The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume II (of 2) by Martin and Martin

 

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THE STONES OF PARIS
IN HISTORY AND LETTERS

THE STONES OF PARIS
IN HISTORY AND LETTERS

BY
BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN
AND
CHARLOTTE M. MARTIN

IN TWO VOLUMES
Vol. II

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
MDCCCXCIX

Copyright, 1899, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

CONTENTS

	Page
The Southern Bank in the Nineteenth Century	1
The Paris of Honoré de Balzac	51
The Paris of Alexandre Dumas	89
The Paris of Victor Hugo	123
The Making of the Marais	163
The Women of the Marais	213

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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

Madame de Sévigné (from the portrait by Mignard).	Frontispiece
PAGE
Alphonse de Lamartine (from a sketch by David d'Angers, "un soir chez Hugo")	facing	10
Madame Récamier (from the portrait by Gros)	facing	40
The Abbaye-aux-Bois		43
Portal of Châteaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac		46
The Court of the Pension Vauquer	facing	52
Honoré de Balzac (from the portrait by Louis Boulanger)	facing	64
Les Jardies		70
The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the house where Voltaire died	facing	78
The Pension Vauquer		80
The Commemorative Tablet to Balzac		84
The Figure of d'Artagnan (from the Dumas Monument by Gustave Doré)	facing	90
Alexandre Dumas	facing	104
The Wall of the Carmelites		113
Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hôtel de Picardie	facing	118
The Hôtel de Toulouse		128
Alfred de Musset (from the sketch by Louis-Eugène Lami)	facing	144
The Cemetery of Picpus		153
Victor Hugo (from the portrait by Bonnat)	facing	160
The Hôtel du Prévôt		175
Anne de Bretagne (from a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection)	facing	186 viii
Louis XII (from a water-color portrait by an unknown artist, in a private collection)	facing	190
Sully (from a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musée Condé at Chantilly)	facing	194
The Court of the Hôtel de Béthune. Sully's Residence		196
The Hôtel de Mayenne. In the distance, the Temple Sainte-Marie, called the Church of the Visitation	facing	198
The Place des Vosges	facing	214
The Hôtel de Beauvais	facing	238
The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de Brinvilliers	facing	246
The Hôtel de Sens	facing	254
Marguerite de Valois (from a portrait by an unknown artist, in the Musée de Montpellier)	facing	258
The Hôtel Lamoignon	facing	262
The Tourelle of the Hôtel Barbette		268
The Gateway of the Hôtel de Clisson		276

THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

3

THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In preceding chapters we have come upon the small beginnings of the Scholars' Quarter; we have had glimpses of the growth of the great mother University and of her progeny of out-lying colleges; and we have trodden, with their scholars and students, the slope of "the whole Latin Mountain," as it was named by Pantaléon, that nephew of Pope Urban IV., who extolled the learning he had acquired here. Looking down from its crest, over the hill-side to the Seine, we have had under our eyes the mediæval Pays Latin, filling up the space within its bounding wall, built by Philippe-Auguste and left untouched by Charles V.; we have seen that wall gradually obliterated through the ages, its gate-ways with their flanking towers first cut away, its fabric picked to pieces, stone by stone; while, beyond its line, we have watched the building up, early in the seventeenth century, of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, over the Pré-aux-Clercs, and in the fields beyond, and along the river-bank toward the west. In the centre of this new quarter the nobility of birth was soon intrenched behind its garden-walls, and in the centre of the old quarter the aristocracy of 4 brains was secluded within its courts. The boundary-line of the two quarters, almost exactly defined by the straight course from the Institute to the Panthéon, speedily became blurred, and the debatable neutral ground between was settled by colonists from either region, servants of the State, of art, of letters. In our former strollings through long-gone centuries, we have visited many of these and many of the dwellers on the University hill; we are now to turn our attention to those brilliant lights on the left bank who have helped to make Paris "la ville lumière" during the forenoon of the nineteenth century.

Through the heart of the faubourg curved the narrow Rue Saint-Dominique, from Esplanade des Invalides to Rue des Saints-Pères. This eastern end, nearly as far west as Rue de Bellechasse, has been carried away by new Boulevard Saint-Germain, and with it the hôtel of the de Tocqueville family, which stood at No. 77 of the ancient aristocratic street. Here in 1820 lived the Comtesse de Tocqueville, with her son, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, a lad of fifteen. Here he remained until the events of 1830 sent him to the United States, with a mission to study their prison systems; a study extended by him to all the institutions of the Republic, which had a profound interest for the French Republicans of that time. His report on those prisons appeared in 1832, and in 1835 he put forth the first volume of "De la Démocratie en Amérique," its four volumes being completed in 1840. That admirable survey of the progress of democracy—whose 5 ascendancy he predicted, despite his own predilections—still carries authority, and at the time created a wide-spread sensation. It made its author famous, and promoted him to the place of first-assistant lion in the salon of Madame Récamier, whose head lion was always Châteaubriand. De Tocqueville had settled, on his return to Paris, in this same faubourg; residing until 1837 at 49 Rue de Verneuil, and from that date to 1840 at 12 Rue de Bourgogne. Elected Deputy in 1839, he soon crossed the Seine, and we cannot follow him to his various residences in the quarter of the Madeleine. For a few months in 1849 he served as Minister for Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of the Prince-President, and was among the Deputies put into cells in December, 1851. His remaining years, until his death at Cannes in 1859, were spent in retirement from all public affairs.

A notable inhabitant of the University quarter, in the early years of the nineteenth century, was François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot, a young professor at the Sorbonne. His classes were crowded by students and by men from outside, all intent on his strong and convincing presentation of his favorite historical themes. He lived, near his lecture-room, at No. 10 Rue de la Planche, a street that now forms the eastern end of Rue de Varennes, between Rues du Bac and de la Chaise. From 1823 to 1830 his home was at 37 Rue Saint-Dominique, where now is No. 203 Boulevard Saint-Germain, next to the Hôtel de Luynes, already visited with Racine. This latter period saw 6 Guizot, after a temporary dismissal from his chair by the Bourbon King, at the height of his powers and his prestige as a lecturer. He carried his oratory to the Chamber of Deputies in 1830, and there compelled equal attention. In 1832 we find him, Minister of Public Instruction, installed in the official residence at 116 Rue de Grenelle, on the corner of Rue de Bellechasse. His work while there still lasts as the basis of the elementary education of France, and it is to him that she owes her primary schools. Pushed out from this office in 1836 by the pushing Thiers, he went to England as Ambassador for a few months in 1840, and in the autumn of that year he took up his abode in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he remained until he was driven out in 1848. That ancient mansion, no longer in existence, stood on the triangle made by Boulevard and Rue des Capucines. With his desertion of this Southern Bank, we lose sight of his dwellings, always thereafter in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Guizot and Louis-Philippe failed in their fight against a nation, and the men of February, 1848, revolted against the Prime Minister as well as against the King of the French. That opéra-bouffe monarch with the pear-shaped face, under the guise of Mr. Smith, with a fat umbrella, slipped out of the back door of the Tuileries and away to England; Guizot got away to the same safe shores in less ludicrous disguise. He returned to his own land in 1849, and lived until 1874, always poor, always courageous, and always at work. Among his many 7 volumes of these years, all marked by elevation of thought and serenity of style, as well as by absence of warmth and color, were his "Mémoires," wherein he proves, to the satisfaction of his austere dogmatism, that he had always been in the right throughout his public career.

The Revolution of 1830, that sent de Tocqueville on his voyage, and that started Guizot in political life, brought Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine to the public ear as an orator. He had filled the public eye as a poet since 1820, when his "Méditations Poétiques" appeared. In 1830, his "Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses" had made it sure that here was a soul filled with true harmony. And while he sang the consolations of religion, as Châteaubriand had sung its splendors, he gave proof of his devotion to the Church and throne. But he bore the Revolution of 1830, and the flight of the Bourbons, with the same equanimity he always summoned for the reverses of others, as well as for his own. When a literary genius is out of work, says Sainte-Beuve, he takes to politics and becomes an Illustrious Citizen, for want of something better to do. Lamartine was elected a Deputy soon after the upset of 1830, and sprang at once into the front rank of parliamentary orators. His speeches in the Chamber, and his "History of the Girondists"—enthralling and untrustworthy—helped to bring on the Revolution of 1848, quite without his knowing or wishing it. It was his superb outburst of rhetoric, as he stood alone on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, 8 on February 25th, backed by no colleague and clad in no authority, that saved to France her Tricolor—"that has swept all around the world, carrying liberty and glory in its folds"—in place of the white flag of the Bourbons that had gone, and the red rag of the mob that was near coming. Between that month of February and June of that same year, Lamartine had been on the crest of his highest wave, and had sunk to his lowest level in the regard of his Parisians. Their faith was justified in his genius and his rectitude, but a volcano is not to be squirted cold by rose-water, and the new republic could not be built on phrases. After his amazing minority in the election for president, Lamartine sank out of sight, accepting without complaint his sudden obscurity, as he had accepted without intrigue his former lustre. The conspiracy of December, 1851, sent him into retirement, and he lived alone with his pen, his only weapon against want—a pathetically heroic figure during these last years. George Sand had seen a good deal of Lamartine in the days of 1848, and he struck her as "a sort of Lafayette without his shrewdness. He shows respect for all men and all ideas, while believing in no ideas and loving no man." A more just and complete judgment is that of Louis Blanc: "He is incessantly laboring under a self-exalting hallucination. He dreams about himself marvellous dreams, and believes in them. He sees what is not visible, he opens his inward ear to impossible sounds, and takes delight in narrating to others any tale his imagination narrates to him. Honest and sincere 9 as he is, he would never deceive you, were he not himself deceived by the familiar demon who sweetly torments him."

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

The desolate fallen idol was rescued from oblivion and poverty by the Second Empire, whose few honorable acts may not be passed over. In 1867, in its and his dying years, that government gave him money, and the municipality gave him a house. These gifts came to him in Rue Cambacérès, in a small hotel now rebuilt into No. 7 of that street. Where it meets with Rue de Penthièvre, just above, you will find the attractive old mansion, with its ancient number 43 cut 10 in the stone over the doorway, in which, during the years after leaving the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he carried on his courageous struggle with his pen against debt and poverty. He had but few months' enjoyment of his last home, the gift of the people of Paris, for he died there in 1869. It was at Passy, not far from the square in Avenue Henri-Martin, named for him and holding his statue. The chair in which he is seated might be a theatrical property, perhaps humorously and fittingly so suggested by the sculptor; who has, however, done injustice to his subject, in robbing him of his natural grace and suavity, and in giving him a pedantic angularity that was never his.

When Lamartine writes to Sainte-Beuve, "I have wept, I who never weep," we are amused by the poet's naïve ignorance of his persistent lachrymose notes. The "smiling critic" accepted them simply as a pardonable overflow of the winning melancholy of that nature, in which he recognized all that was genuine and laudable. This wide-minded tolerance is perhaps the secret of Sainte-Beuve's strength as a critic. With his acute discernment of the soul of a book and of its author, his subtle appreciation of all diverse qualities, he was splendidly impartial. He could read anything and everything, with a keenness of appraisement that did not prejudice his enjoyment of that which was alive, amid much that might be dead. "A pilgrim of ideas, but lacking the first essential of a pilgrim—faith"—he gave all that he was to literature through all his life, and when near its end, he had the right to 11 say: "Devoted with all my heart to my profession of critic, I have tried to be, more and more, a good and—if possible—a skilful workman."

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

At the age of twenty-five, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was living, with his mother, in a small apartment on the fourth floor of No. 19—now 37—Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He had given himself to letters instead of medicine, for which he had studied, and had become a regular contributor of critical papers to the press. His name was already spoken along with the names of Victor Cousin, Villemain, Guizot, Mérimée. He had produced his "Historical and Critical Pictures," his "French Poetry and French Theatre of the Sixteenth Century," and the "Poems of Joseph Delorme"—his selected pen-name. The poet in him had abdicated to the critic, handing down many choice gifts. In this apartment he received for 12 review a volume of poems, "by a young barbarian," his editor wrote. This was the "Odes et Ballades" of Victor Hugo, with whom the critic soon made acquaintance, and at whose house, a few doors away in the same street, he became a constant visitor. From here Madame Sainte-Beuve removed, with her son, in 1834, to Rue du Mont-Parnasse, and in that street he had his home during his remaining years. His official residence, from 1840 to 1848, as a Keeper of the Mazarin Library, was in that building now occupied by the Institute. He found installed there, among the other Keepers, Octave Feuillet. The upheaval of February, 1848, drove Sainte-Beuve into Belgium. On his return in the following year, he settled in the house left him by his mother, and there he died in 1869. This two-storied, plaster-fronted, plain little No. 11 Rue du Mont-Parnasse, saw his thirty years of colossal work. From here, he went to take his chair of Latin poetry in the Collège de France, where he was hissed by the students, who meant to hiss, not the critic and lecturer, but the man who had accepted the Second Empire in accepting that chair. He was no zealous recruit, however, and preserved his entire independence; and when he consented to go to the Senate in 1865, it was for the sake of its dignity and its salary. He was always poor in money.

To his workroom in this house, came every French writer of those thirty years, anxious to plead with or to thank that Supreme Court of Criticism. Among those who bowed to its verdicts and who have owned 13 to its influence, Edmond de Goncourt has given us the most vivid sketch of the critic in conversation: "When I hear him touch on a dead man, with his little phrases, I seem to see a swarm of ants invading a body; cleaning out all the glory, and in a few minutes leaving a very clean skull of the once illustrious one." And, in his written reviews, Sainte-Beuve had the supreme art of distilling a drop of venom in a phial of honey, so making the poison fragrant and the incense deadly. There is no more constant presence than his on this southern hill-side, where all his days and nights were spent. We seem to see there the short, stout figure, erect and active, the bald head covered with a skull-cap, the bushy red eyebrows, the smooth-shaven face, redeemed from ugliness by its alert intelligence. His walks were down this slope of Mont-Parnasse, which he thought of as the pleasure-ground of the mediæval students of the University, to the quays, where he hunted among the old-book stalls. And he loved to stroll in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens. In the Poets' Corner, now made there, you will find his bust along with those of Henri Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, and Paul Verlaine.

Crossing the street from Sainte-Beuve's last home to No. 32, we find a modest house set behind its garden-wall, in which is a tablet containing the name of Edgar Quinet. More than passing mention of his name is due to this fine intellect and this great soul. His mother thought that "an old gentleman named M. Voltaire"—whom she might have seen in her childhood, as her 14 village crowded about his carriage on its way to Paris—was the cleverest man who ever lived. She brought up her boy to think for himself, after that philosopher's fashion, and the boy bettered her teachings. He spent his life in looking into the depths of beliefs and institutions, in getting at the essence of the real and the abiding, in letting slip that which was shallow and transitory; so that, towards the end, he could say: "I have passed my days in hearing men speak of their illusions, and I have never experienced a single one." He became, in Professor Dowden's apt phrase, "a part of the conscience of France," and as such, his influence was of higher value than that exerted by his busy pen in politics, history, poetry. Indeed, his enthusiasms for the freedom and progress of his fellow-beings carried his pen beyond due restraint. Of course he was honored by exile during the Second Empire, and when it tumbled to pieces, he returned to Paris, and soon went to Versailles as a Deputy. At his grave, in 1875, Hugo spoke of him as living and dying with the serene light of truth on his brow, and he can have no happier epitaph.

Quinet had outlived, by only a few months, his life-long friend Jules Michelet, who died in 1874. He, too, had his homes and did his work, private and public, on this same hill-side. His birth-place, far away on the northern bank, on the corner of Rues de Tracy and Saint-Denis, is now given over to business. It was a church, built about 1630 in the gardens of "Les Dames de Saint-Chaumont," and had been closed in 15 1789, along with so many other churches. Going fast to ruin, it was fit only for the poverty-stricken tenant, who came along in the person of the elder Michelet, a printer from Laon. He set up his presses in the nave and his household gods in the choir, where the boy Jules was born on August 22, 1798. The building is unchanged as to its outer aspect, with its squat columns supporting the heavy pediment of the façade, except that two stories have been placed above its main body. In these strange surroundings for a child, and in the shelters equally squalid, to and from which his father removed during many years, the boy grew up, haunted and nervous, cold, hungry and ill-clad, and always over his books when set free from type-setting.

He got lessons and took prizes at the Lycée Charlemagne, but the pleasantest lesson and the dearest prize of his youth did not come in school. They were his first sight, from his father's windows in Rue Buffon, of the sun setting over beyond the trees, tuneful with birds, of the Jardin du Roi. Grass and foliage, and a sky above an open space, had been unknown to his walled-in boyhood. When he became able to choose a home for himself, it had always its garden, or a sight of one. At an early age he went to tutoring; in 1821 he was appointed lecturer on history in the Collège Rollin, then in its old place on the University hill; soon after 1830 he succeeded to Guizot's chair in the Sorbonne, and in 1838 the Collège de France made him its professor of History and Moral 16 Science. In that institution, he and his colleague Quinet caused immense commotion by their assaults on the Church intrenched in the State, and from their halls the hootings of the clericals, and the plaudits of the liberals, re-echoed throughout France. The priesthood complained that "the lecturer on history and morals gave no history and no morals," and it began to be believed—rightly or wrongly—that he was using his professor's platform as a band-stand, and was beating a big drum for the gratification of the groundlings. He was speedily dismissed, he was reinstated soon after 1848, and was finally thrown aside by the Second Empire.

At this period only, he disappears from the Scholars' Quarter for a while. His earliest residence there was, soon after his marriage in 1827, at 23 Rue de l'Arbalète, a street named from the "Chevaliers de l'Arbalète," who had made it their archery grounds in mediæval days. The site of Michelet's residence is fittingly covered by a large school, on the corner of that street and of the street named for Claude Bernard. After a short stay in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor—that street nearly all gone now—he returned to this neighborhood, and settled in Rue des Postes, which, in 1867, received the name of the grammarian Lhomond. Otherwise, no change has come to this quiet street, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century buildings, among which is the Hôtel Flavacourt, set in the midst of gardens. On its first floor Michelet lived from 1838 to 1850. At No. 10 is the arched gateway through 17 which he went, in its keystone the carved head of a strong man with thick beard and curling locks. Above the long yellow-drab wall shows the new chapel of the priests, who, with unknowing irony, have taken his favorite dwelling for their schools.

Absent from this quarter during the early years of the Second Empire, and absent from Paris during part of that time, it was in 1856 that Michelet settled in his last abode. It was at 44 Rue de l'Ouest, and his garden here was the great Luxembourg Garden. In 1867, the street was renamed Rue d'Assas, and his house renumbered 76. After his death in the south of France in 1874, his widow lived there until her own death in 1899, and kept that modest home just as he had left it. She was his second wife, and had been of great help to him in his work, and had done her own work, aided by his hand, which sprinkled gold-dust over her manuscript, as she prettily said. That hand had not been idle for over fifty years. He gave forty years of labor, broken only by his other books, to his "History of France," which at his death was not yet done, as he had meant that it should be done. It is a series of pictures, glowing and colored by his sympathetic imagination, which let him see and touch the men of every period, and made him, for the moment, the contemporary of every epoch. And Taine assures us, contrary to the general belief, that we may trust its accuracy. His style has a magic all its own. He had said: "Augustin Thierry calls history a narration, Guizot calls it an analysis; I consider that history 18 should be a resurrection." This idea is translated into durable marble on his striking tombstone in Père-Lachaise, done in high relief by the chisel of Mercié.

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

Like Sainte-Beuve, Littré gave up medicine, to which he had been trained, for journalistic work; some of which, in his early days, was done for the Gazette Médicale, and much of it all through life for the political press. He was an ardent Liberal, and after the fall of the Empire, was elected a Deputy, and later a Senator, of the Third Republic. Nothing in the domain of literature seemed alien to this catholic mind, 19 equally at ease in science and philosophy, philology and history. The enduring achievement of his life is his Dictionary of the French Language. It was begun in 1844 and completed in 1872, and a supplement was added in 1877. In his fortieth year, he was attracted by the teachings of Comte, and became a leader of the Positivists and a copious contributor to their review. His career is that of an earnest and a self-denying student; a teacher of unfettered thinking in science, religion, politics; a modest and disinterested fellow-worker in letters.

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

This faubourg has had no more striking figure than that of Prosper Mérimée, tight-buttoned in frock-coat, 20 and of irreproachable starchedness; with a curiously round, cold eye behind glasses, a large nose with a square end, a forehead seamed with fine wrinkles. It was his pride to pass as an Englishman in his walk. In his work, in romance equally with archæology, the gentleman prevails over the author, so that he seems to stand aloof, reserved, sceptical, correct; never showing emotion, never giving way to his really infinite wit and frisky mockery. He began his working-life in 1825, as a painter with his father, alongside the École des Beaux-Arts, at No. 16 Rue des Petits-Augustins, now 12 Rue Bonaparte. In 1840 he moved around the corner to No. 10 Rue des Beaux-Arts, half way between the school and his other place of work in the Institute, as Inspector of the Historical and Artistic Monuments of France. From 1848 to 1851 he was to be found at 18 Rue Jacob, and close at hand he found "l'Inconnue," at 35 of the same street. In 1852 he removed to his last residence at 52 Rue de Lille, on the corner of Rue du Bac. The Commune burned that house along with others adjacent, and until rebuilding began, long after, there stood in the ruins a marble bust on its pedestal, unharmed except for the stain of the flames. It was all that was left of Mérimée's great art-collection, with which, and with his books and cats, he had lived alone since his mother's death. He had gone away to Cannes to die in 1870. So that he did not see the ruins of the Empire, to which he had rallied, altogether from devotion to the Empress, whom he had 21 known in Spain when she was a child. He accepted nothing from the Emperor except the position of Librarian at Fontainebleau, and was as natural and sincere with the Empress, as he had been with Eugenie Montijo playing about his knee. In his other office he was a loyal servant of the State, and to his alert, artistic conscience France owes the preservation of many historic structures.

There are those who claim that the influence of Taine on modern thought has been deeper and will be more durable than that of Renan. They base their belief on the groundless notion that men are most profoundly impressed by pure reason, forgetful of that well-grounded experience, which proves that all men are touched and moved and persuaded rather by sentiment than by conviction. And the writer is irresistible, who, like Renan, appeals to our emotional as well as to our thinking capacities. We are captivated by those feminine qualities in his strain that are disapproved of by his detractors; his refined fancy and his undulating grace seduce us. We are convinced by his zest in the search for truth, by his courage in speaking it as he found it; we recognize his sincerity and sobriety that do not demand applause; we respect the magnanimity that looked on curses as oratorical ornaments of his enemies, and that took no return in kind. And so we stand in the peaceful court of homelike No. 23 Rue Cassette, on whose first floor Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine died in 1893, in respectful memory of the man who has helped us all by his dissections, 22 his cataloguing, and his array of facts. The structure of the philosophy of history, that he raised, stands imposing and enduring on the bank of the stream of modern thought, and yet it may be that Edmond de Goncourt was not wholly wrong, in his characterization of Taine as "the incarnation of modern criticism; most learned, most ingenious, and most frequently unsound." We turn away and follow eagerly the steps of sympathetic Joseph-Ernest Renan.

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

Once a week, while at the seminary, young Renan took an outing with the other pupils to its succursale at Issy. It is a dreary walk, along the wearisome length of Rue de Vaugirard, to the village to which Isis gave her name, when that goddess, once worshipped 23 in Lutetia, was banished to this far-away hamlet. There "Queen Margot" had a hunting-lodge and vast grounds, and when these were taken by the brothers of Saint-Sulpice, they saved the grounds and transformed the cupids on the walls of the lodge into cherubs, and the Venus into a Madonna. Now their new structures in Caen stone face the street named for Ernest Renan. In the gardens is a chapel built around the grotto, roofed with shells, wherein Bossuet and Fénelon used to meet, toward the end of the eighteenth century. There they doubtless began that controversy over the mystical writings of Madame Guyon, which ended in Fénelon's dismissal from the court through the influence of the imperious Bossuet. Under these trees that shaded them, walked Renan in his long and cruel conflict between his conscience and his traditions, most dreading the pain he would give his mother by the step he felt impelled to take. He took that step in October, 1845, when he laid aside the soutane—to be adorned and glorified by him, his teachers had hoped—and walked out from the seminary to a small hôtel-garni on the opposite side of Place Saint-Sulpice. Supported at first only by the savings of his devoted sister, Henriette, he started as a tutor, and began his life's pen-work, in a cheap pension, in one of the shabby houses just west of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, in Rue des Deux-Églises, now renamed Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Épée.

His future dwellings, befitting his modest gains, were all in quiet streets of this scholarly quarter. The 24 site of that one occupied from 1862 to 1865, at 55 Rue Madame, is covered by Collége Bossuet, where priests teach their dogmas. Old Passage Sainte-Marie, where he lodged for a while in 1865, is now Rue Paul-Louis-Courier, and his lodging is gone. During the ten years from 1866 to 1876, he lived in the plain house numbered 29 of retired Rue Vaneau. Then for three years, he had an apartment at No. 16 Rue Guillaume; "a short street of provincial aspect," says Alphonse Daudet, "grass-grown, with never a wheel; of silent mansions and unopened gates, and of closed windows on the court; faded and wan after centuries of sleep." This mansion was built for Denis Talon, an advocate-general at the end of the seventeenth century, and described by Germain Brice, writing in 1684, as having "most agreeable apartments, with outlook on neighboring gardens, and a large court, and great expense in building." He did not mention the entrance-door, which is monumental, nor the knocker, worth a pilgrimage to see. In 1880 Renan removed to No. 4 Rue de Tournon, so finding himself between No. 6, once occupied by Laplace, and No. 2, once occupied by Balzac. In 1883 he was made Administrator of the Collége de France, and there took up his official residence. His appointment to the chair of Hebrew in that institution, on his return from the Orient in 1861, had so perturbed the Church behind the State that he was dismissed after he had given but one lecture.

The Second Empire gone, he came back, mainly through the action of Jules Simon, a wise and learned 25 statesman and a most lovable man. Renan the administrator remained the lecturer as well, and has left ineffaceable memories with those who saw and heard him in his declining years; when, his body disabled by maladies, he still went singing on his way, as he manfully put it. It was a gross and clumsy body; to use Edmond de Goncourt's words, an ungraceful, almost disgraceful body, full of the moral grace of this apostle of doubt, this priest of science. His lectures were rather readings of the scriptures, interspersed with his own exegesis. On chairs about a large table, and against the wall, in a small room of the college, were seated the few intent listeners. Renan sat at one end of the table, his head—"an unchurched cathedral"—bent over a bulky copy of the scriptures as he read; then, as he talked, he would raise his head and throw back the long hair that had tumbled over his brow, the subtle humor of his mobile mouth and his dreamy eyes effacing the effect of his big nose and fat cheeks, his beardless face luminous with an exalted intellectual urbanity. His interpretations and illustrations were spoken with his perfect art of simple and limpid phrase, and in those tones that told of his dwelling with the saints and prophets of all the ages, and with the elusive spirits of mockery of our own day.

He died, on October 2, 1892, in his official residence in the Collége de France, an apartment on the second floor of the main structure facing the front court. The austere simplicity of this Breton interior was leavened by the books and the equipment of the scholar. The 26 window of his death-chamber is just under the clock.

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

It vibrated to the touch of outrages on woman and of injustice to man, and it pulsated with equal passion for her children and for the rural sights and scents of her birth-place. And we feel her heart in her phrases, that stir us, as Thackeray puts it, like distant country-bells. This half-poet, half-mystic, came fairly by her fantastic inheritance; for she was, in the admirable phrase of Mr. Henry James, "more sensibly the result of a series of love affairs than most of us." On the other side, we may accurately apply to her Voltaire's words concerning Queen Elizabeth: "And Europe counts you among her greatest men." There were masculine breadth and elevation in her complex, ample nature, with divine instincts and ideal purities, that left no room for vulgar ambitions and mean avidities. Balzac, of kindred qualities, wrote, after having learned to know her a little: "George Sand would speedily be my friend. She has no pettiness whatever in her 27 soul; none of the low jealousies that obscure so many contemporary talents. Dumas resembles her in this."

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

It may have been, for she always dwelt on her royal ancestry, in the house now No. 5, which had been the home of Maurice de Saxe. That son of Augustus 28 the Strong of Poland and of the Countess of Königsmark was the father of a natural daughter, who became the grandmother and guardian of Mlle. Lucile-Aurore. Madame Dudevant gave his name to her son, and this young Maurice, and his sister Solange, were now brought to their mother's new home. She devoted hours to their amusement and instruction, and hours to her pen-work; writing far into the night when daylight did not suffice. She improvised a study in the ground floor on the court, cool when the westering sun flooded her windows above, and quiet when too many visitors disturbed her. For she had sprung into fame with her "Indiana"—its author styled George Sand—and after only two months' interval with her "Valentine." Naturally inert, she had to push herself on to work, and then her "serene volubility" knew no pause. She had now to be reckoned with in the guild of letters, and its members met in the "poets' garret," as she termed her little salon.

Balzac came—he who discouraged her in the beginning, on Quai Saint-Michel—and Hugo and Dumas and Sainte-Beuve and young de Musset. With this last-named she went from here to Italy, having persuaded his mother that his infatuation would reform the wayward youth. All the world knows, from the books on both sides, the story of the short-lived liaison. She returned to this home in August, 1834, hungry for her children. Then we lose sight of her for many years, in her visits to her beloved provincial scenes, and her journeys to other lands, and her temporary 29 residences on the right bank of the Seine. In the winter of 1846 and 1847 she had a pied-à-terre in her son's studio, in the secluded square of Cours d'Orléans, its entrance now at 80 Rue Taitbout. There she was visited by Charles Dickens, who describes her as "looking like what you'd suppose the queen's monthly nurse would be; chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed; a singularly ordinary woman in appearance and manner." Others describe her, at this period, when she had just passed her fortieth year, as having a wearied, listless bearing, her only notable feature being her dull, mild, tranquil eyes. In February, 1852, she was found by Mr. and Mrs. Browning in the small apartment attached to her son's studio, at No. 3 Rue Racine. It is at the top of the house, and can be rented to-day. A curious picture of her and her surroundings is given by the Brownings. She was a constant attendant at this time at the Odéon—on whose stage her plays were produced—and at the restaurant in the place in front of the theatre. There she used to sit among her male friends, smoking "those horrid big cigars" which so revolted Rachel that she would never meet the smoker.

George Sand's last Paris home was in Rue Gay-Lussac, and she was one of the earliest tenants in that street, opened in 1868. She had three or four small rooms in the entresol of No. 5, the lease of which, after her death in 1876, was sold by her son to a Roumanian lady, along with some of his mother's furniture. This lady is delighted to chatter about her illustrious predecessor 30 in this apartment, and allows the favored visitor to sit on the broad couch, covered in dingy and worn leather, whereon George Sand was fond of reclining in her last tranquil days, at rest after stormy and laborious years.

There is a hospitable little inn in the Faubourg Saint-Germain endeared to many of us by memories, joyous or mournful. The Hotel de France et de Lorraine, in narrow Rue de Beaune, just south of the quay, was one of the earliest hotels in Paris, and was an approved resort of the Royalists, before emigration and after Restoration. They seem still to haunt its court and halls, where there lingers that atmosphere of decayed Bourbonism, which James Russell Lowell humorously hits off in a letter written when he was a guest here. The pervading presence is that of Châteaubriand, and our amiable hosts have a pride in keeping his apartment—on the first floor, in plain wood panelling of time-worn gray—much as it was when he wrote, in its salon, his letter of resignation of his post in the Diplomatic Service, to the First Consul, to be Emperor within two months. Châteaubriand was in Paris on leave of absence at the time of the shooting of the Duc d'Enghien, in the ditch of Vincennes on the night of March 20, 1804, and he refused to serve any longer the man whom he regarded as an assassin. Just seventeen years earlier these two men had arrived in Paris, both sub-lieutenants, of nearly the same age, equally obscure and ambitious, equally without heart. Napoleon Bonaparte, coming from Corsica, took a room in the Hôtel de 31 Cherbourg, as we have seen; François-Auguste, Vicomte de Châteaubriand, coming from his natal town of Saint-Malo, found lodging in the Hôtel de l'Europe in Rue du Mail. This street, between Porte Saint-Denis, by which the coaches entered, and Place des Victoires, where they put up, was full of hôtels-garnis for travellers. Installed there, Châteaubriand hunted up the great Malesherbes, a friendly counsellor who put him in the way of meeting men of note; among others Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, at the top of them all, just then, with his "Paul et Virginie." These two, the one just fifty, the other not yet twenty, then in 1787, strolled together in the Jardin du Roi, forgetting their old world and its worries, in their talks of the new world and its glories.

During the next two or three years, Châteaubriand came frequently to Paris, an intent and disgusted onlooker at its doings. He stood, with his sisters, at their windows in Rue de Richelieu, open on that September day, when the mob surged by holding aloft on pikes the heads of Foulon and Berthier. His Royalist stomach revolted, and he joined his regiment at Rouen, to retire soon from the service, and to sail in 1791 for the new United States, with dreams of distinction as the discoverer of the Northwest Passage. He dined with George Washington, to whom he carried a letter from a French officer, who had served in the colonial army. The President waved aside Châteaubriand's florid compliments, and advised him to give up his futile quest. The young Breton wandered far into the new country, and while 32 resting in a clearing on the Scioto, where now is Chillicothe, Ohio, he read in an old newspaper of the royal flight to Varennes, and of the enforced return.

At once he started for France, to offer his sword to his King, arriving in January, 1792, and in the summer of that year he joined the growing train of émigrés to England. For eight years he toiled and starved in London, and returned to Paris in 1800. His passport bore the name of "Lassague," and he posted, in company, as far as Porte de l'Étoile. Thence he went on foot down the Champs Élysées, finding none of the silence and desolation his fancy had pictured, but, on either hand, lights and music. On the spot where the guillotine had stood he stopped, provided with the proper emotions. He crossed Pont Royal, then the westernmost bridge, and betook himself to lodgings in Rue de Lille, in an entresol of one of the dignified mansions, that seem still to stand aloof from their bourgeois neighbors. From here, he stole out to his meals, hiding his face behind his journal, in which he had been reading impassioned praise of the new book, "Atala," and listened to the other guests speculating as to the unknown genius who had written it. The picture is to be cherished, for it is the only known portrait of Châteaubriand, modest and shrinking. He had brought the manuscript of "Atala" to Paris in his pocket, and had sought long before securing a publisher. The book found a public eager for novelty. It came in a period of sterility in letters, when all the virility of France had been spent in her colossal wars, and the new century 33 was alert to greet the serene light of science and literature. That came from all points of the horizon, but the resplendent figures of these years were Madame de Staël and Châteaubriand.

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

A year after his "Atala," in 1802, his "Génie du Christianisme" had placed him, in the estimation of his country and of himself, on a literary throne level 34 with the military throne of Bonaparte. The rhetorical fireworks of this book, corruscating around the Catholic Church, lighted up the night of scepticism, when worship had been abolished and God had been outlawed. Yet, as he poetized beyond recognition the North American savages in his "Atala," so now he prettified the sanctuary and "gilded the Host." The First Consul, welcoming any aid in his scheme to use the Church for his own ends, sent the author to the legation at Rome. We have seen his return. After this, he moves about Paris, lodging, for a while, he says, "in a garret" offered him by Madame la Marquise de Coislin, a stanch friend and stanch Royalist. "Hotel de Coislin" may still be read above the doorway of the stately mansion that faces Place de la Concorde, at the western corner of Rue Royale, and aggressive Bourbonism speaks from its stone pillars and pediment. His garret there was no squalid lodging. On his return from the Holy Land in 1807, Châteaubriand planted the Jerusalem pines and cedars of Lebanon he had brought back, in the garden of "Vallée-aux-Loups," a little place he then purchased near Aulnay, on the south of the city. Here, while the Empire lasted, he passed years of quiet content, with his wife, his plants, and his books, but writing no more romance after 1809. In 1817, having a town residence, and finding himself too poor to keep this country place, he sold it, and new buildings cover the site of his cottage and garden.

Recalled to active life by the Restoration, Châteaubriand posed as one who was more Royalist than the 35 King, with a mental reservation of his platonic fancy for a republic. He was a pretentious statesman, none too sincere. His pamphlet, "De Buonaparte et des Bourbons," had been worth an army to the cause, said Louis XVIII., who placed him in the Chamber of Peers, and in 1822, after a short stay at the Berlin Embassy, in the Ambassador's residence in London. Lording it there, in all "the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power," he recalled his former years of obscurity and privation in London streets, and began his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." In writing about himself he was at his ease, feeling that he had a subject worthy of his best powers, and these memoirs have little of the inflated and fantastic mannerisms of his romances about other people. As to the rest, they are a colossal monument to his conceit and selfishness. Dismissed suddenly and indecently by Louis XVIII., from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Châteaubriand was made Ambassador to Rome on the accession of Charles X., in 1828. He refused to recognize the younger branch of the Bourbons in 1830, and when the crown was given to Orleans, he strode out of the Chamber of Peers, and stripped himself of his peer's robe, with great theatric effect. Appearing no more in public life, he was active in pamphlets and in the press as an opponent of the new royalty, which would lead to a republic, he predicted.

"Châteaubrillant, Vicomte de, Rue de l'Université 25," is his address in the Bottin of 1817; a record of interest in its antiquated spelling of his name, and because this is the house, on the corner of Rue du Bac, 36 which we shall visit later with Alexandre Dumas. This three years' lease expiring in 1820, he removed to the fine old mansion, where he gave reception to young Victor Hugo, to be described later, at No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique. Its site is covered by the modern building numbered 197 in Boulevard Saint-Germain, whose southern side, just here, replaces the same side of Rue Saint-Dominique, as has been already told. He kept other town addresses, to which we need not follow him, during his absences on diplomatic duty. From 1827 to 1838 we find him and Madame de Châteaubriand in their retired home, in the southern outskirts of the city. Their 84 Rue d'Enfer is now 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, the old street name thus punningly extended, in homage to the heroic defender of Belfort.

The dingy yellow front of the long wall and the low building is broken by a gate-way, and within is a small lodge on the left, wherein sits a woman in the costume of a sisterhood. She permits entrance into the cottage on the right, and you are in Châteaubriand's small salon, the remaining portion of the cottage being now in possession of the Institution des Jeunes Filles Aveugles, alongside. His portrait in pencil, and a water-color sketch of his wife, hang on the wall. Her face shows the boredom and patience that were put into it by her life with this man of irascible genius and of frequent infidelities. She is buried behind the altar of the chapel of the Marie-Thérèse Infirmary, which she founded and carried on, in the devoutness that dwelt 37 in her soul for the Church, whose appeal to him was in its artistic endowments. A portion of the revenue that supports this institution comes from the sale of chocolate, made first to her liking by her chef, and made after his rule ever since. As Sœur Marie shows you out from the salesroom, alongside this little reception-room, you see the group of trees in the circular lawn, that was planted by husband and wife; on the farther side are the dilapidated buildings of their day, now used for the chocolate fabrique; behind the great court rise the walls of the Infirmary for aged and invalid priests. Châteaubriand had known, while in Kensington during his exile, many of the impoverished curés who were, like himself, refugees from the Revolution; and some of them had followed him here, and had become domesticated pets of the household, together with the big gray cat given him by the Pope. To them and their successors in poverty and illness, he bequeathed this comfortable retreat.

There is an episode of these years that shows a kindly side of Châteaubriand, that he seldom allows us to see. He was suggested for the presidency of the republic, adventured by the political clubs for a year or two after the unwelcome accession of Louis-Philippe. Châteaubriand did not join the plotters, but he was arrested, along with many of them, and locked up for two weeks or so. Now, when the Bourbons had put Béranger in prison, in 1828, Châteaubriand had been one of the many sympathizers who had flocked to the cell of the courageous singer. In 1832 the rôles were reversed, 38 and Béranger came in, from his cottage in Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne, to visit the imprisoned statesman. And after Châteaubriand's release, he wrote a charming letter to Béranger, thanking him for that token of fellow-feeling, and begging him not to "break his lyre," as the veteran chansonnier had threatened to do, and urging him to go on "making France smile and weep; for, by a secret known only to you, the words of your chansons are gay and the airs are plaintive." Béranger's songs touch no chord now, their plaintiveness is commonplaceness, his philosophy has no loftiness, his sentimentality is of the earth earthy, and his lyre is, to us, a tinkling hurdy-gurdy.

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

In 1793, at the very top of the Terror, Jacques Récamier brought to this house his bride not yet sixteen, who had been Mlle. Jeanne-Françoise-Julie-Adélaïde 39 Bernard. Here they lived for five years. Their house is unaltered as to fabric, and the original heavy, circular, stone staircase still mounts to the upper floors. These are now divided by partitions into small rooms, and the lofty first story is cut across by an interposed floor; all for the needs of trade. The ceiling of the grand salon retains its admirable cornice. Like other mansions on the south side of Rue du Mail, this Récamier house extended, behind a large court, now roofed over with glass, through to Rue d'Aboukir, where its rear entrance is at No. 11. On the first floor of this wing, in the oblong ceiling of a small room, is a deeply sunk oval panel, that holds a painting of that time, in good preservation.

From here Jacques Récamier, just then wealthy, removed to the newest fashionable quarter of which the centre was Rue du Mont-Blanc, now Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, whose No. 7 covers the site of his magnificent mansion. It was then a street of small and elegant hôtels, each in its own grounds, and M. Récamier bought the one that had belonged to Necker, and had been confiscated by the State. He bought also the adjoining house, and rebuilt the two into one. Its furniture, fittings, bronzes, and marbles were all especially designed for this new palace of a prosperous financier. Here was the scene of those balls that were the wonder of Paris during the Consulate and the early years of the Empire. The costumes of the period, both for men and women, were picturesque in cut and coloring. Among the guests shone Caroline Bonaparte, later to marry 40 Murat, the youngest of the sisters and most resembling her great brother in face and character. M. and Mme. Récamier spent their summers in a château owned by him in the suburbs of Clichy; and to it every man of note in the State and the army found his way. Napoleon said he, too, would be glad to go to Clichy, if the fair châtelaine would not come to court, and sent Fouché to arrange it, but with no success. She fought shy of Napoleon, the man and the Emperor, as Madame de Staël itched for his attention, personal and political. Nor did Madame Récamier like his brother Lucien, who languished about her, to the ridicule of his equally love-lorn rivals.

His justification, and that of all her other adorers, speaks from David's unfinished canvas in the Louvre. Yet this shows only the outer shell of her loveliness; within was a lovely nature, simple and kindly, sympathetic and loyal, that made her generous in her friendships with men and women, and devoted to the welfare of her friends. The single passion of her life was her passion for goodness. Her modesty kept her unconscious of her attractions of mind and body, and thus she held, almost unaware, the widest dominion of any woman of her day. The Duchess of Devonshire put it daintily: "First she's good, next she's spirituelle, and after that, she's beautiful." And so, as we come to know her, we learn infinite respect for the woman, who "with an unequalled influence over the hearts and wills of men, scorned to ask a favor, and endured poverty and ... exile, which fell with tenfold severity on 41 one so beloved and admired, without sacrifice of dignity and independence."

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

Just beyond the Boulevards de la Madeleine and des Capucines, which show the line of the rampart levelled by Louis XIV., and along the course of its outer moat, a new street had started up at the end of the eighteenth century, and was completed in the early years of the nineteenth century. It began at present Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and ended at the Church of the Madeleine, then in course of construction; it was built up in the best style of that period, and it was named Rue Basse-du-Rempart. That untouched section, to the west of Rue Caumartin, shows us the admirable architecture of the early Empire in the stately fronts, that shrink back behind the boulevard in stony-faced protest against its turmoil. Eastwardly from Rue Caumartin, the northern side of Boulevard des Capucines has trampled out nearly the whole of the old street. The stones of Place de l'Opéra lie on the site of the modest house, at 18 Rue Basse-du-Rempart, taken by M. Récamier after his first business reverses, and occupied by him during his wife's exile; and the florist's shop, under the Grand Hôtel, is on the spot of 42 their stately residence at No. 32 of the same street, after her return and until 1820. In that year, his fortune regained, he moved farther west in the same street to a more sumptuous home at No. 48. This house has been happily saved for us, and is now numbered 18 of Boulevard des Capucines; one of the three structures of the old street, which stand back from the line of modern frontage, and lower than the level of modern paving. The present No. 16 is the Récamier coach-entrance, and the huge stabling in the rear is built on the Récamier gardens. Their house preserves its wrought-iron balconies, and within is the circular staircase mentioned in her "Mémoires." Down these stairs, for the last time, she came in 1827, leaving M. Récamier to his disastrous speculations, which had at last swallowed up her own fortune, and drove to the Abbaye-aux-Bois. There was her home until her death in 1849.

The venerable mass of the convent is in sight behind the railed-in court at No. 16 Rue de Sèvres. One portion that we see was built in 1640 for the "Annonciades," and from them bought by Anne of Austria, in 1654, for the sisterhood of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, who had been driven from their convent near Compiègne by the civil wars of the Fronde. That wing which was burned in 1661 was speedily rebuilt, and forms part of the structure before us. Convents had then, and have still, rooms and apartments which are let or sold to lone spinsters and widows, and to "decayed gentlewomen who have seen better days." This Abbaye-aux-Bois, during the Bourbon Restoration, "when the sky had 43 no horizon," was a favorite retreat for fashionable dévotes, mending their reputations by a temporary retirement. The life there is pleasantly described in the early letters of Mary Clarke—later Madame Julius Mohl—who lived there with her mother. M. Bernard, the father of Madame Récamier, had bought one of its grandest apartments for his daughter, after the first bankruptcy of her husband. When she came here it was occupied, and she rented a shabby upper floor for two or three years, and then went down to her own apartment on the first floor, to which she added another 44 in the rear of the same floor. It is in the western wing, of modern construction, with windows on Rue de Sèvres, and on the terrace that overlooks the garden, now shorn of a goodly slice by Boulevard Raspail. We know all about this salon, famous for twenty years, the roll of whose frequenters holds every illustrious name in France during that period, as well as those of many charlatans and bores.

It is reported that Madame Récamier and Châteaubriand met first, in the earliest years of the century, at the receptions of Madame de Staël. Whenever they met to become mutually attracted, this attraction grew in him until it became the dominant sentiment of his life. With all his elevation of soul and his breadth of mind, he had no depth of feeling. "I have a head, good, clear, cold," he wrote; "and a heart that goes jog-trot for three-and-one-half quarters of humanity." The other one-eighth was Madame Récamier, and she outcounted all the rest of the world in stirring such heart as he had. "You have transformed my nature," he tried to make her believe, and he may have believed it himself. Sick with conceit as he was, spoiled by flattery, morbid from introspection, her companionship lifted him out of his melancholy and raised him into serenity. As for her, so long as Madame de Staël lived, she had no other affection to spare for anyone, and perhaps this incomparable creature never gave to Châteaubriand more than homage to her hero, tenderness to the isolated man, and medicine to a mind diseased. He may well have written, 45 toward the last: "I know nothing more beautiful nor more good than you."

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

Its dining-room and a chapel, arranged by them, gave on this court. The chapel has been thrown into, and made one with, the dining-room, but this is the only alteration since their time. His bedroom, and that of 46 his wife—with her huge bird-cages behind—and the salon between the two rooms, looked out on their garden, and beyond it on the vast grounds of the Missions Étrangères. The enchanting seclusion was dear to 47 him in these last years, during which his only work was the completion and touching-up of his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." Select extracts from the manuscript were sometimes read by him to the group that assembled in the drawing-room at the abbaye, between four and six o'clock of every afternoon. The hostess sat on one side of the fireplace, her form grown so fragile that it seemed transparent for the gentle spirit shining out, like a radiant light within a rich vase. Châteaubriand "pontificated" in his arm-chair opposite, toying with the household cat, the while he tried to listen to the lesser men; "a giant bored by, and smiling pitifully down on, a dwarf world," is Amiel's phrase. When Châteaubriand spoke or read, it was with sonorous tones, and with attitude and gesture of a certain stateliness. He was always an artist in all details. His costume was simple and elegant. Short of stature, he made himself shorter by his way of sinking his head—"an Olympian head," says Lamartine—between his shoulders. Under his thick-clustering locks rose a noble forehead, power shone from his eyes, pride curled his lips—too often—and his expression gave assurance of a glacial reserve.

The day came when he found himself too feeble for the short walk between his house and the abbaye. Then his friend came to him. She and Madame de Châteaubriand had been sufficiently friendly, but that good lady gave her days to her prayer-books, and to reading her husband's books; which she never understood, albeit she had the finest mind of any woman he 48 had known, he always asserted. She died in the winter of 1846-47, and her body was carried to the Infirmary, the care of which had been the occupation and the happiness of her later years. Jacques Récamier, when in mortal illness in 1830, had been brought to his wife's rooms in the abbaye, at her request and by special favor of the Mother Superior, and there he had died.

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

Châteaubriand's funeral service, attended by all that was best in France, was solemnized in the Church of 49 the Missions Étrangères, next door, and his body was laid in a rock of the harbor of Saint-Malo. Madame Récamier went back to her now desolate rooms. On May 10, 1849, she drove over to the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, on a visit to her niece, whose husband, M. Lenormant, was its librarian and had his apartment there. That night she died in that building, in a sudden seizure of cholera.

THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC

53

THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC[1]

Set in the front wall of a commonplace house, in the broad main street of sunny Tours, a tablet records the birth of Balzac in that house, on the 27 Floréal, An VII. of the Republic—May 16, 1799—the day of Saint-Honoré, a saint whose name happened to hit the fancy of the parents, and they gave it to their son. Many a secluded corner of the town, many a nook within and about its Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, many a portrait of its priests, has been brought into his books. And he has portrayed, with his artist hand, the country round about of the broad Loire and of bright Touraine, always vivid in his boyish reminiscences. In his life 54 and his work, however, he was, first and always, a Parisian. To the great town, with all its mysteries and its possibilities, his favorite creations surely found their way, however far from it they started, drawn thither, as was drawn and held their creator, by its unconquerable authority.

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

To please his father, the boy, when almost eighteen, went through the law course of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France. To please himself he listened, for the sake of their literary charm, to the lectures of Villemain and Cousin and Guizot, and would rehearse them with passion when he got home. But he had no love for the arid literature of the law, and was wont to linger, in his daily walks along the quays and across the bridges to and from his lecture-rooms, over the bookstalls, 55 spending his modest allowance for old books, which he had learned already to select for their worth.

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

The elder Balzac, severely practical, dreamed no dreams, and was horrified by his son's refusal to pursue the profession appointed for him. He foretold speedy starvation, and—perhaps to prepare Honoré for it—allowed him to try his experiment, for two years, on a hundred francs or less a month. So, the family having to leave Paris early in 1820, a garret—literally—was rented for the young author, and poorly furnished by his mother; a painstaking, hard-working, fussy old lady, who looked on him as a little boy all her life long, who drudged for him to his last days, and who felt it to be her duty to discipline him to hardship in these early days! This attic-room was at the top of the old house No. 9 Rue Lesdiguières, which was swept away by the cutting of broad Boulevard Henri IV. in 1866-67, its site being in the very middle of this new street. 56 To wax sentimental—as has a recent writer—over the present No. 9 as Balzac's abode is touching, but hardly worth while, that house having no interest for us beyond that of being of the style and the period of Balzac's house, and serving to show the shabbiness of his surroundings. These did not touch the young author, whose garret's rental was within his reach, as was the Librairie de Monsieur; for he gives it the old Bourbon name, and how it got that name shall be told in our last chapter. It was the Library of the Arsenal, still open to students as in his days there, in the building begun by François I. for the casting of cannon, which he made lighter and easier of carriage, and the casting of which exploded the Arsenal within twenty years, and with it part of the adjacent Marais. The Valois kings rebuilt it, Henri IV. enlarged it, and gave it for a residence to his Grand Master of artillery, Sully, for whom he decorated the salons as we see them to-day. You may climb the grand staircase, and stand in the rooms—their gildings fresh, their paintings bright—occupied by the great minister. In the cabinet that contains his furniture and fittings is an admirable bust of the King. And you seem to see the man himself, as he enters, his debonair swagger covering his secret shamefacedness for fear of a refusal of his stern treasurer to make the little loan for which he has again come to beg, to pay his last night's gambling or other debt of honor!

In this library by day, and in his garret by night, Balzac began that life of terrific toil from which he never ceased until death stopped his unresting hand. 57 The novels he produced during these years were hardly noticed then, are quite unknown now; showing no art, giving no promise. He never owned them, and put them forth under grotesque pen-names, such as "Horace de Saint-Aubin," "Lord R'hoone"—an anagram of Honoré—and others equally absurd, all telling of his fondness for titles.

This garret, in which he lived for fifteen months, is vividly pictured in "La Peau de Chagrin," written in 1830, as Raphael's room in his early days, before he became rich and wretched. Balzac's letters to his sister Laure (Madame Laure de Surville) detail, with delightful gayety, his exposure to wind and wet within these weather-worn walls; and his ingenious shifts in daily small expenditure of sous to make his income serve. He relates how he shopped, how he brought home in his pockets his scant provender, how he fetched up from the court-pump his large allowance of water. For he used it lavishly in making his coffee, that stimulation supplying the place of insufficient food, and carrying him through his nights of pen-work. Excessive excitation and excessive toil, begun thus early, went on through all his life, and he dug his too early grave with his implacable pen. His only outings, by day or by night, were the long walks that gave him his amazing acquaintance with every corner of Paris, and his solitary strolls through the great graveyard of Paris, near at hand. "Je vais m'égayer au Père-Lachaise," he writes to his sister; and there he would climb to the upper slopes, from which he saw the vast city stretched 58 out. For he was fond of height and space, and we shall see how he sought for them in his later dwelling-places.

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

Dreaming the dreams of Midas, he loved to plunge his favorite young heroes into floods of sudden soft opulence, and his longings for luxury found expression in those unceasing schemes for instant wealth which made him a kindly mock to his companions. His first practical project was started in 1826, during a temporary sojourn for needed rest and proper food at his father's new home in Villeparisis, eighteen miles from Paris, on the edge of the forest of Bondy. He speedily hurried back to Paris and turned printer and publisher; bringing out, among other reprints, the complete works of Molière and of La Fontaine, each with his own introduction, each in one volume—compact and inconvenient—and, at the end of the year which saw twenty copies of either sold, the entire editions were got rid of, to save storage, at the price by weight of their paper. This and other failures left him in debt, and to pay this debt and to gain quick fortune, he set up a type-foundry in partnership with a foreman of his printing-office. The young firm took the establishment at No. 17 Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, now Rue Visconti; named for the famous archæologist who had lived, and 59 in 1818 had died, in that venerable mansion hard by on the corner of Rue de Seine and Quai Malaquais. We have already found our way to this short and narrow Rue Visconti, to visit Jean Cousin and Baptiste du Cerceau, and, last of all, the rival houses of Racine.

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

"Balzac H. et Barbier A., Imprimeurs, Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, 17;" so appears the firm in the Paris directory for 1827. The senior partner had not yet assumed the particle "de," so proudly worn in later years when, too, he is labelled in the directory "homme-de-lettres," the title of "imprimeur," on which he prided himself because it meant wealth, having lasted only until the end of 1827 or the beginning of 1828. Printing-office and type-foundry were sold at a ruinous sacrifice, and Balzac was left with debts of about 120,000 francs; a burden that nearly broke his back and his heart for many years. He never went through that narrow street without groaning for its memories; and for a long time, he told his sister, he had been tempted to kill himself, as was tempted his hero of "La Peau 60 de Chagrin." In his "Illusions Perdues" he has painted, in relentless detail, the cruel capacity of unpaid, or partially paid, debts for piling up interest. But the helpless despair of David Séchard was, in Balzac himself, redeemed by a buoyant confidence that never deserted him for long. To pay his debts, he toiled as did Walter Scott, whom Balzac admired for this bondage to rectitude, as he admired his genius. All through the "Comédie Humaine" he dwells on the burden of debt, the ceaseless struggle to throw it off, by desperate, by dishonorable, expedients.

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

Here Balzac finished the book begun in his former room over his works, "Les Chouans." It was published in 1829, and was the first to bear his real name as author, the first to show to the reading world of what sterling stuff he was made. That stuff was not content with the book, good as it was, and he retouched and bettered it in after years. It brought him not only readers 61 but editors and publishers; and before the end of 1830, he had poured forth a flood of novels, tales, and studies; among them such works as "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote," "Physiologie du Mariage," "Gobseck," "Étude de Femme," "Une Passion dans le Désert," "Un Épisode sous la Terreur," "Catherine de Médicis," "Lettres sur Paris"—with "Les Chouans," seventy in all!

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

From Rue de Tournon he removed, early in 1831, to Rue Cassini, No. 1, as we find it given in the Paris Bottin of that year. It is a short street of one block, running from Avenue de l'Observatoire to Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, and takes its name appropriately from the Italian astronomer, who was installed in the Observatory, having been made a citizen of France by Colbert, Louis XIV.'s great Finance Minister. It is a secluded quarter still, with its own air of isolation and its own village atmosphere. In 1831 it was really a village, far from town, and these streets were only country lanes, bordered by infrequent cottages, dear to the weary Parisian seeking distance and quiet. Three of them, near together here, harbored famous men at about this period, and all three have remained intact until lately for the delight of the pilgrim—that of Châteaubriand, 62 No. 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, that of Victor Hugo, No. 27 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and this one of Balzac. His house, destroyed only in 1899, was on the southwest corner of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques and Rue Cassini. It was a little cottage of two stories, with two wings and a small central body, giving on a tiny court. A misguided Paris journal has claimed, with copious letterpress and illustrations, the large building at No. 6 Rue Cassini for Balzac's abode. This is a lamentable error, one of the many met with in topographical research, by which the traditions of a demolished house are transplanted to an existing neighbor. This characterless No. 6 carries its own proof that Balzac could never have chosen it, even were we without the decisive proof given by the cadastre of the city, lately unearthed by M. G. Lenôtre among the buried archives of the Bureau des Contributions Directes.

In the sunny apartment of the left wing dwelt Balzac and his friend, Auguste Borget; in the other wing, Jules Sandeau lived alone and lonely in his recent separation from George Sand. Their separation was not so absolute as to prevent an occasional visit from her, and an occasional dinner to her by the three men. She has described one of these wonderful dinners with much humor; telling how Balzac, when she started for her home—then on Quai Malaquais—arrayed himself in a fantastically gorgeous dressing-gown to accompany her; boasting, as they went, of the four Arabian horses he was about to buy; which he never bought, but which 63 he quite convinced himself, if not her, that he already owned! Says Madame Dudevant: "He would, if we had permitted him, have thus escorted us from one end of Paris to the other." He so far realized his vision as to set up a tilbury and horse at this period—about 1832—and exulted in the sensation created by his magnificence as he drove, clad in his famous blue coat with shining buttons, and attended by his tiny groom, "Grain-de-mil."

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

In his work-room, apart and markedly simple and severe, he began that series of volumes, amazing in number and vigor, with which he was resolute to pay his enormous debts. Here, in this little wing, in the years between 1831 and 1838, he produced, among over sixty others of less note, such masterpieces as "La Peau de Chagrin," "Le Chef d'Œuvre Inconnu," "Le Curé de 64 Tours," "Louis Lambert," "Eugénie Grandet," "Le Médecin de Campagne," "Le Père Goriot," "La Duchesse de Langeais," "Illusion Perdues" (first part only), "Le Lys dans la Vallée," "L'Enfant Maudit," "César Birotteau," "Cent Contes Drôlatiques" (in three sections), "Séraphita," "La Femme de Trente Ans," and "Jésus-Christ en Flandres."

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

When once at work, Balzac shut himself in his room, often seeing no one but his faithful servant for many weeks. His work-room was darkened from all daylight, his table lit only by steady-flamed candles, shaded with green. A cloistered monk of fiction, he was clad in his favorite robe of white cashmere, lined with white silk, open at the throat, with a silken cord about the waist, as we see him on the canvas of Louis Boulanger. He would get to his table at two in the morning and leave it at six in the evening; the entire time spent in writing new manuscript, and in his endless correction of proofs, except for an hour at six in the morning, for his bath and coffee, an hour at noon for his frugal breakfast, with frequent coffee between-times. At six in the evening he dined most simply, and was in bed and asleep by eight o'clock. 65

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

This stupendous work had been preceded and was accompanied by as stupendous preparation of details. He dug deep to set the solid foundations for each structure he meant to build. "I have had to read so many books," he says, referring to his preliminary toil on 66 "Louis Lambert." So real were his creations to him—more alive to his vision than visible creatures about—that he must needs name them fittingly, and house them appropriately. Invented nomenclature gave no vitality to them, in his view, and he hunted, on signs and shop-fronts wherever he went, for real names that meant life, and a special life. "A name," as he said, "which explains and pictures and proclaims him; a name that shall be his, that could not possibly belong to any other." He revelled in his discovery of "Matifat," and "Cardot," and like oddities. He dragged Léon Gozlan through miles of streets on such a search, refusing every name they found, until he quivered and colored before "Marcas" on a tailor's sign; it was the name he had dreamed of, and he put "Z" before it, "to add a flame, a plume, a star to the name of names!"

His scenes, too, were set for his personages with appalling care, so that, as has been well said, he sometimes chokes one with brick and mortar. He knew his Paris as Dickens knew his London, and found in unknown streets or unfrequented quarters the scenes he searched long for, the surroundings demanded by his characters. If his story were placed in a provincial town, he would write to a friend living there for a map of the neighborhood, and for accurate details of certain houses. Or, he would make hurried journeys to distant places: "I am off to Grenoble," or, "to Alençon"—he wrote to his sister—"where So-and-so lives:" one of his new personages, already a living acquaintance to him. In his artistic frenzy for fitting atmosphere he 67 has, unconsciously, breathed his spirit of unrest into much of his narrative, and the reader plunges on, out-of-breath, through chapterless pages of fatiguing detail.

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

And he began to see the world of Paris, and to be seen in that world, notably in the famous salon of Emile de Girardin and his young wife, Delphine Gay de Girardin, where the watchword was "Admiration, more admiration, and still more admiration." He met well-bred women and illustrious men, whose familiar intercourse polished him, whose attentions gratified him. The pressure of his present toil removed for a while, he was fond of emerging from his solitude, and of flashing in the light of publicity. He was an interested and an interesting talker, earnest and vehement and often excited in his utterances; yet frank and merry, and vivid with a "Herculean joviality." His thick fine black hair was tossed back like a mane from his noble, towering brow; his nose was square at the end, his lips full and curved, and hidden partly by a small mustache. His most notable features were his eyes, brown, spotted with gold, glowing with life and light—"the eyes of a sovereign, a seer, a subjugator." A great soul shone out of them, and they redeemed and triumphed over all that was heavy in face and vulgar in body; for, with a thickness of torso like Mirabeau, and 68 the neck of a bull, he had his own corpulence. Lamartine says that the personal impression made by Balzac was that of an element in nature; he gripped one's brain when speaking, and one's heart when silent. Moreover, it was an element good as well as strong, unable to be other than good; and his expression, we know from all who saw it, told of courage, patience, gentleness, kindliness.

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

When Balzac removed with Sandeau, in 1838, to new quarters, he kept this apartment in Rue Cassini for an occasional retreat, perhaps for a friendly refuge against the creditors, who became more and more clamorous in their attentions. The two comrades furnished the lower floor of their new home most handsomely; mainly with the view of dazzling urgent publishers, who, as said Balzac, "would give me nothing for my 69 books if they found me in a garret." Coming to drive a bargain, these guileless gentry found themselves too timid to haggle with the owners of such luxury. They could not know that that luxury was merely hired under cover of a friend's name, and lit up only by night to blind and bewilder them, while the haughty authors lived by day in bare discomfort, on a half-furnished upper floor.

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

The glorious view from this spot—embracing the 70 valley of Ville d'Avray, the slopes opposite, the great city in the distance—was a delight to Balzac. Les Jardies was a tiny box, having but three rooms in its two stories, which communicated by a ladder-like staircase outside. He had tried to improve the place by a partial rebuilding, and the stairs were forgotten until it was too late to put them inside. A later tenant has enclosed that absurd outer staircase within a small addition. His garden walls gave him even more trouble, for they crumbled and slid down on the grounds of an irate neighbor. The greater part of that garden has been walled off. Yet the poor little patch was a domain in his eyes; its one tree and scattered shrubs grew to a 71 forest in his imagination, and his fancy pictured, in that confined area, a grand plantation of pineapples, from which he was to receive a yearly income of 400,000 francs! He had fixed on the very shop on the boulevards where they were to be sold, and only Gautier's cold sense prevented the great planter, as he saw himself, from renting it before he had grown one pineapple!

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

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

In 1843, forced to sell Les Jardies, he came back into the suburbs, to a house then No. 19 Rue Basse, at Passy, now No. 47 Rue Raynouard of that suburb. On the opposite side of the street, at No. 40, is a modest house, hiding behind its garden-wall. This was the unpretending home of "Béranger, poète à Passy," to quote 72 the Paris Bottin. No. 47 is a plain bourgeois dwelling of two stories and attic, wide and low, standing on the line of the street; in the rear is a court, and behind that court is the pavilion occupied by Balzac. He had entrance from the front, and unseen egress by a small gate on the narrow lane sunk between walls, now named Rue Berton, and so by the quay into town. This was a need for his furtive goings and comings, at times.

Balzac's work-room here looked out over a superb panorama—across the winding Seine, over the Champ-de-Mars, and the Invalides' dome, and all southern Paris, to the hills of Meudon in the distance. This room he kept austerely furnished, as was his way; while the living apartments were crowded with the extraordinary collection of rare furniture, pictures, and costly trifles, which he had begun again to bring together. To it he gave all the money he could find or get credit for, and as much thought and labor and time as to his books, although with little of the knowledge that might have saved him from frequent swindlers. It was only his intimates who were allowed to enter these rooms, and they needed, in order to enter them, or the court or the house on the street, many contrivances and passwords, constantly changed. He himself posed as "la Veuve Durand," or as "Madame de Bruguat," and each visitor had to ask for one of these fictitious persons; stating, with cheerful irrelevancy: "The season of plums has arrived," or, "I bring laces from Belgium." Once in, they found free-hearted greeting and full-handed hospitality, and occasional little dinners. The good 73 cheer was more toothsome to the favored convives, than were the cheap acrid wines, labelled with grand names, made drinkable only by the host's fantastic fables of their vintages and their voyages; believed by him, at least, who dwelt always in his own domain of dreams.

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

In all his letters, the saddest reading of all letters, there is this curious commingling of the comic and the 74 sordid. Those, especially, written to his devoted sister and to the devoted lady who became his wife at the last, give us most intimate acquaintance with the man; showing a man, indeed, strong and vehement, steadfast and patient; above all, magnanimous. Self-assertive in his art, eager and insistent concerning it, he was quite without personal envy or self-seeking. Said Madame Dudevant: "I saw him often under the shock of great injustices, literary and personal, and I never heard him say an evil word of anyone." Nor was there any evil in his life—a life of sobriety and of chastity, as well as of toil. At the bottom of his complex nature lay a deep natural affection. This giant of letters, when nearly fifty years old, signed his letters to his mother, "Ton fils soumis"; so expressing truly his feeling for her, from the day she had installed him in his mean garret, to that later day, when she fitted up his grand last mansion. In his letters to those dear to him, amid clamorous outcries about debts and discomforts, comes a deeper cry for sympathy and affection. Early in life, he wrote to his sister: "My two only and immense desires—to be famous and to be loved—will they ever be satisfied?" To a friend he wrote: "All happiness depends on courage and work." So, out of his own mouth, we may judge this man in all fairness.

From this Passy home one night, Balzac and Théophile Gautier went to the apartment of Roger de Beauvoir, in the Hôtel de Lauzun-Pimodan, on the Island of Saint-Louis; and thence the three friends took a short flight into a hashish heaven. Their strange experiences 75 have been told by their pens, but to us, Balzac's night of drugged dreams is not so strange as his days of unforced dreams. That which attracts us in this incident is its scene—one of the grandest of the mansions that sprang up from the thickets of Île Saint-Louis, as le Menteur has put it. Built in the middle years of the seventeenth century, it stands quite unchanged at No. 17 Quai d'Anjou, bearing, simply and effectively, every mark of Mansart's hand in his later years. Its first owner followed his friend Fouquet to the Bastille and to Pignerol; its next tenant came to it from a prison-cell, and went from it to the very steps of the throne. He was the superb adventurer, Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Duc de Lauzun, and his family name clings still to the place, and is cut in gold letters on the black marble tablet above the door. On that prettiest balcony in Paris, crowded the prettiest women of Paris, on summer nights, to look at the river fêtes got up by their showy and braggart Gascon host. Through this portal have passed Bossuet and Père Lachaise, going in to convert the plain old Huguenot mother of de Lauzun, who lived retired in her own isolated chamber through the years of her son's ups and downs. When her family had gone, came the Marquis de Richelieu, great-nephew of the great Richelieu, with the bride he had stolen from her convent at Chaillot—the daughter of Hortense Mancini, niece of Mazarin, and of her husband, it is alleged. Then came the Pimodan, who was first of that name, and who gave it to his hôtel. It is an admirable relic; its 76 rooms, with their frescoed ceilings and their panelled walls, are as remarkable as those of the château of Fontainebleau, and are not surpassed by any in Paris. The mansion is well worth a visit for itself and for its memories.

Balzac's Paris—the Paris for which his pen did what Callot and Meryon did for it with their needles—has been almost entirely pickaxed out of sight and remembrance. The Revolution, wild-eyed in its mad "Carmagnole," gave itself time to raze a few houses only, after clearing the ground of the Bastille, although it had meant much more destruction; the Empire cut some new streets, and planned some new quarters; the Bourbons came back and went away again, leaving things much as they had found them. It remained for Louis-Philippe to begin "works of public utility," an academic phrase, which being interpreted signified the tearing down of the old and the building up of the new, to gratify the grocers and tallow-chandlers whose chosen King he was, and to fill his own pocket. Yet much of Balzac's stage-setting remained until it was swept away by Haussmann and his master of the Second Empire. Such was the wretched Rue du Doyenné, that "narrow ravine" between the Louvre and Place du Carrousel, where Baron Hulot first saw la Marneffe, and where la Cousine Bette kept guard over her Polish artist in his squalid garret; doubtless the very garret known to Balzac in his visits there, when it was tenanted by Arsène Houssaye, Gautier, Gavarni, and the rest of "Young France, harmless in its furies." That 77 house, one of a block of black old eighteenth-century structures, stood where now is the trim little garden behind the preposterous statue of Gambetta.

History and fiction meet on the steps of Saint-Roch. There César Birotteau, the ambitious and unlucky perfumer, was "wounded by Napoleon," on the 13 Vendémiaire, the day that put the young Corsican's foot into the stirrup, and gave to the sham-heroic César that sounding phrase, always thereafter doing duty on his tongue. He was carried to his shop in Rue Saint-Honoré, on its northern side near Rue de Castiglione, and hid and bandaged and nursed in his entresol. This part of Rue Saint-Honoré and its length eastward, with its narrow pavement and its tall, thin houses, is still a part of the picture Balzac knew and painted; but the business district hereabout has greatly changed since his day. The Avenue de l'Opéra, and all that mercantile quarter dear to the American pocket, the Bourse and the banking-houses about, date from this side of his Paris. Nucingen would be lost in his old haunts, and Lucien de Rubempré could not recognize the newspaper world of our day.

The hôtels of the Faubourg Saint-Germain—the splendid mansions of the splendid eighteenth century, where his Rastignac and his lesser pet swells lorded it—are now, in many cases, let out in apartments, their owners content with the one floor that is in keeping with their diminished fortunes. Undiminished, however, are their traditions and their prejudices, albeit "Le Faubourg" exists no longer, except as an attitude 78 of mind. Yet, here on the left bank, are still to be found some of the scenes of the "Comédie Humaine." On Quai Voltaire, alongside the house in which Voltaire died, is the very same shop of the antiquary, from whom Raphael de Valentin bought the peau de chagrin. Balzac knew it well, doubtless was swindled there, and to-day you will find it as crowded with curiosities, as begrimed with dust, as suggestive of marvels hid in its dusky corners, as when he haunted it.

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

"One of the most portentous settings of the scene in all the literature of fiction. In this case there is nothing superfluous; there is a profound correspondence between the background and the action." Such is the judgment of so competent a critic as Mr. Henry James, concerning the house in which is played the poignant tragedy of "Père Goriot." You will, if you love Balzac, own to the truth of this statement, when you look upon this striking bit of salvage. It stands, 79 absolutely unchanged as to externals, at No. 24 Rue Tournefort; a street named in honor of the great botanist who cleared the track for Linnæus. In Balzac's day, this street was known by its original name of Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève; one of the most ancient and most isolated streets on the southern bank. Once only, through the centuries, has its immemorial quiet been broken by unseemly noise, when, in the days of François I., a rowdy gambling-den there, the "Tripôt des 11,000 Diables," did its utmost to justify its name. The street seems to creep, in subdued self-effacement, over the brow of Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, away from the Paris of shops and cabs and electric light. The house stands narrow on the street, its gable window giving scanty light to poor old Goriot's wretched garret; framed in it, one may fancy the patient face of the old man, looking out in mute bewilderment on his selfish, worldly daughters. The place no longer holds the "pension bourgeoise de deux sexes et autres" of the naïve description on the cards of Madame Vauquer, née Conflans; and is now let out to families and single tenants. Its gate-way stands always open, and you may enter without let or hindrance into the court, and so through to the tiny garden behind, once the pride of Madame Vauquer, no longer so carefully kept up. You peep into the small, shabby salle-à-manger, on the entrance floor of the house, and you seem to see the convict Vautrin, manacled, in the clutch of the gens-d'armes, and, cowering before him, the vicious old maid who has betrayed him. That colossal conception 80 of the great romancer had found his ideal hiding-place here, as had the forlorn father his hiding-place, in his self-inflicted poverty. All told, there is no more convincing pile of brick and mortar in fiction; sought out and selected by Balzac with as much care and as many journeys as Dickens gave to his hunt for exactly the right house for Sampson and Sally Brass.

While Balzac was still at Passy, after long searching 81 for a new home, he made purchase, as early as 1846, in the new quarter near the present Parc Monceaux. That name came from an estate hereabout, once owned by Philippe Égalité; and his son, the King of the French, and the shrewdest speculator among the French, was just at this time exploiting this estate, in company with lesser speculators. The whole suburb was known as the Quartier Beaujon, from a great banker of the eighteenth century, whose grand mansion, within its own grounds, had been partly demolished by the cutting of new streets, leaving only out-buildings and a pavilion in a small garden. This was the place bought by Balzac; the house and grounds, dear as they were, costing much less, as he found, than his furniture, bronzes, porcelains, and pottery, paintings and their frames—all minutely described in the collection of le cousin Pons. He made a museum, indeed, of this house, bringing out all his hidden treasures from their various concealments here and there about town. There was still a pretence of poverty regarding his new home; he would say to his friends, amazed by the display: "Nothing of all this is mine. I have furnished this house for a friend, whom I expect. I am only the guardian and doorkeeper of this hôtel."

The pretty mystery was resolved within a few months, and its solution explained Balzac's frequent and long absences from Paris after the winter of 1842-43. These months had been passed at the home of Madame Ève de Hanska, the Polish widow who was to be his wife. Her home was in the grand château of Wierzchownie, 82 in the Ukraine, whose present owner keeps unchanged the furniture of Balzac's apartment, where is hung his portrait by Boulanger, a gift to Madame de Hanska from her lover. And from there he brought his bride to Paris in the summer of 1850, their marriage dating from March of that year, after many years of waiting in patient affection. She had made over—with Balzac's cordial consent—nearly the whole of her great fortune to her daughter, her only child, and to that daughter's husband, retaining but a small income for herself. It was—and the envious world owned that it was—truly a love-match. They came home to be welcomed, first of all, by Balzac's aged mother; who had, during his absence, taken charge of all the preparations, with the same anxious, loving care she had given to the fitting-up of his garret thirty years before. She had carried out, in every detail, even to the arrangement of the flowers in the various rooms, the countless directions he had sent from every stage of the tedious journey from Wierzchownie.

"And so, the house being finished, death enters," goes the Turkish proverb. This undaunted mariner, after his stormy voyage, gets into port and is ship-wrecked there. His premonition of early years, written to his confidant Dablin in 1830, was proven true: "I foresee the darkest of destinies for myself; that will be to die when all that I now wish for shall be about to come to me." As early as in the preceding summer of 1849, he had ceased to conceal from himself any longer the malady that others had seen coming since 1843. 83 The long years of unbroken toil, of combat without pause, of stinted sleep, of insufficient food, of inadequate exercise, of the steady stimulation of coffee, had broken the body of this athlete doubled with the monk. Years before, he had found that the inspiration for work given by coffee had lessened in length and strength. "It now excites my brain for only fifteen days consecutively," he had complained; protesting that Rossini was able to work for the same period on the same stimulus! So he spurred himself on, listening to none of the warnings of worn nature nor of watchful friends. "Well, we won't talk about that now," was always his answer. "In the olden days," says Sainte-Beuve, "men wrote with their brains; but Balzac wrote, not only with his brains, but with his blood." And now, he went to pieces all at once; his heart and stomach could no longer do their work; his nerves, once of steel and Manila hemp, were torn and jangled, and snapped at every strain; his very eyesight failed him. The most pitiful words ever penned by a man-of-letters were scrawled by him, at the end of a note written by his wife to Gautier, a few weeks after their home-coming: "Je ne puis ni lire ni écrire."

"On the 18th August, 1850"—writes Hugo in "Choses Vues"—"my wife, who had been during the day to call on Madame Balzac, told me that Balzac was dying. My uncle, General Louis Hugo, was dining with us, but as soon as we rose from table, I left him and took a cab to Rue Fortunée, Quartier Beaujon, where M. de Balzac lived. He had bought what remained of the 84 hôtel of M. de Beaujon, a few buildings of which had escaped the general demolition, and out of them he had made a charming little house, elegantly furnished, with a porte-cochère on the street, and in place of a garden, a long, narrow, paved court-yard, with flower-beds about it here and there."

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

"I rang," continues Hugo; "the moon was veiled by clouds; the street deserted. No one came. I rang 85 again. The gate opened; a woman came forward, weeping. I gave my name, and was told to enter the salon, which was on the ground floor. On a pedestal opposite the fireplace was the colossal bust by David. A wax-candle was burning on a handsome oval table in the middle of the room.... We passed along a corridor, and up a staircase carpeted in red, and crowded with works of art of all kinds—vases, pictures, statues, paintings, brackets bearing porcelains.... I heard a loud and difficult breathing. I was in M. de Balzac's bedroom.

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

The bust that Hugo saw was done by David d'Angers; a reduced copy surmounts Balzac's tomb. His portrait, in water-color, painted, within an hour after his death, by Eugène Giraud, is a touching portrayal of the man, truer than any made during life, his widow thought. While long suffering had wasted, it had refined, his face, and into it had come youth, strength, majesty. It is the head of the Titan, who carried a pitiable burden through a life of brave labor. 86

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

"He died in the night," continues Hugo. "He was first taken to the Chapel Beaujon.... The funeral service took place at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. As I stood by the coffin, I remembered that there my second daughter had been baptized. I had not been in the church since.... The procession crossed Paris, and went by way of the boulevards to Père-Lachaise. Rain was falling as we left the church, and when we reached the cemetery. It was one of those days when the heavens seemed to weep. We walked the whole distance. I was at the head of the coffin on the right, holding one of the silver tassels of the pall. Alexandre Dumas was on the other side.... When we reached the grave, which was on the brow of the hill, the crowd was immense.... 87 The coffin was lowered into the grave, which is near to those of Charles Nodier and Casimir Delavigne. The priest said a last prayer and I a few words. While I was speaking the sun went down. All Paris lay before me, afar off, in the splendid mists of the sinking orb, the glow of which seemed to fall into the grave at my feet, as the dull sounds of the sods dropping on the coffin broke in upon my last words."

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

THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS

91

THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS

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

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

Besides this letter, young Dumas carried only a meagre outfit of luggage, and such meagre education 92 as may be picked up by a clever and yet an idle lad, in a notary's office in a provincial town. Indeed, when he was made welcome by General Foy, he was questioned, too; and, to his chagrin, he was found to be without equipment for any sort of service. On the strength, however, of his "belle écriture," he obtained, through the influence of the general, a petty clerkship in the household of the Duc d'Orléans, coming naturally enough to the boy from Villers-Cotterets, the country-seat of the Orleans family. Its stipend of 1,200 francs a year was doubtless munificent in the eyes of Orleans thrift, and was certainly sufficient for the needs then of the future owner of Monte-Cristo's millions. He earned his wage and no more; for his official pen—at his desk in the Palais-Royal—while doing its strict duty on official documents, was more gladly busied on his own studies and his own paper-spoiling. For the author within him had come to life with his first tramping of the Paris streets and his first taking-in of all that they meant then.

The babies, begotten by French fathers and mothers during the Napoleonic wars, and during those tremendous years at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, breathed, full-lunged, an air of instant and intense vitality. Now, come to stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, eager to speed the coming of red-blooded Romanticism and the going of cold and correct Classicism, showed itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in literature and the arts, after the sterility of so many years. 93

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

"They all come from Châteaubriand," said Goethe, of these and of other rhymesters of that time. Châteaubriand himself had closed his career as poet and as imaginative writer as far back as 1809, and had by now taken his rank as a classic in literature, and 94 in life as a Peer of France and a Minister of the Bourbons.

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

In prose, during these years, Nodier, Librarian at the Arsenal, was plying his refined and facile pen. Mérimée showed his hand in 1825, not to clasp, with any show of sympathy, the hand of any fellow-worker, yet willing to take his share of the strain. Guizot, out of active politics for a time, did his most notable pen-work between 1825 and 1830. His untiring antagonist, Thiers, not yet turned into the practical politician, produced, between 1823 and 1827, his "History of the French Revolution," voluminous and untrustworthy; 95 its author energetically earning Carlyle's epithet, "a brisk little man in his way." His life-long crony, Mignet, was digging vigorously in dry, historic dust. Sainte-Beuve left, in 1827, his medical studies for those critical studies in which he soon showed the master's hand; notably with his early paper on Hugo's "Odes et Ballades." Michelet was finding his métier by writing histories for children. The two Thierry brothers, Augustin and Amédée, proved the genuine historian's stuff in them as early as 1825. Balzac was working, alone and unknown, in his garret; and young Sue was handling the naval surgeon's knife, before learning how to handle the pen.

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

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

Less aggressive was the theatre. Scribe had possession, flooding the stage with his comedies, vaudeville, opera-librettos, peopling its boards with his pasteboard personages. There was call for revolt and need of life. Talma, near his end, full of honors, devoted 96 to his very death to his art, longed to fill the rôle of a man on the boards, after so many years' impersonation of bloodless heroes. So he told Dumas, who had come to see him only two weeks before his death, in 1826, when the veteran thought he was recovering from illness—an illness acceptable to the great tragedian, for it gave him, he pointed out with pride, the lean frame and pendent cheeks, "beautiful for old Tiberius"—the new part he was then studying. Death came with his cue before that rôle could be played.

This wish for a real human being on the boards came home to Dumas, when he saw the true Shakespeare rendered by Macready and Miss Smithson at the Salle Favart in 1826. It was Shakespeare, in the reading before and now in the acting, that helped Dumas more than any other influence. No Frenchman has comprehended more completely than Dumas the Englishman's universality, and he used to say that, after God, Shakespeare was the great creator. His first attempt to put live men and women on the stage, in "Christine," was crowded out by a poorer play of the same name, pushed by the powers behind the Comédie Française. But on its boards, on the evening of February 16, 1829, was produced his "Henri III. et sa Cour," an instantaneous and unassailable success. He might have said, in the words of Henri IV. at Senlis, "My hour has struck"; for from that hour he went on in his triumphant dramatic career. The Romantic drama had come at last, with its superb daring, its sounding but spurious sentiment, its engorgement of adjectives, 97 and its plentiful lack of all sense of the ludicrous. Perhaps if it had not taken itself so seriously, and had been blessed with a few grains of the saving salt of humor, it had not gone stale so soon.

Dumas had removed, soon after coming to town, from the inn in Rue du Bouloi to another of the same sort just around the corner, Hôtel des Vieux-Augustins, in the street of the same name—now widened and renamed Rue Hérold. In the widening they have cut away his inn, at present No. 12, and that of "La Providence," next door at No. 14, where Charlotte Corday had found a room on coming to Paris, thirty years before, to visit Monsieur Marat. The sites of the two hotels are covered by the rear buildings of the Caisse d'Epargne, which fronts on Rue du Louvre. One ancient house, which saw the arrival of both these historic travellers, has been left at No. 10; in it was born, on January 28, 1791, the musician Hérold, composer of "Zampa" and "Pré-aux-Clercs." Dumas lived for a while later at No. 1 Place des Italiens, now Place Boïeldieu. In the summer of 1824 he brought his good mother to town, and took rooms on the second floor of No. 53 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, next door to the old cabaret, "Au Lion d'Argent." Mother and son soon after moved across the river, where he found for her a home in Rue Madame, and found for himself an apartment at No. 25 Rue de l'Université, on the southeastern corner of Rue du Bac. There had been an illustrious tenant of this house, in 1816 and 1817, who was named Châteaubriand. Dumas, 98 in his "Mémoires," gives both the third and the fourth floors for his abode, as he happens to feel like fixing them. He had windows on both streets, and he fitted up the rooms "with a certain elegance." Shoppers at the big establishment, "Au petit Saint-Thomas," may explore its annex and mount to Dumas's rooms in the house that now hides its stately façade and its entrance perron in the court behind modern structures. Here he remained from 1824 to 1833, making a longer stay than in any of the many camping-places of his migratory career. And here he gave his name to his most memorable endowment to the French drama, in the person of his only son, born on July 29, 1824, at the home of the mother, Marie-Catherine Lebay, a dressmaker, living at No. 1 Place des Italiens, where Dumas had had his rooms. On March 17, 1831, the father formally owned the son by l'acte de reconnaissance, signed and recorded at the office of the mayor of the Second Arrondissement, May 6, 1831. So came into legal existence "Alexandre Dumas, fils."

Portions of the child's early life were passed with his father, but separations became more frequent and more prolonged, as the boy developed his own marked character—in striking contrast with that of the elder. Their mutual attitude came, before many years, to be as queer and as tragi-comic as any attitudes invented by either of them for the stage. The son used to say, in later life, that he seemed to be the elderly guardian and counsellor of the father—a happy-go-lucky, improvident, 99 chance child. For the son of the Parisienne had inherited her hard shrewdness along with his father's dramatic range, and this happy commingling of the stronger qualities of the parents gave him his special powers.

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

So his pen was his only ally, and it soon proved itself to be no broken reed, but a strong staff for support. Strong as it was and unresting, no one pen could do even the manual labor required by the endless volumes he poured forth. In 1844, having finished "Monte-Cristo," he followed it by "The Three Musketeers," and then he put out no less than forty volumes in that same year; each volume bearing his name as sole author. But this sturdy and undaunted toiler was no laborious recluse, like Balzac, and he was surrounded by clerks for research, secretaries for writing, young and unknown authors for collaborating; reserving, for his own hand, those final telling touches that give warmth and color to the canvas signed by him. His "victims," as they are described 100 in the "Fabrique de Romans, Maison Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie," a malicious exposure, are hardly subjects for sympathy; they earned money not otherwise within their power to earn, and not one of them produced, before or after, any work of individual distinction. In his historical romances, their work is evident in the study and research that give an accuracy not commonly credited to Dumas and about which he never bothered. The belle insouciance of his touch is to be seen in the dash of the narrative, and above all in the dialogues, not only in their dramatic force and fire, but in their growing long-windedness. For he was paid by the line at a royal rate, and he learned the trick of making his lines too short and his dialogues too long, his paymasters complained. And, as he went on, it must be owned that he used his name in unworthy ways, not only for books of no value and for journalistic paltriness, but for shameless signature to shopkeepers' puffs, composed for coin.

As the volumes poured out, money poured in, and poured out again as freely. For he was a spendthrift of the old régime, spending not only for his own caprices, but for his friends and flatterers and hangers-on. He made many foolish ventures, too, such as building his own theatre and running it; and he squandered fabulous sums in his desire to make real, at Saint-Gratien, his dream of a palace fit for Monte-Cristo himself. The very dogs abused his big-hearted hospitality, quartering themselves on him there, until his favorite servant, under pretence of fear of the unlucky 101 number thirteen, to which they had come, begged to be allowed to send some of them away. He gave up his attempt toward reformatory thrift when Dumas ordered him to find a fourteenth dog! He would have drained dry a king's treasury, and have bankrupted Monte-Cristo's island of buried millions. Yet with all his ostentatious swagger and his preposterous tomfoolery, he had a childlike rapture in spending, and a manly joy in giving, that disarm stingy censure. The lover of the romancer must mourn for the man, growing poorer as he grew older, and must regret the degrading shifts at which he snatched for money, by which he sank to be a mountebank in his declining years. Toward the last his purse held fewer sous than it held when he came to Paris to hunt for them.

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

Twenty-five years after the death of the father, when the son, as he says, was older and grayer than his father had ever grown to be, a letter to him was 102 written by that son. It is an exquisite piece of literature. He brings back their life in this apartment, when, twenty-two years apart in their birth, they were really of the same age. He tells how he, a young man going early to his studies, left the elder at his desk, already at work at seven in the morning, clad only in trousers and shirt, the latter with open neck and rolled-up sleeves. At seven in the evening his son would find him planted there still at work, his mid-day breakfast often cold at his side, forgotten and untouched! Then these two would dine, and dine well, for the father loved to play the cook, and he was a master of that craft. All the while he was preparing the plats he would prattle of his heroes, what they'd done that day, and what he imagined they might do on the next day. And then the letter calls back to the father that evening, a little later, when he was found by his son sunk in an armchair, red-eyed and wretched, and mournfully explained: "Porthos is dead! I've just killed him, and I couldn't help crying over him!" It must have been at this period that the romancer tried to secure his son as his permanent paid critic, offering him 25,000 francs a year, and "you'll have nothing to do but to make objections." The offer was declined, and rightly declined.

It was in this and in his succeeding residences—Rue de Richelieu, 109, in 1844, and Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, 45, in 1845—that he brought out in newspaper feuilletons "The Count of Monte-Cristo," and "The Three Musketeers," these amazing successes 103 written from day to day to keep pace with the press. In 1846, while his address was at No. 10 Rue Joubert, he was in Spain with the Duc de Montpensier, one of his many companions among princes. They, along with other cronies, male and female, more or less worthy, found Dumas at Saint-Germain from 1847 to 1854. Then, suddenly, he disappeared into Belgium, "for reasons not wholly unconnected with financial reverses," as he and his only peer in fiction, Micawber, would have put it. He was in town again in 1856, at No. 77 Rue d'Amsterdam, and there remained until 1866, when he rushed off to the head-quarters of the "Dictator of Sicily," Garibaldi, to whom Dumas appointed himself aide and messenger. Between 1866 and 1870 his residence was at 107 Boulevard Malesherbes. On the coming of the Prussians, he was carried, ailing and feeble, to his country-place at Puys, near Dieppe, where he died December 5, 1870. His public burial was delayed until the close of the war, and then, in 1872, was solemnized in the presence of all that was notable in French art and literature, at his birthplace and his boyhood-home, Villers-Cotterets.

When Dumas was asked how a monument might be erected in memory of a dead pen-worker, who in life had been misunderstood and maligned, he replied: "Use the stones thrown at him while he lived, and you'll have a tremendous monument." The lovers in all lands of the great romancer could well have brought together more telling stones than those that make Doré's monument in Place Malesherbes, near his last 104 Paris home. And yet, curiously weak in its general impression, its details are effective. The group in front is well imagined: a girl is reading to a young student, and to an old, barefooted workman; on the other side is our hero d'Artagnan. The seated statue of Dumas, on too tall a pedestal, is an admirable portrait, with his own vigorous poise of head and gallant regard.

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

Dumas lives and will never die as long as men love strength and daring, loyalty and generosity, good love-making and good fighting. He has put his own tenderness and frankness and vivacity into the real personages, whom he has reanimated and refined; and 105 into the ideal personages, whom he has made as real as the actual historic men and women who throng his thrilling pages. His own virility and lust of life are there, too, without one prurient page in all his thousands. And he tells his delightful stories not only with charm and wit, but in clean-cut, straightforward words, with no making of phrases.

Very little of the Valois Paris is left to-day, and the searcher for the scenery familiar to Margot and to Chicot must be content with what is left of the Old Louvre, and of the then new Renaissance Louvre as it was known to the grandchildren of its builder, François I. Of the old, the outer walls and the great central tower are outlined by light stones in the darker pavement of the southwest corner of the present court. Of the new structure, as we see it, the cold and cheerless Salle des Caryatides lights up unwillingly to us with the brilliancy of the marriage festival of Marguerite de France and Henri de Navarre, as it is pictured by Dumas. This festivity followed the religious ceremony, that had taken place under the grand portal of Notre-Dame, for Henry's heresy forbade his marriage within. He and his suite strolled about the cloisters while she went in to mass. In this hall of the Caryatides his body, in customary effigy, lay in state after the assassination. There is no change in these walls since that day, except that a vaulted ceiling took the place, in 1806, of the original oaken beams, which had served for rare hangings, not of tapestries, but of men. The long corridors and square rooms above, 106 peopled peaceably by pictures now, echoed to the rushing of frightened feet on the night of Saint Bartholomew, when Margot saved the life of her husband that was and of her lover that was to be. Hidden within the massive walls of Philippe-Auguste's building is a spiral stairway of his time, connecting the Salle des Sept Cheminées with the floor below, and beneath that with the cumbrous underground portions of his Old Louvre. As one gropes down the worn steps, around the sharp turns deep below the surface, visions appear of Valois conspiracy and of the intrigues of the Florentine Queen-Mother.

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

After the accidental killing of Henry at the hand of Montmorency in the lists of this palace, his widow urged its immediate destruction, and this was accomplished within a few years. One portion of the site became a favorite duelling-ground, and it was here—exactly in the southeastern corner of Place des Vosges, where now nursemaids play with their charges and romping schoolboys raise the dust—that was fought, on Sunday, April 27, 1578, the duel, as famous in history as in the pages of Dumas, between the three followers of the Duc de Guise and the three mignons 107 of Henri III. Those of the six who were not left dead on the ground were borne away desperately wounded. The instigator of the duel, Quélus—"un des grands mignons du roy"—lay for over a month, slowly dying of his nineteen wounds, in the Hôtel de Boissy, hard by in Rue Saint-Antoine, which the King had had closed to traffic with chains. By his bedside Henri spent many hours every day, offering, with sobs, 100,000 francs to the surgeon who should save him.

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

In the same street, on the corner of Rue Sainte-Catherine, now Sévigné—where stand new stone and brick structures—was the town house of the Comte de Monsoreau. To this house, says Brantôme, Bussy d'Amboise, done with Margot, was lured by a note written by the countess, under her husband's orders and eyes, giving her lover, Bussy, his usual rendezvous during the count's absence. This time the count was at home, with a gang of his armed men; and on this corner, on the night of August 19, 1579, the gallant was duly and thoroughly done to death, not quite so dramatically as Dumas narrates it in one of his magnificent fights. 108

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

Gorenflot's priory—a vast Jacobin priory—was on the same road, just beyond the Bastille. To visit him out here came Chicot, almost as vivid a creation in our affections as d'Artagnan. Once, when the fat and esurient monk was fasting, Chicot tormented him with a description of their dinner awhile ago, near Porte Montmartre, when they had teal from the marshes of 109 the Grange Batelière—where runs now the street of that name—washed down with the best of Burgundy, la Romanée. These two dined most frequently and most amply, at "La Corne d'Abondance"—a cabaret on the east side of Rue Saint-Jacques, opposite the cloisters and the gardens of Saint-Benoît, where the boy François Villon had lived more than a century before. Either of the two shabby, aged hotels, still left at one corner of the old street may serve for Chicot's pet eating-place. His dwelling was in Rue des Augustins, now Rue des Grands-Augustins. Where that street meets the quay of the same name, is a restaurant dear to legal and medical and lay gourmets, where those two noble diners would be enchanted to dine to-day. Near Chicot's later dwelling in Rue de Bussy—now spelt "Buci"—was the inn, "The Sword of the Brave Chevalier," which served as the meeting-place of the Forty-five Guardsmen, on their arrival in Paris. You may find, in that same street, the lineal descendant of that inn, dirty and disreputable and modernized as to name, but still haunted for us by those forty-five gallant Gascon gentlemen.

The striking change of atmosphere, from the Valois court to the regency of Marie de' Medici and the reign of the two great cardinals, is shown clearly in the pages of Dumas, with his perhaps unconscious subtlety of intuition. We greet with delight the entrance into Paris of a certain raw Gascon youth mounted on his ludicrously colored steed, and we are eager to follow him to the hôtel of the Duc de Tréville in Rue du Vieux-Colombier. 110 This street stretches now, as then, between Place de Saint-Sulpice and Place de la Croix-Rouge, but it has been widened and wholly rebuilt, and the courtyard that bustled with armed men, and every stone of de Tréville's head-quarters, have vanished.

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

It was the new Hôtel La Trémouille, on the south side of the river, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, that was nearly wrecked by de Tréville's guardsmen, 111 running to the rescue of d'Artagnan on that morning of his duel with Bernajoux, and of his danger from the onslaught of de La Trémouille's retainers.

That duel ought to be good enough for us, but we have a hankering for the most dramatic and delightful of all duels in fiction. To get to its ground, we may follow either of the four friends, each coming his own way, each through streets changed but slightly even yet, all four coming out together at the corner of Rues de Vaugirard and Cassette; where stands an ancient wall, its moss-covered coping overshadowed by straggling trees, through whose branches shows the roof of a chapel. It is the chapel, and about it are the grounds, of the Carmes Déchaussés. A pair of these gentry, sent by Pope Paul V., had appeared in Paris in the year of the assassination of Henri IV., and drew the devout to the little chapel they built here in the fields. The order grew rapidly in numbers and in wealth, acquiring a vast extent of ground; roughly outlined now by Rues de Vaugirard, du Regard, du Cherche-Midi and Cassette. The corner-stone of the new chapel, that which we see, was laid by the Regent Marie de' Medici on July 26, 1613. Beyond its entrance, along the street, rise modern buildings; but behind the entrance in the western end of the wall, near Rue d'Assas, stands one of the original structures of the Barefooted Carmelites. This was used for a prison during the Revolution, and no spot in all Paris shows so graphic a scene of the September Massacres. Nothing of the prison has been taken away or altered. Here are the iron bars put then 112 in the windows of the ground floor on the garden side. At the top of that stone staircase the butchers crowded about that door; out through it came their victims, to be hurled down these same steps, clinging to this same railing; along these garden walks some of them ran, and were beaten down at the foot of yonder dark wall. This garden has not been changed since then, except that a large portion was shorn away by the cutting of Rues d'Assas and de Rennes and the Boulevard Raspail.

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

Not only the duelling ground, but many of the scenes of "The Three Musketeers" are to be looked for in this quarter, near to de Tréville's dwelling; where, 113 too, the four friends, inseparable by day, were not far apart at night, for they lived "just around the corner," one from the other.

Athos had his rooms, "within two steps of the Luxembourg," in Rue Ferou, still having that name, still 114 much as he saw it. Those few, whom the taciturn Grimaud allowed to enter, found tasteful furnishing, with a few relics of past splendor; notably, a daintily damascened sword of the time of François I., its jewelled hilt alone worth a fortune. The vainglorious Porthos would have given ten years of his life for that sword, but it was never sold nor pledged by Athos.

Porthos, himself, lived in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, he used to say; and he gave grandiloquent descriptions of the superb furniture and rich decorations of his apartment. Whenever he passed with a friend through this street, he would raise his head and point out the house—before which his valet, Mousqueton, was always seen strutting in full fig—and proudly announce, "That is my abode." But he never invited that friend to enter, and he was never to be found at home. So that one is led to suspect that his grand apartment is akin to his gorgeous corselet, having only a showy front and nothing behind! We know that his "fine lady," his "duchess," his "princess"—she was promoted with his swelling mood—was simply a Madame Coquenard, wife of a mean lawyer, living in Rue aux Ours. That dingy street, named from a corruption of the ancient "Rue où l'on cuit des oies," between Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, has been partly cut away by Rue Étienne-Marcel; but its tall, hide-bound, tight-fisted houses, that are left, make vivid to us those scrimped Sunday dinners, at which Porthos was famished even more than the already starved apprentices; and bring home to us his artful working on the lady's credulous 115 infatuation, that he might get his outfit from her husband's strongbox.

The wily Aramis let his real duchess pass, with his friends, for the niece of his doctor, or for a waiting-maid. She was, indeed, a grande dame, beautiful and bold, devoted to political and personal intrigue, the finest flower of the court of that day. Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse, known as "la Frondeuse Duchesse," was the trusted friend of Anne of Austria, and the active adversary of Richelieu and of Mazarin, and exiled from Paris by each in turn. She plays as busy a rôle in history as in Dumas. The daughter of Hercule de Rohan, Duc de Montbazon, and the wife of Charles d'Albert, Duc de Luynes, and, after his death, of Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse, this zealous recruit of the Fronde naturally had her "fling" in private as well as in public life. Her Hôtel de Chevreuse et de Luynes was one of the grandest mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, as it originally stood at No. 31 Rue Saint-Dominique. The cutting of Boulevard Saint-Germain, leaving it No. 201 of that boulevard, has shorn off its two wings and its great front court. The main body, which remains, is impressive in the simple, stately dignity stamped on it by Mansart, who gave to it his own roof. Its first-floor salons and chambers, lofty and spacious, glow with the ornate mouldings and decorations of that period, mellowed by the sombre splendors of its tapestries. Much of the garden—once a rural park within city limits—has been cut away by Boulevard Raspail, but from that street 116 one sees, over the new boundary wall, wide-spreading trees that strike a welcome note of green amid surrounding stone. The latest Bottin, with no room for romance within its covers, gives the Comtesse de Chevreuse as tenant of the house, along with other tenants, to whom she lets her upper floors.

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

To the most sympathetic of them, d'Artagnan, dearer to us than all the others, we are eager to turn. The real d'Artagnan of history, who succeeded de Tréville in command of the Guards, has left his memoirs, possibly written by another hand under his guidance. They are commonplace and coarse, broad as well as long, and leave us with no distinct portrait of the man. Our d'Artagnan, bodied forth from that ineffective 117 sketch by the large brush that never niggled, might serve as an under-study for Henri IV.; equally brave and resourceful, equally buoyant in peril and ready in disaster; with the same guileless and ingenuous candor that covered and carried off the craftiness beneath. The Gascon, no less than the Béarnais, was master of the jaunty artlessness of an astute and artful dodgery, a fausse-bonhomie that is yet delicious and endears them both to us.

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

"Twenty Years After" we find our friend, but slightly sobered by those years, in search of a good lodging and of a good table. He fell on both at the inn, "La Chevrette," kept by the pretty Flemish Madeleine, 118 in Rue Tiquetonne. Once a path on the outer side of the ditch, north of the town-wall, named for Rogier Tiquetonne, or Quinquetonne, a rich baker of the fourteenth century, that narrow curved street is, still, as to most of its length, a village highway in the centre of Paris. Its tall-fronted houses rise on either hand almost as he saw them. Among them is the Hôtel de Picardie, and it is out of reason to doubt that d'Artagnan, in memory of Planchet—for Planchet came from Picardy—was attracted by the name and made search therein for suitable rooms. Or, it may please our fancy to believe that this inn bore then the sign of The Kid, and that the kindly hostess changed its name, later, in memory of Planchet, grown prosperous and rich.

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

Good Master Planchet, sometime valet, and lifelong friend of the great d'Artagnan, turned grocer, and lived over his shop at the sign of "Le Pilon d'Or," in Rue des Lombards. This had been a street of bankers and money-dealers in the outset, and it was named, to alter De Quincey's ornate reference to another Lombard Street, after the Lombards or Milanese, who affiliated an infant commerce to the matron splendors of the 119 Adriatic and the Mediterranean. When the financial centre went westward, this street was invaded by the grocers and spice-dealers, who hold it to this day. Its narrow length is still fragrant with the descendants of the spices in which Planchet traded, and of the raisins into which d'Artagnan plunged his hands so greedily.

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

D'Artagnan, while living on the left bank in his 120 early days, made his way by this street to visit his flame Lady de Winter. That dangerous adventuress is domiciled by Dumas at No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, the number of the house still the same. It is a historic house, and its story is told in our Hugo pages. Dumas was one of the frequenters of Hugo's apartment there, and made use of it and its approaches in "The Three Musketeers."

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

From there, the two went, one night, across the river to a house in the Marais, known to all the footmen and sedan-chairmen of Paris, says Dumas; a house not of a great lord or of a great lady, and where was neither dancing, dining, nor card-playing; yet it was the favorite resort of the men best worth knowing in Paris. It was the abode of "le petit Scarron." About his chair, wherein he was held helpless by his paralysis, met especially the enemies of Mazarin, the witty and lewd rhymesters of the Fronde—not one of them as witty or as lewd as was the crippled host. Yet some soupçon of decency had been brought into his house by his young wife; the poor country girl of sixteen, 121 Françoise d'Aubigné, who accepted the puny paralytic of forty and more, rather than go into a convent. After his death she became Madame de Maintenon, and later Queen of France, by her secret marriage with Louis XIV., as old and almost as decrepit as was her first husband.

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

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

And d'Artagnan? Most fitting in his eyes, mayhap, would it be to take our last look at him in the height of his glory, host of the Hôtel de Tréville, receiving the King at his own table. We prefer, rather, to hold him in memory just when Athos introduces his old comrade to the assemblage at Blois, as "Monsieur le Chevalier 122 d'Artagnan, Lieutenant of his Majesty's Musketeers, a devoted friend and one of the most excellent and brave gentlemen I have ever known."

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

THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO

125

THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO

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

This homely paradise has disappeared; partly invaded by the aggressive builder, and partly cut away to 126 make room for Rue d'Ulm, called by Hugo a "big and useless street." The greater portion of the site of his house and garden is now covered by the huge buildings of one of the city schools. By a curious coincidence, at No. 12 Rue des Feuillantines—which must not be confused, as it is often confused, with the Impasse of the same name—there stands just such an old house, in the midst of just such gardens, shaded by just such old trees, as Hugo describes in the pathetic reminiscences of his youth, and as those of us remember, who saw his old home, only a few years ago.

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

Once more in Paris, and for awhile at the Feuillantines, 127 we find the devoted mother settling herself and her sons, on the last day of the year 1813, in a roomy old building of the time of Louis XV., in Rue du Cherche-Midi. Her rooms were on the ground floor, as usual, with easy access to the health-giving garden, and the boys slept above. There was a court in front, in which, during the occupation of Paris by the Allies, were quartered a Prussian officer and forty of his men; to the disgust of the mother, and to the joy of her boys, captivated by soldierly gewgaws. The site of court and house and garden is covered by a grim military prison, in which history has been made in the closing years of the nineteenth century.

On the other side of the street, at the corner of Rue du Regard, was and is the Hôtel de Toulouse, a seventeenth-century structure, named for its former occupant, the Comte de Toulouse, son of Madame de Montespan. It was used as a prison early in the nineteenth century, and since then it has been the seat of the Conseil-de-Guerre; famous, or infamous, in our day, as the head-quarters of the Court-Martial. The wide façade on the court has no distinction, nor has the "Tribunal of Military Justice" on the first floor; to which we mount by the broad staircase at the left of the entrance-door. Above are the living-rooms of the commandant, who was a Monsieur Foucher at that time, with whose family, the Hugo family, already acquainted, formed now a lasting friendship. It was this intimacy that made their home here the brightest spot in Hugo's boyish horizon. 128

When Napoleon's return from Elba brought his old officers back to their allegiance, General Hugo hurried to Paris, and, before hurrying away again, placed his boys in a boarding-school—the Abbaye Cordier, in Rue Sainte-Marguerite. This was a gloomy little street, dingy with the smoke of the smiths' forges that filled it, elbowed in among equally narrow ways between the prison of the Abbaye—then standing where now runs the roadway of modern Boulevard Saint-Germain—and the Cour du Dragon. This superb relic of ancient Paris has been left untouched, and the carved dragon above its great arched entrance looks down, out of the 129 past, on modern Rue de Rennes. Rue Sainte-Marguerite has been less lucky, for such small section of it, as remained after the cutting of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue de Rennes, is mainly rebuilt, and renamed Rue Gozlin.

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

In 1818 Madame Hugo and her boys came to a new home on the third floor of No. 18 Rue des Petits-Augustins, in a wing of that old abbaye of the Augustin fathers, which had given its name to the street, now Rue Bonaparte. The entrance court, on that street, of the École des Beaux-Arts, covers the site of this wing, and the school has replaced the rest of the monastery, saving, within its modern walls, only the chapel built by Queen Marguerite. In the old court and the old buildings behind, at that time, were stored tombs of French kings and historic monuments and historic bones, removed from their original grounds, as has been 130 told in our Molière chapter, to save them from mutilation at the hands of the Revolutionary Patriots. On this queer assemblage the boys' room looked down; their mother, from her front windows, looked down on the remains of the vast gardens of the Hôtel de La Rochefoucauld, once a portion of the grounds of Marguerite, that stretched to the north of Rue Visconti, between Rues de Seine and Bonaparte. The view, so far below, could not compensate Madame Hugo for the loss of her own garden, which meant sun and air and health. She drooped and fell ill, and her only solace was the devotion of her son Victor. Whenever she was able to go out, they spent their evenings with the Foucher family, at the Hôtel de Toulouse. While the boys sat silent, listening to the talk of their elders, Victor's eyes were busy, and they taught him that Adèle Foucher was good to look upon. These two children walked, open-eyed, into love, as simply and as naturally as did Cosette and Marius; and after a brief period of storm and stress, their marriage came in due time, and they began their long and happy life together.

This Hugo home in Rue des Petits-Augustins, rising right in front of all who came along Rue des Beaux-Arts, was a familiar sight to a young Englishman, about ten years after this time. His name was William Makepeace Thackeray, and he was lodging in this latter street among other students of the Latin Quarter, and trying to make a passable artist with the material given him by nature for the making of an unsurpassable author. His way lay in front of the old abbaye, each time 131 he went to or from the schools, or his modest restaurant. Thirion was the host of this cheap feeding-place, esteemed by art students, on the northern side of old Rue des Boucheries; of which this side and some of its buildings have been saved, while the street itself has been carried away in the wider stream of Boulevard Saint-Germain. There, at No. 160, to-day, you will find the same restaurant, under the same name on the sign, and the same rooms, swarming with students as during Thackeray's days in Paris.

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

Early in their residence here, Victor was honored by a summons to visit Châteaubriand, long the literary idol of the schoolboy, who had written in his diary, when only fourteen: "I will be Châteaubriand or nothing!" For he had begun to rhyme already at the Cordier school, and in his seventeenth year he had established, in collaboration with his eldest brother, Abel, "Le Conservateur Littéraire," a bi-monthly of poetry, criticism, politics, most of it written by Victor. It lived 132 from December, 1819, to March, 1821, and its scarce copies are prized by collectors. Now the precocious boy's ode "On the death of the Duke of Berry"—assassinated by Louvel in February, 1820, in Rue Rameau, on the southern side of Square Louvois, then the site of the opera-house—had fallen under the eye of Châteaubriand, who was reported to have dubbed him "The Sublime Child." Châteaubriand denied this utterance, in later years, but agreed to let it stand, since the phrase had become "consecrated." It was at the door of No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique, then the residence of the elder author, that the young poet knocked in those early days of his fame; and here, a little later, he was invited by the diplomat to join his Embassy to Berlin. Madame Hugo's health prevented the acceptance of this flattering offer.

While still at this home in Rue des Mézières, Victor received another honor in a call from Lamartine, the lately and loudly acclaimed author of "Les Méditations," who was then about thirty-one years of age. In a letter, written many years after, Lamartine described this first meeting: "Youth is the time for forming friendships. I love Hugo because I knew and loved him at a period of life when the heart is still expanding within the breast.... I found myself on the ground floor of an obscure house at the end of a court. There a grave, melancholy mother was industriously instructing some boys of various ages—her sons. She showed me into a low room a little apart, at the farther end of which, either reading or writing, sat a studious youth 133 with a fine massive head, intelligent and thoughtful. This was Victor Hugo, the man whose pen can now charm or terrify the world."

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

After weeks of wretched loneliness, young Hugo went to live, with a country cousin just come to town, on the top floor of No. 30 Rue du Dragon. This street is connected with the court of the same name by a narrow passage under the houses at the western end of the court. No. 30 is still standing, a high, shabby old building, that yet suggests its better days. In the belvedere high above the attic windows, Hugo lived the life of his Marius, keeping body and soul together on a slender income of 700 francs a year. Luckier than Marius, who could only follow Cosette and the old convict in the Luxembourg Gardens, Hugo was allowed little walks there with his adored lady, her mother always accompanying them. This chaperonage did not 134 prevent the secret slipping of letters between the lovers' hands, and many of these have been preserved for future publication.

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

Among the men who visited him in this garret was Alfred de Vigny, then a captain in the Royal Guard, and dreaming only, as yet, of his "Cinq-Mars." Hugo was dreaming many dreams, too, over his work, and his brightest dream became a reality in October, 1822, when, in Saint-Sulpice's Chapel of the Virgin—the chapel from which his mother had been buried eighteen months earlier—was performed the Church part of his marriage with Adèle Foucher. The wedding banquet was given at the Hôtel de Toulouse by her father, who had been won over to this immediate marriage, despite the delay he had urged because 135 of the youth of the bride and the poverty of the bridegroom.

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

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

With their growing fortune, the young couple allowed themselves more commodious quarters. These they found, early in 1828, in a house behind No. 11 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a street somewhat curtailed in its length by the cutting of Rue de Rennes, and the old No. 11 is now No. 27. A long alley, once a rural lane between bordering trees, leads to the modest house hidden away from the street. Quiet 136 enough to-day, it was quieter then, when it was really in the Fields of Our Lady, in that quarter of the town endeared to Hugo by his several boyhood-homes.

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

To these rooms came, of evenings, those brilliant young fellows and those who were bent on being brilliant, who made the vanguard of the Romanticists. Here was formed "le Cénacle," of which curious circle we shall soon see more. Here Sainte-Beuve dropped in, from his rooms a few doors off, at No. 19, now No. 37, Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs; dropped in too frequently, 137 for the "smiling critic" came rather to smile on young Madame Hugo than for other companionship. Sometimes of an afternoon, such of the group as were walkers would start for a long stroll out to and over the low hills surrounding the southern suburbs, to see the sun set beyond the plains of Vanves and Montrouge. As they returned they would rest and quench their modest thirst in a suburban guinguette and listen to the shrill fiddling of "la mère Saguet." All this and much more is told in Hugo's verse. The town has grown around and beyond the tavern, where it stands on the southwestern corner of Rue de Vanves and Avenue du Maine, its two stories and steep roof and dormer windows all like an old village inn going to decay.

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

It was in this way that Hugo had opportunity to study the prison, in such quick and accurate detail, as enabled him to make that dramatic description of the escape of Thénardier; an escape made possible, at the last, by little Gavroche, fetched from his palatial lodging in the belly of the huge plaster elephant on Place de la Bastille, on the very night of his giving shelter 138 to the two lost Thénardier boys, whom he—the heroic, pathetic, grotesque creature—didn't know to be his brothers any more than he knew he was going to rescue his father!

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

The landlady of the Hugo household had retired from trade with enough money to buy this quiet place, set far back from this quiet street, intending to end her days in an ideal resting-place. From the first, her smug comfort had been violated by many queer visitors, 139 and when "Hernani" made its hit, there was a ceaseless procession of the author's noisy admirers, by night and by day, on her staircase and over her head—she had kept the ground floor for her tranquil retreat—until the maddened woman gave Monsieur Hugo "notice to quit." She liked her tenants, she hastened to say, she felt for the poor young wife in her loss of sleep, and, above all, she pitied her for having a husband "who had taken to such a dreadful trade!"

So they had to move, and late in 1830, or early in 1831, they went across the river to No. 9 Rue Jean-Goujon, where, in an isolated house surrounded by gardens, in the midst of the then deserted and desolate Champs-Élysées, they could be as noisy as they and their friends chose. Soon after coming here they took their new daughter and their last child, Adèle, to Saint-Philippe-du-Roule for her baptism, as Hugo recalled, twenty years later, at Balzac's burial service in the same church. But here, despite the fields that tempted to walks in all directions, Hugo shut himself in and shut out his friends. For he was bound, by contract with his publisher, to produce "Notre-Dame de Paris" within a few months. With his eye for effect, he put on a coarse, gray, woollen garment, reaching from neck to ankles, locked up his coats and hats, and went to work, stopping only to eat and sleep. He began his melodramatic book to the booming of the cannon of a Parisian insurrection, and he ended it in exactly five and one-half months, just as he had got to the last drop of ink in the bottle he had bought at 140 the beginning. He thought of calling this romance "What there is in a Bottle of Ink," but gave that title to Alphonse Karr, who used it later for a collection of stories. Goethe's verdict on "Notre-Dame de Paris" must stand; it is a dull and tiresome show of marionettes.

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

During the rehearsals of "Le Roi s'Amuse," in October, 1832, Hugo found time to settle himself and his family in the apartment on the second floor of No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des Vosges. We shall prowl about this historic spot when we come to explore the Marais; just now, only this apartment and this house come under our scrutiny. It was one of the earliest and grandest mansions of this grand square, and took its title of Hôtel de Guéménée when that family held possession in 1630. Ten years later one of its floors was tenanted by Marion Delorme, whose gorgeous 141 coach with four horses drew a crowd to that south-eastern corner whenever she alighted, and whose dainty rooms drew a crowd of another sort on her evenings, so much the vogue. They were the gathering-place of the swells of her day, of dignitaries of the court and the Church, of men famous in letters and science, all attracted by the charm and wit and polish of this young woman. In his "Cinq-Mars," de Vigny brings together in her salon, among many nameless fine people, Descartes, Grotius, Corneille—fresh from his latest success, "Cinna"—and a youth of eighteen, Poquelin, afterward Molière. This is well enough, but he goes too far in his fancy for a telling picture, and drags in Milton, shy and silent. John Milton had long before passed through Paris, on his way home from Italy, and was then busy over controversial pamphlets in London. Nor can the English reader take seriously the recitation, urged on "le jeune Anglais," of passages from his "Paradise Lost"—written twenty years later—a recitation quite comprehended by this exclusively French audience. For the Delorme is moved to tears, and Georges Scudéry to censure, so shocked are his religious scruples and his poetic taste! De Vigny is surer of his stepping when on French ground, and plausibly makes Marion a spy on the conspirators, in the pay of Richelieu. At that time, during the construction of his Palais-Cardinal—now the Palais-Royal—his residence was diagonally opposite No. 6, in the northwestern corner of Place Royale. That corner has been cut through, and his 142 house cut away, by the prolongation of Rue des Vosges along that side of the square. It has been said that the cardinal's hunting to death of Cinq-Mars was less a punishment for the conspiracy against King and State than a personal vengeance on the dandy, with a hundred pairs of boots, who had supplanted him with Mlle. Delorme. The Marais streets knew them both well. Cinq-Mars lived with his father in the family Hôtel d'Effiat, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, demolished in 1882. Marion did not pine long after his execution, but went her way gayly, until she was driven by her debts to a pretended death and a sham funeral, at which she peeped from these windows. She sank out of sight of men, and died in earnest, before she had come to forty years, in her mother's apartment in Rue de Thorigny, leaving a fortune in fine lace and not a sou in cash for her burial.

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

That entrance is still in existence from Rue Saint-Antoine, by way of the Impasse—then Cul-de-sac—Guéménée, and at its end through a small gate into the court, and so by a back door into the house. Through that rear entrance crowded a squad of the National Guard, from Rue Saint-Antoine, during the 143 street fighting of February, 1848, intending by this route to enter the square unseen, and secure it against the regular troops of Louis-Philippe. Some few among them amused themselves by mounting the stairs and invading Hugo's deserted apartment. He had gone, that day, at the head of a detachment of the royal force, not leading it against the rioters, but lending his influence as Peer of France to save, from its bayonets, the fellow-rioters of the men just then intruding on his home. They did no harm, happily, as they filed through the various rooms, and past a child's empty cradle by the side of the empty bed. It had been the cradle of the daughter, Adèle, and perhaps of the other babies, and was always cherished by Madame Hugo. In a small room in the rear, that served as Hugo's study, the leader of the band picked up some written sheets from the table, the ink hardly dry, and read them aloud. It was the manuscript of "Les Misérables," just then begun, but not finished and published until 1862, when the exile was in Guernsey.

While plodding along with that great work, Hugo put forth from this study much verse and his last plays. Here, in 1838, he wrote his final dramatic success, "Ruy Blas," and his final dramatic failure, "Les Burgraves," which ended his stage career. From here he went to his fauteuil in the Academy in 1841, the step to the seat of Peer of France, accorded him by the King within a few years. Meanwhile, his larger rooms hardly held the swelling host of his friends, and, it must be said, his flatterers. Not Marion Delorme had 144 more, nor listened to them with a more open ear. Their poison became his food. Indeed, the men who formed "le Cénacle," in these and other salons, seemed to find their breath only in an atmosphere of mutual admiration. Each called the other "Cher Maître," and all would listen, in wistful reverence, to every utterance of the others and to the deliverance of his latest bringing-forth, vouchsafed by each in turn. While Lamartine, standing before the fireplace, turned on the pensive tune of his latest little thing in verse, Hugo gazed intent on him as on an oracle. Then Hugo would pour forth his sonorous rhymes, his voice most impressive in its grave monotone. The smaller singers next took up the song. No vulgar applause followed any recitation, but the elect, moved beyond speech, would clutch the reciter's hand, their eyes upturned to the cornice. Those not entirely voiceless with ecstasy might be heard to murmur the freshest phrases of sacramental adoration: "Cathédrale," or "Pyramide d'Égypte!"

There were certain minor chartered poseurs in the circle. There was Alfred de Vigny, "before his transfiguration," to whom might be applied Camille Desmoulins's gibe at Saint-Just: "He carries his head as if it were a sacrament." To which Saint-Just replied by the promise, that he kept, to make Camille carry his head after the fashion of Saint-Denis. There was Alfred de Musset, who had been brought first to the cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs by Paul Foucher, his schoolmate and Hugo's brother-in-law. Like 145 his Fantasio, de Musset then "had the May upon his cheeks," and was young and gay and given to laughter; now, old at thirty, he posed as the bored and blasé prey and poet of passion.

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

Among the guests were occasional irreverent onlookers, not deemed worthy of admission to the inner circle, who sat outside, getting much fun out of its antics. Such a one was Madame Ancelot, whose graphic pen is pointed with her jealousy as a rival lion-hunter, who had outlived her vogue of the early Restoration. Daudet's sketch of her blue-stockinged salon, a faded survival of its splendors under Louis XVIII., is as daintily malicious as is her sketch of 146 Hugo's evenings. Through those evenings, Madame Ancelot says, Madame Hugo reclined on a couch, as if over-wearied by the load of glory she was helping to carry. That lady had one relief in this new home, its doors being shut against the ugly face of Sainte-Beuve, at the urging of the indignant young wife. This happened in 1834, and within a few years Sainte-Beuve gave to the world his "Book of Love," a book of hatred toward Hugo, with its base suggestion of the wife's complaisance for the writer. Him it hurt more than it hurt Hugo. He had taken, and he still keeps, his unassailable place in the affection, as in the admiration, of his countrymen. There can be no need to summon them as witnesses, yet it may be well to quote the words of two foreign fellow-craftsmen.

The Englishman, Swinburne, in his wild and untamed enthusiasm, acclaims Hugo as a healer and a comforter, a redeemer and a prophet; burning with wrath and scorn unquenchable; deriving his light and his heat from love, while terror and pity and eternal fate are his keynotes. No great poet, adds Swinburne, was ever so good, no good man was ever so great. Heine, German by birth, scoffs at Hugo, claiming that his greatest gift was a lack of good taste, a condition so rare in Frenchmen that his compatriots mistook it for genius. He sees merely a studied passion and an artificial flame in Hugo's specious divine fire; and the product is nothing but "fried ice." And Heine sums him up: "Hugo was more than an egoist, he was a Hugoist." 147

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

Dickens and Forster found Hugo the best thing in that house, and the latter records the sober grace and self-possessed, quiet gravity of the man, recently ennobled by Louis-Philippe, but whose nature was already written noble. "Rather under the middle size, of compact, close buttoned-up figure, with ample dark hair falling loosely over his close-shaven face. I never saw upon any features, so keenly intellectual, such a soft and sweet gentility, and certainly never heard the French language spoken with the picturesque distinctness given it by Victor Hugo." 148

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

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

They came in crowds about this house, with flaming 149 torches and blaring bands, howling their windy homage. They are remembered, with mute disapproval, by the old concierge of the house, Lagoutte Armand. With real pleasure does he recall "Monsieur Hugo," and prattle memories of his friends like Béranger, and of his family. There were two sons, Charles and François-Victor, the former known as "Toto," a "très gentil garçon." In his loge, pointed out with pride by the concierge, to whom it was given by Hugo, is a rare engraving of the poet, which makes him serious, almost stern, of aspect, his mouth showing its strength in the beardless face, his hair plastered down about the superb brow. His head was carried always well bent forward, and he went gravely, the old man tells us. The house is unaltered, but the street has grown commonplace since the days when its half-countryfied cut attracted Hugo and Béranger and Alphonse Karr. This witty editor of "Les Guêpes," something of a poseur with his pen, had a genuine love of flowers and of women, on whom he lavished his pet camelias and tulips. He cultivated them in the garden of the house, now numbered 15, which he occupied in this street from 1839 to 1842. The sculptor Carrier-Belleuse is now in possession of Karr's old rooms, and his studio covers the one-time garden. Béranger came, in 1832, to No. 31, then a small cottage behind a garden, where he lived for three years. The bare walls of the communal school, numbered 35, now cover the site of his home, and there are no more cottages nor gardens in the street. 150

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

Here, too, he finished "Les Misérables," writing it, he said, with all Paris lying before him in his mind's eye; or, as he puts it, with the exile's longing, "on regarde la mer, et on voit Paris." His topographical memory was none too accurate, and errors of slight or of real importance may be detected in "Les Misérables." It is really in his poetry that he has done for his "maternal city" what Balzac did for her in prose; singing in all tones the splendor and the squalor of "la ville lumière," to use his swelling phrase. Despite some errors, and despite the pulling-about of Paris since Valjean's day, we may still trace his flight through nearly all that thrilling night, when Javert and his men hunted him about the southern side of the town, and across the river from the Gorbeau tenement. This tenement, so striking a set in many scenes 151 of the drama, was an historic mansion run to seed, standing just where Hugo places it—on the site of Nos. 50 and 52 Boulevard de l'Hôpital, almost directly opposite Rue de la Barrière-des-Gobelins. Facing that street—renamed Rue Fagon in 1867—on the northern side of Boulevard de l'Hôpital, the little market of the Gobelins replaces the squalid old shanty which gave perilous shelter to Valjean and Cosette, and later to Marius.

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

Now, Valjean turns away from the river, carrying the tired child in his arms, and makes a long circuit around by the Collége Rollin—long since removed to the northern boulevards—and by the lower streets skirting the Jardin des Plantes—no longer the Jardin du Roi—and so along the quay. He is bent, as Javert guessed, on putting the river between himself and his pursuers. He crosses Pont d'Austerlitz, and plunges 152 into the maze of roads and lanes, lined with woodyards and walls, on the northern side of the river. There Javert loses the trail; while for us, that trail is hidden under new streets laid out along those lanes, and under railway tracks laid down on those roads. We come in sight of the fugitive again, as he climbs the convent wall, drawing up Cosette by the rope taken from the street lantern. Here is that high gray wall, stretching along the eastern side of old Rue de Picpus, and the southern side of the new wide Avenue Saint-Mandé. This wall—of stone, covered with crumbling plaster—is as old as the garden of "Les Religieuses de Picpus," which it surrounds, and as the buildings within, which it hides from the street. We may enter the enclosure by the old gate at No. 35 Rue de Picpus, the very gate through which Cosette was carried out in a basket, and Valjean borne alive in the nun's coffin to his mock burial. About the court within, the red-tiled low roofs of the ancient foundation peep out among more modern buildings. Behind all these and beyond the court stretches the garden, a portion still set aside for vegetables, and we look about for Fauchelevent's protecting glasses for his cherished melons. What we do find is the very outhouse, in an angle of the wall, on which Valjean dropped; it is a shanty nearly gone to ruin, but serving still to store the garden tools of Fauchelevent's successor.

"Near the old village of Picpus, now a part of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, under the walls of the garden which belonged to the Canoness of Saint-Augustin, 153 in a bit of ground not more than thirty feet in length, repose thirteen hundred and six victims beheaded at Barrière du Trône, between 26 Prairial and 9 Thermidor, in the second year of the republic." 154 This extract, from the "Mémorial Européen" of April 24, 1809, is a fitting introduction to the small cemetery, hid away at the very end of this convent garden. In this snug resting-spot sleep many illustrious dead. On the wall, alongside the iron-railed gate, under a laurel-wreath, is a tablet inscribed with the name of "André de Chénier, son of Greece and of France," who "servit les Muses, aima la sagesse, mourut pour la verité." He and his headless comrades were carted here and thrown into trenches, when the guillotine was busy at the Barrière du Trône, now Place de la Nation, only a step away, in the early summer of 1794, up to the day of Robespierre's arrest. Their mothers, widows, children, dared not visit this great grave nor, indeed, ask where it was. In that time of terror, grief was a crime and tears were no longer innocent. It was only in after years that this bit of ground was bought, and walled in, and cared for, by unforgetting survivors. Some few among them, of high descent or of ancient family, planned for their own graves and those of their line to come and to go, within touch of this great common grave that held the clay of those dear to them. They bought, in perpetuity, this bit of the convent garden on the hither side of the gate, through which we have been looking, and it is dotted with many a cross and many a slab. And this tiny burial-ground draws the American pilgrim as to a shrine, for in it lies the body of Lafayette.

The sisters of the Séminaire de Picpus, who inherited the duties, along with the domain of "Les Religieuses" 155 of the eighteenth century, devote themselves to the instruction and the training of their young pensionnaires. The story of the establishment is told in "Les Misérables," in detail that allows no retelling.

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

On those summer days, when Hugo used to stroll from his cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs out to the southern slopes, he discovered the Champ de l'Alouette—a fair field bordering the limpid Bièvre, 156 just beyond the factory of the Gobelins. It had borne that name from immemorial time, and was the field, as the man told Marius, where Ulbach had killed the shepherdess of Ivry. Marius came to this green spot that he might dream about "The Lark," after he had heard, from his peep-hole in the wall of the Gorbeau tenement, the Thénardiers so name his unknown lady. We, too, may walk in the Field of the Lark, its ancient spaciousness somewhat shrunken, as with all those erstwhile fields hereabout, of which we get glimpses along Boulevard Saint-Jacques and other distant southern boulevards. There is a wide gateway in the high wall that runs along stony Rue du Champ-de-l'Alouette, and we pass through it and the court within to the bright little garden beyond, where children are playing, guileless as Cosette. This is her field, now shut in by great tanneries, its air redolent of leather, its Bièvre sullied by the stains and the scum of the dye-works above. Yet, hid away in this dreary quarter—where the broad and cheerless streets are sultry in summer, bleak in winter, and gritty to the feet all the year round—it is still, as Hugo aptly says, the only spot about here where Ruysdael would have been tempted to stop, and sit, and sketch.

Among the countless American feet that tread Rue du Bac and Rue de Babylone, on their way to the shop that is a shrine at the junction of those two streets, there may be some few that turn into Rue Oudinot. It is well worth the turning, if only because it has contrived to keep that village aspect given by gardens 157 behind walls, and cottages within those gardens. It still bore its old name, Plumet, when General Hugo came to live in it, that he might be near his son in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and here he died suddenly in January, 1828. In this house, well known to Hugo, he installed Valjean and the girl Cosette. From this house, by its back door and by the lane between high parallel walls, Valjean slips out unseen into Rue de Babylone. In its front garden, under a stone on her bench, Cosette finds her wonderful love-letter; and here is the scene of that exquisite love-making, when Marius appears in the moonlight.

The trumpery tumults of 1832—in hopeless revolt against the Orleans monarchy and in impotent adventure for the republic—give occasion for grandiose barricade-building and for melodramatic combats. Hugo takes us, with Marius and his fellow-students, to that labyrinth of narrowest lanes, twisting about high bluffs of houses, that was then to be found between the churches of Saint-Leu and Saint-Eustache. It was a most characteristic corner of mediæval Paris, and it has, only recently and not yet entirely, been cut away by Rue Rambuteau, and built over by the business structures around the Halles. The street of la Grande-Truanderie is for the most part respectabilized, that of la Chanverie is reformed quite out of life, and la Petite-Truanderie alone remains narrow and malodorous. But "Corinthe" has been carted clean away. This was the notorious tavern, of two-storied stone, in front of which Enjolras defended his barricade, 158 within which Grantaire emptied his last bottle, and in whose upper room these two stood up against the wall to be shot. Grantaire was doubtless sketched from his illustrious precursor and prototype, the poet, Mathurin Régnier, who tippled and slept at a table of this squalid drinking-den during many years, until the year 1615, when debauchery killed him too young. His colossal and abused body carried the soul, original, virile, and fiery, which he has put into his verse, although he has over-polished it a bit. When this tavern—in the fields near the open markets—was his favorite resort, it bore the sign and name, "Pot-aux-Roses"; it was dedicated later "Au Raisin de Corinthe"; and this was soon popularly shortened to "Corinthe." Forty years after his death, another true poet was born in the tall house that rose alongside this tavern, its windows looking out over the waste lands of the Marais, as Jean-François Regnard says in his verse. Like young Poquelin, thirty years before, this boy played about the Halles; then he went away to strange adventures in foreign lands with pirates and with ladies; and came home here to write comedies, that have the gayety and sparkle, yet not the depth, of those of Molière. Indeed, Voltaire asserts that he who is not pleased with Regnard is not fit to admire Molière. The seventeenth-century mansion, in which he was born, befitted the position of his father, a rich city merchant, and it has luckily escaped demolition, albeit brought down to base uses, as you shall see on looking at No. 108 Rue Rambuteau. And if you hurry 159 to this neighborhood, you may yet find some few reminders of the scenes of 1832. In Rue de la Petite-Truanderie is just such a tavern as was "Corinthe," in its worst days. Its huge square pillars will hardly hold up, much longer, the aged stone walls. Just here is the dark corner where Valjean set Javert free; and in Rue Mondétour, at that end not yet shortened and straightened into a semblance of respectability, you may see a small sewer-mouth, direct descendant of the grated hole, down which Valjean crawled, with Marius on his back, to begin that almost incredible march through the tortuous sewers to their outlet on the Seine, under Cours-la-Reine. He came out on a spit of sand, "not very far distant from the house brought to Paris in 1824," says Hugo, who should have said 1826. His reference is to the house popularly named "la maison de François I^er." It was built by that monarch, at Moret on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, for his beloved sister, Marguerite de Navarre, it is believed. It was removed, stone by stone, and re-erected on its present site in Cours-la-Reine, where it is a delight to the lover of French Renaissance.

Hugo was one of the earliest, among the exiles of the Empire that ended worthily in the shame of Sedan, to be welcomed by the new Republic on his hastening to Paris. There he remained through l'Année Terrible of the Prussian siege, with his friend Paul Meurice, a hale veteran of letters, still in the youth of age in 1899. Paris being once more opened, Hugo went to and fro between Brussels and Guernsey and his own 160 country for awhile. In 1873 he had quarters in the Villa Montmorenci at Auteuil, we learn by a letter from him dated there. In 1874 he settled in an apartment at No. 66 Rue de La Rochefoucauld, an airy spot at the summit of the slope upward toward Montmartre. Here he remained a year, and in 1875 removed a little farther along this same slope, to No. 21 Rue de Clichy, on the corner of Rue d'Athènes. His apartment on the third floor was bright and sunny, having windows quite around the corner on both streets, and here he lived for four years. Much of the last two years was taken up by his new duties as Senator, so that scant leisure was left him for literary labor; and it was in this house that he sadly told a favorite comrade that the works he had dreamed of writing were infinitely more numerous than those he had found time to write. Driven from here by the unremitting invasion of friends, admirers, strangers, men and women from all quarters of the globe, bent on a sight of or an autograph from the only Hugo, he took refuge in Avenue d'Eylau, away off at the other end of the town, where only real friendship would take the trouble to follow him. He made this last removal in 1880. This final home was as modest as any of his childhood homes, and had just such a garden as theirs. Here he passed five happy years, with cherished companionship within, and all about him "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends."

As a tribute to him, Avenue d'Eylau has become Avenue Victor-Hugo, and his two-story-and-attic house—not 161 one bit grander than the cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, in which began his literary fame—remains unchanged under its new number 124, only its side garden having been built over, the garden in the rear being left unspoiled. At No. 140 of the avenue, the residence of M. Lockroy, is preserved the original death-mask of the poet, taken by the sculptor, M. Dalou. It is a most striking portrait, and one wishes that copies might be permitted.

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

THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS

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THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS

The prehistoric savages, who settled, for safety from onslaught, on the largest of the islands in the Seine, known to us as Île de la Cité; the rabble of Gaulish fisherfolk, who came to camp here in after-years; the little tribe of Parisii who later builded a fortified hamlet on this sure ground, and bridged it with the mainland: all these, looking, through the centuries, northwardly across the transparent and unsullied stream, saw the flat river-bank opposite, over beyond it a ring of low wooded hills, and between these, on either hand, broad expanses of marsh, morass, and forest. That which stretched to their right is our Marais. In it the veteran Camulogenus, captaining the Parisii, hoped to mire down the Roman soldiers, once already stuck in the mud along the Bièvre on the southern bank of the Seine. But it is Labienus, that ablest of Cæsar's lieutenants, who "marches with four legions to Lutetia. (This is the fortress of the Parisii, situated on an island in the river Seine.)" And Labienus knows the country as well as his trade, and skirts around the Marais, and crosses the Seine at Auteuil to the solid ground he has chosen on the plains of Grenelle. There he wins battle in the year 52 B.C., and drives the Gauls in disorder 166 to the high ground on which the Panthéon now stands, and the Luxembourg Gardens lie. The Romans, in possession of the island, rebuild the bridges, cut away by the Parisii, and restore the town partly burned by them; a palace for the resident Governors arises on the extreme western end of the island; and new defences are constructed for the Gallo-Roman Lutetia. Four centuries later, it was called his "dear and well-beloved Lutetia" by Julian, and from that conviction he was never apostate. He loved it for its soft air, its fair river, its honest wines coming from its own vineyards. On the slope of its southern suburb stood out the massive walls of the baths that bear his name; and his gardens, planted with vines, reached to the river. Where he swam, we go dry-shod, when we saunter through the Cluny; and we may sit, a little farther south, in Rue de Navarre just off Rue Monge, in the stone seats of the Roman arena, a perfect bit of loyal preservation of Lutetia.

The Romans meant to make their new town an important centre, and those impassioned road-builders began to bring to it the highways, in the making of which, and by means of which, they were easily masters of their world. The Gauls had trodden footpaths through the forests and over the marshes, and of these, the two most trodden on the northern bank started from near the end of their only bridge, now replaced by Pont Notre-Dame. That which went northerly to the southeastern corner of the Halles of our Paris, there split into two branches; the one, named the Voie des Provinces Maritimes, followed 167 nearly the line of present Rue Montmartre, and went, by way of Pontoise, to the northwestern coast of Gaul; the other, named the Voie des Provinces du Nord, ran from the Halles on a line between Rues Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, about where now Boulevard Sebastopol stretches. It was the high road to Saint-Denis, Senlis, Soissons, and so away to the north. The other main pathway turned toward the east, just above the bridge-end, and went nearly parallel with the river-bank, along the line of present Rue Saint-Antoine. This road, to Sens and Meaux and thence eastwardly, was known as the Voie des Provinces de l'Est, and later in life as the Voie Royale.

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

On the two sides of this raised road, bit by bit the bog was planted; foot by foot the swamp was reclaimed; gardens were cultivated, farms were tilled, flocks were fed; herdsmen's huts dotted the plain; on the higher spots farmers' houses peeped from among the trees; and on the slopes above, all around from 168 Chaillot to Charonne, shone the white walls of the villas—walls of marble from Italy—of great officials and of wealthy traders. The Church came along this road from its central seat at Sens, and, keen of eye, picked out choice sites for chapels, convents, monasteries. Little by little the entire Marais was levelled up as the surrounding hills were levelled down; yet keeping so well its forests, that it gave good hiding for eight years to Saint-Denis dodging Valerian's pursuit, until that day of the saint's long and winding walk down the street of his name, his head carried in his hands. This northern suburb grew more gradually, at first, than its southern sister, whose sunny breast had enticements for gardeners and for vine-growers. It was a strong man who woke the Marais to unwonted life, and by his wall, encircling and securing it, Philippe-Auguste quickened its sluggish suburban pulse into urban animation. The northern settlements became la Ville, the island being la Cité, and the southern suburb l'Université.

There was a beach or strand—la grève—near the middle of this northern bank, at which were moored and unloaded the boats bringing to the town light merchandise, such as grain, meats, stuffs, and fabrics. All heavy goods—timber, stone, metals—came to the Port Saint-Paul, in front of Quai des Célestins; still there under its old name, but its old business long since gone to the bustling Port de Grenelle. On the Grève gathered men out of place, wandering about while waiting for work; whence comes the modern meaning of grève—a 169 strike, when men get out of place and are not anxious for a job. Here on the Grève, as their common ground, met the men who carried goods by water from up and down stream, and the men who carried goods by land, to and from the provinces. They were strong and turbulent men, and they made two mighty guilds, and these two, combined with other guilds, formed an all-powerful confraternity. In the course of years, there came to its head, as Prévôt des Marchands, that demigod of democracy, the notable Étienne Marcel. He had his home, while living, on Place de Grève, and in the river, when dead; to-day, in bronze he bestrides his bronze horse between those two dwelling-places, facing the strand he ruled and the city he tried to rule. It is he—none more worthy—who shall marshal us on our way to the Marais.

For, when Jean II., "le Bon," was sent to his long captivity in England from the field of Poictiers, won by the Black Prince in 1356, it was the first Dauphin France had had, known later as Charles V., who acted as Regent in his father's absence. He was a sickly and a studious youth, easily alarmed by the violence of these guilds, now making one more savage assault on royal prerogatives, in a desperate stroke to secure the right of the townsmen to rule their town. The Dauphin was afraid of being trapped in the Louvre, and he took refuge in the old Palace of the City. To him forces his way, one day, the boisterous Marcel at the head of three thousand armed and howling men, kills two of the royal marshals in the Presence, and places his own cap of the 170 town colors, red and blue—these were combined with the Bourbon white to make the Tricolor, centuries later—on the head of the terrified Dauphin, either to protect him, or in insolent token of this new recruit to the faction. As soon as might be, the Dauphin got away from his revolted citizens, and came back to his town only when strong enough to hold it against them. Nor would he then trust himself to a permanent residence in the Island-Palace, and it was allowed to fall into disrepair through several successive reigns. Louis XII. made partial restorations, and occasionally sojourned in his palace "in mid-stream," that made him think of his Loire. Parliament already owned the building then, by gift from Charles VII., and since then it has always been known as the Palais de Justice. The returned Dauphin took up his abode in the Hôtel d'Étampes, in the quarter of Saint-Paul, outside Philippe-Auguste's wall; and, by successive purchases, secured other neighboring hôtels and their grounds. This spacious enceinte, within its own walls, stretched from behind the gardens of the Archbishop of Sens, on the river front, and from the grounds of the Célestins, just east of them, on Port Saint-Paul—where the Dauphin's new estate had a grand portal and entrance-way from the quay and the river—away back to Rue Saint-Antoine on the north; and from just outside the old wall, eastwardly to the open country. This domain, and the suburbs that had grown beyond that old wall, toward the north, now came to be embraced within a new enclosure. On the southern side of the river there 171 seemed no need for any enlargement of the old enclosure.

This wall, known in history as the wall of Charles V., was partly quite new, partly an extension or a strengthening of a wall begun by Marcel in 1356; under the pretext of "works of defence of the kingdom against the English," and carried on in offence of his royal master. But before he had finished it, he came to his own end, opportunely for everyone but himself. It is midnight of July 31, 1358, and he is hastening, in darkness and stealth, to open his own gate of Saint-Antoine for the entrance of the combined forces of the English and of Charles the Bad, of Navarre. In Froissart's words: "The same night that this should have been done, God inspired certain burgesses of the city ... who, by divine inspiration, as it ought to be supposed, were informed that Paris should be that night destroyed." So they armed and made their way to Porte Saint-Antoine, "and there they found the provost of merchants with the keys of the gates in his hands;" and their leader, John Maillart, asked, "Stephen, what do you here at this hour?" When Stephen told John not to meddle, John told Stephen: "By God, you're not here for any good, at this hour, and I'll prove it to you." And so, as his notion of proof, "he gave with an axe on Stephen's head, that he fell down to the earth—and yet he was his gossip." Thus died Stephen Marcel, the martyr of devotion to the liberties of his fellow-citizens, in the eyes of many. To others of us, he is the original of the modern patriot of another land, who thanked God 172 that he had a country—to sell; and his ignoble death seems to be the just execution of a traitor. It is due to him to own that he was a strong man, genuine and pitiless in his convictions, and might have merited well of his town and his country, but that the good in him was poisoned by his rapacity for power, and polluted by personal hatred of the Dauphin. His naked body, before being thrown into the Seine, lay exposed for days in front of the Convent of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, whose grounds stretched from without the old wall, eastwardly along the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine. Through them was cut our present Rue Sévigné, and it was on the spot made now by the corner of that street and Rue Saint-Antoine, half way between the old gate and the new gate just built by Marcel, that the crowd gathered to gaze on his corpse.

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

We have already made a visit to Quai des Célestins, and have read the tablet that marks the place where played Molière and his troupe, in 1645; and the other tablet that shows the site of Philippe-Auguste's Barbeau 173 tower, constructed toward 1200, and taking its name from the great Abbey of Barbeau, whose extensive grounds bordered the river-bank here. From this huge tower and its gateway, kept intact as the starting-point at this end, the new wall turned at a right angle to the fast crumbling old wall, and went eastwardly along the shore; which they now banked up and planted with elms. That shore-line is now Boulevard Morland—named from that brave colonel of chasseurs who was killed at Austerlitz—and the land in front, as far as Quai Henri IV., was anciently the little Île des Javiaux, renamed Île Louvier in the seventeenth century, when it served as a vast woodyard for the town. The slight arm of the river that cut it off has been filled in, and the island is now one with the mainland. At the corner of Boulevard Bourdon—which records the name of a colonel of dragoons, who fell at Austerlitz—the new wall turned, and followed what is now the middle line of that boulevard to the present Place de la Bastille. Here was the two-round-towered gateway built by Marcel, and called, as were called all those gateways, Bastilia—a word of mediæval Latin, meaning a small fortress, such as was formed by each of these gates with its flanking towers. There were many of them opening into and guarding the town, that of Saint-Denis being the only other one of the size of this of Saint-Antoine; which was enlarged into the massive fortress known to us as the Bastille.

Of all the wretched memories of the accursed old prison, we shall awaken only one; that of Hugues 174 Aubriot, its builder and its first tenant. Made Provost of Paris by Charles V.—who, after his hapless experience with Marcel, when Dauphin, would have no more Provost of Merchants—Aubriot had many enemies among the guilds and among the clerics. He was frank and outspoken of speech, humane to the priest-despoiled and mob-harried Jews, for whom he had, like his royal master, toleration if not sympathy, and to whom he returned their children, caught and christened by force. So, on the very day of the burial of his royal master, in September, 1380, Aubriot was arrested for heresy, and soon sent to his own Bastille of Saint-Antoine, "pour faire pénitence perpétuelle, au pain de tristesse, et à l'eau de douleur." The Church sentence gives a poetic touch to prosaic bread and water. Aubriot fed only a short time on these delicacies, for he was rescued by the mob that, for the moment, idolized him, and led in triumph to his home. That home, from which he speedily fled out of Paris in terror of his rescuers, was given by Charles V. to this good servant, and we may stop, just here, to look on what is left of it.

Under an arch at No. 102 Rue Saint-Antoine, we enter Passage Charlemagne, and go through an outer into an inner court. In its northwestern corner is a tower containing an old-time spiral staircase. This is the only visible vestige of the palace of the Provost of Paris, its unseen portions being buried under, or incorporated with, the structures of the Lycée Charlemagne, just behind us toward the east. The boundary railing, between this college and the Church 175 of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, is exactly on the line of Philippe-Auguste's wall. From the inner or city side of that wall, the provost's palace, with its grounds, stretched to Rue Prévôt, then Rue Percée; that name still legible in the carved lettering on its corner with 176 Rue Charlemagne. In that street, behind us as we stand here, is the southern entrance of his grounds, whose northern line was on Rue Saint-Antoine. This tower before us has been sadly modernized and newly painted, but its fabric is intact, with its original, square, wide-silled openings at each of the three landing-places of the old staircase. These openings are within a tall, slender arch, a timid attempt at the ogival, whose bolder growth we shall see presently in the Hôtel de Sens.

Above this arch a superimposed story, its window cut in line with the others below, has taken the place of the battlements. On either side the tower joins a building obviously later than it in date, although it has been claimed that all three structures are fifteenth-century work. The high arch and the other decorations of the tower are undoubtedly of that time, but they are, as undoubtedly, applied over the small stones of a much more ancient fabric. This conviction is reinforced by the sentiment that makes us see Charles the Wise come into this court, with his good Aubriot, enter that low door, and climb that staircase, looking out through those windows as he mounts. In the year of that King's death there was born a future owner of this tower and its palace. This was Pierre de Giac, a charming specimen of the gang that helped John of Burgundy and Louis of Orleans in their ruin of France—the only job in which they were ever at one. Pierre de Giac, after betraying both sides, fell into the strong clutch of the Duke of Richmond, by whom, after torture, he was tied in a bag and flung into the Seine. His crony, 177 Louis d'Orléans, had possession of this property in the closing years of the fourteenth century, when he instituted the order of the Porc-Épic in honor of the baptism of his eldest son, Charles the Poet. The family emblem which gave its name to this order, gave it also to this hôtel, to which it still clings.

Going back to Place de la Bastille, on our map, we may follow the course of the new town wall along the curve of the inner boulevards, to Porte Saint-Denis; whence it took a straight southwesterly course, parallel with present Rue Aboukir, through Place des Victoires and the Bank of France, and diagonally across the gardens of the Palais-Royal, to the gate of Saint-Honoré, nearly in the centre of our Place du Théatre-Français. It was this gate and its protecting works that were pounded by the "canons et coulevrines" of Joan of Arc, and it was this portion of the wall which was assaulted by her at the head of her men; an assault that would have succeeded, and so have given Paris to the French, had she not been struck down by a crossbow bolt, so striking panic to her followers. When you post your letters in the outside southern box of the Post-office on the corner of Avenue de l'Opéra and Place du Théâtre-Français, or when you look in at the incubating chickens in the shop window alongside, you are standing, as near as may be, on the spot where she fell wounded on September 8, 1429. Her tent was pitched, and her head-quarters fixed, on the outer slope of the Butte des Moulins, a few feet north of where now stands the apse of the Church of Saint-Roch. From 178 Porte Saint-Honoré, the wall went direct, across present Place du Carrousel, to the round Tour de Bois on the river-shore, and from that tower a chain was swung slantwise up-stream to the Tour de Nesle on the southern bank.

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

Within the enceinte thus made, our Marais was at length entirely enclosed; away from its river-front, bordered by abbeys and monasteries; through its streets, 179 walled off by palaces and mansions; and its other streets, packed with modest dwellings and shops; far back to the gardens and the vineyards, and the waste fields not yet tilled, that spread all around the inner zone of the wall. Within it, too, was brought the vast domain of the Templars, covering the space from this outer wall away south to Rue de la Verrerie, and between Rues du Temple and Vieille-du-Temple. It was partly under cultivation, partly left wild to forest and bog, this portion being known as the Marais du Temple. Farther north were the buildings—palaces, priories, chapels—all secure within their own crenellated wall, all commanded and defended by the moated and towered citadel known as the Temple.

The order had been founded early in crusading days, in the beginning of the twelfth century, by nine French gentlemen and knights, who, clad in white robes marked with a red cross, devoted themselves to the service and the safety of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Louis VII. gave them this waste land late in the same century. The small godly body, vowed to poverty and humility, grew large in numbers and appetite, great in wealth and pride. Its knights were equal with princes, its monks were bankers for kings, and all had become simply a gang of sanctimonious brigands. A Capet saw the birth of the order, a Capet thought it time to strangle it as it neared its two-hundredth birthday. Philippe IV., "le Bel," less solicitous for the genuine faith than for the good coin of the Templars, laid hands on them and on it. He got rid of them by axe and stake and in 180 other ways approved of in that day, and parcelled out their lands; through which streets were cut later, and building begun, when this new wall put them on its safe side.

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

Safely settled in his Hôtel Saint-Paul, within his own wall—Marcel quiet in his grave at last, the nobles curbed, the Jacquerie crushed—the young Dauphin, who had been weak and dissembling, and who was now grown, by long apprenticeship to his trade of royalty, into the strong, prudent, politic Charles V., known in history as Charles the Wise, made proclamation, on his accession in 1364, that this—"l'hôtel solennel des grands ébastements"—should be henceforth the royal residence. In the old Palace on the Island was held the official court; the Louvre, partly rebuilt and brightened by him, was kept for the occasional "séjour, souper, et gîte" of roving royalty. Here in "Saint-Pol" was his home, from whose windows he looked out, with keen, patient, far-sighted vision, over the Paris and the France he had quelled and tranquillized. 181

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

While in Paris, this was his abode, and here he was left, almost a prisoner to unconcerned servants, by his shameless wife, Isabeau de Bavière. When she saw him, once in a way, he looked on her with unknowing eyes, or with knowing eyes of horror. His only companion was the low-born Odette de Champdivers, and with her he played the cards that untrue tradition claims to have been invented for him. He prowled about these halls, in filthy rags, eaten by ulcers and vermin, gnawing his food with canine greed; he ranged through these grounds, finding fellowship with the animals that were not let loose, but kept in cages. You may hunt up the stone walls of those cages—originally 182 on pointed arches with short Romanesque pillars—and the stone foundations of the royal stables, in the yards on the southern side of Rue des Lions; a street whose name tells of these menageries, and that seems to echo with their roarings. The alleyway of cherry-trees now makes Rue de la Cerisaie, and Rue Beautreillis replaces the green tunnels of vines on trellises, where were gathered the grapes—good as are those of Thomery to-day—which produced the esteemed vin de l'hôtel Saint-Paul. Along the farther edge of its grounds, just under the old wall, ran the lane that is now Rue des Jardins; and Rue Charles V. keeps alive the memory of the founder of Saint-Paul. In all these streets, we are treading on the ground he loved.

After the wretched mad king died here in 1422, royalty came no more to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and the place ran to waste. It was no home for the new Dauphin, come to his kingdom as Charles VII., by the grace of Joan of Arc and of God. His boyish memories were of a dreary childhood, between a mad father, a devilish mother who had hated him from his birth, and princely relatives raging and wrestling over those two for the power to misgovern France. Outside the royal madhouse, Paris was a butcher-shop. Burgundians and Armagnacs were howling crazy war-cries in every street, ambuscading and assassinating at every corner, equally thirsty for blood, but both surpassed in that thirst by the butchers and horse-knackers, led by Jean Caboche and called Cabochians. All these factions, while intent solely on bloodshed, were loud-mouthed 183 with loyalty and patriotism. They were all alike, and we may transfer to them and to their times the apt phrase of Joseph de Maistre, concerning the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew: "Quelques scélérats firent périr quelques scélérats." Almost every leader of men in those days came to his end by arms and in arms, and death by violence seemed the natural death. The town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black-death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came marching on; the while la danse Macabre whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries.

On the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Hôtel Saint-Paul, stretched the grounds of the old hôtel of Pierre d'Orgemont, Bishop of Paris. This property had come to the crown by purchase or by gift, and had been partly torn down, rebuilt, and its grounds greatly enlarged, to make a maison-de-plaisance for Charles VI. The principal building had so many and such various shaped towers and turrets that it was named the Palais des Tournelles. Viewed from a distant height, as from the tower of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo, it had the look of a set of giant chessmen. This was the place selected by the Duke of Bedford for his residence during the English occupation of Paris; and from here, after the death of his brother Henry V. of England—and heir of France, as was then claimed—he reigned as Regent for the little Henry VI. He 184 enlarged the buildings and beautified the grounds, in which he kept many rare birds. He kept, too, the rare manuscripts brought together by Charles V. in the Louvre; and after his death in Rouen—where he had helped burn The Maid—this library was carried to England, when the English departed from France. It was ransomed with coin, and brought back to Paris, by the two grandsons of its original owner—Charles of Orleans, and his brother of Angoulême, and became the nucleus of the Royal, now the National Library.

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

During this first short stay of three weeks, the listless and sluggish young King grew as fond as had been the Duke of Bedford of the walled-in grounds of the Tournelles. They were very extensive, covering 185 the space bounded by present Rues Saint-Antoine, Saint-Gilles, Turenne, and Boulevard Beaumarchais. Within this vast enclosure were many buildings and outbuildings, and in the words of Sauval: "Ce n'étoit que galeries et jardins de tous côtés, sans parler des chapelles."

And henceforth, for more than a hundred years, the Tournelles, "pour la beauté et commodité du dit lieu," was the favored abode of royalty, when royalty favored Paris with infrequent visits. The sombre shapes of Louis XI. and his ignoble comrades darkened its precincts, at times. When he made his entry, already narrated, into the town after his coronation at Rheims, he passed the night of August 31, 1461, in the old Island-Palace, and on the following day he installed himself in "son hôtel des Tournelles, près la Bastille de Saint-Antoine." Here he received, in September, 1467, a visit from his second wife, Charlotte de Savoie, who came up the river from Rouen. She was met, below the Island, by a boatful of choristers, who "sang psalms and anthems after a most heavenly and melodious manner." She landed on the Island, performed her devotions at Notre-Dame, and took boat to the water-gate of Quai des Célestins opposite, and thence made her way on a white palfrey to the Tournelles. The King's physician, Dr. Coictier—most skilled in bleeding, in all possible ways, his royal patient—had an astrological tower in the grounds, and in the centre was a maze named "Le Jardin Dædalus." About these grounds Louis prowled, seldom going beyond them, and then only by night, and 186 with one trusted gossip. Indeed, he was less like the King of France here in his palace than anywhere else; camping rather than residing, with a small retinue of old Brabant servitors, and a larder filled mostly with cold victuals, says Michelet. It was Loches occasionally, and Plessis-les-Tours habitually, that had the pleasure of harboring the "universal spider"; in them both he spun his webs, and waited gloating, and found "many cockroaches under the King's hearthstone," as the saying went. And at last he died, triumphant and wretched, at Plessis-les-Tours.

"Le Petit Roi," Charles VIII., hardly knew Paris; and when he entered the town on February 8, 1492, with his young wife, Anne of Brittany, who had been crowned at Saint-Denis the day before, the populace was not agreeably impressed by his short stature, his bad figure, his heavy head, his big nose, his thick lips always open, and his great, blank, staring eyes. He was in curious contrast with the bride—pretty, sprightly, vivacious, and "very knowing," wrote home the Venetian Ambassador, Zaccaria Contarini. The gentle, weakly King—so strange a scion of Louis XI.—made his home in Touraine. On the terrace of Amboise, where he was born, we all know the little door, leading to the old Haquelebac Gallery, against which he struck his head as he started down to look on a game of tennis. There, on April 7, 1498, in a sordid and filthy chamber, a remnant of the old château he was just then rebuilding, he lay for hours until his death, so carrying out the curse of Savonarola, who had threatened him 187 with the anger of God, if he failed to return to Italy with his army to cleanse the unclean Church with the sword.

"Le bon Roi Louis, Père du Peuple, est mort," is the doleful pronouncement of the crieurs du corps, starting out from the Tournelles before dawn of New Year's day, 1515. The kindly old fellow has died in the night, a martyr to a young wife and to her fashionable hours. All his life long, Louis had been subject to the fancies of women, to his undoing. We meet him first, the young and ardent Duc d'Orléans, the best horseman and swordsman in the court, riding out from Plessis with the brave Dunois—both grandsons, with different bars, of the murdered Louis d'Orléans—to snatch the girl Isabelle from the escort of Quentin Durward. The duke has already taken the eye of the capable Anne, eldest daughter of Louis XI., as Brantôme is quick to note. Getting no return for her passion, the fury of a woman scorned, backed by her father's malign humor, marries the handsome prince to her younger sister, Jeanne—ugly and deformed and uncharming. Freed by divorce from this childless union, on taking the throne, Louis hastens to marry his former flame, Anne of Brittany, now the widow of Charles VIII. This lady, fair in person and fairer in her duchy, lively and not unlearned, a blameless yet imperious spouse, gave him many happy years. The personal court he allowed "sa Bretonne" outshone his own court, and glorified the gloomy Tournelles. For all his clinging to her, she was taken from him when only thirty-seven years of 188 age; refusing to live, when she found, for the first time, that her self-will was not allowed its own way. She would have her daughter, Claude, marry Charles of Austria, Emperor-to-be, and the powers in France would not have it, because they were unwilling that Brittany should go, with its heiress, into foreign hands. A marriage was arranged between Claude and the young Duc d'Angoulême, who was to become François I., so keeping the rich duchy for France. After Anne's death, her widower made a third venture, and yet, the chronicler plaintively assures us, he had no need of a new wife. This was Mary, sister of Henry VIII. of England, who was glad to get her out of his country; and she was as glad to return as soon as, on finding herself a widow, she could become the wife of her first love, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. And so these two were the grandparents of Lady Jane Grey.

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

Montaigne owns that his dinner-hour of eleven in the morning was unduly late, but then his supper came correspondingly late, never before, and often after, six of the evening. Henri IV. dined at the same belated hour, while François I. could not wait later than nine 189 o'clock. Once installed in the Tournelles, this young English bride of Louis's must needs, among other innovations, introduce her own country's customs into her husband's mode of life, as we are told in "la très joyeuse et plaisante histoire" of the "Loyal Serviteur," of Bayard: "His wife changed all his manner of living; he had been wont to dine at eight, and he now dined at mid-day; he had been wont to go to bed at six in the evening, and he now went to bed at midnight." Moreover, she beguiled him into supping late and heavily. So these changes, and other changes in his habits, brought him to his grave, six weeks after his marriage. His Parisians gathered in Rue Saint-Antoine, about the entrance of the Tournelles, in honest sorrow for the loss of the big and benevolent old boy, whom they looked on and loved as the Father of his People; indeed "one of the people," says Michelet, "without the soul of a king."

The Tournelles blazed out bravely for François I., the while the Hôtel Saint-Paul found itself cut up and sold off in lots by him; the two cases showing his way, all through life, of raising money by any means, squeezing his subjects, starting France's national debt as he did, all because of his puerile ambitions, his shallow levity, his selfish waste. He did his best to justify Louis XII.'s shrewd prophecy for him: "Ce grand gars-là gâtera tout." Recalling, one needy day, that he owned Saint-Paul, "un grand hôtel, fort vague et ruineux," he soon got rid of the buildings and the land for coin, reserving one large tract, along the eastern 190 side under the wall, for the erection of an arsenal. And so, with streets cut through the old domain, no trace was left of Charles V.'s "hôtel solennel des grands ébastements." As for the Tournelles, its new master's fondness for all showy gimcrackery adorned it with furniture and fittings, and notably with the tapestries turned out so sumptuously from the factory at Tours, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, that they came into vogue for decoration, in place of wall-paintings. No need to say that the table at the Tournelles was profuse and its court resplendent. There had been few women in the court before now, and it was a garden without pretty flowers, as Brantôme puts it. Anne of Brittany had brightened it a bit for Brantôme with some few dames et demoiselles, but François crowded it with fair women, who brought music and dancing and flirting. This big and brutal dilettante—study his face in the countless portraits in the Louvre and at Azay-le-Rideau—gave little of his time to the Tournelles, however. Setting Pierre Lescot at work on the lovely western wing of his new Louvre, he rushed over the land, building and beautifying at Saint-Germain, Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Blois, Chambord, posing always as the patron and prodrome of the Renaissance in France. At least, he could say truly of himself, "On verra qu'il y a un roi en France;" but besides the throne and his pet foolishnesses, he handed down nothing worth owning to his son—that Henri II. of heavy fist and light brain, slow of thought and of speech, cold, uncongenial, commonplace. 191 Yet the Tournelles was a cheerful home for him and for his official family, when he could get away from the exclusive holding of Diana of Poictiers and her family. His youngest daughter, Marguerite de France, has sketched, in her "Mémoires," a most winning picture of the place and of herself, a lovely maid of seven, playing about the garden or sitting on her father's knee, helping him select a suitor for her, from among the young swells at the court. That scene took place only a few days before his death.

To the Tournelles comes François Rabelais, in the "Contes Drôlatiques" of Balzac, and gives to King and court that delicious sermon, worthy of Rabelais himself. He has come along Rue Saint-Antoine from his home in Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, a rural lane then, just outside Philippe-Auguste's wall, on the extreme edge of the gardens of Saint-Paul. In that paved and built-up street of to-day none of us can fix on the site of his house, and the tablet on its corner, of Quai des Célestins, tells us only that Rabelais died in a house in this street on April 9, 1553. Charles Nodier, starting out from his Librarian's rooms in the Arsenal Library, on his endless prowls about old Paris, always stopped and took off his hat in front of No. 8 of Rue des Jardins, in honor of the great French humorist. Ignorant of his reason for the selection of this site, we may be content, in imitation of this charming flâneur, to stand uncovered there, before or near the last dwelling of "le savant et ingénieux rieur," whose birthplace and whose statue at Chinon are worth a journey 192 to see; where, too, the local wine will be found as delicate and as individual as when, sold by the elder Rabelais in the fourteenth century, it made the money that sent his famous son to the great schools of the capital. That son closed his life of congenial vagabondage, and of many métiers, in this sedate country road, where he had passed three blameless years, two of them as curé of Meudon, resigning that position in 1552. He was buried in the cemetery of old Saint-Paul, to which we shall find our way later. Modern Paris has doubtless built itself over the grave, as it certainly has over the last dwelling-place, of the narrator of the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel and the creator of Panurge.

The famous lists of the Tournelles extended along the southern edge of its grounds, just beyond the present northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, Rue de Birague being cut through almost their middle line. For more than a hundred years they had been the scene of many a tournament, and not one of them had been so crowded or so brilliant as that which began on June 28, 1559. The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, made in the previous April with England and Spain, was to be celebrated, and there were to be rejoicings over the recent marriage of Henry's sister, Marguerite, with the Duc de Savoie, and of his eldest daughter, Isabelle, with Philip II. of Spain. This girlish third wife of the Spanish King was the heroine of the Don Carlos affair, which has made so many dramas. To rejoice in royal fashion in those days, men must needs 193 fight and ladies must look on. So it came that the King, proud of having shown himself "a sturdy and skilful cavalier" during the two days' tilting, insisted on running a course with Montgomery of the Scottish Guard, whose broken lance pierced Henri's visor through the eye into the brain. He lay unconscious in the Tournelles for eleven days, and there he died on July 10, 1559.

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

On his Pont-Neuf sits Henri IV. on his horse, and every Frenchman looks up as he passes, with almost the same emotion felt by the Frenchmen of Voltaire's day, at the effigy of the most essentially French of all French kings. The statue faces "the symmetrical structures of stone and brick," planned by him for his Place Dauphine, in honor of the birth of his son. They 194 are hardly altered since their construction by his good friend Achille de Harlay, President of Parliament, whose name is retained in the street behind the place and in front of the Palace of Justice. The King looks out, a genial grin between his big, ugly, Gascon-Bourbon nose and his pushing chin, over his beloved Paris, well worth the mass he gave for it; for, from the day he got control, it grew in form and comeliness for him. His kindly, quizzical eyes seem to see, over the Island and the river, his own old Marais, the quarter which held the hôtel of his menus plaisirs, and which it was his greater pleasure to rebuild and make beautiful. And "la perle du Marais"—his Place Royale—deserves his unchanging regard, almost unchanged as it is, since he planned it and since its completion, which he never saw. It is the grand tangible monument he has left to Paris, and speaks of him as does nothing else in the town.

When he came into his capital on March 22, 1594, he found the enclosure of the Tournelles en friche. Within a few days he gave a piece of it, holding an old house, that fronted on Rue Saint-Antoine, to his good Rosny, whom he made Duc de Sully a little later. This Maximilien de Béthune had been the most faithful helper of Henri de Navarre and he continued to be the most faithful servant of Henri IV. He had many homely virtues, rare in those days, rare in any days. He was courageous, honest, laborious; he did long and loyal service to the State; he worked almost a miracle for the finances of the kingdom, carrying his economies 195 into every detail, even to the ordering of costumes in black, to spare the expense of the richly colored robes in vogue. A vigilant watch-dog, he was surly and snappish withal, and he had a greedy grip on all stray bones that fell fairly in his way. His wealth and power grew with his chances. He seems to have put something of himself into his hôtel, which faces us at No. 143 Rue Saint-Antoine. It bears on its lordly front an honesty of intention that is almost haughty, with a certain self-sufficiency that shows a lack of humor; all most characteristic of the man. Neither he nor his abode appeals to our affections, howsoever they may compel our respect.

Having got this well-earned gift of land from the King, he cleared away the old buildings upon it, and erected this superb structure. His architect was doubtless Jean du Cerceau, for the heaviness of his early work is apparent in these walls, but their owner evidently enforced his personal tastes on them. The façade, on the shapely court, has its own touch of distinction, dashed by the touch of pomposity that dictated, to the four secretaries employed on his memoirs, his stock phrase, "Such was Sully!" This front is over-elaborate. The main body and the two wings—which are a trifle too long and too large, and so crowd and choke that main body—are all heavily sculptured. On every side, stone genii bear arms, stone women pose as the seasons and the elements, stone masks and foliage, whose carving is finer than the sculpture, crowd about the richly chiselled windows. Yet those windows look down on the 196 court in a most commanding way; and the fabric, behind all its floridness, shows a power in the rectitude of its lines that must needs be acknowledged.

The garish windows of the restaurant on the ground floor glare intrusively out on the old-time court, and a discordant note is struck by the signs, all about its doorways, of the new-fangled industries within—a water-cure, a boxing-school, a gymnasium. School-boys play noisily in this court, and, in the garden behind, 197 schoolgirls take the air demurely. To reach their garden, we pass through a spacious hall, along one side of which mounts a wide, substantial staircase, its ceiling overloaded with panels and mouldings. Set in a niche in the garden-wall is a bust of the Duke of Sully. This garden façade is in severer taste than that of the front court, its wings are less obtrusive, and its whole effect is admirable. The little garden once made one with the garden of the Hôtel de Chaulnes behind, that faced the Place Royale, to which Sully thus had entrance. That entrance may be found through the two small doors of No. 7, Place des Vosges, and behind that building is Sully's orangerie, in perfect preservation.

Having handsomely requited his servant and comrade, the King began, in the very centre of the Tournelles, a great square with surrounding structures. As soon as one of his pavilions was sufficiently finished, he installed in it a colony of two hundred Italians, brought to France for that purpose, skilled weavers and workers of silks shot with silver and with gold, such as made Milan famous. And to this man alone—who was, said a memorial of his Chamber of Commerce, pleading for the planting of the mulberry, "nearly divine, never promising without performing, never starting without finishing;" and who issued edicts for that planting, in spite of Sully's opposition—does France owe her mulberry plantations and her silkworms, as Voltaire truly points out. It is commonly asserted that his "mason," for these constructions 198 of the Place Royale, was Androuët du Cerceau, whose name is claimed for many buildings that would make his working-life last for a century and more. This Jacques Androuët was so renowned in his day, that much of the architecture of his sons and his grandson was then, and is still, set down to him. That stern old Huguenot, born in 1515, went from Paris along with the dwellers in "Little Geneva," and is last heard of, still in exile, as late as 1584. Perhaps his son Baptiste joined him in 1585, when his convictions drove him, too, from the court and the capital, as has been told in the chapter, "The Scholars' Quarter." Baptiste came back to serve Henri IV. and Louis XIII., and trained his son Jean in his trade. For much of the work of this busy Jean his grandfather has the credit, as well as for other work done by Jean's uncle Jacques, second of that name. The Pont-Neuf is always ascribed to the great Androuët, who never saw one of its stones in place. That bridge was begun by his son Baptiste in 1578, and finished by his grandson Jean in 1607. He it was, if it were any du Cerceau, who planned and began the Place Royale.

We are fortunate in that we may see one example of the style of the founder of this notable family, in the massive structure at No. 212 Rue Saint-Antoine, its side walls extending along Rue du Petit-Musc. This street took its title from one of the numerous small hôtels that made up the grand Hôtel Saint-Paul; and on its foundations—still buried beneath these 199 stones—was erected the present structure by Androuët du Cerceau. It is the only entire specimen of his work in Paris, and we may believe that he had done better work than this, albeit it carries the authority of the old Huguenot. He began it for Diane de Poictiers, and it was finished for an owner as heavy and as stolid as its walls. This was Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Mayenne, the eldest, the least brilliant, the most honest, of the famous brothers of Guise. As Lieutenant-General of the League, he led its troops to the defeats of Arques and Ivry. When Henri de Navarre became Henri IV. of France, the only punishment he inflicted on his fat opponent was to walk him, at a killing pace, about the grounds of Monceaux, while listening to his protests of future submission: "I will be to you, all my life long, a loyal subject and faithful servant. I will never fail you nor desert you." So promised Mayenne, and he kept his word. He lived here in this mansion, through sixteen years of honorable employment in the Council of State, surviving Henry only a few months, and dying in his bed, in pain and with patience. His house, once one of the noisy hatching-places of the Holy League, is now a noisy school for boys. Its well-set cornice has been mangled by the cutting through it of the dormer windows, its grand staircase has been degraded, its court, stern from du Cerceau's hand, has grown sullen, and its great gardens are built over, all along Rue du Petit-Musc.

In accordance with the King's scheme for his Place Royale, its eastern side was first built up at the crown's 200 expense. The other sides were divided into lots of similar size, and leased to men of the court, of family, and of finance, on condition that they should begin to build at once, each after the original plans. With this stipulation, and an agreement to occupy their dwellings when finished, and to pay a yearly rental of one crown of gold, they and their heirs forever were given possession of these lots, as stated in the royal patent registered on August 5, 1605. Thirty-six structures were planned for these private dwellings, the two central pavilions on the northern and southern sides being reserved for royalty; so that thirty-six crowns were to come in as the entire annual revenue from the Place Royale; not an exorbitant rental, since the écu de la couronne of that day was worth from seven to ten francs. Thus began that historic square, and thus vanished, from off the face of the earth, the last trace of the historic Tournelles.

Henry was more eager to hurry on the constructions than were his tenants; only a few of whom, indeed, completed and occupied their houses. There were other delays in building, not to be overcome by his almost daily visits to the spot when in town, and by his appealing letters from Fontainebleau to Sully, urging him to "go and see" if the work were being pushed on. But it was still unfinished, when Ravaillac's knife cut off all his plans. This plan, however, was carried out by Marie de' Medici, who had made herself Queen-Regent by lavish payments and promises. Her memories of the style of Northern Italy influenced details 201 of the new constructions, which were so far finished in 1615 as to serve for the scene of the festivities, planned by her as an expression of the joy that the Parisians did not know they felt. The occasion was the marriage of her son, the fourteen-year-old Louis XIII., with Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III. of Spain; and of her daughter, Isabelle, with the Spanish Infante, afterward Philip IV. That was a great day for the Place Royale. For this function its still uncompleted portions were hid by scaffoldings, and all its fronts were draped with hangings and festooned with flowers. One hundred thousand guests swarmed to see the childish mummery of bearded men pranking as nymphs, the circus antics of ballets de chevaux by day, and the fireworks by night.

This first public appearance of the place was, also, the last public appearance of the Queen-Regent. There can be woven no romance about this woman; fat and foolish, copious of emotion, impulsive of speech. The pencil of Rubens cannot give grace to her affluent curves, and her husband's strength could not stand against her "terribly robust" arms, working briskly when she raged. Whatever may be our summing-up of this man's morality, we must set down, to the credit of his account, his hard case with the two women to whom fate had married him, each so trying after her own fashion. Of sterner stuff than he, so far as that sex goes, was Richelieu, the new ruler of the young King Louis XIII. He would bear no more of Marie's meddling and muddling, and sent her into exile in 202 1617. These two died in the same year, 1642, she in poverty and neglect at Cologne, after having so long been "tossed to and fro by the various fortunes of her life," says English Evelyn; who, travelling on the Continent, notes the "universal discontent which accompanied that unlucky woman, wherever she went."

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

We have already come here, under the guidance of Dumas, to witness one famous duel in the time of Henri III. This spot had retained its vogue for the 203 aristocratic pastime, in spite of the repeated edicts and the relentless punishments of Richelieu, under royal sanction and signature. Fair women hung over the infrequent balconies, or peeped from the windows, to view these duels and to applaud the duellists. A keener interest was given to the probability of the death on the ground of one combatant, by the certainty of the axe or the rope of the public executioner for the survivor.

Windows and balconies are deserted now; there is no clash of steel in the square, whose silence is in striking contrast with the sordid strife of neighboring Rue Saint-Antoine; and these stately mansions, dignified in their unimpaired old age, seem to await in patience the return of their noble occupants. There has been no change in them since, on their completion in 1630, they were regarded as the grandest in all Paris, and there is hardly any change in their surroundings. The commonplace iron railings of the square, put there at the same time with the fountains, by Louis-Philippe, were the cause of hot protest by Hugo and other residents of the quarter, who mourned the loss of the artistic rails and gateway of seventeenth-century fabrication. And Rue des Vosges has been cut through into the northern side of the square, making a thoroughfare to Boulevard Beaumarchais, such as was not planned originally. That plan provided for approach to the place only by the two streets under the two central pavilions, north and south, now named Béarn and Birague. Those two pavilions, higher than the others, were set apart 204 for the King and Queen; and over the central window of the southern one, the King, in medallion, looks down. The stately fronts of red brick—new to Paris then—edged with light freestone, and the steep roofs of leaded blue slate, broken by great dormers reminiscent of Renaissance windows, are time-stained to a delicate tricolor; and it pleases us to fancy the first Bourbon King unconsciously anticipating the flag of the French Republic in the colors of his Place Royale.

These tall windows, opening from floor to ceiling, were a novelty to the Parisians of that day, the fashion having only just then been set in the new Hôtel Rambouillet. Behind them, the spacious blue and yellow salons were hung with Italian velvets, or with Flemish and French tapestries, interspaced with Venetian mirrors. Lebrun and his like decorated the ceilings later, and the cornices were heavily carved, and the furniture was in keeping with its surroundings. The arcades of brick, picked out with stone ribs—a trifle too low and heavy, it may be, for their symmetry with the otherwise perfect proportions of these façades—were imitated from those of Italy, to serve for shelter from sun, and for refuge from rain, to the strollers who thronged them for over a century. To tell over their names, one has merely to look down the list of the men who made themselves talked about, through the whole of Louis XIII.'s and almost to the close of Louis XIV.'s reign. Then there were the women, lovely or witty or wicked, and those others, "entre deux âges," 205 for whom the Marais was noted. The creations of comedy are here, too, and Molière's Mascarille and le Menteur of Corneille are as alive as their creators, under these arcades.

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

Go up Rue de Beauce, narrowest of Marais streets between its old house- and garden-walls, and you come to the passage that leads to the Marché des Enfants-Rouges, 206 the market and its surrounding space taking the greater part of the site, and keeping alive the name, of the admirable charity for children originated by the good Marguerite de Navarre, sister of François I., and by him endowed at her urging. The little orphans cared for in this institution were clad all in red, and their pet popular name of "Enfants Rouges" soon took the place of the official title of "Enfants de Dieu." On the corner of this passage, you must stop to choose the abode of Mlle. de Scudéry from one of the two ancient houses there, for it is certain that she lived in one of these two, with a side door in the passage; and local legend and topographic research have failed to fix on the true one. She has told us that it stood alongside the Templars' grounds, in the midst of gardens and orchards tuneful with birds, so that the lower end of the street was called Rue des Oiseaux; and we find this narrow passage, since then close shut in with houses, still tuneful to-day, but the birds are kept in cages.

In this house Madeleine de Scudéry wrote her long and weary romance, "Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus," the most widely read and the most successful book of the day, from the money point of view. With this money she paid the debts of her brother, Georges, a dashing spendthrift with showy tastes; one of those chivalric souls, too fine to work, but not too fine to sponge on his sister and to take pay for, and put his name to, work done by her pen. Here she carried on the old business of the Hôtel Rambouillet, where she 207 had served her apprenticeship before starting out for herself, and where she had produced the poem by which she won her nom de Parnasse, "Sapho." Here she was promoted to be the Tenth Muse, and sat enthroned amid her admirers, who trooped in from all about the Marais, on every Saturday for more than thirty years. As to the causerie littéraire et galante of these reunions, we learn all about it, and laugh at it, in Pellisson's "Chronique du Samedi." It is impossible to burlesque it; Molière himself could not do it. He has taken entire sentences concerning the education of woman from the "Grand Cyrus," and put them into his "Femmes Savantes"; and it is simply a portrait that he drew of Madelon, as she sat in this salon a year or so before he put her on the stage, awaiting the gifted authors of "La Carte du Royaume des Précieuses." And Mascarille's fatuous swagger and strident voice—as he walks the boards in Coquelin's skin—seem to come straight and uncaricatured from Pellisson's pages. When the valet's voice, quavering with complacency, shakes our midriff with his pronouncement: "We attach ourselves only to madrigals," he is making a direct quotation from the "Chronique."

Mlle. de Scudéry, while a précieuse herself, was too genuine and talented and good-hearted a woman to be ridiculous. She is really an admirable example of the writing-woman of the seventeenth century, a female Mignard in her pen-portraits. Dr. Martin Lister came to pay his respects to the Tenth Muse, in this little house in 1698, and found her over ninety years 208 old, toothless, and still talking! One might wish to have been present at this meeting, but may be content with looking on the walls that harbored a worthy woman and her queer crowd of adorers.

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

Many of the new mansions of the bourgeoisie were in Marais streets that were still walled off by the shut-in grounds of the religious bodies, whose unproductive dwellers avoided all taxation. "You see, formerly, 209 there were monasteries all about here," says light-hearted Laigle in "Les Misérables"; "Du Breul and Sauval give the list of them and the Abbé Lebeuf. They were all around here; they swarmed; the shod, the unshod, the shaven, the bearded, the blacks, the grays, the whites, the Franciscans, the Minimi, the Capuchins, the Carmelites, the Lesser Augustins, the Greater Augustins, the Old Augustins. They littered." These belated owls, blinking in the new sunlight and fresher air, had now to find other dark walls for their flapping. The zone of abbeys, stretching from the Bastille to the Louvre, began to be cut into, and the grounds of the great hôtels of the noblemen came into the market as well. There had been hardly any opening-up of this quarter, from the day when Charles V. ended his wall, to the day when Henri IV. began his Place Royale. He had planned, also, a monumental square at the top of the Templars' domain, to be called Place de France, with a grandiose entrance, from which eight wide streets, bearing the names of the great provinces of France, were to radiate, to be crossed by smaller streets named from the lesser provinces. For this scheme Sully had bought up, under cover of a broker, an immense tract in this region, just as the King's death put a sudden end to this project, along with all his other projects.

One man did much to make real the plan that had been put on paper only. This was Claude Charlot, a Languedoc peasant, who had come to the capital in wooden sabots, with no money, but with plenty of 210 shrewdness and audacity. By 1618 he had managed to acquire almost the entire tract set aside by Sully, and through it he cut streets, the principal one of which is called after him, while, of those called after the provinces, some still keep their names and some have been renamed.

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

Of these mansions, a surprising proportion is still standing, given up to business-houses, factories, and schools; for all of which uses their capacious rooms readily lend themselves. Within these old walls, face to face with the bustling streets, shouldered by structures of yesterday, or in dignified withdrawal behind their courts, can be found actual treasures of decoration and of carving, along with invisible and intangible treasures of association. For the aspect of a street, or 211 the atmosphere of a house, tells to the intelligent looker-on as much of its bygone inmates as of its bare masonry. And kindly fate has left such relics plentifully scattered about the Marais. In oldest Paris of the Island, and in that almost as old suburb on the southern bank, one must prowl patiently to find suggestive brick and stone. In those regions a concealed tower, or an isolated tourelle on the angle of a building, makes the whole joy of a day's journey. Here, in the Marais, at every step you stumble on history and tradition and romance.

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

The vogue of the Marais began to fade away with the middle years of the eighteenth century, when the old noblesse de famille adopted the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the new noblesse de finance migrated to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the gadding multitude sought the arcades of the Palais-Cardinal, renamed Palais-Royal. A few ancient families, poor and proud, remained to burrow in their ancestral homes, and retired pensioned officials and petits rentiers found 212 a boon in the small rentals of the big apartments. All these locataires, preserving the old forms and keeping untarnished the old etiquette, gave an air of dignified dulness to the Marais. Their dinner-hour was at five o'clock, and after that solemn function, held in the hall hung with family portraits or with dingy tapestry, their sedate prattle, before going to bed at nine o'clock, would touch on the unhallowed Edict of Nantes and on its righteous revocation; even as in a certain London club of to-day, musty old gentlemen still lament, with subdued dismay, "the murder of the Martyr, Charles Stuart." The sole diversion of these ancient dames of the Marais was a stroll in the Place Royale, arrayed in old-time costumes, their white hair dressed high above their patrician brows.

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

THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS

215

THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS

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

It is but a step away from this tablet above us, to 216 the corner of Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and Sévigné; the latter street, at that time, bearing its original name of Culture-Sainte-Catherine, having been opened through that portion under cultivation of the grounds of the great monastery of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers. On the corner of this new street and that of Francs-Bourgeois—then Rue Neuve-Sainte-Catherine—a piece of the convent garden was bought by Jacques de Ligneris, and thereon a house for his residence was erected. Its plans were drawn by Pierre Lescot, it was built by Jean Bullant, was decorated by Androuët du Cerceau, and its sculptures were carved by Jean Goujon. And thus these walls, on which we are looking, speak in mute laudation of four famous men. One more notable name may be added to this list—that of François Mansart. He was called in, a century or so after the completion of this mansion, for its renovation and enlargement; and, to his lasting honor, he contented himself with doing only what seemed to him to be imperatively demanded, and with attempting no "improvements" nor "restoration" of the work of his great predecessors. He knew what we have learned, that those words too often mean desecration and ruin to all historic monuments in all lands. During this interval, the building had come into the hands of Françoise de la Baume, Dame de Kernévalec, whose Breton name, corrupted to Carnavalet, has clung to it ever since. That name suggested the pun of the carnaval masks, carved in stone over the arches of the wings in the court. They were done by a later hand than that of 217 Goujon, whose last work is to be seen about that window of the Louvre, on which he was busy, when a bullet picked him off, a day or two after the night of Saint Bartholomew. The tranquil elegance of his chisel has adorned this almost perfect gateway with the graceful winged figure in its keystone. It lifts and lightens the severe dignity of the façade. And, in the court—its centre not unworthily held by the bronze statue of Louis XIV., remarkable in its exquisite details, found in the old Hôtel de Ville—we linger in joy before the graceful flowing curves and the daylight directness of the Seasons of this French Phidias. The figures on the wings are from a feebler chisel than his. Of all the crowding memories of this spot, those of the Marquise de Sévigné and of Jean Goujon are the most vivid and the most captivating. The busts of these two, one on either side, greet us at the head of the staircase leading to her apartments; she is alert and winsome, he is sedate and thoughtful and a trifle too stern for the most amiable of sculptors, as he shows himself here, rather than the staunch Huguenot, killed for his convictions.

She was fifty-one years of age by the records when she came to live here, in 1677, and half that age at heart, which she kept always young. She had been so long camping about in the Marais, that she was impatient to settle down in the ideal dwelling she had found, at last. She writes to her daughter: "Dieu merci, nous avons l'hôtel Carnavalet. C'est une affaire admirable; nous y tiendrons tous, et nous aurons le bel air. Comme on 218 ne peut pas tout avoir, il faut se passer des parquets, et des petites cheminées a la mode.... Pour moi, je vais vous ranger la Carnavalette, car, enfin, nous l'avons, et j'en suis fort aise."

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

Above all, this real woman showed a masculine strength and loyalty of friendship for men; showed it most markedly in her sympathy for those who had fallen in the world. There is no finer example in the annals of constancy than her devotion to the broken Fouquet, howbeit he may have merited breaking. The spirit of her letters, at the time of his disgrace and imprisonment, cannot be twisted into anything ignoble, as Napoleon 219 tried to do, on reading them in the State archives. He sneeringly suggested that her sympathy with Fouquet was "bien chaud, bien vif, bien tendre, pour de la simple amitié." So it was, indeed; for her friendships were attachments, and warmth and tenderness pulsate in all her letters; and these qualities will, along with their unpremeditated spontaneity, keep them alive as long as letters live. What else was in her letters has been told by Nodier, when he says that they regulated and purified the language for ordinary use; and by Jules Janin, who rightly claims that, from this Carnavalet, came the purest and most perfect French hitherto heard in France.

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

We may join the early-goers among these men, who make their way to another house, not far distant. There 220 are temptations to stop before, and explore within, the seventeenth-century mansions all along Rues Sévigné and du Parc-Royal, but we pass on into Rue Turenne—once Rue Saint-Louis, the longest and widest and foremost in fashion of Marais streets, now merely big and bustling, with little left of its ancient glory—until we come to its No. 58, on the corner of old Rue des Douze-Portes, now named Ville-Hardouin, after the contemporary chronicler of the Fifth Crusade. This modest house at the corner has been luckily overlooked by the modern rebuilder of this quarter, who has not touched its two stories and low attic above a ground floor, its unobtrusive portal, its narrow hall, and its staircase; small and quaint, in keeping with the cripple who was carried up and down for many years. Paul Scarron lived here, in the apartment au deuzième à droite, dubbed the "Hôtel de l'Impécuniosité" by his young wife, who was the granddaughter of the Calvinist leader, Agrippa d'Aubigné, and who was to be the second wife of Louis XIV. Sitting at her scantily supplied supper-table here, the maid would whisper that a course was lacking, and that an anecdote from the hostess must fill the bill of fare instead. Goldsmith tells us, at the beginning of his "Retaliation:"

And, just here, it is curious to recall the fact that Goldsmith was busied, during the last months of his life, on a translation of Scarron's "Roman Comique," and 221 his bethumbed copy was found on his desk, after his death.

Scarron was always poor and always importunate, and yet he was "a pleasant prodigy never before seen," he says of himself; rightfully claiming that he was able "to sport with misery and jest in pain." Paralyzed and still a prey to incurable torments, immovable in his armchair except for his nimble fingers, he drove his pen merrily to the making of comedies, tales, pamphlets, and the verse that, like him, was impishly awry with mockery, as if chattered by "a wilderness of monkeys." Letters, too, he wrote in this house, that give us striking glimpses of the man and of his time. In them we discover that "most terribly" was the sanctified slang then for the modern abomination "awfully." Appeals for money make up much of his correspondence, but there is never a hint of a loan in the charming letters to the "belle ange en deuil," Madame de Sévigné; in which he always assures her that she is a dangerous person, and that those who look on her without due care, grow sick upon it immediately, and are not long-lived. Mlle. de Lenclos was a favorite of his, too, and that "charmant objet, belle Ninon," came to sit for hours beside his invalid-chair. She made friends with the young wife, too, but complained that she was "trop gauche" to learn gallantry, and was "vertueuse par faiblesse." The large-minded lady frankly owns: "J'aurais voulu l'en guérir, mais elle craignait trop Dieu." For all that, the friendship then formed between the two women was never broken, and when the 222 widow Scarron came to position and power she offered a place at court to her elder friend; an offer that was refused, for the old lady never grew old enough to change her mode of life. And there is little doubt that the younger woman often looked back with longing to those wretched days that were so happy. She said once, seeing the carp dying of surfeit in the Versailles pond: "Elles regrettent leur bourbe," suggesting that, like them, she suffered from satiety.

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

Between fifty and one hundred years later—the exact date is not to be got at—the garret above was crowded with the pet dogs and cats and birds of Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, who lived in filth among them, seldom eating, never washing, always smoking. The big blond dramatist had fallen a victim to poverty and melancholy, after a short career of success on those boards which he stained with the blood of many violent deaths. He had said that, since Corneille had taken heaven for his own and Racine had seized upon earth, 223 he could place his scenes only in hell. He was rescued, and taken from this garret, by the pension obtained through La Pompadour. That great lady was not prompted by any comprehension of the sombre power of his tragedy, but by a desire to wreak her spite against Voltaire by the exaltation of a rival.

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

The line of walls along Rue des Tournelles was broken by only a few isolated houses, when François Mansart selected a site here, and put thereon his own dwelling, unpretending as the man himself, in contrast with the grand mansions he had planned for his noble and wealthy clients. This is his modest entrance-court, 224 at No. 28 Rue des Tournelles, and behind it is the simple façade of his hôtel. This building probably formed his entire frontage, or it may have been the corps-de-logis of a more extensive structure, whose two wings reached out toward the street at Nos. 26 and 30. This number 28, whether the central or the entire body of the building, remains in perfect preservation. At Mansart's death, in 1666, it came, along with most of his property, to his sister's son, whom he had adopted, and trained to be the architect known as Jules Hardouin Mansart. He gained position and pay in the royal employ, more by this adoptive name than by his abilities. As Superintendent of Buildings under Louis XIV. he is responsible for most of the horrors of the palace of Versailles, yet the dome of the Invalides proves him to have been capable of less meretricious work.

On taking possession of his uncle's mansion, he had, as sole tenant of his spacious and inviting first floor, Mlle. Anne Lenclos, popularly christened Ninon de Lenclos, then fifty years of age. Her dwelling is the end and object of this short walk, and together with the house from which we started, and the one at which we stopped, it gives us a complete picture of the social doings of the Marais at that period. We are allowed to enter among the men with whom we have come, and we will go in, let us say, with young de Sévigné, who finds his way here frequently, from his pied-à-terre in his mother's house, as his father and his grandfather had found their way to Ninon's abode. Under the stone 225 balcony on the court-front we step up into a goodly hall, from which rises a stone staircase, its outer end finely carved, its steps well worn by many visitors through the years. An admirable medallion looks down from the wall as we mount, and in the rooms above we find carved panels and decorated ceilings, many of them done by Lebrun and Mignard, probably for the fair tenant. They are so carefully kept that canvas covers such of them as are feared to be "trop lestes" for modern eyes, in the modest words of the ancient concierge. Mansart put an excellent façade on his garden-front, and its coupled Ionic columns, and balconies of wrought-iron railings, are all there unmutilated. But the garden, then stretching to Boulevard Beaumarchais, is now hidden under the shops that front on that boulevard.

To these rooms and this garden thronged the same men whom we have seen in the Sévigné and Scudéry salons, and these reunions were as decorous as those, and perhaps somewhat more cheerful and more natural in tone. For, while Ninon had the honor of being enrolled in the "Grand Dictionnaire des Précieuses," published in 1661, and while she had been presented at the Hôtel de Rambouillet at the early age of seventeen, she had none of the pretensions nor the ridiculosities of "Les Femmes Savantes." She was absolutely genuine, not ashamed to be natural, quite ready to laugh or to cry with her friends. These friends, drawn to her less by her beauty than by her charm, were held always by her sunny amiability, her quick sympathies, her frank 226 camaraderie. She was the Clarisse of Mlle. de Scudéry's "Clélie;" an enjouée aimable, who never denied herself the indulgence of any caprice of head or of heart. Yet, as she laughingly confessed, while she thanked God every night for the good wits given her, she prayed every morning for better protection against the follies of her heart. It is a faithful portrait that is given in the verse of her day:

Beyond most women of that time, she was really cultivated, in the best meaning of that word; far different from the meaningless Culture with a capital, of our time. She was fond of philosophy, withal, and took turns with Plato and with Montaigne; and would speculate on the problems of life either with Church dignitaries or with the epicurean Saint-Évremond. And she captivated them all, men of all sorts, beginning with her girlish years—when she dutifully obeyed her father, who preached pleasure to her, rather than her mother, who pushed her toward a convent—through all her long life of incredibly youthful heart and body, to her amazing conquests when over sixty. A portrait of her at about this age hangs in Knole House, Sevenoaks; her hair, parted down the middle and plainly drawn back in modest fashion, her alluring eyes and her ingenuous direct smile, give her the look of a girl. 227 Richelieu was her first admirer, Voltaire was the latest. When brought to this house, where he celebrated Ninon's ninetieth birthday in verse, young Arouet was only about twelve years old, as was told in a preceding chapter. She was charmed with the youthful genius, and, dying within a few weeks, in 1706, she left him two thousand crowns for buying his beloved books.

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

We look about these rooms, in which we are standing, and wish we might have seen Boileau and Racine here; we seem to see Molière, reading his unacted and still unnamed play, and consulting his hostess as to whether "Tartufe" will do for a title; and old Corneille, forgetting to be shy and clumsy at her side; and Scarron, wheeled in his chair, quicker in his scoffing for her quick catching of the point; and La Rochefoucauld, less of a surly and egotistic poseur in her presence, content to sparkle as a boudoir Machiavelli; and Huyghens, fresh from his discovery of the moons of Saturn, finding here a heavenly body of unwonted radiance, 228 and setting to work to write erotic verse mixed with mathematics. The great Condé himself, proud, vain, hardest-hearted of men, melts when he meets her; broken and decrepit, he climbs out from his sedan-chair—"that wonderful fortification against bad weather and the insults of the mud," says delicious Mascarille—and approaches, hat in hand, the calèche of that other aged warrior, Ninon de Lenclos.

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

Traced in the pavement of Place de la Bastille and across Rue Saint-Antoine, you may follow the outlines of such portions of the walls and towers of the great prison as are not hidden under the houses at the two 229 corners. When you ask for your number in the omnibus office of the place, you are standing in the Bastille's inner court. Across its outer eastern ditch and connected with the wall of Charles V., was thrown a projecting bastion, the tower of which stood exactly where now rises the Column of July. At the corner of Rues Saint-Antoine and Jacques-Cœur, a tablet shows the site of the gateway that gave entrance to the outer court, which led southwardly along the line of the latter small street. By this gateway the armed mob entered on July 14, 1789. Lazy Louis XVI., hard at work on locks and other trifles at Versailles—having as yet no news from Paris—writes in his diary for that day: "Rien"! That mob had found the fortress as little capable of resistance as the throne that it overturned a while later; both proved to be but baseless fabrics of an unduly dreaded terror. Indeed, it was the power behind this prison that was stormed on that day. There were plenty of prisons in Paris, as fast and as secret as was the Bastille. This was more than a prison to these people; it gloomed over their lives as its towers gloomed over their street—a mysterious and menacing defiance, a dumb and docile doer of shady deeds, a symbol of an authority feared and hated. And so these people first tore away the tool, and then disabled the hand that had held it. It was a stirring act in the drama, though a trifle melodramatic.

"Palloy le Patriote," as he styled himself, takes the centre of the stage just here, and, like all professional patriots, in all lands and all times, he makes a good 230 thing of his patriotism. He was the contractor for demolishing the walls and for clearing the ground of the wreckage, at a handsome price; and he doubled his wage by the sale of the materials. Some of the stones went, queerly enough, to the building of Pont de la Concorde; others of them may be seen in the walls of the house on the western corner of Boulevard Poissonière and Rue Saint-Fiacre, and of other houses in the town. With the stones not fit for these uses, and with the mortar, he made numerous models of the Bastille, which were purchased by the committees and sent as souvenirs to the chief towns of the then newly created departments. One of these models is in the Musée Carnavalet. So, too, the thrifty Palloy turned the ironwork dug out into hat and shoe buckles, and the woodwork into canes and fans and tobacco-boxes; all, at last, into coin for his patriotic pocket. The gate of one of the cells was removed, and rebuilt in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie; where it may be seen by the inmates, who care nothing for a door more or less, but never by the outsider, who would like to get in for a glimpse!

To "Palloy the Patriotic" and his gang of a thousand workingmen, rides up on his white horse, one day, the first commander of the just invented and organized National Guard—Lafayette, aptly named by Mirabeau the "Cromwell-Grandison" of his nation. He looks over the busy ground, and gives orders that the men shall receive a pint of wine and a half-franc daily; but they got neither money nor wine, both doubtless "conveyed, the wise it called," on the way, by Palloy or by 231 other "patriots." Lafayette carried away the great key of the Bastille's great entrance-door, and sent it to George Washington by Thomas Paine, when, a few years later, Paine got out of the Luxembourg prison and out of France. It is one of the cherished relics at Mount Vernon, and not one is more impressive and more appropriate in that place, since it was the success of the American revolutionists that inspirited those who opened the Bastille.

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

The little temple of Sainte-Marie on our left, as we go—a reduced imitation of Rome's Pantheon—is a design by François Mansart, and while it has his grace of line and his other qualities, it is not a notable work. Built on the site of the Hôtel de Boissy, wherein Quélus died and his lover Henry wept, it was intended for the chapel of the "Filles de la Visitation," and their name clings to it, although it has been made over to the Protestant Church. To this convent fled Mlle. Louise de la Fayette from Louis XIII.; who, ardent in the only love and the only chase known in his platonic career, visited her here until his confessor, Vincent de Paul, showed him the scandal of a King going to a nunnery. So he had to leave her, secure under the veil and the vows of 232 the cloister. She became Sœur, and later Mère, Angélique, of the Convent of Sainte-Madeleine, founded in 1651 by Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I., which stood on the far-away heights of Chaillot, where now is the museum of the Trocadéro. There the sister and the sweetheart of Louis XIII. lived together for many years.

A few steps farther, and we come to Rue Beautreillis; its pavement and its houses on both sides, nearly as far as Rue Charles V., covering the Cemetery of old Saint-Paul; which extended westerly toward Passage Saint-Pierre, wherein we may find the stone walls, now roofed in with wood, of the charniers. There had been a suburban cemetery outside the old wall, which was brought within city limits by the new wall, and served as the burial-ground of the prisoners who died in the Bastille. It did not so serve, as is commonly asserted, for the skeletons found in chains in the cells, when the prison was opened by righteous violence, because no such skeletons were found. "The Man in the Iron Mask" was buried in this ground, close alongside the grave of Rabelais, dug exactly one hundred and fifty years earlier. Pass through the two courts that lie in the rear of No. 17 Rue Beautreillis, and you will find yourself in a large waste garden, in one corner of which the persuasive concierge points out the grave of the "Masque-de-Fer." It may well be that she is not misled by topographical pride, for this ground was certainly a portion of the old burial-ground, and not impossibly that portion where Rabelais 233 and "Marchioly" were laid near together. This is the prisoner's name on the Bastille's burial-register, and not far from his real name. For we know, as surely as we shall ever know, that this prisoner of State was the Count Ercolo Antonio Mattioli, Secretary of State of Charles IV., Duke of Mantua. The count had agreed to betray his trust and to sell his master's fortress of Casali to the French representative; with this in their possession, Pignerol belonging already to France, Louis XIV. and Louvois would dominate all upper Italy. Mattioli took his pay, and betrayed his paymaster; the scheme miscarried, and the schemer deserved another sort of reward. His open arrest, or execution, or any public punishment, meant exposure and scandal to the Crown and the Minister and the Ambassador of France. So he was secretly kidnapped, and became "The Man in the Iron Mask." At his death, in 1703, his face was mutilated, lest there might be recognition, even then; the walls of his cell were scraped and painted, to obliterate any marks he might have put on them; his linen and clothing and furniture were burned. Had Voltaire suspected the results of modern research, he would not have put forth his theory, in the second edition of his "Questions sur l'Encyclopédie," that this prisoner was an elder brother of Louis XIV. Yet, but for Voltaire's error, we should have lost those delightful pages of Dumas, wherein Aramis carries off from the Bastille this elder brother and rightful heir to the crown, leaving Louis XIV. in the cell, and at last replaces his puppets in their original positions. 234

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

And now, passing the flamboyant Italian façade—a meretricious imitation of the front of Saint-Gervais—of the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, which has absorbed the name of old Saint-Paul, we reach at last the ample space where the two streets of Rivoli and of Saint-Antoine meet and so make one broad, unbroken thoroughfare through the length of the town, from the place where the Bastille was to the place now 235 named Concorde. This grand highway has existed only since the middle of the nineteenth century. The Consulate and the First Empire had cut Rue de Rivoli along the upper edge of the Tuileries Gardens as far easterly as Rue de Rohan; from there it was prolonged, taking the line of some of the old, narrow streets and piercing through solid masses of ancient buildings, in the last years of Louis-Philippe; and was carried from the Hôtel de Ville to this point by the Second Empire. All through earlier days, the route, common and royal, from the Louvre and the Tuileries to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, the Tournelles, the Bastille, and the Arsenal, was by way of narrow Rue Saint-Honoré and its narrower continuation, Rue de la Ferronerie, thence around by Rue Saint-Denis into Rue des Lombards, and so along Rues de la Verrerie and Roi-de-Sicile to the old gate of Saint-Antoine, that stood just behind us here at the end of Rue Malher. Outside that gate was the country road leading to Vincennes, which was transformed into the city street, known to us as Rue Saint-Antoine, through the protection given by Charles V.'s new wall and by his Bastille. There had been, long before, a Rue Saint-Antoine, and it curves away here on our left, and is called Rue François-Miron, so named in honor of that Prévôt des Marchands in Henri IV.'s time, who merits remembrance as an honest, high-minded, capable administrator of his weighty office.

Thus this street of old Saint-Antoine was the thoroughfare—at first from the entrance into the town by 236 the old gate of Saint-Antoine, and afterward from the new street of Saint-Antoine and its entrance gate farther east—to the open space behind the Hôtel de Ville, alongside Saint-Gervais, and so to the bridges and the Palace on the Island. It was a street "marvellously rich" in shops, having no rival except in Rue Saint-Denis. Its shopkeepers shouted, from their doors or from the pavement in front, the merits of their wares to the throng swarming always along. Their wares were worthy of the city that, with its fast-growing population, equalled Venice herself in wealth, display, and splendor, if we may trust the word of an exultant scribbling citizen of the Paris of Charles V.

So, too, it was the grand highway for royal entries, for troops, for ambassadors with their trains, for any parade that demanded display and attracted spectators. Such an array came along here on August 26, 1660, when young Louis XIV. brought into his town his young bride, Maria Theresa of Spain, each of them being just twenty-two years old. It was the showiest pageant and the longest procession yet seen in Paris, taking ten or twelve hours to pass. The bride—a slight, pretty, girlish figure, in white satin and pearls, and a violet mantle of velvet—leaned back on the crimson velvet of her huge gilded chariot; at her right on horseback was the King, in cloth-of-gold and black lace, his collars and ruffles of white point. In the resplendent retinue nothing so blazed as the superb empty coach of the Cardinal-Minister Mazarin, its 237 panels painted by Lebrun, drawn by the famous mules and escorted by the Mousquetaires. Less than a year later Mazarin was carried through Paris in his hearse, caring no more for mules or any tomfoolery.

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

At No. 88 Rue François-Miron you may see an excellent balcony of that period, solidly and richly wrought in iron, supported by captivating stone dragons of fantastic design. There were similar balconies on the front of the great mansion at No. 68—which was then No. 62—but of these only a small one is still left over the portal. They were all crowded with a most select mob of the elect on the day of this procession. There was Anne of Austria, in her black 238 mantle, looking down on her son, her thoughts turning back to her own bridal procession over the same route, and her own youthful blond beauty of forty-five years before. By her side sat Henrietta of France, widow of Charles I., and her daughter, Henrietta Anne of England. The girl may have gazed with curiosity on the over-dressed fop riding at the bride's left wheel. This was Philippe d'Orléans, who was to be her husband, and was, through his complacent creatures, to poison her within ten years from this day. In another balcony sat Mazarin, too ill to take part in the procession.

The hostess of these great ladies was one Catherine Bellier, wife of Pierre de Beauvais; and this house is the Hôtel de Beauvais. The husband had been a pedlar or a shopkeeper, and had amassed sufficient wealth from ribbons to enable him to buy his title. The wife had served as first femme-de-chambre to Anne of Austria, and had so learned many secrets of that queer court, of its Queen-Mother, and of her Cardinal. In that court there was no more unscrupulous creature than this Catherine Bellier. The deliciously outspoken Duchess of Orleans—the second wife of that Philippe we have just seen—describes this woman as one-eyed and hideous, of profligate life, and apt in all intrigue. To the day of her death she loved to appear in flamboyant costumes at the court, where she was treated with distinction because of what she knew. Anne of Austria gave her the stone for the construction of this hôtel, and she used to visit her 239 waiting-woman and confidente here. A popular verse of the day ran:

The design of the Hôtel de Beauvais, by Antoine Lepautre, is most daring and original in its great interior oval court, embellished with pilasters that are topped with finely carved stone masks. Despite the unhallowed devotion to cleanliness which, with its whitewash, has robbed it of its former lovely bloom of age, this court remains one of the most impressive specimens of seventeenth-century domestic architecture in all Paris. From the street we pass through an ample gateway, its curved top surmounted by a great shell. The vestibule is ornamented with escutcheons, alternating with the garlanded ox-skulls of Roman-Doric decoration—mistaken by many for rams' heads, so as to make a sculptor's pun on Bellier—all admirably carved in stone. The noble staircase has Corinthian columns, and a massive stone balustrade so perfectly pierced into fine lines of intertwisted tracery as to give delicacy to it, thick and broad as it is. Cut in stone escutcheons in the ceiling of this stairway are the intertwined initials of the brand-new nobility that built it. The grand salons of the first floor have been 240 partitioned off into small rooms for trade purposes. No character of any sort has been left to the interior.

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

Many of the streets here remain unmodernized and unspoiled, and here are hôtels as perfectly preserved as this Hôtel de Beauvais. At No. 26 Rue Geoffroy-Lasnier we stop in delight before an entrance-door superbly carved and heavy with a glorious knocker—a lion's head holding a great ring in its mouth. Above this door we read: "Hôtel de Châlons, 1625, et de Luxembourg, 1659." The small court within, diminished by modern stables on one side, retains on its other side an ancient iron fountain. The façade of the miniature hôtel giving on this court is in well-balanced stone and brick; its shapely windows are surrounded by male and female masks, and by delicate foliage twining about the monograms of the aforetime exalted owners—all elaborately carved in stone. The roof rises gracefully to its ridge, and each gable end is surmounted by a well-wrought iron finial. There is a modest garden behind, shut in and hid by the buildings about, which hide, too, the simple and attractive 241 stateliness of that rear face of the Hôtel de Châlons. The enchanting isolation and the singular charm of this concealed corner give us the feeling that here is a bit of Bourges, gently dropped, tranquil and untroubled, into the midst of these turbulent streets.

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

Turning into Rue de Jouy, an altogether delightful old-time street, we pass through a monumental gateway at No. 7 into a symmetrical court. Facing us is the Hôtel d'Aumont, and it tells us more than is told by any structure hereabout of the merits of François Mansart. This front of two stories and of his own roof is faultless in proportion and dainty in adornment. He has given it the stamp of the stately days of the Grand Monarch by the four œils-de-bœuf above the perfect cornice of the second floor, two on either side of the central window. In the two corners of the court, at each angle of the building, are round-fronted stone perrons, broad and low and inviting. That on our left gives entrance to a small hall, the staircase in which carries an exquisite wrought-iron rail that lifts and lightens the stone steps. By them we mount to the chambers of the first floor, small as was the custom then, with one grand central reception-room, excellent in its proportions, its vaulted ceiling curiously carved in relief. All these rooms are, by the 242 good taste and generous spirit of the owners of the property, kept in perfect condition, the furniture is of the period, and the painting—done by Lebrun a century later than the ceiling on which it is placed—is fresh and untarnished.

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

The hôtel is now occupied by the Pharmacie Centrale of France, to whose officials is due our gratitude for their rare and scrupulous respect for this delightful relic. Over its spacious gardens behind they have erected their immense laboratories and offices, which we may enter under the great vaulted porch at No. 21 Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyères. That once narrowest of the streets of old Paris, as quaint as its name, given it by the branch of the Hyères nunnery having its seat here, has become a broad and bustling thoroughfare. The plain rear elevation of the hôtel can be seen here from the little corner of the garden that is still kept, 243 and kept green by the choice plants of the company. In it is a capital bust of Dorvault, physician, author, founder of the Pharmacie Centrale. This may be the very bit of garden noticed by Dr. Martin Lister, an English traveller in France at the close of the seventeenth century. He dined with the Duc d'Aumont, and records that, opening from the dining-room, was a greenhouse through which his noble host led him into the garden.

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

Let us look about the court and the little garden behind, both embraced by the two wings of the structure. That wing on our right, with round arches and 244 a round tower at its end, is evidently of the original fabric and intended for stabling. This wing on our left, now extended by a new chapel, was, when built, meant to contain only this staircase, whose wide and broad stone steps and well-wrought iron balustrade mount gradually about a spacious central well. Here, resting on the bench at its foot, we may recall what is known about the strange and monstrous woman who once lived here.

She was Marie-Madeleine Dreux d'Aubray, and her father was an officer of Louis XIV., appointed Civil Lieutenant of the Châtelet Prison. He married her in 1651, when she was twenty-one, to the wealthy and dissolute Marquis de Brinvilliers, who was not a model husband. She was nothing loath, with her inborn instincts, to follow the example set by him. Among her lovers, a certain Gaudin de Sainte-Croix was much talked of; so much so that the lady's father, more powerful than her husband, and doubtless more outraged by the shameless publicity of the liaison, had Sainte-Croix taken from his daughter's carriage, as they rode together, and put into the Bastille. There his cell-mate was an Italian known only as Exili, a past-master in poisons, who boasted that he had brought to death at least one hundred and fifty men and women in Rome alone. He taught his trade to Sainte-Croix, who proved to be an apt pupil, and who continued his studies after his release. He took rooms with an apothecary in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and fitted up a laboratory. There his Marquise visited 245 him, and was taught in her turn the use of his potions, among which the "manna of Saint-Nicholas" became her favorite.

For she took pains and showed conscience in her experiments, mainly on the patients in the hospitals, wherein she was a constant charitable worker. Thus she soon learned to dispense her poisoned wafers with scientific slowness and precision. But she was anxious that her charity should begin at home. Her father failed gradually with some obscure and unaccountable malady, and died in torment; and she nursed him tenderly to the end. There were too many in her family for her comfort, and her relatives outside had been too solicitous about her; so some sickened and some died off, she caring for all and lamenting each death. She had a sister, a Carmelite nun, who was never blinded by the round, girlish face, appealing blue eyes, and beguiling ways that bewitched so many. This woman guarded her own life and watched over others of the family. The attempts made by the marchioness on her husband's life were caused to fail, it is believed, by the attenuation of the poisons mixed for her by Sainte-Croix, who doubtless feared that he must marry the widow if he allowed her to become a widow. He himself was found dead, in 1672, in his laboratory, poisoned by the fumes of his devilish brews, through the breaking of the glass mask worn at his work. The official search among his effects discovered a casket, addressed to the marchioness at this dwelling; being opened, its contents were found to be her own ardent 246 love-letters to him, a document detailing the doses and periods for the proper administration of the poisons, and a choice assortment of preparations of opium, antimony, sulphur. There was also a water-like liquid, unknown to chemists, which was found to kill animals instantaneously, leaving no lesions of any organ that could be traced by science. Sainte-Croix's servant made a disclosure, and the marchioness, hearing of his arrest and the finding of her package, made "confession by avoidance" by a flight to England. She slipped down these stairs, out through that doorway, and took coach around the corner for a northern port.

Colbert's brother was then Ambassador at the court of Saint James, and between them her capture was planned; she got wind of it, and fled to Liège, where she felt sure of safety in a convent. To her appears, after a while, a handsome and susceptible young abbé, who allows himself to be corrupted, and arranges for an elopement to a more congenial refuge for lovers. She climbs gayly into his carriage, his men surround it, and she is driven across the frontier into France and to the Bastille. The abbé was Desgrais, an eager police officer detailed for this duty. He returned to her room in the convent, and found scattered sheets of paper containing notes that began a confession. This confession she was forced to complete and confirm by the torture by water—repugnant to her coquetry, because it would spoil her figure; "toute mignonne et toute gracieuse," had said an adorer of her early days. She showed courage at the last, Madame de Sévigné states, in the letters 247 that were full of the trial and execution. She was burned, having first been beheaded. "Her poor little body was thrown, after her execution, into a good large fire, and her ashes blown about by the wind; so that we may be breathing her," Sévigné writes. This took place late in the afternoon of July 16, 1676—she was just over forty-five years of age—on Place de Grève, to which she was carted in a tumbril, having stopped on the way in front of Notre-Dame, and there, on her knees on the stones—her feet bare, a rope around her neck, a consecrated lighted taper in her uplifted hand—made to confess afresh.

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

Turning from this street down through Rue Beautreillis, we pass the end of Rue des Lions, on whose southern side we have already found remains of the Hôtel des Lions du Roi. On its northern side is a row of plaster-fronted houses, commonplace and shabby. In one of those garrets there was living, shortly after 248 1830, a poor family of Jews named Félix, lately arrived from the Canton Aarau in Switzerland. Their two little girls went about the streets, singing and picking up coppers. One day in the Place Royale, among those who stopped to listen was a kindly eyed gentleman, who handed to the younger and thinner of the two pinched children a piece of silver. "That is Victor Hugo," said a woman in the crowd, as he went his way to his home in the corner. That small singer was Élisa Rachel Félix, known to us as the great Rachel.

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

Going down Rue du Petit-Musc, we reach the Quai des Célestins, and here on our left is the beginning of broad Boulevard Henri IV., cutting away, in its diagonal course through the grounds of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, much history and romance. Nothing is left of the gardens of the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, whose site is marked by a tablet on the corner of the street of that 249 name, at No. 10 Rue de la Cerisaie. This tablet tells us that the hôtel was the residence of the Czar Peter the Great in 1717; the guest, during his short sojourn in Paris, of the Maréchal de Villeroy, its owner then. We prefer to go back from that visit over a hundred years to a more attractive presence in this house. This was Gabrielle d'Estrées, beloved of Henry, who—for his fondness for her and their two fine boys—would have made her his wife, and have made them his legitimate successors, if he could have had his way.

It was Sébastien Zamet who was their host in this "palais d'amour du roi." The son of a shoe-maker of Lucca, he had found his fortune in Paris, like so many of his countrymen in those days, and he built here "a true fairy palace, such as romances describe," says Saint-Simon. And here, walking in the garden after supper on the evening of April 9, 1599, the lovely Gabrielle was taken ill very suddenly. They carried her to the Hôtel de Sourdis and put her in the care of her aunt, with whom she had passed a portion of her girlhood in that mansion. It stood within the precincts of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, its entrance on Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, where now is the end of Rue Perrault. Here Gabrielle died, in agony, at six o'clock of the next morning; poisoned, say Sismondi, Michelet, and the rest, but by whose hand we shall never know. The Hôtel des Mousquetaires, that you will find at No. 4 of Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, was then in existence, and so, too, were many of these tall façades, with ancient, iron 250 balconies that look down on the narrow winding street, then a crowded thoroughfare of old Paris. After Zamet's death his house was bought by the Duc de Lesdiguières, Marshal and later Constable of France, from whom it took its permanent name. We have already come here with Boileau to see the veteran Frondeur, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, whose last years were passed in this mansion, under the care of one niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and comforted by another niece, Madame de Sévigné.

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

That long façade beyond, on Rue de Sully, belongs to the Arsenal, the building alone left, its spacious gardens now under streets and houses. We have come to its library with young Balzac, when he escaped from his grinding drudgery and his dreary garret in Rue Lesdiguières. We have driven here with Madame Récamier 251 on the day before her death. The most winning memory of the place is that of Charles Nodier, an adorable man of genius, whose very defects were lovable, we are told by the elder Dumas, who loved him. Nodier and Charles Lamb were hissing, almost in the same year, each his own damned play. Many others besides Dumas loved Nodier—Royalists and Republicans, Classicists and Romanticists; and they crowded his salon here of an evening. For this was his official residence as Librarian, occupied by him from his appointment in 1823 until his death in 1844. His historic green drawing-room, where men were friendly who fought outside, and the smaller rooms of his apartment on the first floor overlooking Boulevard Morland, have been thrown into the library, and are now its reading-rooms. They have kept their old-time panelling, carvings, mouldings, but their walls, once decorated en grisaille, have been toned to a uniform delicate gray-white.

This library was begun in 1785 by the Comte d'Artois, who purchased the valuable books and manuscripts of Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d'Argenson, and of the Duc de la Vallière. Rooms in the Arsenal were arranged for this collection, and it was named the "Librairie de Monsieur;" the Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI. and of Louis XVIII., having been the last "Monsieur" in France. His library has grown to be the grandest in Paris after the Bibliothèque Nationale. It contains the original archives of the Bastille—such as were saved, when so many were scattered and destroyed 252 at its taking—and it is especially rich in dramatic literature and in manuscripts.

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

We pass along the quay, glancing at the homelike 253 and homely house numbered 4, whose quiet dignity behind its court is in pleasing contrast with the place just left. Here were the home and the studio of Antoine-Louis Barye, and here he died on June 25, 1875.

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

The last of the Valois women, Marguerite, had her home hard by here, and its story begins just on this spot. When Charles V., to round out and make entire his Saint-Paul estate, was taking in neighboring hôtels and outlying bits of land, he found, here where we find the Hôtel de La Vieuville, the Paris seat of the archbishops of Sens. Their palace on this corner, and its grounds extending along the river-front and back along the east side of Rue Saint-Paul, up beyond present Rue des Lions, cut out a goodly slice from this angle of the royal domain. The King took this property, giving in exchange, to the archbishop, the feudal fortress, the Hôtel d'Éstoménil, a little farther west on the river-bank, at the meeting-place of several country roads. Those roads are now the streets named Hôtel-de-Ville, 254 Figuier, Fauconnier, de l'Ave-Maria; and where they meet stands the Hôtel de Sens, in almost the same state, as to its walls, as when they were finished by the archbishop Tristan de Salazar. This soldier-priest had rebuilt the old structure in the last years of the fifteenth and the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and it remains an authentic and authoritative document of the domestic architecture of that period. The delicate ornamentation of its façade has suffered, some few mutilations have despoiled the fabric, its gardens are built upon, their great trees are gone, yet it stands, time-stained and weather-worn, a most impressive example of that Gothic strength and beauty whose frozen lines were just beginning to melt under the fire of the upspringing Renaissance.

The noble arch of the ogival portal is, by a touch of genius, pinched forward at its topmost point, and is there sliced away, so as to make a snub-nosed protuberance that seems to lift up the whole front. Its two high-peaked bartizan turrets are a trifle heavy, as we see them hemmed in by other buildings, but their panelling and moulding plead for pardon for any slight disproportion; and the one on the corner is perfect in situation and in effect. The few windows of the front have lost their stone-crossed mullions, some broken, some bricked up. The great dormer window above, possibly of later construction, is a prediction of the loveliness that was to come to dormers, such as we see in the roofs of Rouen's Hôtel de Ville and of the château of Blois. The fine effect of the chimneys, once 255 entirely of stone, has been marred by cheap patching. As to the rest, the oddities and irregularities of this façade are yet all in good taste and all captivating. Within the groined porch we see, across the small court, the main building meant for the archbishop's dwelling, and the solid square tower meant for defence and for watching. Its entrance-door tells, in its size and shape, the entire tale of feudal days. Away up on one angle of this tower is an imitation sentry-box, battlemented and supported by corbelled brackets. The interior of the buildings has been defaced and degraded by the base usages to which it has been subjected, yet traces are left of its past grandeur in some of the rooms and halls.

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

The King had been allowed his divorce by his childless wife, Marguerite, and he in turn allowed her to return to Paris from her long exile in Auvergne; ordering 256 that this hôtel should be fittingly arranged for her residence, in 1605. We saw her last, a charming child, in the gardens of the Tournelles. And now she comes here, a worn wanton of nearly fifty-five, her wonted fires still smouldering under the ashes. It is between these two appearances that we like to look on her in the pages of Brantôme and on the canvas of Clouet. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, has been aptly dubbed the valet-de-place of history; and yet a valet has the merit of looking out of his own eyes from his own point of view. It was for him that Marguerite wrote her "Mémoires," and to him she left them. In after days, when exiled from the court he loved, able only to lick the chops of memory, he wrote her éloge in these glowing words: "If there has ever been anyone in the world perfect in beauty, it is the Queen of Navarre. All who have been, or shall be, near her, are ugly beside her. If there is a miscreant who believes not in the miracles of God, let him look upon her. Many believe that she is rather a goddess of heaven than a princess of earth, and yet perhaps no goddess was ever so lovely."

It is indeed a lovely creature, yet all of earth, whom we see in Clouet's half life-size portrait in the château of Azay-le-Rideau. Her plentiful blond hair curves back above her fine brow, and her bluish-gray eyes smile out with inviting mischievousness. Yet Brantôme has to own that his goddess was easily first in the escadron volant that sailed under her mother's flag, and we may guess what that meant in the court 257 "whose vices it would be repulsive to suggest, and whose virtues were homicide and adultery."

In this Hôtel de Sens, Madame Marguerite held receptions, twice a week, of men of letters and of the arts, with whom her learning allowed her to converse on equal terms; and her kindliness allowed them to feel at ease. For "from her behavior it could never be discovered that she had once been the wife of the King." But the wayward Margot made trouble for herself that ended her stay here after a year or less. She came home from mass at the Célestins on the morning of Wednesday, April 5, 1606, and as she was helped from her coach by her newest favorite page of eighteen, he was killed by her latest discarded favorite, already twenty. She sat in one of these front windows the next day, having neither eaten nor drunk nor slept meanwhile; she looked out on the beheading of the jaunty assassin; that evening she left the Hôtel de Sens forever. For a while she stayed at her hunting-lodge at Issy, already visited by us in former pages, and then went to her last dwelling, on the southern bank in the Pré-aux-Clercs, which looked out across the river at the Louvre, where Henry was unhappy with her successor. The two women remained always friendly, and were seen together in festivities and processions, and the reigning Queen paid many a debt of the deposed Queen. To the last she rouged to the eyes, and wore a flowing wig and low frocks, albeit she had turned dévote, and had found a new idol in her confessor. This was young Vincent de Paul, not yet 258 canonized, whose chaste ministrations made him adored by sinners elderly enough to repent. There she died in the spring of 1615, at the age of sixty-three, the last of the Valois name, leaving everything, mostly debts, to young Louis XIII.

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

That mail-coach was stopped near Lieussart, its driver killed, and a large sum in assignats and gold carried off. For this crime one Joseph Lesurques was arrested, and was recognized by several witnesses as the robber. He had been an official in Douai, had saved money, and had gone to Paris for the education of his children. Neither his record nor his alibi sufficed to 259 acquit him, the strongest of circumstantial evidence convicted him, and he was executed on October 30, 1796. Two years later the murderer and robber was captured in one Dubosc, who, after a daring escape and recapture, went to the guillotine. By Dubosc's conviction Lesurques was posthumously morally acquitted, but his judicial rehabilitation has never been made, albeit his broken and crazed children petitioned, courts debated, and Deputies chattered through many long years. This true story, our last reminiscence of the Hôtel de Sens, has been put on the French stage as "Le Courrier de Lyons," and on the English stage as "The Lyons Mail."

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

We cross Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, a main thoroughfare of old Paris, whose odd name came from Charles, brother of Saint Louis, Count of Anjou and Provence, 260 and King of Naples and Sicily in 1265. His fortified abode stood on the northern side of this street, at its eastern end just within the old walls. It became, in after times, the hôtel and then the prison of La Force. Its entrance was over yonder, at the corner of modern Rue Malher; and opposite, on the southern corner, was the stone that served as the axeman's block for the Princess of Lamballe. Along this pavement the small Gavroche led the two smaller Thénardier boys, on his way to his hôtel—the plaster elephant in Place de la Bastille. A wide avenue, bordered by modern constructions, is fast taking the place of the old street and robbing it of all its character.

Where Rue Pavée meets Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, stands the Hôtel Lamoignon, formerly the Hôtel d'Angoulême. At that corner a square turret juts out from above the ground floor, overhanging the pavement, its supporting bracket cut under in shell-like curves. About the stately court, entered from Rue Pavée, rise the imposing walls, those of the wings of a little later date and a little more ornate than that of the façade. This front is pre-eminently impressive in its height, in the unusual loftiness of its floors and their windows, in the single Corinthian pilasters, tall and slender and graceful, rising from ground to cornice. They may serve us as a souvenir of Jean Bullant's work in the château of Ecouen and in his portion of Chantilly. Above that cornice the dormer windows spring high under their gabled ends. Beneath them, and over the entrance porch, and on the side wall of 261 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois—profusely decorating, but not overloading, the spacious surfaces that carry them easily—we trace without effort the unworn hunting-horns, the stags' heads, the dogs in chase, the crescent and the initial H so interlaced as to form an H and a D—all the carved emblems of Diane de France, for whom this remarkable structure was planned and built, a little after 1580, by a now unknown architect.

She was born of an Italian mother, during a stay in her country of the son of François I., who was later Henri II. On coming to the throne, in 1547, he legitimatized this daughter, then ten years of age, and gave her education and position in France. She grew up to be a good woman and a good wife to Horace Farnese, Duc de Castro, and to her second husband, François, the eldest son of the Constable Montmorenci. She spent her long life—which saw seven monarchs sitting on the French throne—doing kindly acts, not one of which meant so much for the France she loved as the reconciliation between Henri III. and Henri de Navarre; possible through her, because the sceptic Béarnais took her word for or against any written word of anyone. Dying in 1619, she left this mansion to Charles, Duc d'Angoulême, son of Charles IX. and Marie Touchet, the last of her many benefactions to him. He added these wings, and placed in that on the northern side this stately stone staircase, filling the width between the stone walls, with no hand-rail to break its sweep. Nothing is left of the former grandeur of the interior, which is given up to large industries 262 and petty handicrafts; even the vast and lofty chambers are cut up for trade purposes by partitions and by interposed floorings.

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

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

The concierge or his wife, honored by the interest shown in their splendid show-place, will conduct such curious strangers as may wish around the corner into 263 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and through a little gate on that street into a small back court. This is the shabby remnant of Diane's and of Lamoignon's extensive gardens, which once stretched to those of the Hôtel de La Force on the south, and eastwardly to Rue Sévigné. From this spot you may see four or five windows away up in the rear wall of the mansion, and you will be told that these are the windows of Alphonse Daudet's former apartment, wherein he wrote "Fromont jeune et Risler aîné." His large study on the top floor had two high, wide windows, from which he saw the roofs of all Paris on that side. Against the wall at one end of the room was his shelf for standing at his work, and his wife's desk was at the other end; while, between them, carrying the freshly written sheets, trotted the little boy Léon, who is now a man, wielding his own good pen. To him, in those days, the tall Flaubert and Tourgueneff were "giants" by the side of his father, and of the other friends who used to climb these many stairs to this salon in the sky. Daudet has left affectionate records of the old house. His "Rois-en-exil" was written in a pavilion in the garden of Richelieu's old mansion, which stood in the northwestern corner of the then Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, where has been cut, through house and garden, the prolongation of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Rue des Vosges.

The gentle artist, "handsome as a Hindoo god" in those days, says M. Claretie, brought from his beloved Midi a longing for space and air and quiet, and all his 264 abodes in the city were high above the street, with ample breathing-space and unbroken horizon. His earliest Paris home was at the very top of the furnished Hôtel du Senat, still at No. 7 Rue de Tournon. This was the wretched room to which he came back, early one morning, from his first swell reception, his only dress-suit drenched with the wet snow through which he had waded, owning no overcoat. Then, for a while, he occupied an entresol in No. 4 Place de l'Odéon, in "la maison A. Laissus," one of the unaltered houses of that historic place. His last home was on the third floor of No. 31 Rue Bellechasse, in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and one of its delightful old gardens lay beneath his windows, giving him the greenness and the tranquillity so dear to him.

The name of Madame Daudet may not be omitted from this record of the illustrious women of the Marais, although now, in the maturity of her distinction and elegance, she adorns another quarter of Paris. She has made for herself an honored place among French women of letters, and she helped her husband to his own place by her critical powers and her sympathetic appreciation. She both tranquillized and stimulated him through his earlier years of robust strength, and the later invalidism that was yet filled with labor. Her son, who carried the father's sheets across the room to her for approval or correction, has dedicated his "Alphonse Daudet" to his mother, "who aided and encouraged her husband alike in the hours of discouragement and of hopefulness." 265

There are bits and fragments of vanished antiquity—portals, windows, balconies, brackets, pitifully sundered from the grandeur they stand for and suggest—scattered all about this portion of the Marais. Much of this bygone grandeur was to be found in Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, a street that had been a country road just outside the wall of Philippe-Auguste, and, with the crumbling of the wall, had been speedily built up with stately mansions. One of these, with a fund for its support, was willed, in 1415, to the Grand Prior of France, in trust for such burghers as were freed from all taxation by reason of their extreme poverty. So it came that these francs bourgeois gave their name to the street. Here at No. 30 is a quaint low front, mostly taken up by a spacious entrance-porch, decorated with finely cut dragons; here at No. 31 is the superb portal of the Hôtel Jeanne d'Albret; all that is left of the noble residence of that niece of François I. who married the Duc de Clèves in 1541. It is more than a century from that date before this hôtel holds any history for us, when it became tenanted by César Phébus d'Albret, Marshal of France; a rich and frolicsome Gascon, a friend of Scarron, an especial friend of young Madame Scarron. It was he who killed the Marquis de Sévigné in a duel. The Duchesse d'Albret was an eminently proper person, a bit of a précieuse, and her salon here was a flimsy copy of that of the Hôtel Rambouillet. Scarron's widow, poor and by no means unfriended, found a temporary home in this house, after a short stay with her life-long friend, Mlle. de Lenclos, before 266 taking rooms in the convent, where we have seen her.

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

Let us stop here on the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, where it meets the end of a little street with the big name of des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, given to it by the great hospital and monastery that occupied these grounds, through which this street was afterward cut, when Philippe-Auguste gathered them just within the safe-keeping of his wall. Just without that wall lay the Hôtel Barbette, in the midst of its own wide lands. On this corner, we stand just on the line of the wall, and look across Rue des Francs-Bourgeois into a court, once the Alleé aux Arbalétriers, over whose entrance is a tablet, recording the murder of Louis d'Orléans, near that spot—a scene sketched in our first chapter. That maze of courts, crowded close with ancient wooden structures, tempts us to search within it for vestiges of the outbuildings of the Hôtel Barbette. And it is worth while exploring the interior 267 of the corner house, if only for its mediæval staircase. Coming out by the courts opening into Rue Vieille-du-Temple, we take a few steps to where it meets the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and we stand on the exact site of the Porte Barbette of the old wall.

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

Yet turret and structure are not, as is often stated, any portion of the original Hôtel Barbette. That was built, at the end of the thirteenth century, by Étienne Barbette, a man of wealth and importance, the Provost of Paris under Philippe "le Bel," and his Master of the 268 Mint. The vast enclosure of his grandiose hôtel covered all the ground, from the old wall northward to the line of the present Rues de la Perle and du Parc-Royal; and eastwardly from this Rue Vieille-du-Temple 269 to the gardens of Saint-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, near where now runs Rue Sévigné. This ample domain sufficed for the menus plaisirs of this lucky man, and was merely his petit séjour. Under that blameless guise it served as the abode, a little more than a century later, when rebuilt after the mob had wrecked it, of Isabeau de Bavière, official wife of mad Charles VI. Leaving him to the neglect of servants and to the companionship of Odette, the Queen escaped boredom here, by her dinners and suppers, balls and fêtes; here she invented, or first introduced, the masquerades that were soon the rage of Polite Society. She amused herself with other games, too; such as statecraft, in partnership with her husband's younger brother, Louis d'Orléans. It was from the Barbette that she mismanaged the kingdom, ground down the people with intolerable taxes, pushed the marriage of her daughter Catherine with Henry V. of England, plotted the shameful Treaty of Troyes, which made France an appanage of the English crown, and gave Paris to English troops.

After her husband's death, cast aside by Burgundy and England, she found a drearier refuge in the Hôtel Saint-Paul than that to which she had condemned him there. In its corners she hid while Joan the Maid was undoing the evil work done by this shameless woman, and was bringing back to Paris the son hated by this shameless mother. All through those years she wept and moaned, witnesses have reported; left alone, as she was, with the memories of her lusts and her treasons, with the wreckage of the animal beauty, for which, and 270 for no other quality, she had been selected as the royal consort. Seven days after she learned of the signing of the Treaty of Arras she died, "et son corps fut tant méprisé," says Brantôme, that it was thrown into a boat at the water-gate of Saint-Paul, and, after an unseemly service in Notre-Dame, was sent by night down the Seine to Saint-Denis, "ainsi ni plus ni moins qu'une simple demoiselle!"

Partly destroyed by fire and partly rebuilt, we find the Hôtel Barbette, after another hundred years and more, in the hands of the Comte de Brézé, Seneschal of Normandy. Aged, ugly, crippled, as we see him in Hugo's verse, he is pleasantly remembered for the lovely widow he left for Henri II., and for his lovely tomb left, for our joy, in the cathedral of Rouen. When his widow, Diane de Saint-Vallier, became Diane de Poictiers, Duchesse de Valentinois—an elderly siren of thirty-seven, who was yet "fort aymée et servie d'un des grands rois et valeureux du monde"—she wore always her widow's white and black, and kept to the last that whiteness of skin and purity of complexion that came, she claimed, from her only cosmetic, soap and water. Her coldness of heart had much to do with it, to our thinking. Brantôme saw her when she had come to sixty-two, and was struck by her freshness, "sans se farder," as of thirty. He adds, with his ever-green susceptibility: "C'est dommage que la terre couvre ce beau corps." This property had gone, on her husband's death, in 1561, to his and her two daughters; who profited by its vast extent and by the example 271 set by François I. in similar jobs, to open streets through it, and divide it into parcels for selling. Those streets were named Barbette and Trois-Pavilions, the latter now renamed Elzévir. And if any remnant exists of the second Hôtel Barbette of Diane de Poictiers, it is this corner house and its lovely turret.

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

A step to the south from this street, along Rue Vieille-du-Temple, brings us to the massive entrance-doors of 272 No. 47. Their outer surfaces are richly carved with masks and with figures; on their inner side is an excellent bas-relief representing Romulus and Remus found by the shepherd, when the wolf is giving them suck. About the court, diminutive and dainty, the walls of the small hôtel are adorned with tasteful sculptures, and laden with dials, two of the sun and two of the moon. These anomalous adornments came here through the caprice of a Director of the Royal Observatory, who once occupied the house and who wreaked his scientific humor in this odd fashion. This is the Hôtel de Hollande, a rebuilt remnant of the large mediæval mansion of Maréchal de Rieux. The street just in front of his hôtel, some authorities insist, was the scene of the assassination of the Duc d'Orléans. Reconstructed early in the seventeenth century, the carvings, sculptures, and decorations of this elegant little hôtel are excellent examples of late Renaissance. Unluckily, the bas-reliefs and paintings of the interior may no longer be seen. Beyond this outer court is a smaller court, containing an attractive structure of a later date.

This Hôtel de Hollande has borne that name since, in the reign of Louis XIV., it was the seat of the embassy representing Holland at his court. This being officially Dutch soil, at that time, we may see Racine coming through this entrance-doorway, in full wig and court costume; coming to present his son for introductions at The Hague, where the young man is to be a member of the French Embassy. We have seen the letters sent to 273 him there by his thrifty father. There is another bit of history for us here. It was in this house that the firm "Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie" started in business in 1776, with a capital of 3,000,000 francs. The firm was composed of Caron de Beaumarchais, with the governments of France and Spain for his silent partners; the former putting in 2,000,000 francs, and the latter the other million. The business of this house—and it did a lively business while it lasted—was to supply, secretly and unknown to the English officials in Paris, arms and equipments to the American colonies.

Anne de Montmorenci, the great constable of France, in alliance, against the Huguenots, with the Guises, his near neighbors in the Marais, outfought Condé and Coligny at Saint-Denis in 1567, and died, of the wounds he got in that battle, "in his own hôtel in Rue Saint-Avoie." So says the chronicle, and it tells us further that his was the grandest mansion in the town, with most extensive grounds; far surpassing in size and magnificence the Hôtels Lamoignon and Carnavalet. It was sufficiently spacious for the large-minded John Law, who established his bank in the building two centuries later. When the crash came, and he sought more modest quarters, the State took the building for its bureaux. Now, no stone of the structure can be found, the street from which it had entrance—Saint-Avoie—is merged in that portion of Rue du Temple which crosses Rue Rambuteau, and this broad thoroughfare sweeps over the site of Montmorenci's palace and his gardens. 274

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

There is hardly any history to detain us here, and the great names that once resounded in this court make only far-away echoes now. Claude de Mesme, Comte d'Avaux, a diplomat of the seventeenth century, built this hôtel. At his death, it came to the Duc de Saint-Aignan, a royal Purveyor at the head of Louis XIV.'s Council of Finance. He was a relative of Madame de 275 Scudéry, wife of the Georges whom we have met in his sister's salon. Through his wife's influence with Saint-Aignan, Georges was presented to the King, and succeeded in obtaining a pension—useful to supplement such of his sister's earnings as came in his way. His merits, for which the royal bounty was granted, seem to have been of so momentous a literary character as to be pronounced equal to those of Corneille!

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

It was de Clisson, who, quite without his consent, gave the King one of the several shocks which culminated in his madness. King and Constable had supped together in the royal apartment of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and the Constable went on his way home. Lighted by the main facts of the affair, we may easily 276 track him. After crossing Rue Saint-Antoine and passing through one of the narrow lanes to Rue Neuve-Sainte-Catherine—now the eastern end of Rue des 277 Francs-Bourgeois—he should have kept along this street to this new home of his. Perhaps the old soldier was not quite sure of his way, so soon after supper and the plentiful petit vin de l'hôtel Saint-Paul, for he found himself beyond his corner, up in Rue Sainte-Catherine, now Rue Sévigné; and there, in front of a baker's shop opposite the spot where now is the Carnavalet, he was set upon by a band of men led by Pierre de Craon, a crony of Louis d'Orléans. They left the tough old warrior in the baker's doorway, bleeding from many wounds, but not quite killed. The King was summoned, came hastily in scanty clothing, and it was long before he recovered from his affright. When he had rallied, he started out to punish the assailant of his favorite captain, and it was on his way to Brittany, with whose duke de Craon had taken refuge, that the King received the final blow to his reason.

The history of the Hôtel de Clisson would weary us, were it told in detail. We may jump to the year 1553, when it came to Anne d'Est, wife of François de Lorraine, Duc de Guise. He and his family were beginning to feel and to show their growing power, and he found these walls not wide enough for his swelling consequence. He bought the Hôtels de Laval and de la Roche-Guyon, whose grounds adjoined his own; so adding to his estate, while others, following the example of François I., were cutting up and selling their Paris lands. Soon the Hôtel de Guise was made up of several mansions, rebuilt and run together, within one enclosure, bounded by Rues de Paradis (now the western 278 end of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois), du Chaume (now des Archives), des Quatre-Fils, and Vieille-du-Temple. The heirs of the last Guise, who died in 1671, sold this property at the end of the seventeenth century, and it came into the grasping hands of Madame de Soubise; bought with the savings of the French peasants, squeezed from them by Louis XIV.'s farmers of taxes, and by him poured into the lap of this lady, one of the many ladies so turning an honest penny. Her complaisant husband, François de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, began to tear down much of the old work, and to replace it by new work, in 1706. For thirty years he kept the most skilful artists and artisans of that day employed on the place within and without; and he left the Hotel de Soubise much as we find it now. To him we owe this striking cour d'honneur, square with curved ends, and framed in a colonnade of coupled columns, that leads a covered gallery from the grand entrance around to the portal of the main building. This is his façade of three stories, with pediment, its columns both composite and Corinthian. For general effect this court has no parallel in Paris.

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

Vast and magnificent as was this palace, it did not 279 suffice for the son of this prince, the Cardinal Armand Gaston de Rohan, Bishop of Strasburg, who, says Sauval, "was, in his prosperity, very insolent and blinded." On the site of the demolished Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon he built for himself the Palais Cardinal, now commonly known as the Hôtel de Strasbourg. The library, great and precious, which he there collected, together with his hôtel and his blind insolence, came to his grand-nephew, the Cardinal de Rohan of the Diamond Necklace, the last cardinal of a family of cardinals.

At his death, in 1803, desertion and emptiness came to the Hôtel de Strasbourg, as they had already come to the Hôtel de Soubise. The huge size of the buildings rendered them unfit for private residences. At length they were taken for the State by the Emperor, at the urging of Daunou, Director of the Archives of France. By the decree of March 6, 1808, those archives took for their own the Hôtel de Soubise, and the Hôtel de Strasbourg was given to the Imprimerie Impériale. No after-revolution nor any change of rulers has troubled them. As their contents grew, new structures have been added, over the gardens and on the street behind, all done in good taste, all suggesting the uses for which they are meant. The Imprimerie, entered from Rue Vieille-du-Temple, through a court containing a statue of Gutenberg, does the work for the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, for the Ministers and for the Institute. Its Bulletin des Lois, issued to all the Communes of France, carries to completion the mission 280 meant for it when it was begun by Louis XIII., Hugo asserts.

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

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

Suddenly at noon, these streets are all astir with an 281 industrial, unarmed mob, and the whole quarter is given over to an insurrection, peaceful and unoffending. These workers are making their way to restaurant or rôtisserie or cabaret; some of them saunter along, taking their breakfast "sur le pouce." The men, in stained blouses, are alert, earnest, and self-respecting; the girls, direct of gaze, frank of manner, shrill of voice, wear enwrapping aprons, that fall from neck to ankle, and their hair, the glory of the French working-woman who goes hatless, is dressed with an artless art that would not dishonor a drawing-room. We can carry away with us, from these last scenes, no more captivating memory than this of the most modern woman of our Marais. 283

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