The Stones of Paris in History and Letters Volume Ii Part 6

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 Lycee Buffon. To be near the then newly opened burial-ground of Mont-Parna.s.se, "_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 Gaiete, a street strangely misguided in t.i.tle 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 was.h.i.+ng the smell of fresh mould from out their nostrils. This den is the _a.s.sommoir_ 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 Bievre, 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 Thenardiers so name his unknown lady. We, too, may walk in the Field of the Lark, its ancient s.p.a.ciousness 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 pa.s.s 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 Bievre sullied by the stains and the sc.u.m of the dye-works above. Yet, hid away in this dreary quarter--where the broad and cheerless streets are sultry in summer, bleak in winter, and gritty to the feet all the year round--it is still, as Hugo aptly says, the only spot about here where Ruysdael would have been tempted to stop, and sit, and sketch.

Among the countless American feet that tread Rue du Bac and Rue de Babylone, on their way to the shop that is a shrine at the junction of those two streets, there may be some few that turn into Rue Oudinot.

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

The trumpery tumults of 1832--in hopeless revolt against the Orleans monarchy and in impotent adventure for the republic--give occasion for grandiose barricade-building and for melodramatic combats. Hugo takes us, with Marius and his fellow-students, to that labyrinth of narrowest lanes, twisting about high bluffs of houses, that was then to be found between the churches of Saint-Leu and Saint-Eustache. It was a most characteristic corner of mediaeval 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 Pet.i.te-Truanderie alone remains narrow and malodorous. But "_Corinthe_" has been carted clean away. This was the notorious tavern, of two-storied stone, in front of which Enjolras defended his barricade, within which Grantaire emptied his last bottle, and in whose upper room these two stood up against the wall to be shot. Grantaire was doubtless sketched from his ill.u.s.trious precursor and prototype, the poet, Mathurin Regnier, 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-Francois 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 Moliere. Indeed, Voltaire a.s.serts that he who is not pleased with Regnard is not fit to admire Moliere. The seventeenth-century mansion, in which he was born, befitted the position of his father, a rich city merchant, and it has luckily escaped demolition, albeit brought down to base uses, as you shall see on looking at No. 108 Rue Rambuteau. And if you hurry to this neighborhood, you may yet find some few reminders of the scenes of 1832. In Rue de la Pet.i.te-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 Mondetour, 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 Francois Ier_." It was built by that monarch, at Moret on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, for his beloved sister, Marguerite de Navarre, it is believed. It was removed, stone by stone, and re-erected on its present site in Cours-la-Reine, where it is a delight to the lover of French Renaissance.

Hugo was one of the earliest, among the exiles of the Empire that ended worthily in the shame of Sedan, to be welcomed by the new Republic on his hastening to Paris. There he remained through _l'Annee Terrible_ of the Prussian siege, with his friend Paul Meurice, a hale veteran of letters, still in the youth of age in 1899. Paris being once more opened, Hugo went to and fro between Brussels and Guernsey and his own country for awhile. In 1873 he had quarters in the Villa Montmorenci at Auteuil, we learn by a letter from him dated there. In 1874 he settled in an apartment at No. 66 Rue de La Rochefoucauld, an airy spot at the summit of the slope upward toward Montmartre. Here he remained a year, and in 1875 removed a little farther along this same slope, to No. 21 Rue de Clichy, on the corner of Rue d'Athenes. 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed five happy years, with cherished companions.h.i.+p within, and all about him "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Victor Hugo.

(From the portrait by Bonnat.)]

As a tribute to him, Avenue d'Eylau has become Avenue Victor-Hugo, and his two-story-and-attic house--not one bit grander than the cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, in which began his literary fame--remains unchanged under its new number 124, only its side garden having been built over, the garden in the rear being left unspoiled.

At No. 140 of the avenue, the residence of M. Lockroy, is preserved the original death-mask of the poet, taken by the sculptor, M. Dalou.

It is a most striking portrait, and one wishes that copies might be permitted.

Here he died in 1885, and from here his body was carried by France to the Pantheon, there to be placed among all her other glories by a grateful country. Despite the ostentation of the pauper's hea.r.s.e 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 att.i.tude of the closely packed concourse--hushed, motionless, with bared heads--that gazed all through that hot May day at the slow-moving _cortege_, than in that magnificent retinue, escorting to his grave "The Sublime Child," grown gray in the service of his country's letters.

THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS

THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS

The prehistoric savages, who settled, for safety from onslaught, on the largest of the islands in the Seine, known to us as ile de la Cite; 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, mora.s.s, 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 Bievre on the southern bank of the Seine. But it is Labienus, that ablest of Caesar's lieutenants, who "marches with four legions to Lutetia. (This is the fortress of the Parisii, situated on an island in the river Seine.)" And Labienus knows the country as well as his trade, and skirts around the Marais, and crosses the Seine at Auteuil to the solid ground he has chosen on the plains of Grenelle. There he wins battle in the year 52 B.C., and drives the Gauls in disorder to the high ground on which the Pantheon 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 ma.s.sive 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 impa.s.sioned road-builders began to bring to it the highways, in the making of which, and by means of which, they were easily masters of their world. The Gauls had trodden footpaths through the forests and over the marshes, and of these, the two most trodden on the northern bank started from near the end of their only bridge, now replaced by Pont Notre-Dame. That which went northerly to the southeastern corner of the Halles of our Paris, there split into two branches; the one, named the Voie des Provinces Maritimes, followed nearly the line of present Rue Montmartre, and went, by way of Pontoise, to the northwestern coast of Gaul; the other, named the Voie des Provinces du Nord, ran from the Halles on a line between Rues Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, about where now Boulevard Sebastopol stretches. It was the high road to Saint-Denis, Senlis, Soissons, and so away to the north. The other main pathway turned toward the east, just above the bridge-end, and went nearly parallel with the river-bank, along the line of present Rue Saint-Antoine. This road, to Sens and Meaux and thence eastwardly, was known as the Voie des Provinces de l'Est, and later in life as the Voie Royale.

This pathway was diked by the Romans, and when sufficiently raised, it was paved with stones. Even then it was often submerged, and the marsh over which it went made more marshy, by frequent floods of the swollen Seine, overwas.h.i.+ng its slight banks; and by the ceaseless streams that carried down through this bowl the waters of the encircling slopes of Montmartre, Belleville, Chaumont, Menilmontant. 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'a.r.s.enal.

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

There was a beach or strand--_la greve_--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 Celestins; still there under its old name, but its old business long since gone to the bustling Port de Grenelle. On the Greve gathered men out of place, wandering about while waiting for work; whence comes the modern meaning of _greve_--a strike, when men get out of place and are not anxious for a job. Here on the Greve, 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 _Prevot des Marchands_, that demiG.o.d of democracy, the notable etienne Marcel. He had his home, while living, on Place de Greve, 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 a.s.sault on royal prerogatives, in a desperate stroke to secure the right of the townsmen to rule their town. The Dauphin was afraid of being trapped in the Louvre, and he took refuge in the old Palace of the City. To him forces his way, one day, the boisterous Marcel at the head of three thousand armed and howling men, kills two of the royal marshals in the Presence, and places his own cap of the town colors, red and blue--these were combined with the Bourbon white to make the Tricolor, centuries later--on the head of the terrified Dauphin, either to protect him, or in insolent token of this new recruit to the faction. As soon as might be, the Dauphin got away from his revolted citizens, and came back to his town only when strong enough to hold it against them. Nor would he then trust himself to a permanent residence in the Island-Palace, and it was allowed to fall into disrepair through several successive reigns. Louis XII. made partial restorations, and occasionally sojourned in his palace "in mid-stream," that made him think of his Loire. Parliament already owned the building then, by gift from Charles VII., and since then it has always been known as the Palais de Justice. The returned Dauphin took up his abode in the Hotel d'etampes, in the quarter of Saint-Paul, outside Philippe-Auguste's wall; and, by successive purchases, secured other neighboring _hotels_ and their grounds. This s.p.a.cious _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 Celestins, just east of them, on Port Saint-Paul--where the Dauphin's new estate had a grand portal and entrance-way from the quay and the river--away back to Rue Saint-Antoine on the north; and from just outside the old wall, eastwardly to the open country. This domain, and the suburbs that had grown beyond that old wall, toward the north, now came to be embraced within a new enclosure. On the southern side of the river there seemed no need for any enlargement of the old enclosure.

This wall, known in history as the wall of Charles V., was partly quite new, partly an extension or a strengthening of a wall begun by Marcel in 1356; under the pretext of "works of defence of the kingdom against the English," and carried on in offence of his royal master.

But before he had finished it, he came to his own end, opportunely for everyone but himself. It is midnight of July 31, 1358, and he is hastening, in darkness and stealth, to open his own gate of Saint-Antoine for the entrance of the combined forces of the English and of Charles the Bad, of Navarre. In Froissart's words: "The same night that this should have been done, G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d that he had a country--to sell; and his ign.o.ble 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-ecoliers, whose grounds stretched from without the old wall, eastwardly along the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine. Through them was cut our present Rue Sevigne, 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 Celestins, and have read the tablet that marks the place where played Moliere and his troupe, in 1645; and the other tablet that shows the site of Philippe-Auguste's Barbeau tower, constructed toward 1200, and taking its name from the great Abbey of Barbeau, whose extensive grounds bordered the river-bank here. From this huge tower and its gateway, kept intact as the starting-point at this end, the new wall turned at a right angle to the fast crumbling old wall, and went eastwardly along the sh.o.r.e; which they now banked up and planted with elms. That sh.o.r.e-line is now Boulevard Morland--named from that brave colonel of cha.s.seurs who was killed at Austerlitz--and the land in front, as far as Quai Henri IV., was anciently the little ile des Javiaux, renamed ile 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 mediaeval 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 ma.s.sive fortress known to us as the Bastille.

Of all the wretched memories of the accursed old prison, we shall awaken only one; that of Hugues Aubriot, its builder and its first tenant. Made Provost of Paris by Charles V.--who, after his hapless experience with Marcel, when Dauphin, would have no more Provost of Merchants--Aubriot had many enemies among the guilds and among the clerics. He was frank and outspoken of speech, humane to the priest-despoiled and mob-harried Jews, for whom he had, like his royal master, toleration if not sympathy, and to whom he returned their children, caught and christened by force. So, on the very day of the burial of his royal master, in September, 1380, Aubriot was arrested for heresy, and soon sent to his own Bastille of Saint-Antoine, "_pour faire penitence perpetuelle, au pain de tristesse, et a 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Hotel du Prevot.]

Under an arch at No. 102 Rue Saint-Antoine, we enter Pa.s.sage 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 Lycee Charlemagne, just behind us toward the east. The boundary railing, between this college and the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, is exactly on the line of Philippe-Auguste's wall. From the inner or city side of that wall, the provost's palace, with its grounds, stretched to Rue Prevot, then Rue Percee; that name still legible in the carved lettering on its corner with Rue Charlemagne. In that street, behind us as we stand here, is the southern entrance of his grounds, whose northern line was on Rue Saint-Antoine. This tower before us has been sadly modernized and newly painted, but its fabric is intact, with its original, square, wide-silled openings at each of the three landing-places of the old staircase. These openings are within a tall, slender arch, a timid attempt at the ogival, whose bolder growth we shall see presently in the Hotel de Sens.

Above this arch a superimposed story, its window cut in line with the others below, has taken the place of the battlements. On either side the tower joins a building obviously later than it in date, although it has been claimed that all three structures are fifteenth-century work. The high arch and the other decorations of the tower are undoubtedly of that time, but they are, as undoubtedly, applied over the small stones of a much more ancient fabric. This conviction is reinforced by the sentiment that makes us see Charles the Wise come into this court, with his good Aubriot, enter that low door, and climb that staircase, looking out through those windows as he mounts. In the year of that King's death there was born a future owner of this tower and its palace. This was Pierre de Giac, a charming specimen of the gang that helped John of Burgundy and Louis of Orleans in their ruin of France--the only job in which they were ever at one. Pierre de Giac, after betraying both sides, fell into the strong clutch of the Duke of Richmond, by whom, after torture, he was tied in a bag and flung into the Seine. His crony, Louis d'Orleans, had possession of this property in the closing years of the fourteenth century, when he inst.i.tuted the order of the _Porc-epic_ 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 _hotel_, 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-Honore, nearly in the centre of our Place du Theatre-Francais. 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 a.s.saulted by her at the head of her men; an a.s.sault 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'Opera and Place du Theatre-Francais, 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 b.u.t.te des Moulins, a few feet north of where now stands the apse of the Church of Saint-Roch. From Porte Saint-Honore, the wall went direct, across present Place du Carrousel, to the round Tour de Bois on the river-sh.o.r.e, 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 mediaeval mural masonry. Besides its round gate-towers, it was strengthened by many square towers, and was crenellated, and had frequent strong sentry-boxes and watch-towers between the battlements.

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

Within the _enceinte_ thus made, our Marais was at length entirely enclosed; away from its river-front, bordered by abbeys and monasteries; through its streets, walled off by palaces and mansions; and its other streets, packed with modest dwellings and shops; far back to the gardens and the vineyards, and the waste fields not yet tilled, that spread all around the inner zone of the wall. Within it, too, was brought the vast domain of the Templars, covering the s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.dly body, vowed to poverty and humility, grew large in numbers and appet.i.te, great in wealth and pride. Its knights were equal with princes, its monks were bankers for kings, and all had become simply a gang of sanctimonious brigands. A Capet saw the birth of the order, a Capet thought it time to strangle it as it neared its two-hundredth birthday. Philippe IV., "_le Bel_," less solicitous for the genuine faith than for the good coin of the Templars, laid hands on them and on it. He got rid of them by axe and stake and in other ways approved of in that day, and parcelled out their lands; through which streets were cut later, and building begun, when this new wall put them on its safe side.

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

Safely settled in his Hotel Saint-Paul, within his own wall--Marcel quiet in his grave at last, the n.o.bles curbed, the Jacquerie crushed--the young Dauphin, who had been weak and dissembling, and who was now grown, by long apprentices.h.i.+p 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'hotel solennel des grands ebastements_"--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 "_sejour, souper, et gite_" of roving royalty. Here in "Saint-Pol" was his home, from whose windows he looked out, with keen, patient, far-sighted vision, over the Paris and the France he had quelled and tranquillized.

The Hotel Saint-Paul was a town in itself, of many mansions, big and little, of _chateaux_ 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 emba.s.sies and to honored visitors.

Withal, pigeons perched on the carved bal.u.s.trades, 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 Baviere. 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 fellows.h.i.+p with the animals that were not let loose, but kept in cages. You may hunt up the stone walls of those cages--originally on pointed arches with short Romanesque pillars--and the stone foundations of the royal stables, in the yards on the southern side of Rue des Lions; a street whose name tells of these menageries, and that seems to echo with their roarings. The alleyway of cherry-trees now makes Rue de la Cerisaie, and Rue Beautreillis replaces the green tunnels of vines on trellises, where were gathered the grapes--good as are those of Thomery to-day--which produced the esteemed _vin de l'hotel 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 Hotel 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 G.o.d. 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 a.s.sa.s.sinating at every corner, equally thirsty for blood, but both surpa.s.sed in that thirst by the butchers and horse-knackers, led by Jean Caboche and called Cabochians. All these factions, while intent solely on bloodshed, were loud-mouthed with loyalty and patriotism. They were all alike, and we may transfer to them and to their times the apt phrase of Joseph de Maistre, concerning the Ma.s.sacre of Saint Bartholomew: "_Quelques scelerats firent perir quelques scelerats._" 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 Hotel Saint-Paul, stretched the grounds of the old _hotel_ 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 princ.i.p.al building had so many and such various shaped towers and turrets that it was named the Palais des Tournelles. Viewed from a distant height, as from the tower of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo, it had the look of a set of giant chessmen. This was the place selected by the Duke of Bedford for his residence during the English occupation of Paris; and from here, after the death of his brother Henry V. of England--and heir of France, as was then claimed--he reigned as Regent for the little Henry VI. He enlarged the buildings and beautified the grounds, in which he kept many rare birds. He kept, too, the rare ma.n.u.scripts 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 Angouleme, 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 Duchatel. That quick-witted provost, discovering that the Burgundians had got into the town by the betrayed Porte de Buci, on the night of Sat.u.r.day, May 28, 1418, had hastened to the Hotel Saint-Paul, had wrapped the sleeping boy in his bedclothes, and had carried him up Rue Saint-Antoine to the Bastille, and out into the country on the following day, and so to Melun, where the King's son was safe.

During this first short stay of three weeks, the listless and sluggish young King grew as fond as had been the Duke of Bedford of the walled-in grounds of the Tournelles. They were very extensive, covering the s.p.a.ce 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'etoit que galeries et jardins de tous cotes, sans parler des chapelles._"

And henceforth, for more than a hundred years, the Tournelles, "_pour la beaute et commodite du dit lieu_," was the favored abode of royalty, when royalty favored Paris with infrequent visits. The sombre shapes of Louis XI. and his ign.o.ble comrades darkened its precincts, at times. When he made his entry, already narrated, into the town after his coronation at Rheims, he pa.s.sed the night of August 31, 1461, in the old Island-Palace, and on the following day he installed himself in "_son hotel des Tournelles, pres 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 Celestins 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 Daedalus_." About these grounds Louis prowled, seldom going beyond them, and then only by night, and with one trusted gossip. Indeed, he was less like the King of France here in his palace than anywhere else; camping rather than residing, with a small retinue of old Brabant servitors, and a larder filled mostly with cold victuals, says Michelet. It was Loches occasionally, and Plessis-les-Tours habitually, that had the pleasure of harboring the "universal spider"; in them both he spun his webs, and waited gloating, and found "many c.o.c.kroaches under the King's hearthstone," as the saying went. And at last he died, triumphant and wretched, at Plessis-les-Tours.

"_Le Pet.i.t 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 Amba.s.sador, 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 _chateau_ he was just then rebuilding, he lay for hours until his death, so carrying out the curse of Savonarola, who had threatened him with the anger of G.o.d, if he failed to return to Italy with his army to cleanse the unclean Church with the sword.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Anne de Bretagne.

(From a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection.)]

"_Le bon Roi Louis, Pere du Peuple, est mort_," is the doleful p.r.o.nouncement 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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'Orleans, 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'Orleans--to s.n.a.t.c.h 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 Brantome is quick to note. Getting no return for her pa.s.sion, the fury of a woman scorned, backed by her father's malign humor, marries the handsome prince to her younger sister, Jeanne--ugly and deformed and uncharming. Freed by divorce from this childless union, on taking the throne, Louis hastens to marry his former flame, Anne of Brittany, now the widow of Charles VIII. This lady, fair in person and fairer in her duchy, lively and not unlearned, a blameless yet imperious spouse, gave him many happy years. The personal court he allowed "_sa Bretonne_" outshone his own court, and glorified the gloomy Tournelles. For all his clinging to her, she was taken from him when only thirty-seven years of age; refusing to live, when she found, for the first time, that her self-will was not allowed its own way. She would have her daughter, Claude, marry Charles of Austria, Emperor-to-be, and the powers in France would not have it, because they were unwilling that Brittany should go, with its heiress, into foreign hands. A marriage was arranged between Claude and the young Duc d'Angouleme, who was to become Francois I., so keeping the rich duchy for France. After Anne's death, her widower made a third venture, and yet, the chronicler plaintively a.s.sures us, he had no need of a new wife. This was Mary, sister of Henry VIII. of England, who was glad to get her out of his country; and she was as glad to return as soon as, on finding herself a widow, she could become the wife of her first love, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. And so these two were the grandparents of Lady Jane Grey.

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

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