of his journal, the
widow Brissot opened a modest stationer's shop and reading-room in the
former printing-office, we are told by M. Sardou. It is an error that
places the printing-office at the present No. 1 of the court, in the
building which extended then through to No. 7 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie.
These two lots do, indeed, join in their rear, but Marat has no
association with either. In Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, certainly, the
"Friend of the People" had storage room in the cellar and an office on
an upper floor, but it was in one of the tall houses on the western
side of the street, just north of the old theatre.
The only claim to our attention of No. 1 Cour du Commerce--a squalid
tavern which aspires to the title of "_La Maison Boileau_"--comes from
the presence of Sainte-Beuve. The great critic is said to have rented
a room, under his pen-name of "Joseph Delorme," for a long time in
this then cleanly _hôtel-garni_, for the ostensible purpose of working
in quiet, free from the importunate solicitors of all sorts who
intruded on his home in Rue du Mont-Parnasse, No. 11.
Marat's death was frantically lamented by the rabble, that was quite
unable to recognize the man's undeniable abilities and attainments,
and that had made him its idolized leader because of his atrocious
taste in saying in print exactly what he meant. They carried his body
to the nave of the church, and later to its temporary tomb in the
garden, of the Cordeliers, a step from his house. In the intervals of
smiling hours spent in watching heads fall into the basket, in new
Place de la Révolution, they crowded here to weep about his bedraped
and beflowered bier. The remains were then placed, with due honors, in
the Panthéon. Then, within two years, the same voices that had
glorified him shrieked that his body and his memory should be swept
into the sewer. It was the voice of the people--the voice of Deity, in
all ages and in all lands, it is noisily asserted.
When the Franciscan monks, who were called Cordeliers because of their
knotted cord about the waist, came to Paris early in the thirteenth
century, they were given a goodly tract of ground just within the
Saint-Germain gate, stretching, in rough outlines, from Rues
Antoine-Dubois and Monsieur-le-Prince nearly to Boulevards
Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel. The church they built there was
consecrated by the sainted Louis IX. in 1262, and when burned, in
1580, was rebuilt mainly by the accursed Henri III. New chapels and
cloisters were added in 1672, and there were many other structures
pertaining to the order within these boundaries. Of all these, only
the Refectory remains to our day. The site of the church, once the
largest in Paris, is covered by Place de l'École-de-Médecine and by a
portion of the school; something of the shape and some of the stones
of the old cloisters are preserved in the arched court of the
Clinique; bits of the old walls separate the new laboratories, and
another bit, with its strong, bull-nosed moulding, may be seen in the
grounds of the water-works behind No. 11 Rue Racine, this street
having been cut through the monks' precincts, so separating the
Infirmary, to which this wall belonged, and that stretched nearly to
the rear walls of Lycée Saint-Louis, from the greater portion of "_Le
Grand Couvent de l'Observance de Saint François_."
Turn in at the gateway in the corner of Place de l'École-de-Médecine,
and the Refectory stands before you, a venerable fabric of Anne of
Brittany's building, with sixteenth and seventeenth century
adornments, all in admirable preservation. The great hall, filled with
the valuable collection of the Musée Dupuytren, attracts us as a relic
of ancient architecture, and as the last existing witness of the
Revolutionary nights of the Cordeliers Club. That club had its hall
just across the garden alongside the Refectory, in one of the
buildings of the cloisters, which, with the church, had been given
over to various uses and industries. Hence the name of the club,
enrolled under the leadership of Danton, on whom the men of his
section looked as the incarnation of the Revolution. To him
Robespierre and his republic were shams, and to his club the club of
the Jacobins was at first distinctly reactionary. It took but little
time, in those fast-moving days, for the Cordeliers, in their turn, to
be suspected for their unpatriotic moderation!
[Illustration: The Refectory of the Cordeliers.]
We must not leave our Cour du Commerce, without a glance at the small
building on the northern corner of its entrance from Rue de
l'Ancienne-Comédie. It was here that the first guillotine was set up
for experiments on sheep, by Dr. Antoine Louis, Secretary of the
Academy of Surgeons, and the head of a committee appointed by the
National Assembly on October 6, 1791. On that day a clause in the new
penal code made death by decapitation the only method of execution,
and the committee had powers to construct the apparatus, which was to
supersede Sanson's sword. It was not a new invention, for the mediæval
executioners of Germany and Scotland had toyed with "the Maiden," but
for centuries she had lost her vogue. On December 1, 1789, Dr.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had tried to impress on the Assembly the need
of humane modes of execution, and had dwelt on the comfort of
decapitation by his apparatus until he was laughed down. That grim
body could find mirth only in a really funny subject like the cutting
off of heads! After two years and more, the machine, perfected by Dr.
Louis, and popularly known as "_La Louisette_," was tried on a
malefactor in the Place de Grève on April 25, 1792. Three days later
the little lady received her official title, "_La Guillotine_."
Dr. Guillotin had made his model and his experiments at his residence,
still standing, with no external changes, at No. 21 Rue
Croix-des-Petits-Champs. It was already a most ancient mansion when he
came here to live, and perhaps to remain until his death--in bed--in
1814. It had been known as the Hôtel de Bretagne, and it is rich in
personal history. To its shelter came Catherine de Lorraine, the young
widow of the Duc de Montpensier, the "lame little devil" whom Henri
III. longed to burn alive, for her abuse of him after the murder of
her brother Guise. Within its walls, Anne of Austria's treasurer, the
rich and vulgar Bertrand de la Bazinière--whom we have met on Quai
Malaquais--hoarded the plunder which he would not, or dared not,
spend. Louis XIV. gave him, later, lodgings in the Bastille, in that
tower named Bazinière always after. In this same Hôtel de Bretagne,
Henrietta of France, widowed queen of England, made her temporary home
in the winter of 1661, near her daughter, lately installed as
"Madame," wife of the King's brother, in the Palais-Royal. Returning
from England in 1665, this unhappy queen went to the last refuge of
her troubled life in the convent she had founded on the heights of
Chaillot. From that farther window of the first story on the right of
the court, the Comte de Maulevrier, Colbert's nephew, threw himself
down to his death on the pavement on Good Friday, 1706. In time the
stately mansion became a _hôtel-garni_, was appropriated as National
Domain in the Revolution, and sold in a lottery.
"_La Guillotine_," having proved the sharpness of her tooth, was
speedily promoted from Place de Grève to a larger stage in Place de la
Réunion, now Place du Carrousel, and thence in May, 1793--that she
might not be under the windows of the Convention--to Place de la
Révolution, formerly Place de Louis XV., at present Place de la
Concorde. This wide space, just beyond the moat of the Tuileries
gardens, had in its centre, where now is the obelisk of Luxor, a
statue of the late "well-beloved," then altogether-detested, King for
whom the place had been named; and a little to the east of that point
the scaffold was set up. Lamartine puts it on the site of the southern
fountain, for the effect he gets of the flowing of water and of blood;
this is one of his magniloquent phrases, which scorn exactness. On
January 21, 1793, for the execution of Louis XVI., the guillotine was
removed to a spot just westward of the centre, that it might be well
protected by the troops deploying about the western side of the
_place_, and into the Champs Élysées and Cours la Reine. For a while
in 1794, the guillotine was transferred to the present Place de la
Nation--where we shall find it in a later chapter--to come back to
Place de la Révolution in time to greet Robespierre and his friends.
Standing here, we are near the other centre of Revolutionary Paris,
made so by the Club of the Jacobins, that met first in the refectory,
later in the church of the monastery from which it took its name. The
site of these buildings is covered by the little Marché Saint-Honoré
and by the space about. The club of the more moderate men, headed by
Bailly and Lafayette, had its quarters in the monastery of the
Feuillants, which gave its name to the club, and which extended along
the south side of Rue Saint-Honoré, eastwardly from Rue de
Castiglione; this street being then the narrow Passage des Feuillants,
leading from Rue Saint-Honoré to the royal gardens, and to the
much-trodden Terrasse on the northern side of those gardens facing the
Manège. This building had been erected for the equestrian education of
the youth who afterward became Louis XV., and was converted into a
hall for the sitting of the Assembly, after that body had been crowded
for about three weeks, on coming to Paris from Versailles, into the
inadequate hall of the Archbishop's palace, on the southern shore of
the City Island, alongside Notre-Dame. The Convention took over the
Manège from the Assembly, and there remained until May, 1793, when it
removed to the more commodious quarters, and more befitting
surroundings, of the Tuileries. The old riding-school, whose site is
marked by a tablet on the railing of the garden opposite No. 230 Rue
de Rivoli, was swept away by the cutting of the western end of that
street, under the Consulate in 1802.
When Maximilien Robespierre came up from Arras--where he had resigned
his functions in the Criminal Court, because of his conscientious
objections to capital punishment--he found squalid quarters, suiting
his purse--which remained empty all through life--in Rue Saintonge.
That street, named for a province of old France, remains almost as he
saw it, one of the few Paris streets that retain their original
buildings and ancient atmosphere. The high and sombre house, wherein
he lodged from October, 1789, to July, 1791, is quite unaltered, save
for its number, which was then 8 and is now 64. From here, Robespierre
was snatched away, suddenly and without premeditation on his part, and
planted in the bosom of the Duplay family. They had worshipped him
from afar, and when, from their windows, they saw him surrounded by
the acclaiming crowd, on the day after the so-called massacres of the
Champ-de-Mars of July 17, 1791, the peaceful carpenter ran out and
dragged the shrinking great man into his court-yard for temporary
shelter. The house was then No. 366 Rue Saint-Honoré. If any reader
wishes to decide for himself whether the modern No. 398 is built on
the site of the Duplay house, of which no stone is left, as M. Ernest
Hamel asserts; or whether the present tall structure there is an
elevation on the walls of the old house, every stone of which is left,
as M. Sardou insists; he must study the pamphlets issued by these
earnest and erudite controversialists. There is nothing more
delightful in topographical sparring. The authors of this book can
give no aid to the solicitous student; for they have read all that has
been written concerning the subject, they have explored the house,
and they have settled in silence in the opposing camps!
In the Duplay household, to which he brought misery then and
afterward, Robespierre was worshipped during life and deified after
death. To that misguided family, "this cat's head, with the prominent
cheekbones, seamed by small-pox; his bilious complexion; his green
eyes rimmed with red, behind blue spectacles; his harsh voice; his
dry, pedantic, snappish, imperious language; his disdainful carriage;
his convulsive gestures--all this was effaced, recast, and transformed
into the gentle figure of an apostle and a martyr to his faith for the
salvation of men." From their house, it was but a step to the sittings
of the Assembly. It was but a few steps farther to the garden of the
Tuileries and to the "_fête de l'Être Suprême_," planned by him, when
he had induced the Convention to decree the existence of God and of an
immortal soul in man. He cast himself for the rôle of High Priest of
Heaven, and headed the procession on June 8, 1794, clad in a blue
velvet coat, a white waistcoat, yellow breeches and top-boots;
carrying in his hand flowers and wheat-ears. He addressed the crowd,
in "the scraggiest prophetic discourse ever uttered by man," and they
had games, and burned in effigy Atheism and Selfishness and Vice! Such
of the stage-setting of this farce as was constructed in stone remains
intact to-day, for our wonder at such childishness, and our admiration
of the architectural perfection of the out-of-door arena.
From this Duplay house, Robespierre used to go on his solitary
strolls, accompanied only by his dogs, in the woods of Monceaux and
Montmorenci, where he picked wild-flowers. From this house he went to
his last appearance in the Convention on the _9 Thermidor_, and past
it he was carted to the scaffold, on the following day, July 28, 1794.
He had followed Danton within a few months, as Danton had predicted.
They were of the same age at the time of their death, each having
thirty-five years; the younger Robespierre was thirty-two, Saint-Just
was twenty-six, Desmoulins thirty-four, when their heads fell.
Mirabeau died at the age of forty-two, Marat was forty-nine when
stabbed. Not one of the conspicuous leaders of the Revolution and of
the Terror had come to fifty years!
[Illustration: The Carré d'Atalante in the Tuileries Gardens.]
When the tumbrils and their burdens did not go along the quays to
Place de la Révolution, they went through Rue Saint-Honoré, that being
the only thoroughfare on that side of the river. From the
Conciergerie they crossed Pont au Change, and made their way by narrow
and devious turnings to the eastern end of Rue Saint-Honoré, and
through its length to Rue du Chemin-du-Rempart--now Rue Royale--and so
to the scaffold. Short Rue Saint-Florentin was then Rue de
l'Orangerie, and was crowded by sightseers hurrying to the _place_.
Those of the victims not already confined in the Conciergerie were
sent to the condemned cells there, for the night between sentence and
execution. The trustworthy history of the prisons of Paris during the
Revolution remains to be written, and there is wealth of material for
it. There were many smaller prisons not commonly known, and of the
larger ones that we do know, there are several, quite unchanged
to-day, well worth unofficial inspection. The Salpêtrière, filling a
vast space south of the Jardin des Plantes, was built for the
manufacture of saltpetre, by Louis XIII.; and, by his son, was
converted into a branch, for women, of the General Hospital. A portion
of its buildings was set apart for young women of bad character, and
here Manon Lescaut was imprisoned. The great establishment is now
known as the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, and is famous for its
treatment of women afflicted with nervous maladies, and with insanity.
The present Hospice de la Maternité was also perverted to prison
usages during the Revolution. Its formal cloisters and steep tiled
roofs cluster about its old-time square, but its ancient gardens, and
their great trees, are almost all buried beneath new masonry. The
façade of the chapel, the work of Lepautre, is no longer used as the
entrance, and may be seen over the wall on Boulevard de Port-Royal.
Another prison was that of Saint-Lazare, first a lazar-house and then
a convent, whose weather-worn roofs and dormers show above the wall on
Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. On the dingy yellow plaster of the arched
entrance-gate one may read, in thick black letters: "_Maison d'Arrêt
et de Correction._" Unaltered, too, is the prison in the grounds of
the Carmelites, to be visited later in company with Dumas; and the
Luxembourg, that was reserved for choice captives. The prison of the
Abbey of Saint-Germain was swept away by the boulevard of that name.
Its main entrance for wheeled vehicles was through Rue Sainte-Marguerite,
the short section left of that street being now named Gozlin. Of the
other buildings of the abbey, there remain only the church itself, the
bishop's palace behind in Rue de l'Abbaye, and the presbytery glued to
the southern side of the church-porch. Its windows saw the massacres
of the priests and the prisoners, which took place on the steps of the
church and in its front court. When you walk from those steps across
the open _place_, to take the tram for Fontenay-aux-Roses, you step
above soil that was soaked with blood in the early days of September,
1792. Some few of the abbey prisoners were slaughtered in the garden,
of which a portion remains on the south side of the church, where the
statue of Bernard Palissy, by Barrias, stands now. In other chapters,
the destruction of the Grand-and the Petit-Châtelet has been noted.
La Force has gone, and Sainte-Pélagie is soon to go. And the
Conciergerie has been altered, almost beyond recognition, as to its
entrances and its courts and its cells. Only the Cour des Femmes
remains at all as it was in those days.
There are three victims of the Terror who have had the unstinted pity
of later generations, and who have happily left traces of their
presence on Paris brick and mortar. The last of these three to die was
André-Marie de Chénier, and we will go first to his dwelling. It is an
oddly shaped house, No. 97 Rue de Cléry--Corneille's street for many
years--at its junction with Rue Beauregard; and a tablet in its wall
tells of de Chénier's residence there. Born in Constantinople in 1762,
of a French father--a man of genius in mercantile affairs--and a Greek
mother, the boy was brought to Paris with his younger brother,
Joseph-Marie, in 1767. They lived with their mother in various streets
in the Marais, before settling in this final home. Here Madame de
Chénier, a poet and artist in spirit, filled the rooms with the poets
and artists and _savants_ of the time, the friends of her gifted sons.
Hither came David, gross of body, his active mind busied with schemes
for his annual exhibitions of paintings, the continuation of those
begun by Colbert, and the progenitor of the present _Salons_; Alfieri,
the poet and splendid adventurer; Lavoisier, absorbed in chemical
discovery. Here in his earlier years, and later, when he hurried home
from the French Embassy in London on the outbreak of the Revolution,
André de Chénier produced the verse that revived the love of nature,
dead in France since Ronsard, and brought a lyric freshness to poetry
that shamed the dry artificialities so long in vogue. That poetry was
the forerunner of the Romantic movement. In his tranquil soul, he
hoped for the pacific triumph of liberty and equality, and his
delicate spirit abhorred the excesses of the party with whose
principles he sympathized. He was taken into custody at Passy, early
in 1794, while visiting a lady, against whose arrest he had struggled,
locked up in Saint-Lazare for months, convicted, and sent to the
Conciergerie. He was guillotined in Place de la Nation on July 26,
1794, only the day before Robespierre's fall, and was one of the last
and noblest sacrifices to the Terror. We shall look on his
burial-place in our later rambles. Müller has made André de Chénier
the central figure of his "Roll-Call," now in the Louvre. He sits
looking toward us with eyes that see visions, and his expression seems
full of the thought to which he gave utterance when led out to
execution: "I have done nothing for posterity, and yet," tapping his
forehead, "I had something here!"
In 1795 this little house was surrounded by a great crowd of citizens
come to bury Louis de Chénier, the father. The Section of Brutus
guarded the bier, draped with blue set with silver stars, to suggest
the immortality of the soul! And they gave every honor they could
invent to the "_Pompe funèbre d'un Citoyen Vertueux_," whose worthy
son they had beheaded.
Joseph-Marie de Chénier lived for many years under suspicion of having
given his assent if not his aid to his brother's death, albeit the
mother always asserted that he had tried to save André. Joseph was a
fiery patriot, and a man of genius withal. He wrote the words of the
"Chant du Départ" which, set to music by Méhul, proved almost as
stirring as the "Marseillaise" to the pulses of the Patriots. Music
was one of the potent intoxicants of the time, and the Revolution was
played and sung along to the strains of these two airs, and of "Ça
ira" and the "Carmagnole." The classic style, which had hitherto
prevailed, gave way before the paltry sentimentality and the tinkling
bombast of the music adored by the mob. David planned processions
marching to patriotic airs, and shallow operas were performed in the
streets. Yet Rouget-de-l'Isle, the captain of engineers who had given
them the "Marseillaise," was cashiered and put into a cell; being
freed, he was left to starve, and no aid came to him from the Empire
or the Bourbons, naturally enough. Louis-Philippe's government found
him in sad straits, in that poor house No. 21 of the poor Passage
Saulnier, and ordered a small pension to be paid to him during his
life. His death came in 1836.
Joseph-Marie de Chénier was a playwright, also, and in 1798 he had
created a sensation by his "Charles IX.," produced at the Comédie
Française, now the Odéon. In the part of the King, wonderfully made up
and costumed, Talma won his first notable triumph. "This play," cried
Danton from the pit, "will kill royalty as 'Figaro' killed the
nobility." Joseph-Marie lived, not too reputably, but very busily,
until January 10, 1811; a fussy politician, a member of the
Convention, of the Council of Five Hundred, and of the Institute,
Section of the French Tongue and Literature, always detested by his
associates, by the Emperor, and by the common people.
When the Place Dauphine of Henri IV. was finished, the new industry of
the spectacle-makers established itself in the same buildings we see
to-day, and gave to the place the name of Quai des Lunettes. Later
came the engravers, who found all the light they needed in these
rooms, open on three sides. Among them was a master-engraver, one
Phlipon, bringing his daughter, Marie-Jeanne--her pet name being
Manon--from the house of her birth, in 1754, in Rue de la Lanterne,
now widened into Rue de la Cité. It is not known whether the site of
that house is under the Hôtel-Dieu or the Marché-aux-Fleurs. Their new
home stood, and still stands, on the corner of the northern quay, and
is now numbered 28 Place Dauphine and 41 Quai de l'Horloge. The small
window of the second floor lights the child's alcove bedroom, where
this "daughter of the Seine"--so Madame Roland dubs herself in her
"Memoirs"--looked out on the river, and up at the sky, from over Pont
au Change to beyond the heights of Chaillot, when she could lift her
eyes from her Plutarch, and her thoughts from the altar she was
planning to raise to Rousseau. It must be owned that this all
too-serious girl was a prig; a creature over-fed for its size, the
word has been happily defined. At the age of eleven, she was sent to
the school of the "_Dames de la Congrégation_," in the Augustinian
convent in Rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne. It has been told how that ancient
street was cut in half by Rue Monge. In its eastern section, now named
Rue de Navarre, was Manon's school, directly above the Roman
amphitheatre, discovered only of late years in the course of
excavations in this quarter. The portion that is left of this
impressive relic is in good preservation and in good keeping. Her
school-days done, the girl spent several years in this house before
us, until her mother's death, and her father's tipsiness, sent her
back to her convent for a few months. Then, having refused the many
suitors who had thronged about her in her own home, she found the
philosopher she wanted for a husband in Jean-Marie Roland de la
Platrière, a man much older than she; lank, angular, yellow, bald,
"rather respectable than seductive," in the words of the girl-friend
who had introduced him. But Manon Phlipon doubtless idealized this
wooden formalist who adored her, as she idealized herself and all her
surroundings, including The People, who turned and rent her at the
last. She gave to her husband duty and loyalty, and it was not until
she counted herself dead to earth and its temptations, in her cell at
Sainte-Pélagie, that she addressed her last farewell to him, whom "I
dare not name, one whom the most terrible of passions has not kept
from respecting the barriers of virtue." This farewell was meant for
François-Léonard-Nicolas Buzot, Girondist member of the Assembly
and later of the Convention. He remained unnamed and unknown, until
his name and their secret were told by a bundle of old letters, found
on a book-stall on Quai Voltaire in 1864. She had met him first when
her husband came from Lyons, with petitions to the Assembly, in
February, 1791, and took rooms at the Hôtel Britannique, in Rue
Guénégaud. Her _salon_ soon became the gathering-place of the
Girondists, where those austere men, who considered themselves the
sole salvation of France, were austerely regaled with a bowl of sugar
and a _carafe_ of water. Their hostess could not bother with
frivolities, she, who in her deadly earnestness, renounced the theatre
and pictures, and all the foolish graces of life! The Hôtel
Britannique was the house now numbered 12 Rue Guénégaud, a
wide-fronted, many-windowed mansion of the eighteenth century. Its
stone steps within are well worn, its iron rail is good, its second
floor--the Roland apartment--still shows traces of the ancient
decorations.
[Illustration: The Girlhood Home of Madame Roland.]
Buzot lived at No. 3 Quai Malaquais, an ancient mansion now replaced
by the modern structure between the seventeenth-century houses
numbered 1 and 5. For when the Convention outlawed the Girondists, and
Buzot fled, it was decreed that his dwelling should be levelled to the
ground, and on its site should be placed a notice: "_Là fut la maison
du roi Buzot._" So that it would seem that his colleagues of the
Convention had found him an insufferably Superior Person.
Leaving this apartment on his appointment to office in 1792, Roland
took his wife to the gorgeous _salons_ of the Ministry of the
Interior, in the _hôtel_ built by Leveau for the Comte de Lionne, and
beautified later by Calonne. It occupied the site of the present annex
of the Bank of France just off Rue des Petits-Champs, between Rues
Marsollier and Dalayrac. Here, during his two terms of office in 1792
and 1793, Roland had the aid of his wife's pen, as well as the
allurements of her personal influence, in the cause to which she had
devoted herself. The masculine strength of her pen was weakened, it is
true, by too sharp a feminine point, and she embittered the Court, the
Cordeliers, the Jacobins, all equally against her and her party. For
"this woman who was a great man," in Louis Blanc's true words, was as
essentially womanly as was Marie Antoinette; and these two most
gracious and pathetic figures of their time were yet unconscious
workers for evil to France. The Queen made impassable the breach
between the throne and the people; Madame Roland hastened on the
Terror. And each of them was doing exactly what she thought it right
to do!
On January 23, 1793, two days after the King's death, Roland left
office forever and removed to a house in Rue de la Harpe, opposite the
Church of Saint-Cosme. That church stood on the triangle made by the
meeting of Rues de l'École-de-Médecine and Racine with Boulevard
Saint-Germain. On the eastern side of that boulevard, once the eastern
side of Rue de la Harpe, where it meets modern Rue des Écoles, stood
the Roland house. The students and studentesses, who sip their coffee
and beer on the pavement of Vachette's, are on the scene of Madame
Roland's arrest, on the night between May 31st and June 1st. On the
former day, seeing the end so near, Roland had fled. His wife was
taken to the prison of the Abbaye, and given the cell which was to be
tenanted, six weeks later, by Charlotte Corday. Released on June 22d
and returned to her home in Rue de la Harpe, she was re-arrested on
the 24th and locked up in Sainte-Pélagie. It was an old prison, long
kept for the detention of "_femmes et filles, dont la conduite est
onéreuse_," and its character had not been bettered by the character
of the female prisoners sent there by the Terror. This high-minded
woman, subjected to infamous sights and sounds, preserved her serenity
and fortitude in a way to extort the "stupefied admiration" of her
fellow-prisoners, as one of these has testified. It was only in her
cell that the great heart gave way. There she found solace, during her
four months' confinement, with Thomson's "Seasons," "done into choice
French," with Shaftesbury and an English dictionary, with Tacitus, and
her girlhood companion, Plutarch. And here she busied herself with her
"Memoirs," "writing under the axe," in her own phrase. In the solitude
of her cell, indeed, she was sometimes disturbed by the unseemly
laughter of the ladies of the Comédie Française, at supper with the
prison-governor in an adjacent cell. We shall see, later, how these
ladies came to be here. More acceptable sounds might have come almost
to her ears; that of the hymn-singing or of the maiden laughter of
the girls in her old convent, only a few steps away. The
prison-register contains her description, probably as accurate as
matter-of-fact: "Height, five feet; hair and eyebrows, dark chestnut;
brown eyes; medium nose; ordinary mouth; oval face, round chin, high
forehead." From Sainte-Pélagie she went to the Conciergerie on
November 1st, the day after the guillotining of the Girondists, and
thence in eight days to her own death. It has been told, by every
writer, that she could look over at her girlhood home, as her tumbril
crossed Pont au Change. It has not been told, so plainly as it
deserves, that her famous utterance on the platform was made fine for
historic purposes, as was done with Cambronne's magnificent
monosyllable at Waterloo. She really said: "_O Liberté, comme on t'a
jouée!_" With these words, natural and spontaneous and without pose,
she is, indeed, "beautiful, amazonian, graceful to the eye, more so to
the mind."
Within a few days of her death died her husband and her lover. Roland,
on hearing of her execution, in his hiding-place near Rouen, thrust
his cane-sword into his breast; Buzot, wandering and starving in the
fields, was found half-eaten by wolves. She had confided her daughter
Eudora and her "Memoirs" to the loyal friend Bosc, who hid the
manuscript in the forest of Montmorenci, and in 1795 published it for
the daughter's benefit. The original is said to be in existence, on
coarse gray paper, stained with her tears. Sainte-Beuve speaks of them
as "delicious and indispensable memories," deserving a place "beside
the most sublime and eloquent effusions of a brave yet tender
philosophy." When he praises that style, clearer and more concise than
that of Madame de Staël, "that other daughter of Rousseau," he does
not say all; he might have added that, like Rousseau, she occasionally
speaks of matters not quite convenient to hear.
It is difficult to refrain from undue admiration and pity, to remain
temperate and modest, when one dwells on the character and qualities,
the blameless life and the ignominious death, of Marie-Jean-Antoine-
Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. We may look up at his
thoughtful face in bronze on Quai Conti, alongside the Mint, where he
lived in the _entresol_ of the just completed building, when appointed
Director of the Hôtel de la Monnaie by his old friend Turgot, in 1774.
We may look upon the house in Rue Servandoni where he hid, and from
which he escaped to his death. His other Paris homes have no existence
now. His college of Navarre--oldest of all those in the
University--has been made over into the École Polytechnique; and the
house he built for himself in Rue Chantereine, which was afterward
owned by Josephine Beauharnais, has long since disappeared. When only
twenty-two years of age he wrote his famous essay on the Integral
Calculus, when twenty-six he was elected to the Academy of Sciences.
Made Perpetual Secretary of that body in 1777, it came in the course
of his duties to deliver eulogies on Pascal, d'Alembert, Buffon, and
Franklin, and others of the great guild of science. These are more
than perfunctory official utterances, they are of an eloquence that
shows his lovable character as well as his scientific authority. He
contributed largely to Diderot's Encyclopædia, and put forth many
astronomical, mathematical, and theological treatises during his busy
life. He wrote earnestly in favor of the independence of the American
colonies, and was one of the earliest advocates of the people's cause
in France. But he was much more than a man of science and of letters;
he was a man with a great soul, "the Seneca of the modern school,"
says Lamartine; the most kindly and tolerant friend of humanity, and
protector of its rights, since Socrates. He believed in the indefinite
perfectibility of the human race, and he wrote his last essay, proving
its progress upward, while hiding in a garret from those not yet quite
perfect fellow-beings, who were howling for his head! He was beloved
by Benjamin Franklin and by Thomas Paine. Members of the Convention
together, he and Paine prepared the new Constitution of 1793, in which
political document they found no place for theological dogma.
Robespierre prevented the adoption of this Constitution, having taken
God under his own protection. Condorcet made uncompromising criticism,
and was put on the list of those to be suspected and got rid of. Too
broad to ally himself with the Girondists, he was yet proscribed with
them, on June 2, 1793. His friends had forced him to go into hiding,
until he might escape. They had asked Madame Vernet--widow of the
painter Claude-Joseph, mother of Carle, grandmother of Horace--to give
shelter to one of the proscribed, and she had asked only if he were
an honest man. This loyal woman concealed him in her garret for nearly
one year, and would have kept him longer, but that he feared for her
safety, and for that of his wife and daughter, who might be tracked in
their visits to him by night. He had finished his "Esquisse d'un
Tableau historique des Progrès de l'Esprit humain," full of hope for
humanity, with no word of reproach or repining, and then he wrote his
last words: "Advice of one proscribed, to his Daughter." This is to be
read to-day for its lofty spirit. He gives her the names of certain
good men who will befriend her, and among them is Benjamin Franklin
Bache, the son of our Franklin's daughter Sally, who had been in Paris
with his grandfather.
Then, this letter finished, early on the morning of April 5, 1794, he
left it on his table and slipped out, unseen by the good widow Vernet,
from the three-storied plaster-fronted house now No. 15 of Rue
Servandoni, and still unaltered, as is almost the entire street.
Through it he hurried to Rue de Vaugirard, where he stood undecided
for a moment, the prison of the Luxembourg on his left, and the prison
of the Carmelites on his right, both full of his friends. And on the
walls, all about, were placards with big-lettered warning that death
was the penalty for harboring the proscribed. Here at the corner, he
ran against one Sarret, cousin of Madame Vernet, who went with him,
showing the way through narrow streets to the Barrière du Maine, which
was behind the present station of Mont-Parnasse. Safely out of the
town, the two men took the road to Fontenay-aux-Roses, and at night
Sarret turned back. Condorcet lost his way, and wandered about the
fields for two days, sleeping in the quarries of Clamart, until driven
by hunger into a wretched inn. Demanding an omelet, he was asked how
many eggs he would have; the ignorant-learned man ordered a dozen, too
many for the working-man he was personating, and suspicions were
aroused. The villagers bound and dragged him to the nearest guardhouse
at Bourg-la-Reine. He died in his cell that night, April 7, 1794, by
poison, it is believed. For he wore a ring containing poison; the same
sort of poison, it is said, that was carried by Napoleon, with which
he tried--or pretended to try--to kill himself at Fontainebleau. In
the modern village of Bourg-la-Reine, five and a half miles from
Paris, the principal square bears the name of Condorcet, and holds his
bust in marble.
"_La Veuve Condorcet_" appears in the Paris _Bottin_ every year until
1822, when she died. She had been imprisoned on the identification of
her husband's body, but was released after Robespierre's death. She
passed the Duplay house every day during those years, going to her
little shop at 232 Rue Saint-Honoré. There she had set up a linen
business on the ground floor, and above, she painted portraits in a
small way. She was a woman of rare beauty and of fine mind, with all
womanly graces and all womanly courage. Married in 1786, and much
younger than her husband, timorous before his real age and his
seeming austerity, she had grown up to him, and had learned to love
that "volcano covered with snow," as his friend d'Alembert had said he
was. She had a pretty gift with her pen, and her translation into
French of Adam Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" is still extant.
Her little _salon_ came to be greatly frequented in her beautiful old
age.
Condorcet's famous fellow-worker in science, Antoine-Laurent
Lavoisier, was guillotined in May, 1794, the two men having the same
number of years, fifty-one. He was condemned, not for being a chemist,
albeit his enlightened judges were of the opinion that "the Republic
has no need of chemists," but because he had filled, with justice and
honesty, his office of Farmer-General under royalty. Their
contemporaries of nearly equal age, Gaspard Monge and Claude-Louis
Berthollet, escaped the guillotine, and were among the _savants_ in
the train of General Bonaparte in his Italian and Egyptian campaigns.
After many years of useful labors, they died peacefully under the
Restoration.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, of almost equal years with these four, lived to
a greater age, and received higher honors from the Emperor and the
Bourbons. Coming from his birth-place in Calvados in 1767, his first
Paris home to be found is in Rue des Noyers; one side of which ancient
street now forms that southern section of Boulevard Saint-Germain
opposite Rue des Anglais, its battered houses seeming to shrink back
from the publicity thrust upon them. In that one now numbered 57 in
the boulevard, formerly No. 33 Rue des Noyers, Alfred de Musset was
born in 1810; and in the same row lived Laplace in 1777. In 1787 we
find him in Rue Mazarine, and in 1790 in Rue Louis-le-Grand, and this
latter residence represents his only desertion of the University side
of the Seine. He returned to that bank when placed by the Consuls in
the Senate, and made his home in 1801 at No. 24 Rue des
Grands-Augustins, and in the following year at No. 2 Rue Christine.
These stately mansions of that period, only a step apart, remain as he
left them. When Laplace was made Chancellor of the Senate, in 1805,
his official residence was in the Luxembourg, and there it continued
until 1815, the year of the Restoration. His private residence, from
1805 to 1809, was at No. 6 Rue de Tournon, a house still standing in
all its senatorial respectability. He gave this up, and again took up
his quarters in the Luxembourg, when made a Count of the Empire and
Vice-President of the Senate.
From the Medician palace, which appears in the _Bottin_ of those years
as simple No. 19 Rue de Vaugirard, Laplace removed to No. 51 of that
street, when the returned Bourbons made him a Peer of France. This
house, near Rue d'Assas--named for the Chevalier Nicolas d'Assas, the
heroic captain of the regiment of Auvergne during the Seven Years'
War--is unaltered since his time. His last change of abode was made in
1818, to Rue du Bac, 100, where he died in 1827. It is a mansion of
old-fashioned dignity, with a large court in front and a larger garden
behind, and is now numbered 108. The growing importance of his
successive dwellings, every one of which may be visited to-day, mark
his growth in importance as a man of state. The growth of the man of
science is represented by his colossal "La Mécanique Céleste," which
first appeared in 1799, and was continued by successive volumes until
its completion in 1825. Its title, rather than his titles, should be
inscribed on his monument.
A little later than these famous _confrères_, Georges Cuvier appears
in Paris--in Hugo's half-truth--"with one eye on the book of Genesis
and the other on nature, endeavoring to please bigoted reaction by
reconciling fossils with texts, and making the mastodons support
Moses." His first home, at the present 40 Rue de Seine, is a fine
old-fashioned mansion. He removed to the opposite side of that street
in 1810, and there remained until 1816, his house being now replaced
by the new and characterless structure at No. 35. Full of character,
however, is his official residence as Professor in the Jardin des
Plantes, which took again its ancient title of Jardin du Roi during
the Restoration. "_La Maison de Cuvier_" is a charming old building
near the garden-entrance in Rue Cuvier, and within is the bust of this
most gifted teacher of his time. His genuine devotion to science and
his tolerance for all policies carried him through the several changes
of government during his life. He completed the Napoleonic conquest of
Italy and Holland by his introduction of the French methods of
education, perfected by him. The Bourbons made him Baron and
Chancellor of the University, and the Orleans king elevated him to
the Peerage of France. He died in 1832.
Paul-François-Jean-Nicolas, Comte de Barras--soldier, adventurer, a
power in the Convention, the power of the Directory, practically
dictator for a while--has added to the hilarity of the sceptical
student of history by his "Memoirs," kept concealed since his death,
in 1829, until their publication within a few years. Splendidly
mendacious in these pages as he was in life, Barras posed always as
the man on horseback of _his "13 Vendémiaire_." On that day,
unwittingly yet actually, he put into the saddle--where he stayed--his
young friend Buonaparte, whose qualities he had discovered at the
siege of Toulon. This artillery officer, while planting his batteries
to cover every approach to the Tuileries, where cowered the frightened
Convention, took personal command of the guns that faced Saint-Roch.
The front of that church still shows the scars of the bullets that
stopped the rush of the Sections in that direction. This battery was
placed at the Rue Saint-Honoré end of the narrow lane leading from
that street to the gardens of the Tuileries--there being then no Rue
de Rivoli, you will bear in mind. This lane was known as Rue du
Dauphin, because of the royal son who had used it, going between the
Tuileries and the church; after that day, it was popularly called Rue
du 13-Vendémiaire, until it received its official appellation of Rue
Saint-Roch, when widened and aligned in 1807. At this time there were
only two houses in the street, near its southern end, and one of them
was a _hôtel-garni_, in which young Buonaparte caught a short sleep
on that night of October 5, 1795. The oldest structure in Rue
Saint-Roch to-day is that with the two numbers 4 and 6, and it is
known to have been already a _hôtel-garni_ in the first years of the
nineteenth century, when it was refaced. So that it is well within
belief that we have found here Buonaparte's head-quarters for that one
night.
Let us now, crossing the river, get on the ground of positive proof,
safe from doubts or conjectures. The Duchesse d'Abrantès, wife of that
adorable ruffian, Andoche Junot, made a duke in 1807 by the Emperor,
writes in her "Memoirs": "To this day, whenever I pass along Quai
Conti, I cannot help looking up at the garret windows at the left
angle of the house, on the third floor. That was Napoleon's chamber,
when he paid us a visit; and a neat little room it was. My brother
used to occupy the one next it." Madame Junot had been Mlle. Laure
Permon, whose father, an army contractor, had brought his family to
Paris early in 1785, and leased for his residence the Hôtel Sillery,
formerly the Petit Hôtel Guénégaud. Madame Permon, a Corsican lady,
had been an early friend of Madame Buonaparte, and had rocked young
Buonaparte in his cradle; so that he was called by his first name in
her family, as her daughter shows in this quotation. Finding him at
the École Royale Militaire in Paris, she invited him to her house for
frequent visits, once for a week's stay, whenever permission could be
got from the school authorities. He was a lank, cadaverous,
dishevelled lad, solitary, taciturn, and morose; brooding over the
poverty that had forced him to seek an unpaid-for scholarship, and not
readily making friends with the more fortunate Albert Permon. Yet he
came often, and was nowhere so content as in this house before us. It
stands far back from the front of the quay, half-hidden between the
Institute and the Mint, and is numbered 13 Quai Conti, and its
entrance is on the side at No. 2 Impasse Conti. Its upper portion is
now occupied by a club of American art students. Constructed by
Mansart, its rooms are of admirable loftiness and proportion, and
retain much of their sixteenth-century decoration. Here in this
_salon_ after dinner, young Buonaparte would storm about the "indecent
luxury" of his schoolmates, or sit listening to Madame Permon, soothed
by her reminiscent prattle about Corsica and his mother, to whom he
always referred as Madame Letitia. Here he first showed himself to the
daughters in his new sub-lieutenant's uniform, before joining his
regiment on October 30, 1785, and they laughed at his thin legs in
their big boots.
[Illustration: No. 13 Quai Conti.]
The École Supérieure de Guerre, commonly called the "École Militaire,"
remains nearly as when constructed under Louis XV., but it is
impossible to fix on the room allotted to this student during his year
there--a small, bare room, with an iron cot, one wooden chair, and a
wash-stand with drawers. The chapel, now unused, remains just as it
was when he received his confirmation in it. He arrived at this
school, from his preparatory school at Brienne, on the evening of
October 19, 1784, one of a troop of five lads in the charge of a
priest. They had disembarked, late that afternoon, at Port Saint-Paul,
from the huge, clumsy boat that brought freight and passengers, twice
a week, from Burgundy and the Aube down the Seine. The priest gave
the lads a simple dinner near their landing-place, and led them across
the river and along the southern quays--where the penniless young
Buonaparte bought a "Gil-Blas" from a stall, and a comrade in funds
paid for it--and, stopping for prayers at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he
handed them over to the school authorities.
From that moment every hour of young Buonaparte's year in Paris can be
accounted for. And no foundation can be discovered or invented for the
fable, mendaciously upheld by the tablet, placed by the Second Empire
in the hallway of No. 5 Quai Conti, which claims a garret in that
tall, up-climbing, old house as his lodging at that time or at any
later time. This flimsy legend need no longer be listened to. Not far
away, however, is a garret that did harbor the sub-lieutenant in the
autumn of 1787. It is to M. Lenôtre that we owe this delightful find.
Arriving in Paris from Corsica, after exactly two years of absence,
Buonaparte took room No. 9, on the third floor of the Hôtel de
Cherbourg, Rue du Four-Saint-Honoré. That street is now Rue
Vauvilliers, its eastern side taken up by the Halles, and its present
No. 33, on the western side, is the former _hôtel-garni_, quite
unchanged as to its fabric. Here he was always writing in his room,
going out only for the frugal meals that cost him a few _sous_, and
here he had his first amorous adventure, recited by him in cynical
detail under the date: "_Jeudi 22 Novembre 1787, à Paris, Hôtel de
Cherbourg, Rue du Four-Saint-Honoré._"
On August 10, 1792, Buonaparte saw the mob carry and sack the
Tuileries. He was in disgrace with the army authorities, having
practically deserted to Corsica, and he had come back for
reinstatement and a job. In his Saint-Helena "Memorial," he says that
he was then lodging at the Hôtel de Metz in Rue du Mail. This is
evidently the same lodging placed by many writers in Rue d'Aboukir,
for many of the large houses that fronted on the first-named street
extended through to the latter, as shall be shown later. The hotel is
gone, and the great mercantile establishment at No. 22 Rue du Mail
covers its site.
Gone, too, is the shabbily furnished little villa in Rue Chantereine,
where he first called on Josephine de Beauharnais, where he married
that faded coquette--dropping the _u_ from his name then, in March,
1796--and whence he went to his _18 Brumaire_. The court-yard, filled
with resplendent officers on that morning, is now divided between the
two courts numbered 58 and 60 Rue de la Victoire; that name having
been officially granted to the street, on his return from his Italian
campaign in 1797. The villa, kept by the Emperor, and lent at times to
some favorite general, was not entirely torn down until 1860. Its site
is now covered by the houses Nos. 58 and 60.
Rue Chantereine was, in those days, almost a country road, bordered by
small villas; two of them were associated with Napoleon Bonaparte. In
one of them, Mlle. Eléonora Dennelle gave birth, on December 13, 1806,
to a boy, who grew up into a startling likeness of the Emperor, as to
face and figure, but who inherited from him only the half-madness of
genius. He lived through the Empire, the Restoration, the Second
Republic, the Second Empire, and into the Republic that has come to
stay, dying on April 15, 1881. To another modest dwelling in this same
street, there came the loving and devoted Polish lady, Madame
Walewski, who had thrown herself into the Emperor's arms, when she was
full of faith in his intent to liberate her native land. Their son,
Alexandre Walewski, born in 1810, was a brilliant figure in Paris,
where he came to reside after the fall of Warsaw. A gifted soldier,
diplomat, and writer, he died in 1868.
So, of the roofs that sheltered the boyhood of Napoleon, three still
remain. Of those loftier roofs that sheltered his manhood, there are
also three still to be seen. In the Paris _Bottin_ of the first year
of the nineteenth century, the name of Napoleon Bonaparte appears as a
member of the Institute, Section of Mechanism, living in the palace of
the Luxembourg. In 1805 his address is changed to the palace of the
Tuileries, and he is qualified "Emperor of the French;" enlarging that
title in 1806 to "Emperor of the French and King." The Tuileries are
swept away, and Saint-Cloud has left only a scar. The Luxembourg
remains, and so, too, the Palais de l'Élysée, where he resided for a
while, and the _château_ of Malmaison has been restored and
refurnished in the style of Josephine, as near as may be, and filled
with souvenirs of her and of her husband. Her body lies, with that of
her daughter Hortense, in the church of the nearest village, Reuil,
and his remains rest under the dome of the Invalides--his last roof.
There is a curious letter, said to be still in existence, written by
young Buonaparte to Talma, asking for the loan of a few francs, to be
repaid "out of the first kingdom I conquer." He goes on to say that he
has found nothing to do, that Barras promises much and does little,
and that the writer is at the end of his resources and his patience.
This letter was evidently written at that poverty-stricken period
between 1792 and 1795, when he was idly tramping Paris streets with
Junot, the lovable and generous comrade from Toulon; or with
Bourrienne, now met first since their school-days at Brienne, who was
to become the Emperor's patient confidential secretary. At that period
Talma had fought his way to his own throne. Intimate as he had been
with Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins, Joseph-Marie de Chénier and David,
he had, also, made friends with the Corsican officer, either during
these years of the letter or probably earlier. He made him free of the
stage of the Théâtre Français, and lent him books. His friendship
passed on to the general, the Consul, and the Emperor, and it was
gossipped that he had taught Bonaparte to dress and walk and play
Napoleon. Talma always denied this, avowing that the other man was, by
nature and training, the greater actor!
Joseph-François Talma used to say that he first heard of a theatre,
from seeing and asking about the old Théâtre de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne,
whose entrance was in Rue Mauconseil, opposite the place of his birth,
on January 15, 1763. As he grew up he learned a good deal more about
the theatre, for he went early and often. He was only fifteen when he
was one of the audience in the Théâtre Français, on that night of the
crowning of Voltaire, and one of the crowd that tried to unharness the
horses, and drag the old man from the Tuileries to his house on the
quay. By day the lad was learning dentistry, his father's
profession--it was then a trade--and the two went to London to
practice. For a while young Talma got experience in that specialty
from the jaws of the sailor-men at Greenwich, and got gayer and more
congenial experience in amateur theatricals in town. They returned to
Paris, and the father's sign, "_M. Talma, Dentiste_," was hung by the
doorway of No. 3 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, next to the corner of Rue
Saint-Honoré. From the house that was there before the present modern
structure, young Talma went across the river to the Comédie Française,
on the night of November 21, 1787, and made his _début_ as Seide in
"Mahomet."
In our chapter on Molière, we left the Comédie Française, on its
opening night in 1689, at the house in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie.
There it remained for nearly a century, until forced, by overflowing
houses, to find a larger hall. While this was in course of
construction the company removed, in 1770, to the Salle des Machines
in the Tuileries, already transformed into a theatre by the Regent
for his ballets. Here the troupe played until the completion of the
new theatre in 1782. That new Comédie Française is now the Second
Théâtre Français, the Odéon, the second largest hall in Paris. It was
burned in 1799 and again in 1818. In 1789 it took the title of Théâtre
National; in 1793, Théâtre de l'Égalité was the newest name forced
upon the unwilling comedians, who were, as always with that profession,
fond of swelldom and favorites of princes. The house being in the very
centre of the Cordeliers quarter, in _la Section Marat_, there was
always constant friction between players and audience, and by 1793
this had so exasperated the ruling powers--the _sans-culottes_--that
nearly the whole troupe was sent to prison, charged with having
insulted the Patriots on the boards, and with having given "proofs of
marked incivism." The ladies of the company, aristocrats by strength
of their sex, occupied cells in Sainte-Pélagie, where we have already
listened to their merriment. They escaped trial through the
destruction of their _dossiers_ by a humane member of the Committee of
Safety, and the _9 Thermidor_ set them free. Talma had already left
the troupe in April, 1791, driven away, with two or three friends, by
dissensions and jealousies. They went over to the new house which had
been constructed, in 1789, at a corner of the Palais-Royal, by
enterprising contractors with influential politicians between them. It
was called at first Théâtre Français de la Rue de Richelieu, and, in
1792, Théâtre de la République. On Talma's desertion of the old
house, there began a legal process against him, exactly like that
instituted by the same Comédie Française against M. Coquelin, a
century later, when the theatre had for its lawyer the grandson of its
advocate of 1792; and the decision of the two tribunals was the same
in effect. Talma stayed at the theatre in the Palais-Royal, to which
he drew the discerning public, and, after ten years of rivalry, the
two troupes joined hands on those boards, and so the Comédie Française
came to the present "House of Molière."
It would seem that Talma was a shrewd man of business, and drew money
in his private rôle of landlord. He owned the house in which Mirabeau
died, in Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and always referred to the great
tribune as "_mon ancien locataire, Mirabeau_." Just beyond, in Rue
Chantereine, Talma was attracted by the small villa built by the
architect Ledoux, for Condorcet, it is said. Perhaps the actor had
seen, in that street, an even more plausible actor, Giuseppe Balsamo
by name, calling himself the Count Cagliostro. He had established
himself in one of the villas in this street, on coming to Paris to ply
his trade, toward 1784. And in 1778 the wonder-working Mesmer had set
up his machinery and masqueraded as a magician in a house in the same
street. Benjamin Franklin went there, one of a government commission
sent to investigate the miracles.
In his new residence in Rue Chantereine, Talma welcomed his friends
among the Revolutionary leaders, and gave them _bouillon_ in the
kitchen, when he came home from the theatre at night. In 1795 he sold
the villa to Josephine de Beauharnais, and he always said that her
first payment was made to him from moneys sent to her, by her husband,
from Italy. It is not known whether Talma owned, or leased, an
apartment in No. 15 Quai Voltaire, where he lived from 1802 until
1806. The house, now No. 17, one of the ancient stately structures
facing the quay, is somewhat narrower than its neighbors. During the
ten years between 1807 and 1817 he had an apartment at No. 6 Rue de
Seine; possibly in that pavilion in the court which was built by
Marguerite de Valois for her residence, and which has been heightened
by having two new floors slipped between the lower and top stories,
leaving these latter and the façade much as she built them. His home,
from 1818 to 1821, at No. 14 Rue de Rivoli, is replaced by the new
structures at the western end of that street, which is entirely
renumbered. After two more changes on the northern bank, he finally
settled at No. 9 Rue de la Tour-des-Dames. Until 1822 there was still
to be seen the tower of the windmill owned by the "_Dames de
Montmartre_," which gave its name to this street. At its number 3, a
small _hôtel_, circular-fronted and most coquettish, lived Mlle. Mars,
it is believed, and here she was the victim of the earliest recorded
theft of an actress's jewels. The simple and stately house, of a low
curtain between two wings, with two stories and a mansard roof,
bearing the number 9, is the scene of Talma's last years and of his
death, on October 19, 1826. His final appearance had been on June 11th
of that year, in his marvellous personation of Charles VI. At this
house we shall see Dumas visit the old actor, who had seen Voltaire!
Dumas says that Talma spared nothing in his aim at accuracy, historic
and archæologic, when creating a new rôle or mounting a new play.
Indeed, we know that Talma was the first great realist in costume and
scenery, as we know that he first brought the statues of tragedy down
to human proportions and gave them life-blood. Dumas dwells especially
on the voice of the great tragedian--a voice that was glorious and
sincere, and in anguish was a sob.
There is a glowing portrait of Talma from the pen of Chateaubriand, in
which he makes plain that the tragedian, while he was, himself, his
century and ancient centuries in one, had been profoundly affected by
the terrible scenes of the Terror which he had witnessed; and it was
that baleful inspiration that sent the concentrated passion of
patriotism leaping in torrents from his heart. "His grace--not an
ordinary grace--seized one like fate. Black ambition, remorse,
jealousy, sadness of soul, bodily agony, human grief, the madness sent
by the gods and by adversity--_that_ was what he knew. Just his coming
on the scene, just the sound of his voice, were overpoweringly tragic.
Suffering and contemplation mingled on his brow, breathed in his
postures, his gestures, his walk, his motionlessness."
Thomas Carlyle seems strangely placed in the stalls of the Théâtre
Français, yet he sat there, at the end of his twelve-days' visit to
Paris in 1825. "On the night before leaving," he writes, "I found that
I ought to visit one theatre, and by happy accident came upon Talma
playing there. A heavy, shortish, numb-footed man, face like a
warming-pan for size, and with a strange, most ponderous, yet delicate
expression in the big, dull-glowing black eyes and it. Incomparably
the best actor I ever saw. Play was 'Oedipe'; place the Théâtre
Français."
[Illustration: Monogram from former entrance of the Cour du Commerce,
believed to be the initials of the owner, one Girardot.]
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