quarter--carries us to the quay of the Hôtel de Ville, and we may turn
to look in at Saint-Gervais, its precious window as brilliant as on
the day it was finished by Jean Cousin. Passing in front of the
imperious statue of Étienne Marcel, staring at the river that was his
grave, we cross Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, once Place de Grève, when
it had in the centre its stone cross reached by high steps, and its
busy gallows close at hand. We forget its horrid memories in the sight
of the new Hôtel de Ville, of no memories, good or bad, to dash our
delight in this most nearly perfect of modern structures; perfect in
design, execution, and material, a consummate scheme carried out to
the last exquisite detail by architects, sculptors, and decorators,
all masters of their crafts.
Our direct road takes us through the Halles, their huge iron and glass
structures the lineal descendants of those heavy stone Halles, started
in the twelfth century here in the fields, when the small market on
the island no longer sufficed. Their square, dumpy pillars, and those
on which the houses all about were once supported, survive only in the
few left from the seventeenth-century rebuilding, now on the north
side of Rue de la Ferronerie. Standing in that arcade, we look out on
the spot where Ravaillac waited for the coming of Henri IV. The
wretched fanatic, worked on by whom we shall never know, had found
Paris crowded for the Queen's coronation, and had hunted up a room in
the "Three Pigeons," an inn of Rue Saint-Honoré, opposite the Church
of Saint-Roch. Here or in another tavern, while prowling, he stole
the knife. The narrow street was widened a little by Richelieu, and
few of its ancient buildings are left. Returning through this arcade,
once the entrance to the Cemetery of the Innocents, to Rue des
Innocents just behind, you will find many of the old _charniers_
absolutely unchanged. They form the low-ceilinged ground floor of
nearly all these buildings between Rue Saint-Denis and Rue de la
Lingerie. Perhaps the most characteristic specimen is that one used
for a _remise de voitures à bras_, a phrase of the finest French for a
push-cart shed! And under No. 15 of this street of the Innocents, you
may explore two of the cemetery vaults in perfect preservation. They
are come to less lugubrious usage now, and serve as a club-room for
the teamsters who bring supplies to the markets over-night, and for
the market attendants who wait for them. Their wagons unloaded, here
they pass the night until daylight shall bring customers, drinking and
singing after their harmless fashion, happily ignorant or careless of
the once grisly service of these caves. The attendants in the
_cabaret_ on the entrance floor, tired as they are by day, will
courteously show the cellars, one beneath the other. One must stoop to
pass under the heavily vaulted low arches, and the small chambers are
overcrowded with a cottage piano and with rough benches and tables;
these latter cut, beyond even the unhallowed industry of schoolboys,
with initials and names of the frequenters of the club, who have
scarred the walls in the same vigorous style. The demure _dame du
comptoir_ above assures you that you will be welcomed between
midnight and dawn, but bids you bring no prejudices along, for the
guests are not apt, in their song and chatter, to "_chercher la
délicatesse_"!
The Church of the Innocents, built by Louis "_le Gros_" early in the
twelfth century, had on its corner at Rues Saint-Denis and aux
Fers--this latter now widened into Rue Berger--a most ancient
fountain, dating from 1273. This fountain was built anew in 1550, from
a design of the Abbé de Clagny, not of Pierre Lescot as is claimed,
and was decorated by Jean Goujon. Just before the Revolution
(1785-88), when church and charnel-houses and cemetery were swept
away, this fountain was removed to the centre of the markets--the
centre, too, of the old cemetery--and has been placed, since then, in
the middle of this dainty little square which greets us as we emerge
from our _cabaret_. To the three arches it owned, when backed by the
church corner, a fourth has been added to make a square, and the
original Naiads of Goujon have been increased in number. Their fine
flowing lines lift up and lend distinction to this best bit of
Renaissance remaining in Paris. And here we are struck by the
ingenuity shown by making the water in motion a signal feature of the
decoration--another instance of this engaging characteristic of French
fountains.
A few steps farther north take us to Rue Étienne Marcel, cutting its
ruthless course through all that should be sacred, in a fashion that
would gladden the sturdy provost. For all its destructive instincts,
it yet has spared to us this memorable bit of petrified history, the
tower of "_Jean-sans-Peur_." At No. 20, on the northern side of this
broad and noisy street, amid modern structures, its base below the
level of the pavement, stands the last remaining fragment of the Hôtel
de Bourgogne; which, under its earlier name in older annals as the
Hôtel d'Artois, carries us back again to the thirteenth century, for
this was the palace-fortress built by the younger brother of Saint
Louis, Robert, Count of Artois. He it was who fell, in his "senseless
ardor," on the disastrous field of Massouah, in 1250; when the pious
King and his devoted captains were made captive by the Sultan of
Egypt, and released with heavy fines, so ending that Sixth Crusade.
The Hôtel d'Artois was a princely domain, reaching southward from the
wall of Philippe-Auguste to Rue Mauconseil, a road much longer then,
and extending from present Rue Saint-Denis to Rue Montorgueil, the two
streets that bounded the property east and west. Some of its
structures backed against the wall, some of them rested upon its
broken top. For the grounds and gardens enclosed within this northern
_enceinte_--completed between 1190 and 1208--stretched to its base,
leaving no room for a road on its inner side. Because of this plan,
and because this wall crumbled gradually, its broken sections being
surrounded and surmounted by crowding houses, no broad boulevards were
laid out over its line--as was done with its immediate successor, the
wall of Charles V.--and it is not easy to trace it through modern
streets and under modern structures. The only fragment left is the
tower in the court of the Mont-de-Piété, entered from Rue des
Francs-Bourgeois, and it is of build less solid than those we have
seen on the southern bank. In the pavement of the first court is
traced the line of the wall up to this tower. With this exception, we
can indicate only the sites of the towers and the course of the wall.
The huge Tour Barbeau was at the easternmost river end, on Quai des
Célestins, nearly at the foot of our Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. It
commanded Port Saint-Paul, chief landing-place of river boatmen, and
guarded the Pôterne des Barrés. That name was also given to the small
street--now Rue de l'Ave Maria--that led from this postern-gate. They
owe that name indirectly to Saint Louis. Returning from the Holy Land,
he had brought six monks from Mount Carmel, and housed them on the
quay, called now after their successors, the Célestins. The black
robes, striped white, of these six monks, made them known popularly as
"_les Barrés_." Our wall ran straight away from this waterside gate,
parallel with and a little to the west of present Rue des Jardins,
then a country road on its outer edge, to Porte Baudoyer, afterward
Porte Saint-Antoine, standing across the space where meet Rues
Saint-Antoine and de Rivoli. This was the strongest for defence of all
the gates, holding the entrance to the town, by way of the Roman and
later the Royal road from the eastern provinces. From this point the
wall took a great curve beyond the bounds of the built-up portions of
the town. The Pôterne Barbette, its next gate, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple,
just south of its crossing by Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, lost its old
name in this name taken from the Hôtel Barbette, built a century
later, outside the wall here. Next came the gate in Rue du Temple,
nearly half way between our Rues de Braque and Rambuteau. Through this
gate passed the Knights Templar to and from their great fortified
domain beyond. The Pôterne Beaubourg, in the street of that name, was
a minor gateway, having no especial history beyond that contained in
the derivation of its name, "_beaubourg_," from a particularly rich
settlement, just hereabout. Next we come to two most important gates,
Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, across those two streets, that guarded
the approaches by the great roads from Senlis and Soissons, and the
heart of the land, old Île de France, and from all the northern
provinces. Between the Saint-Denis gate and that at Rue Montorgueil,
lay the property of the Comte d'Artois, and he cut, for his royal
convenience, a postern in the wall that formed his northern boundary.
From this point our wall went in another wide curve to the river-bank,
within the lines of old Rues Plâtrière and Grenelle, the two now
widened into modern Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. The country road that
is now Rue Montmartre was guarded by a gate, opened a few years after
the completion of the wall, and its site shown by a tablet in the wall
of No. 30 of that street. A small gate was cut at the meeting of
present Rues Coquillière and Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. Nearly opposite
the end of this latter street, where Rue Saint-Honoré passes in front
of the Oratoire, was the last public gate on the mainland. Thence the
course was straight away to the river shore, as you may see by the
diagram set in lighter stone in the pavement of the court of the
Louvre. These stones mark also the huge round of the donjon of the old
Louvre, on whose eastern or town side the wall passed to the
river-side Tour-qui-fait-le-Coin. This tower was of the shape and size
of the opposite Tour de Nesle, which we have already seen at the point
where the southern wall came down to the shore; and between the two
towers, a great chain was slung across the Seine to prevent approach
by river pirates. Pont des Arts is almost directly over the dip of
that chain. So, too, the river was protected at the eastern ends of
the wall; the Barbeau tower was linked to the solitary tower on Île
Notre-Dame, and that again across the other arm of the Seine, to the
immense tower on Quai de la Tournelle. This island Tour Loriaux rose
from the banks of a natural moat made by the river's narrow channel
between Île Notre-Dame and Île aux Vaches, and this bank was afterward
further protected by a slight curtain of wall across the island, with
a tower at either end. Four centuries later, when this island wall and
its towers had long since crumbled away, that moat was filled up--Rue
Poulletier, the modernized Poultier, lies over its course--and the two
small islands became large Île Saint-Louis.
And now, we have seen _la Cité_, _la Ville_, _l'Université_, all
girdled about by Philippe-Auguste's great wall. The City could spread
no farther than its river-banks; the University was content to abide
within its bounds, even as late as the wars of the League; the Town
began speedily to outgrow its limits, and within two centuries it had
so developed that the capacious range of a new wall, that of Charles
V., was needed to enclose its bustling quarters. That story shall come
in a later chapter.
One hundred years after the death of Robert of Artois, his estate
passed, by marriage, to the first house of Burgundy, whose name it
took, and when that house became extinct, in the days of Jean "_le
Bon_," second Valois King of France, it came, along with the broad
acres and opulent towns of that duchy, into his hands, by way of some
distant kinship. This generous and not over-shrewd monarch did not
care to retain these much-needed revenues, and gave them, with the
resuscitated title of Burgundy, to his younger son, "recalling again
to memory the excellent and praiseworthy services of our right dearly
beloved son Philip, the fourth of our sons, who freely exposed himself
to death with us, and, all wounded as he was, remained unwavering and
fearless at the battle of Poictiers." From that field Philip carried
away his future title, "_le Hardi_." By this act of grateful
recognition, rare in kings, were laid the foundations of a house that
was to grow as great as the throne itself, to perplex France within,
and to bring trouble from without, throughout long calamitous years.
This first Duke Philip seems to have had the hardihood to do right in
those wrong-doing days, for he remained a sufficiently loyal subject
of his brother Charles V., and later a faithful guardian, as one of
the "_Sires de la Fleur-de-Lis_," of his nephew, the eleven-year-old
Charles VI. He married Margaret, heiress of the Count of Flanders, and
widow of Philippe de Rouvre, last of the old line of Burgundy, and she
brought, to this new house of Burgundy, the fat, flat meadows and the
turbulent towns of the Lowlands, and also the Hôtel de Flandres in the
capital, where now stands the General Post-office in Rue
Jean-Jacques-Rousseau.
Duke Philip, dying in 1404, bequeathed to his eldest son, John,
nick-named "_Jean-sans-Peur_," not only a goodly share of his immense
possessions, but also the pickings of a "very pretty quarrel" with
Louis de Valois, Duc d'Orléans. This quarrel was tenderly nursed by
John, who, as the head of a powerful independent house, and the leader
of a redoubtable faction, felt himself to be more important than the
royal younger brother. Ambitious and unscrupulous, calculating and
impetuous, he created the rôle on his stage, played with transient
success by Philippe-Égalité, four hundred years later. He rode at the
head of a brilliant train and posed for the applause of the populace.
He walked arm in arm with the public executioner, Capeluche, and when
done with him, handed him over to the gallows. Finding himself grown
so great, he schemed for sole control of the State. The one man in his
way was Louis of Orleans, the mad king's only brother, the lover of
the queen, and her accomplice in plundering and wasting the country's
revenues. He was handsome and elegant, open in speech and open of
hand, bewitching all men and women whom he cared to win. "_Qui veult,
peut_," was his braggart device, loud on the walls of the rooms of
Viollet-le-Duc's reconstructed Pierrefonds, whose original was built
by Louis. In its court you may see the man himself in Frémiet's superb
bronze, erect and alert on his horse. The horse's hoofs trample the
flowers, as his rider trod down all sweet decencies in his stride
through life. He was an insolent profligate, quick to tell when he had
kissed. In his long gallery of portraits of the women who, his swagger
suggested, had yielded to his allurements, he hung, with unseemly
taste, those of his lovely Italian wife, Valentine Visconti, and of
the Duchess of Burgundy, his cousin's wife; both of them honest women.
For this boast, John hated him; he hated him, as did his other
unlettered compeers, for his learning and eloquence and patronage of
poetry and the arts; he hated him as did the common people, who prayed
"Jesus Christ in Heaven, send Thou someone to deliver us from
Orleans."
[Illustration: "Jean-sans-Peur," Duc de Bourgogne.
(From a painting by an unknown artist, at Chantilly.)]
At last "_Jean-sans-Peur_" mustered his courage and his assassins to
deliver himself and France. Isabelle of Bavaria had left her crazed
husband in desolate Hôtel Saint-Paul, and carried her unclean court to
Hôtel Barbette--we shall see more of these residences in another
chapter--where she sat at supper, with her husband's brother, on the
night of November 23, 1407. It was eight in the evening, dark for the
short days of that "black winter," the bitterest known in France for
centuries. An urgent messenger, shown in to Orleans at table, begged
him to hasten to the King at Saint-Paul. The duke sauntered out,
humming an air, mounted his mule and started on his way, still
musical; four varlets with torches ahead, two 'squires behind. Only a
few steps on, as he passed the shadowed entrance of a court, armed
men--many more than his escort--sprang upon him and cut him down with
axes. He called out that he was the Duke of Orleans. "So much the
better!" they shouted, and battered him to death on the ground; then
they rode off through the night, unmolested by the terrified
attendants. The master and paymaster of the gang, who was watching,
from a doorway hard by, to see that his money was honestly earned,
went off on his way. A devious way it turned out to be, for, having
admitted his complicity to the Council, in his high and mighty
fashion, he found himself safer in flight than in his guarded topmost
room of this tower before us. He galloped away to his frontier of
Flanders, cutting each bridge that he crossed. It was ten years before
he could return, and then he came at the head of his Burgundian
forces, and bought the keys of Porte de Buci, stolen by its keeper's
son from under his father's pillow. Entering Paris on the night of
Saturday, May 28, 1418, on the following day, the Burgundians began
those massacres which lasted as long as there were Armagnacs to kill,
and which polluted Paris streets with corpses. Within a year, John,
lured to a meeting with the Dauphin, afterward Charles VII., went to
the bridge at Montereau, with the infinite precautions always taken by
this fearless man, and there he was murdered with no less treachery,
if with less butchery, than he gave to his killing of Louis of
Orleans.
Valentine Visconti, widow of Orleans, had not lived to see this
retribution. Her appeal to the King for the punishment of the assassin
was answered by pleasant phrases, and soon after, in one of his sane
intervals, was further answered by the royal pardon to Burgundy, for
that "out of faith and loyalty to us, he has caused to be put out of
the world our brother of Orleans." She had counted on the King's
remembering that, in the early years of his madness, hers had been the
only face he knew and the only voice that soothed him. She crept away
to Blois with her children, and with Dunois, her husband's son but not
her own. The others were not of the age nor of the stuff to harbor
revenge, and to him she said: "You were stolen from me, and it is
_you_ who are fit to avenge your father." These are fiery words from a
rarely gentle yet courageous woman, grown vindictive out of her
constancy to a worthless man. She is the one pure creature, pathetic
and undefiled, in all this welter of perfidy and brutality. "She
shines in the black wreck of things," in Carlyle's words concerning
another "noble white vision, with its high queenly face, its soft
proud eyes," of a later day. There, at Blois, she died within the
year.
It would carry us too far from this tower to follow the course of the
feud between the heirs of these two houses. "Philip the Good, Duke of
Burgundy, Luxembourg, and Brabant, Earl of Holland and Zealand, Lord
of Friesland, Count of Flanders, Artois, and Hainault, Lord of Salins
and Macklyn," was a high and puissant prince, and versatile withal.
"He could fight as well as any king going, and he could lie as well as
any, except the King of France. He was a mighty hunter, and could read
and write. His tastes were wide and ardent. He loved jewels like a
woman, and gorgeous apparel. He dearly loved maids-of-honor, and,
indeed, paintings generally, in proof of which he ennobled Jan van
Eyck.... In short, he relished all rarities, except the humdrum
virtues." Charles of Orleans, son of Louis, was of another kidney.
Spirited at the start, this prince was spoiled by his training, "like
such other lords as I have seen educated in this country," says
Comines; "for these were taught nothing but to play the jackanapes
with finery and fine words." Young Charles d'Orléans took his earliest
lessons in rhyme, and he rhymed through life, through his twenty-five
years of captivity in England, until he was old Charles, the pallid
figure-head of a petty, babbling, versifying court. And the quarrel
between the two houses came to nothing beyond the trifle of general
misery for France.
It was only when Burgundy came into collision with the crafty Dauphin
of France, the rebellious son of Charles VII., who had fled from his
father's court and taken refuge with Duke Philip the Good, that this
great house began to fail in power. When that Dauphin, become Louis
XI., made royal entry into Paris, this Hôtel de Bourgogne showed all
its old bravery. From its great court, through its great gate on Rue
Saint-Denis, into the space behind the town gate of that name, Duke
Philip rode forth on the last day of August, 1461, at his side his
son--then Comte de Charolais, known later as Charles "_le
Téméraire_"--to head the glittering array of nobles, aglow with silken
draperies and jewels, their horses' housings sweeping the ground, who
await the new King. Few of them are quite sure "how they stand" with
him, and they hardly know how to greet him as he enters, but they take
the customary oaths when they get to Notre-Dame, and thence escort him
to the old palace on the island. There they feasted and their royal
master pretended to be jolly, all the while speculating on the speedy
snuffing-out of these flashing satellites. On the morrow he took up
his residence in the Hôtel des Tournelles, almost deserted within, and
altogether without. For the populace crowded about this Hôtel de
Bourgogne, all eyes and ears for the sight and the story of its
splendors. Its tapestries were the richest ever seen by Parisians, its
silver such as few princes owned, its table lavish and ungrudging. The
duke's robes and jewels were so wonderful that the cheering mob ran
after him, as he passed along the streets, with his attendant train of
nobles and his body-guard of archers.
With his death died all the pomp and show of this palace. His son,
Charles the Bold, wasted no time in Paris from the fighting, for which
he had an incurable itch, but no genius. He kept this deserted house
in charge of a _concierge_ for his daughter Mary, "the richest heiress
in Christendom," who was promised to five suitors at once, and who
married Maximilian of Austria at last. Their grandson, the Emperor
Charles V., in one of the many bargains made and unmade between him
and François I.--the one the direct descendant of Louis of Orleans and
the other the direct descendant of John of Burgundy--gave up to the
French crown all that Burgundy owned in France, one portion of it in
Paris being this Hôtel de Bourgogne. By now this once most strongly
fortified and best defended fortress-home in all the town was fallen
into sad decay, its spacious courts the playground of stray children,
its great halls and roomy chambers a refuge for tramps and rascals. So
François, casting about for any scheme to bring in money, and greedy
to keep alive the tradition, handed down from Hugh Capet, that gave to
his crown all the ground on which Paris was built, sold at auction
this old rookery, along with other royal buildings and land in the
city, in the year 1543. This _hôtel_ was put up in thirteen lots, this
tower and its dependencies, Burgundian additions of the first years of
the fifteenth century, being numbered 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, and while all
the other structures were demolished, these were kept entire by the
purchaser, whose name has not come down to us. They may have been
"bid in" by the State, for they reappear as crown property of Louis
XIII.; and he gave "what was left of the donjon of the Hôtel d'Artois"
to the monks of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, in exchange for
a tract of their land on the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, just
west of Place Royale. By this barter it would seem that he intended to
carry out one of his father's cherished schemes, to be spoken of in a
later chapter.