The Stones of Paris in History and Letters Volume Ii Part 7

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 Francois I. could not wait later than nine o'clock. Once installed in the Tournelles, this young English bride of Louis's must needs, among other innovations, introduce her own country's customs into her husband's mode of life, as we are told in "_la tres 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 Francois I., the while the Hotel 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-la gatera tout._" Recalling, one needy day, that he owned Saint-Paul, "_un grand hotel, fort vague et ruineux_,"

he soon got rid of the buildings and the land for coin, reserving one large tract, along the eastern side under the wall, for the erection of an a.r.s.enal. And so, with streets cut through the old domain, no trace was left of Charles V.'s "_hotel solennel des grands ebastements_." 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 Brantome puts it. Anne of Brittany had brightened it a bit for Brantome with some few _dames et demoiselles_, but Francois 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, Compiegne, Fontainebleau, Blois, Chambord, posing always as the patron and prodrome of the Renaissance in France. At least, he could say truly of himself, "_On verra qu'il y a un roi en France_;" but besides the throne and his pet foolishnesses, he handed down nothing worth owning to his son--that Henri II. of heavy fist and light brain, slow of thought and of speech, cold, uncongenial, commonplace. Yet the Tournelles was a cheerful home for him and for his official family, when he could get away from the exclusive holding of Diana of Poictiers and her family. His youngest daughter, Marguerite de France, has sketched, in her "Memoires," 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Louis XII.

(Water color, from a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection.)]

To the Tournelles comes Francois Rabelais, in the "Contes Drolatiques"

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 Celestins, 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 a.r.s.enal 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 _flaneur_, to stand uncovered there, before or near the last dwelling of "_le savant et ingenieux rieur_," whose birthplace and whose statue at Chinon are worth a journey to see; where, too, the local wine will be found as delicate and as individual as when, sold by the elder Rabelais in the fourteenth century, it made the money that sent his famous son to the great schools of the capital. That son closed his life of congenial vagabondage, and of many _metiers_, in this sedate country road, where he had pa.s.sed three blameless years, two of them as _cure_ 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-Cambresis, 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 fas.h.i.+on in those days, men must needs fight and ladies must look on. So it came that the King, proud of having shown himself "a st.u.r.dy 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 Francois I., had sickened in the place. So "_le miserable 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 pa.s.ses, with almost the same emotion felt by the Frenchmen of Voltaire's day, at the effigy of the most essentially French of all French kings. The statue faces "the symmetrical structures of stone and brick," planned by him for his Place Dauphine, in honor of the birth of his son. They are hardly altered since their construction by his good friend Achille de Harlay, President of Parliament, whose name is retained in the street behind the _place_ and in front of the Palace of Justice. The King looks out, a genial grin between his big, ugly, Gascon-Bourbon nose and his pus.h.i.+ng chin, over his beloved Paris, well worth the ma.s.s 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 _hotel_ 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 Bethune had been the most faithful helper of Henri de Navarre and he continued to be the most faithful servant of Henri IV.

He had many homely virtues, rare in those days, rare in any days. He was courageous, honest, laborious; he did long and loyal service to the State; he worked almost a miracle for the finances of the kingdom, carrying his economies into every detail, even to the ordering of costumes in black, to spare the expense of the richly colored robes in vogue. A vigilant watch-dog, he was surly and snappish withal, and he had a greedy grip on all stray bones that fell fairly in his way. His wealth and power grew with his chances. He seems to have put something of himself into his _hotel_, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sully.

(From a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musee Conde at Chantilly.)]

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Court of the Hotel de Bethune. Sully's Residence.]

The garish windows of the restaurant on the ground floor glare intrusively out on the old-time court, and a discordant note is struck by the signs, all about its doorways, of the new-fangled industries within--a water-cure, a boxing-school, a gymnasium. School-boys play noisily in this court, and, in the garden behind, schoolgirls take the air demurely. To reach their garden, we pa.s.s through a s.p.a.cious 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 facade 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 Hotel 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 finis.h.i.+ng;" 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 a.s.serted that his "mason," for these constructions of the Place Royale, was Androuet du Cerceau, whose name is claimed for many buildings that would make his working-life last for a century and more. This Jacques Androuet 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 Androuet, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Hotel de Mayenne.

In the distance, the Temple Sainte-Marie, called the Church of the Visitation.]

We are fortunate in that we may see one example of the style of the founder of this notable family, in the ma.s.sive structure at No. 212 Rue Saint-Antoine, its side walls extending along Rue du Pet.i.t-Musc.

This street took its t.i.tle from one of the numerous small _hotels_ that made up the grand Hotel Saint-Paul; and on its foundations--still buried beneath these stones--was erected the present structure by Androuet 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 Pet.i.t-Musc.

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

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

This first public appearance of the _place_ was, also, the last public appearance of the Queen-Regent. There can be woven no romance about this woman; fat and foolish, copious of emotion, impulsive of speech.

The pencil of Rubens cannot give grace to her affluent curves, and her husband's strength could not stand against her "terribly robust" arms, working briskly when she raged. Whatever may be our summing-up of this man's morality, we must set down, to the credit of his account, his hard case with the two women to whom fate had married him, each so trying after her own fas.h.i.+on. Of sterner stuff than he, so far as that s.e.x goes, was Richelieu, the new ruler of the young King Louis XIII.

He would bear no more of Marie's meddling and muddling, and sent her into exile in 1617. These two died in the same year, 1642, she in poverty and neglect at Cologne, after having so long been "tossed to and fro by the various fortunes of her life," says English Evelyn; who, travelling on the Continent, notes the "universal discontent which accompanied that unlucky woman, wherever she went."

We see her in our Place Royale only during this one day, but her son and his minister are with us there to-day, as we stand in front of that King's statue, in the centre of the square. This statue is a reproduction of the original--melted down in 1792--erected by Richelieu in 1639, not less for his own glorification, than to immortalize the virtues of "Louis the Just, Thirteenth of that name."

He had a score of the virtues of a valet, indeed, and with them the soul of a lackey. This present statue, placed here in the closing year of the Bourbon Restoration, 1829, prettifies and makes complacent that sombre and suspicious creature, the dismallest figure in his low-spirited court. On his hair, flowing to his shoulders, rests a laurel crown, and the weak lips, curved in an unwonted smile, not twisted by his habitual stutter, are half hid by a darling mustache.

He sits his horse jauntily, clad in a long cloak and a skirt reaching to his naked knees, and tries to be ostentatiously Roman with bare arms and legs, his right hand pointing out across the square, from which he tried in vain to drive the duellists.

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

Windows and balconies are deserted now; there is no clash of steel in the square, whose silence is in striking contrast with the sordid strife of neighboring Rue Saint-Antoine; and these stately mansions, dignified in their unimpaired old age, seem to await in patience the return of their n.o.ble 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 Bearn and Birague. Those two pavilions, higher than the others, were set apart for the King and Queen; and over the central window of the southern one, the King, in medallion, looks down. The stately fronts of red brick--new to Paris then--edged with light freestone, and the steep roofs of leaded blue slate, broken by great dormers reminiscent of Renaissance windows, are time-stained to a delicate tricolor; and it pleases us to fancy the first Bourbon King unconsciously antic.i.p.ating 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 fas.h.i.+on having only just then been set in the new Hotel Rambouillet. Behind them, the s.p.a.cious blue and yellow _salons_ were hung with Italian velvets, or with Flemish and French tapestries, inters.p.a.ced 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 facades--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 ages_," for whom the Marais was noted. The creations of comedy are here, too, and Moliere'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 Hotel 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. Moliere 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 coa.r.s.eness, 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 n.o.ble; and, in the Place Royale and about, Moliere found his _Precieuses Ridicules_. Just a little way from here, was a room full of them--that of Mlle. de Scudery.

Go up Rue de Beauce, narrowest of Marais streets between its old house- and garden-walls, and you come to the pa.s.sage that leads to the Marche des Enfants-Rouges, the market and its surrounding s.p.a.ce 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 Francois I., and by him endowed at her urging.

The little orphans cared for in this inst.i.tution were clad all in red, and their pet popular name of "_Enfants Rouges_" soon took the place of the official t.i.tle of "_Enfants de Dieu_." On the corner of this pa.s.sage, you must stop to choose the abode of Mlle. de Scudery 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 pa.s.sage; 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 pa.s.sage, since then close shut in with houses, still tuneful to-day, but the birds are kept in cages.

In this house Madeleine de Scudery wrote her long and weary romance, "Artamene, 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 Hotel Rambouillet, where she had served her apprentices.h.i.+p before starting out for herself, and where she had produced the poem by which she won her _nom de Parna.s.se_, "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 Sat.u.r.day for more than thirty years. As to the _causerie litteraire 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; Moliere 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 Precieuses." 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 p.r.o.nouncement: "We attach ourselves only to madrigals," he is making a direct quotation from the "Chronique."

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

They came from all about the Marais, it has been said. At the time of her death, in the first year of the eighteenth century, this quarter had become the chosen abode of the real swells of Paris, and so the only possible residence for all those who wished to be so considered.

Long before, a new member of the body politic had been born--the _bourgeois_--and a place had to be found for him. The leisure he had gained from bread-getting need no longer be given to head-breaking, and for his vision there was a horizon broader than that of his father, of dignity in man and comeliness in life. His first solicitude was for his habitation, which must be set free from the rude strength of the feudal fortresses in which the _n.o.blesse_ had camped. He levelled battlements into cornices, and widened loop-holes into windows, open for sunlight and _a la belle etoile_. In this seemly home, his thoughts threw off the obstruction imposed by centuries of repression, and by the joyless dogmas of the Church. And so began that multiform process that, at last, flamed up through the frozen earth, and has been named the Renaissance.

Many of the new mansions of the _bourgeoisie_ were in Marais streets that were still walled off by the shut-in grounds of the religious bodies, whose unproductive dwellers avoided all taxation. "You see, formerly, there were monasteries all about here," says light-hearted Laigle in "Les Miserables"; "Du Breul and Sauval give the list of them and the Abbe 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 _hotels_ of the n.o.blemen came into the market as well. There had been hardly any opening-up of this quarter, from the day when Charles V. ended his wall, to the day when Henri IV. began his Place Royale. He had planned, also, a monumental square at the top of the Templars' domain, to be called Place de France, with a grandiose entrance, from which eight wide streets, bearing the names of the great provinces of France, were to radiate, to be crossed by smaller streets named from the lesser provinces. For this scheme Sully had bought up, under cover of a broker, an immense tract in this region, just as the King's death put a sudden end to this project, along with all his other projects.

One man did much to make real the plan that had been put on paper only. This was Claude Charlot, a Languedoc peasant, who had come to the capital in wooden _sabots_, with no money, but with plenty of shrewdness and audacity. By 1618 he had managed to acquire almost the entire tract set aside by Sully, and through it he cut streets, the princ.i.p.al 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-cocheres_ 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 s.p.a.cious stone stairways; and many of them were rich in ma.n.u.scripts 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 a.s.sociation. For the aspect of a street, or the atmosphere of a house, tells to the intelligent looker-on as much of its bygone inmates as of its bare masonry. And kindly fate has left such relics plentifully scattered about the Marais. In oldest Paris of the Island, and in that almost as old suburb on the southern bank, one must prowl patiently to find suggestive brick and stone. In those regions a concealed tower, or an isolated _tourelle_ on the angle of a building, makes the whole joy of a day's journey. Here, in the Marais, at every step you stumble on history and tradition and romance.

For "the little province of the Marais" was far away from the capital, and was let alone; or, rather, it was an unmolested island, washed about and not washed over by the swift tide of traffic. The stormy waves of insurrection have broken against its sh.o.r.es, 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 _n.o.blesse de famille_ adopted the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the new _n.o.blesse de finance_ migrated to the Faubourg Saint-Honore, and the gadding mult.i.tude 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 _pet.i.ts rentiers_ found a boon in the small rentals of the big apartments. All these _locataires_, preserving the old forms and keeping untarnished the old etiquette, gave an air of dignified dulness to the Marais. Their dinner-hour was at five o'clock, and after that solemn function, held in the hall hung with family portraits or with dingy tapestry, their sedate prattle, before going to bed at nine o'clock, would touch on the unhallowed Edict of Nantes and on its righteous revocation; even as in a certain London club of to-day, musty old gentlemen still lament, with subdued dismay, "the murder of the Martyr, Charles Stuart." The sole diversion of these ancient dames of the Marais was a stroll in the Place Royale, arrayed in old-time costumes, their white hair dressed high above their patrician brows.

Nowadays, under the horse-chestnuts and baby elms of its ground, school-boys from the neighboring inst.i.tutions 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 t.i.tle 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

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Place des Vosges.]