a phrase that may be modernized into "soup-kitchens." These were under
the control of a certain "Père Vincent," who has been canonized since
as Saint Vincent de Paul. This peasant's son had grown up into a
tender-hearted priest, bountiful to the poor with the crowns he
adroitly wheedled from the rich. For he had guile as well as
loving-kindness, he was a wily and a jocular shepherd to his
aristocratic flock, he became the pet confessor of princesses and the
spiritual monitor of Louis XIII. So zealous was he in his schemes for
the relief of suffering men and women, and signally of children, that
Parliament expostulated, in fear that his asylums and refuges would
fill Paris with worthless vagrants and illegitimate children. His is
an exemplary and honored figure in the Roman Church, and his name
still clings to this tower; local legend, by a curious twisting of
tradition, making him its builder!
While its buyer, at the auction, is unknown to us, we do know to whom
was knocked down one lot, that holds records of deeper concern to us
than all the ground hereabout, thick as it is with historic
footprints. The plot on the southeasterly corner of the property,
fronting on Rue Mauconseil, was purchased by a band of players for a
rental in perpetuity. The Parliament of Paris had not recognized the
King's claim to all these ownerships, and would not give assent to
some of the sales; and this perpetual lease was not confirmed by that
body without long delay. We may let the players wait for this official
warranty while we see who they are, whence they come, and what they
play.
It was a religious fraternity, calling itself "_La Confrérie de la
Passion de Notre Seigneur, Jésus-Christ_," and it had been formed,
during the closing years of the fourteenth century, mainly from out of
more ancient companies. The most ancient and reputable of these was
"_La Basoche_," recruited from the law clerks of the Palais de
Justice, players and playwrights both. This troupe had enjoyed a long,
popular existence before it received legal existence from Philippe
"_le Bel_," early in that same fourteenth century. From its ranks,
reinforced by outsiders--among them, soon after 1450, a bachelor of
the University, François Villon--were enlisted the members of "_Les
Enfants sans Souci_." Other ribald mummers called themselves "_Les
Sots_." Men from all these bands brought their farcical grossness to
mitigate the pietistic grossness of our _Confrérie_, and this
fraternity soon grew so strong as to get letters-patent from Charles
VI., granting it permission for publicly performing passion-plays and
mysteries, and for promenading the streets in costume. Then the
privileged troupe hired the hall of Trinity Hospital and turned it
into a rude theatre, the first in Paris, the mediæval stage having
been of bare boards on trestles, under the sky or under canvas. On the
site of this earliest of French theatres are the Queen's fountain,
placed in 1732 on the northeast corner of Rues Saint-Denis and
Grenéta, and the buildings numbered 28 in the latter and 142 in the
former street. There, in 1402, the _confrères_ began the work that is
called play, and there they remained until 1545. Then, during the
construction of the new house, they took temporary quarters in the
Hôtel de Flandres, not yet cut up by its purchaser at the royal sale,
and settled finally, in 1548, in the Théâtre de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne.
By then an edict of François I. had banished from the stage all
personations of Jesus Christ and of all holy characters; such other
plays being permitted as were "profane and honest, offensive and
injurious to no one."
The name "mystery" does not suggest something occult and recondite,
even although the Greek word, from which it is wrongly derived,
sometimes refers to religious services; it carries back, rather, to
the Latin word signifying a service or an office. The plays called
"mysteries" and "moralities" were given at first in mediæval Latin,
or, as time went on, in the vernacular, with interludes in the same
Latin, which may be labelled Christian or late Latin. They were
rudimentary essays in dramatic art, uncouth and grotesque, in tone
with that "twilight of the mind, peopled with childish phantoms."
Hugo's description of the "_très belle moralité, le bon jugement de
Madame la Vierge_," by Pierre Gringoire, played in the great hall of
the Palais de Justice, is too long and labored to quote here; well
worth quoting is the short and vivid sketch, by Charles Reade, of the
"Morality" witnessed in puerile delight by the audience, among whom
sat Gérard, the father of Erasmus, at Rotterdam, in the same brave
days of Louis XI. of France and Philip the Good of Burgundy.
He shows us the clumsy machinery bringing divine personages, too
sacred to name, direct from heaven down on the boards, that they might
talk sophistry at their ease with the Cardinal Virtues, the Nine
Muses, and the Seven Deadly Sins; all present in human shape, and all
much alike. This dreary stuff was then enlivened by the entrance of
the Prince of the Powers of Air, an imp following him and buffeting
him with a bladder, and at each thwack the crowd roared in ecstasy.
So, to-day, the equally intelligent London populace finds joy in the
wooden staff of the British Punch. When the Vices had vented obscenity
and the Virtues twaddle, the Celestials with the Nine Muses went
gingerly back to heaven on the one cloud allowed by the property-man,
and worked up and down by two "supes" at a winch, in full sight of
everybody. Then the bottomless pit opened and flamed in the centre of
the stage, and into it the Vices were pushed by the Virtues and the
stage-carpenters, who all, with Beelzebub, danced about it merrily to
sound of fife and tabor. And the curtain falls on the first act. "This
entertainment was writ by the Bishop of Ghent for the diffusion of
religious sentiments by the aid of the senses, and was an average
specimen of theatrical exhibitions, so long as they were in the hands
of the clergy; but, in course of time, the laity conducted plays, and
so the theatre, we learn from the pulpit, has become profane."
The dulness of moralities and mysteries was relieved by the farces,
spiced and not nice, of the "_Sots_" and the "Basoche" on their
boards. They made fun of earthly dignitaries, ridiculing even kings.
Thus they represented Louis XII., in his Orleans thirst for
money--never yet quenched in that family--drinking liquid gold from a
vase. Their easy-going monarch took no offence, avowing that he
preferred that his court should laugh at his parsimony, rather than
that his subjects should weep for his prodigalities. To win applause,
in his rôle of "_le Père du Peuple_," he encouraged the "powerful,
disorderly, but popular theatre," and he patronized Pierre Gringoire,
whose plays drew the populace to the booths about the Halles. The poet
and playwright, widower of Hugo's happily short-lived Esmeralda, had
been again married and put in good case by the whimsical toleration of
Louis XI., if we may accept the dates of Théodore de Banville's
charming little play. That monarch, easily the first comedian of his
time, allowed no rivals on the mimic stage, and it languished during
his reign. Nor did it flourish under François I., whose brutal vices
must not be made fun of. Henri IV., fearless even of mirth, which may
be deadly, not only gave smiling countenance to this theatre, but gave
his presence at times; thus we read that, with queen and court, he sat
through "_une plaisante farce_" on the evening of January 12, 1607.
The Renaissance enriched the French stage, along with all forms of
art, bringing translations through the Italian of the classic drama.
The theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne became La Comédie Italienne, and
its records recall famous names, on the boards and in the audience,
throughout long and honorable years. The troupe was not free from
jealousies, and did not escape secessions, notably that of 1598, when
the heavy old men of the historic house cut adrift the light comedians
and the young tragedians, who had been recruited within a few years,
mainly from the country. Those who remained devoted themselves to the
"legitimate drama," yet found place for approved modern work, such as
that of young Racine. The seceders betook themselves to buildings on
the east side of Rue de Renard, just north of Rue de la Verrerie,
convenient to the crowded quarter of la Grève; but removed shortly to
the theatre constructed for them from a tennis-court in Rue
Vieille-du-Temple, in the heart of the populous Marais. You shall go
there, a little later, to see the classic dramas of a young man from
Rouen, named Corneille. These players called themselves "_Les
Comédiens du Marais_," and by 1620 had permission from Louis XIII. to
take the title of "_La Troupe Royale_." A few years later, perhaps as
early as 1650, all the Paris of players and playgoers began to talk
about a strolling troupe in the southern provinces and about their
manager, one Poquelin de Molière. How he brought his comedies and his
company to the capital; how he put them both up in rivalry with the
two old stock houses; how he won his way against all their opposition,
and much other antagonism--this is told in our chapter on Molière.
In the cutting up of the ancient domain of Robert of Artois, after the
royal sale, a short street was run north and south through the grounds,
and named François, since feminized into Rue Française. It lay between
the tower, whose lower wall may be seen in the rear of the court of
No. 8, and the theatre buildings, which covered the sites of present
Nos. 7 and 9 of this street and extended over the ground that now
makes Rue Étienne Marcel. The main entrance of the theatre was about
where now hangs the big gilt key on the northern side of that fragment
of Rue Mauconseil, still left after its curtailment by many recent
cuttings. Gone now is every vestige of the theatre and every stone of
the Hôtel de Bourgogne, except this tower of "_Jean-sans-Peur_."
[Illustration: The Tower of "Jean-sans-Peur."]
By happy chance, or through pious care, this precious fragment has
survived the centuries that looked with unconcern on things of the
past, and has come into the safe keeping of our relic-loving age. It
is an authentic document from the archives of the earliest
architecture of the fifteenth century, convincing in its proof of the
strength for defence of ducal homes in that day. Its massive stones
are scrupulously shaped and fitted, the grim faces of its quadrangular
walls are softened by wide ogival windows, its top is crowned all
around by a deep cornice. Above, the former corbelled machiolations,
heavy yet elegant, are debased into water-spouts, and a new roof has
been added. Only the southern and eastern sides of the oblong are
wholly disengaged, the other faces being mostly shut in by crowding
buildings. On the angle behind is a _tourelle_ supported by corbels,
and in the ogival door is a tympanum, in whose carvings we make out a
plane and a plumb-line. This was the device of John of Burgundy, worn
on his liveries, painted and carved everywhere. Louis of Orleans had
chosen a bunch of knotted fagots as his emblem, with the motto "_Je
l'ennuie_;" and Burgundy's arrogant retort was the plane that cut
through all that was not in plumb-line with his measurements, and the
motto in Flemish "_Ik houd_," meaning "_Je le tiens_."
The great hall within has been partitioned off into small rooms, fit
for the workingmen and their families formerly installed here; so that
its ancient aspect of amplitude and dignity is somewhat marred. We
"must make believe very much," to see either the sinner John mustering
here his assassins, who file out through that door to their rendezvous
with Orléans, or the saint Vincent gathering here his herd of hungry
children. Happily, the grand stairway, on one side, is unmutilated,
and it serves to bring home to us the ample magnificence of these
Burgundian dukes. Dagobert's stair crawls, through twisting darkness,
within its tower; Blanche's stair modestly suggests a venture toward
ease and elegance in life; here we mount the stairway of a feudal
_château_, broad and easy and stately, fitting frame for bejewelled
courtiers and iron-clad men-at-arms. Its one hundred and thirty-eight
steps, each a single stone, turn spaciously about the central column,
which does not reach to the tower top. Its upper section is carved
into a stone pot, from which springs a stone oak-tree to the centre of
the vaulted ceiling of the broad platform that ends the stairway, the
ribs of the vaulting outlined by carved branches and foliage. On each
floor below, a large chamber, deserted and dreary, opens on the
landing-place; from this upper stage a narrow staircase leads, through
the thickness of the wall and up through the _tourelle_ on the angle,
to the tiny chamber occupied by John of Burgundy, tradition tells us.
Here in his bedroom, that was an arsenal, at the top of his
impregnable tower, the fearless one found safety and sleep. We peep
out from his one small window, and far down we see the swarming length
of Rue Étienne Marcel, and hear the low pervasive murmur of Paris all
astir, accented by the shrill cries of the boys from the adjoining
school, at play in the courtyard of our tower. Their voices chase back
to their shadowy haunts all these companions of our stroll through the
ages, and call us down to our own time and to our Paris of to-day.
THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER OF THE MIDDLE AGES
[Illustration: The Church of Saint-Séverin.]
THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER OF THE MIDDLE AGES
On that river-bank of the City-Island which is called Quai aux Fleurs,
you will find a modern house numbered 11; and you will read, in the
gold letters of the weather-stained stone slab set in the front wall,
that here, in 1118, dwelt Héloise and Abelard. Their ideal heads are
carved over the two entrance doors. This is the site of the pleasant
residence occupied by Canon Fulbert, looking across its own garden and
the beach to the river--one of the dwellings in the cloisters that
were set apart for the clergy and clerks of the cathedral, and of the
many parish churches clustering about it. The chapter of Notre-Dame
owned nearly all this end of the island eastwardly from the boundaries
of the old Palace, and had built up this clerical village of about
three dozen small houses, each within its garden and clump of acacias,
all sequestered and quiet. You may see one of these houses, still
owned by the cathedral, and happily left unchanged, at No. 6 Rue
Massillon. Its low two stories and tiled roof on the court keep their
old-time look, and within is a good staircase, with a wooden railing
of the days before wrought iron came into use. Boileau-Despréaux has
mounted this staircase, for he certainly visited this abode of the
Abbé Ménage, who had literary and scientific _salons_ here, on
Wednesday evenings. Boileau himself lived in these cloisters for many
years, and here he died; and here had died Philibert Delorme and
Pierre Lescot. These and many another, not connected with the Church,
sought this quarter for its quiet. It was quiet enough, shut in as it
was by its own walls, that made of it a _cité_ inside the City of the
Island. The two gates at the western ends of present Rues du
Cloître-Notre-Dame and Chanoinesse, with two others on the shore, were
safely closed and barred at nightfall, against all intrusion of the
profane and noisy world without. So greedy for quiet had the dwellers
grown, that they would not permit the bridge--the Pont-Rouge, the
seventeenth-century predecessor of Pont Saint-Louis--to step straight
out from Saint Louis's island to their own, lest the speed of traffic
should perturb them; they made it turn at an angle, until it set its
twisted foot on the retired spot where now Rues des Ursins and des
Chantres meet in a small open space. The southern shore by the side of
the cathedral was given up to the Archbishop's palace and garden; and
the piece of waste land, behind the cathedral and outside the wall,
known as Le Terrain, was in 1750 banked up into the quay at the end of
the present pretty garden. All around the northern and eastern sides
of the original Notre-Dame, stretched the Gothic arched cloisters, and
in them the Church taught what little it thought fit its scholars
should learn.
Here, toward the end of the eleventh century, Pierre Abelard was an
eager pupil of Guillaume de Champeaux; and early in the next century,
here and in the gardens of Saint-Geneviève, he was a honey-tongued
teacher. He lodged in the house of Canon Fulbert, in whose niece of
seventeen--less than half his own age--he found an ardent learner, not
alone in theology. Here, on this spot, she taught herself that
devotion to the poor-spirited lover who was so bold-spirited a
thinker; a devotion, that, outlasting his life by the twenty years of
her longer life, found expression in her dying wish, put into verse by
Alexander Pope:
"May one kind Grave unite each hapless Name,
And graft my Love immortal on thy Fame."
He died at the Priory of Saint-Marcel near Châlons, whose prior sent
the body, at her request, to Héloise, then Abbess of the Convent at
Nogent-sur-Seine, and famed as a miracle of erudition and piety. She
was buried in the grave she there dug for him, and in 1800, when her
convent was destroyed, leaving no stone, the tomb and its contents
were removed to the Museum of French Monuments in Paris, and in 1817
they were placed in Père-Lachaise.
We willingly lose sight of Abelard's sorry story in face of his
splendid powers. These came into play at a period of mental and
spiritual awakening, brought about by unwonted light from all quarters
of the sky. Theological questions filled the air; asked, not only by
priests and clerks, but by the silly crowd and by wistful children,
and by gray-headed men sitting on school benches. The Crusades,
failing in material conquest, had won the Holy Land of Eastern
Learning; and Constantinople, lost later to the Christian world, gave
to it fleeing Greek scholars, carrying precious manuscripts, Byzantine
logic and physics, all through Europe. Pious soldiers, coming home
with wealth; stay-at-home churchmen, who had amassed riches; royalty,
anxious to placate Rome--all these built colleges, founded
scholarships, endowed chairs, subsidized teachers.
From the cloisters on the island--the cradle of the University, as the
Palace at the other end of the island was the cradle of the Town--from
the new cathedral that Abelard had not seen, the schools stepped over
to the mainland on the south. There, on the shore, were built the
College of the Four Nations, and the School of Medicine, alongside
that annex of the old Hôtel-Dieu, which was reached by the little
bridge, that went only the other day, and that led from the central
structure on the island. From this shore the scholars' quarter spread
up the slope to the summit of Mont-Sainte-Geneviève. There teachers
and scholars met in the cloisters of the great abbey, that had grown
up around the tomb of the patron saint of Paris, where now stands the
Panthéon. Of the huge basilica, its foundations laid by Clovis--who
had paid for a victory by his baptism into Christianity--there is left
the tower, rising, aged and estranged, above the younger structures of
the Lycée Henri IV. Its foundations under ground are of Clovis, its
lower portion is of eleventh-century rebuilding, its upper portion of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The plan of his cloisters,
and some of its stones, are kept in the arches of the college court,
to which one enters from No. 23 Rue Clovis. And, in the street named
for his wife, Clotilde, you may see the massive side wall of the abbey
refectory, now the college chapel.
Around about the southern side of the abbey, and around the schools on
the slope below, that were the beginning of the University,
Philippe-Auguste threw the protecting arm of his great wall. Within
its clasp lay the _Pays Latin_, wherein that tongue was used
exclusively in those schools. This language, sacred to so-called
learning and unknown to the vulgar, seemed a fit vehicle for the lame
science of the doctor, and the crippled dialectics of the theologian,
both always in arms against the "new learning." It was not until the
close of Henri IV.'s reign, that it was thought worth while to use the
French language in the classes. All through the Middle Ages, this
University was a world-centre for its teaching, and through all the
ages it has been "that prolific soil in which no seeds, which have
once been committed to it, are ever permitted to perish." While _la
Cité_ was the seat of a militant Church, and _la Ville_ the
gathering-place of thronging merchants, this hill-side swarmed with
students, and their officials were put to it to house them properly
and keep them orderly. They got on as best they might, ill-lodged,
ill-fed, ill-clad, often begging, always roistering, in the streets.
By day the sedate burghers of the other quarters trembled for their
ducats and their daughters, and found peace only when night brought
the locking of the gate of the Petit-Châtelet, and the shutting up in
their own district of the turbulent students.
Turbulent still, the students of our day, of every land and all
tongues--except Latin--stream through the streets of the Latin
Quarter, intent on study, or on pleasure bent. Only the Revolution has
ever thinned their ranks, what time the Legislative Assembly nearly
wrecked the parent University, with all its offspring throughout
France. Napoleon rescued them all, and by his legislation of 1806 and
1808, the University has been builded solidly on the foundations of
the State. The ancient scholars' quarter, unlighted and undrained and
unhealthful, is almost all gone; its narrow, tortuous streets are
nearly all widened or wiped out; open spaces and gardens give it
larger lungs; its dark, damp, mouldy colleges have made way for
grandiose structures of the latest sanitation. Yet the gray walls of
the annex of the Hôtel-Dieu still gloom down on the narrow street; the
fifteenth-century School of Medicine, its vast hall perverted to base
uses, is hidden behind the entrance of No. 15 Rue de la Bucherie; and
above the buildings on the west side of Rue de l'Hôtel-Colbert rises
the rotunda of its later amphitheatre. Rue Galande retains many of its
houses of the time of Charles IX., when these gables on the street
were erected. Except for the superb façade at No. 29 Rue de la
Parcheminerie--a municipal residence dating from about the middle of
the eighteenth century--that venerable street remains absolutely
unaltered since its very first days, when the parchment-makers took it
for their own. Some of their parchment seems to be still on sale in
its shop windows. In the ancient house No. 8 Rue Boutebrie you will
find as perfect a specimen of a mediæval staircase, its wooden rail
admirably carved, as is left in Paris. And the street of the Mountain
of Sainte-Geneviève still winds, stonily steep, up the slope.
[Illustration: Rue Hautefeuille, a Survivor of the Scholars' Quarter.]