left but its name in the broadened curtailment of this most ancient
street. That name comes from the old French word meaning "forage," and
was given to it at the time when the wealthier students bought near
there and brought into it the trusses of hay and straw, which they
spread on the floor for seats during the lectures, the reader himself
being seated on a rude dais at the end of the hall. The forage market
is still held, not far away, in Place Maubert. And the churches of
Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and of Saint-Séverin are unchanged, except by
age, since those days when their bells were the only timekeepers for
lecturers and lectured; giving signal, throughout the day, for the
divisions of the classes, until vespers told that the working-day was
done. The schools opened with the early mass at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre,
then the chapel adjoining the Hôtel-Dieu, now an exquisite relic of
simple twelfth-century Gothic. Still older had been Saint-Séverin, a
chapel of the earliest years of the monarchy, destroyed by the Normans
when they camped just here in 866, besieging the island city and
making their onslaught on the wooden tower that guarded the abutment
of the Petit-Pont on the mainland. The twelve heroes, who held that
tower against the Norman horde, are commemorated by the tablet in the
wall of Place du Petit-Pont. Saint-Séverin was rebuilt in the thirteenth
century, and its vast burial-ground on the south covered by the
buildings and the street of la Parcheminerie. So that of the University
seen by Dante, we can be sure only of the body of Saint-Séverin--its
tower was built in 1347--and of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, and the
buildings that are glued to it.
[Illustration: The Interior of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.]
Dante's bronze figure looks pensively down from the terrace of the
Collége de France on all the noise and the newness of modern Rue des
Écoles. The date of his short stay in Paris cannot be fixed, but it
was certainly after his exile from Florence, therefore not earlier
than 1302, and probably not later than 1310, his own years being a
little less, or a little more, than forty. There can be no doubt as to
his having visited Paris, for Boccaccio, his admirer and biographer,
records the fact; told him perhaps by the elder Boccaccio, who lived
in the capital--where his famous son was born--and who probably met
the expatriated poet there. And in the tenth canto of "_Paradiso_," we
find these words in Longfellow's translation:
"It is the light eternal of Sigieri,
Who, reading lectures in the street of straw,
Did syllogize individious verities."
This closing line, meaning that Sigier of Brabant had the courage to
speak truths that were unpopular, explains why he was Dante's favorite
lecturer. In Balzac's pretty fragment of romance, in which the great
Frenchman makes so vivid the presence of the great Italian, the home
of the latter is in one of the small houses on the extreme eastern end
of the City Island--such as the modest dwelling in which died
Boileau-Despréaux, four centuries later. From there, Balzac has Dante
ferried over to Quai de la Tournelle, and so stroll to his lectures.
But Dante's home was really in that same street of straw, to which he
had come from his quarters away south on the banks of the Bièvre, too
far away from the schools. He had taken up his abode in that rural
suburb, on first coming to Paris, as did many men of letters, of that
time and of later times, who were drawn to the pleasant, quiet country
without the walls.
There was one among these men to whose home, tradition tells us, Dante
was fond of finding his way, after he had come to live in the narrow
town street. The grave figure goes sedately up Rue Saint-Jacques,
always the great southern thoroughfare, passing the ancient chapel of
the martyrs, Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné, and the home and shelter for
poor students in theology, started by the earnest confessor of Saint
Louis, Robert de Sorbon. The foundations of his little chapel, built
in 1276, were unearthed in 1899 during the digging for the new
Sorbonne; and its walls are outlined in white stone in the gray
pavement of the new court. Not a stone remains of the old Sorbonne,
not a stone of the rebuilt Sorbonne of Richelieu, except his chapel
and his tomb; well worth a visit for the exquisite beauty of its
detail. But the soul of the historic foundation lives on, younger than
ever to-day, in its seventh century of youth. Through Porte
Saint-Jacques, Dante passes to the dwelling, just beyond, of Jean de
Meung, its site now marked by a tablet in the wall of the house No.
218 Rue Saint-Jacques. No doubt it was a sufficiently grand mansion in
its own grounds, for it was the home of the well-to-do parents of the
poet, whose lameness gave him the popular nickname of "_Clopinel_,"
preferred by him to the name by which he is best known, which came
from his natal town. In this home, a few years earlier, he had
finished his completion of "Le Roman de la Rose," one of the earliest
of French poems, a biting satire on women and priests, begun by
Guillaume de Lorris. "_Clopinel_" carried on the unfinished work to
such perfection, that he is commonly looked on as the sole author.
Dante admired the work as fully as did Chaucer, who has left a
translation into English of a portion:--so admirable a version that it
moved Eustace Deschamps to enthusiasm in his ballad to "_le grand
translateur, noble Geoffroi Chaucer_." And Dante liked the workman as
well, his equal in genius, many of their contemporaries believed; and
we shall not aggrieve history, if we insist on seeing the grim-visaged
Florentine and the light-hearted Gaul over a bottle of _petit vin de
Vouvray or de Chinon_--for the vineyards of this southern slope of
Paris had been rooted up by the builder early in the twelfth
century--in the low-browed living-room, discussing poetry and
politics, the schism in the Church, the quarrel between the French
King and his spiritual father of Rome.
Behind us in Rue Saint-Jacques, beneath the new Sorbonne, we have left
the site of the chapel of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné. The entrance to
its cloisters and gardens was opposite Rue du Cimetière-Saint-Benoît,
a short street, now widened, that retains a few of its ancient houses,
the cemetery at its farther end being entirely builded over. This
entrance-gate is standing in the gardens of the Cluny Museum, and we
see it as it was first seen by the boy François Villon, and last seen
when he fled under it, after killing a priest in the cloisters. He got
his name from the worthy canon of Saint-Benoît, Guillaume de Villon,
who took in the waif and gave him a roof and food, and tried to give
him morals; and it is by his name that the poet is known in history
rather than by the other names, real or assumed, that he bore during
his shifty life. He lived here with his "more than father," as the
young scamp came to own that the canon had been; whose house in the
cloister gardens, named "_la Porte Rouge_," was not far from the house
of the canon Pierre de Vaucel, with whose niece François got into his
first scrape. Loving her then, he libelled her later in his verse.
Full of scrapes of all sorts were his thirty short years of life--he
was born in the year of the burning of Joan the Maid, and he slips out
of sight and of record in 1461--and it needed all his nimble wits to
keep his toes from dangling above ground and his neck from swinging in
a noose. They did not keep him from poverty and hunger and prison.
Parliament, nearly hanging him, banished him instead from Paris, and
the footsore cockney figure is seen tramping through Poitou, Berri,
Bourbonnais. Louis XI. finds him in a cell at Meung and, sympathizing
with rascality that was not political, sets him free and on foot
again; so playing Providence to this starveling poet as he did to
Gringoire. And from Meung, François Villon steals out of history,
leaving to us his "Small" and "Large Testament," a few odes and
sonnets, with bits of wholly exquisite song. No French poet before him
had put _himself_ into his verse, and it is this flavor of personality
that gives its chiefest charm to his work. We are won by the graceless
vagabond, who casts up and tells off his entire existence of merriment
and misery, in the words of Mr. Henley's superb translation:
"Booze and the blowens cop the lot."
He seems to be owning to it, this slight, alert figure of bronze in
Square Monge, as he faces the meeting-place of wide modern streets.
The spaciousness of it all puzzles him, who prowled about the darkest
purlieus, and haunted the uncleanest _cabarets_, of the old University
quarter. He is struck suddenly quiescent in his swagger; his face,
slightly bent down, shows the poet dashed with the reprobate; his
expression and attitude speak of struggling shame and shamelessness.
His right hand holds a manuscript to his breast, his left hand clasps
the dagger in his belt. Behind, on the ground, lie the mandolin of the
poet-singer and the shackles of the convict. It is a delightfully
expressive statue of François Villon, by his own election one of the
"_Enfants sans Souci_," and by predestination a child of grievous
cares.
From Square Monge it is but a step to the tablet that marks the place
of Porte Saint-Victor, on the northern side of the remnant left of the
street of that name. It is but a step in the other direction to the
tablet on the wall of No. 50 Rue Descartes, which shows the site of
Porte Saint-Marcel, sometimes called the Porte Bordée. Through either
of these gates of the great wall one might pass to the home of a poet,
a hundred years after Villon had gone from sight; like him, born to
true poetry, but unlike him who was born to rags, Pierre de Ronsard
was born to the purple. He was a gentleman of noble lineage, he had
been educated at the famous Collége de Navarre, the college at that
period of Henri III. and of the Duke of Guise, _le Balafré_--its site
and its prestige since taken by the École Polytechnique--he had
entered the court of the Duke of Orleans as a page, he had gone to
Scotland as one of the escort of Madeleine of France, on her marriage
with James V. He was counted among the personal friends of Mary Stuart
and of Charles IX., and by him was selected always as a partner in
tennis. That King visited Ronsard here, and so, too, did his brother
Henri III. Tasso found his way here, while in Paris in 1571, in the
train of Cardinal Louis d'Este. It seems that nothing in all France
was to Tasso's taste, except the windmills on Montmartre; easily in
view, at that day, from the Louvre, at whose windows he watched the
ceaseless whirling of their sails, which mitigated his boredom. Twenty
years earlier, Rabelais was fond of ferrying across the river, from
his home in Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, to prowl about his once
familiar haunts in this quarter, and to drop in on Ronsard and Baïf,
the leaders of the school of "learned poets." They lived in Rue des
Fossés-Saint-Victor, the street formed over the outer ditch of the
wall, now named Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Their house and grounds, just
at the corner of present Rue des Boulangers, have been cut through and
away by the piercing of Rue Monge. Here, Ronsard looked across the
meadows to the Seine, while he strolled in the gardens, book in hand,
eager "to gather roses while it is called to-day," in the words of Mr.
Andrew Lang's version of the "Prince of Poets." For Ronsard's
deafness, which had cut short his adroit diplomatic career, had given
him quicker vision for all beauty; and his verse, Greek and Latin and
French, trips to the music made in him by the sights and scents of
summer, by roses and by women, by the memories of "shadow-loves and
shadow-lips." And, still rhyming, this most splendid of that
constellation--those singers, attuned to stately measure, called the
Pleiades--died in the year 1585, soon after his sixtieth birthday.
[Illustration: Pierre de Ronsard.
(From a drawing by an unknown artist, in a private collection.)]
From here we go straight away over the hill of Sainte-Geneviève and
through Porte Saint-Michel--nearly at the meeting-place of Rues
Soufflot and Monsieur-le-Prince and Boulevard Saint-Germain--to the
house, also in the fields outside the wall, where dwelt Clément Marot,
a poet who sang pleasantly of the graces of life, too, but who had a
more serious strain deep down. The "_Cheval d'Airan_"--so was the
house named--was a gift to the poet from François I. "for his good,
continuous, and faithful services." These services consisted chiefly
in the writing of roundelays and verses, in which "he had a turn of
his own," says Sainte-Beuve; a turn of grace and of good breeding, and
no passion that should startle the King's sister, good Marguerite of
Navarre, who had made him her groom of the chamber. He had been a
prisoner at Pavia with the King, and his life had been spent in the
camp and the court. At Ferrara, in 1534, he had met his
fellow-countryman Calvin, and returned to Paris to prove his
strengthened convictions in the new heresies by those translations of
the psalms, which carried comfort to Calvin and to Luther, and which
have given to their writer his permanent place in French literature.
During this period he lived in this grand mansion, the site of which
is exactly covered by the houses No. 27 Rue de Tournon and No. 30 Rue
de Condé. And from here Marot went into exile, along with the
well-to-do Huguenots, who clung together in this quarter outside the
wall. "_Nous autres l'appelons la Petite Genève_," said d'Aubigné, and
that appellation held for a long time. Its centre was the short,
narrow lane in the marshes, named later Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain,
and now Rue Visconti, wherein the persecuted sect had their hidden
place of worship. On its corner with the present Rue de Seine was the
home of Jean Cousin, that gentleman-worker in stained glass--the sole
handicraft allowed to men of birth--who has left for our joy that
exquisite window in the Church of Saint-Gervais. At the western end of
the lane was the residence built for himself by Baptiste du Cerceau,
son of the illustrious Jacques Androuët, and as stanch as was his
father for the faith. His great mansion took up the whole end of the
block, on the ground covered now by the equally large building that
makes 32 Rue Jacob, 21 Rue Bonaparte, and 23 and 25 Rue Visconti. A
portion of this latter structure may be of the sixteenth century.
Baptiste du Cerceau, a Huguenot by birth and bringing-up, had yet
joined Henri III.'s famous "Forty-Five," in 1575, when he was only
twenty years old. For ten years he served that King as soldier and
architect, and then, rather than attend mass or conform against his
convictions, he left King and court and home in 1585. He came back
with Henri IV. as royal architect, to find that his elegant residence
had fallen into ruin.
[Illustration: Balcony over the Entrance of the Cour du Dragon.]
When Bernard Palissy, released from his dungeon in Bordeaux, came to
Paris, he was made "Worker in Earth and Inventor of Rustic Figulines,"
for the new abode in the Tile Fields, beyond the Louvre, that was
planned for the Queen-Mother, Catherine de' Medici. "Bernard of the
Tuileries," as he was known, in order to be near his work, lodged on
the northern side of Rue Saint-Honoré, just east of present Rue de
Castiglione. Later he removed to Rue du Dragon, nearly opposite the
little street now named in his honor, and so became one of the colony
of "_la Petite Genève_." Here he worked as he worked always in his
passion for perfection in ornamental pottery, giving to it all "my
affection for pursuing in the track of enamels," in his own quaint
words. For his single-mindedness in praising his Creator, and in
making worthy images of His creations, he was looked on as a
"_huguenot opiniâtre_," and hated by the powers of the Church and
State, who, failing to burn him, because of the mercy of the Duke of
Mayenne, cast him into the Bastille. With all Paris hungry, during the
siege of the League by Henry of Navarre, the prisoners took their
turn, and this old man renewed the experience of his youth, when he
had starved himself for his beloved enamels. And so, at the age of
eighty, in the year of the stabbing by Jacques Clément of the most
Christian King, Henri III., Bernard Palissy died in his cell
"naturally," the report said. A medallion of the great potter may be
seen over the entrance of a house in Rue du Dragon, and his statue
stands in the little garden of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, not far away.
He is in his workman's garb, gazing down at a platter on which he has
stamped his genius in clay.
We have seen John Calvin, fresh from Picardy, a student at the Collége
du Cardinal-Lemoine, in Rue Saint-Victor, and this is his only
residence in Paris known to us. Appointed Curé of Pont l'Evêque, at
the age of sixteen, he was induced by a daring relative to read the
Bible, and the ultimate result was Calvinism, as it has been
interpreted by his bigoted disciples. The immediate result was his
persecution by the Sorbonne, and his flight to Ferrara, about the year
1534. There he met with welcome and protection, as did many a
political fugitive of the time, from Renée, the reigning duchess, as
kindly a creature as was her father, Louis XII. of France. But her
goodwill could not prevail against the ill-will of the Church, and
Calvin was forced to find his way finally to Switzerland, to live
there for thirty useful years. Marot, who was with Calvin in Ferrara,
went back to Paris, still countenanced at court; but no favor of king
or king's sister could save a sinner who would eat meat during Lent;
and in 1543 Marot was forced to flee to Italy, and died in Turin in
1544. He lives less in his special verse than in his general
influence, along with Rabelais and Montaigne, in the formation of
French letters. These three cleansed that language into literature, by
purging it of the old Gallic chaos and clumsiness of form.
So the Church made a desert, and called it peace, and "Little Geneva"
was at last laid waste, and those leaders, who escaped the cell and
the stake, were made refugees, because they had been insurgents
against enslaved thought. But they left behind them him who has been
styled the "Martyr of the Renaissance," Étienne Dolet. Here, in Place
Maubert, this bronze figure on the high pedestal, which he somehow
makes serve as a Protestant pulpit, looks all the martyr, with his
long, stubborn neck, his stiff spine of unbending conviction, his
entire attitude of aggressive devotion to principle. In life he was so
strong and so genuine that he made friends almost as many as enemies.
That glorious woman, Marguerite of Navarre--whose absurd devotion to
her brother Francis is only a lovable flaw in her otherwise faultless
nature--stood by Dolet as she stood by so many men who had the courage
to study and think and speak. She saved him from execution, when he
had killed a man in self-defence at Lyons, and she should have been
allowed to sit at table with the friends who gave him a little dinner
in the _Pays Latin_ to celebrate his escape. Among those about the
board were Marot, Rabelais, Erasmus, Melancthon, tradition says, and
says no more. We are told nothing about the speechmakers, and we can
only guess that they were terribly in earnest. Dolet was soon again in
arrest for printing books forbidden by the Church; his trial resulted
in an acquittal. Soon again he was arrested for importing the
forbidden literature, and escaped from prison. Rearrested, he was
speedily convicted, and on August 3, 1546, he was burned in Place
Maubert, on the spot where they have put his statue.
[Illustration: Clément Marot.
(From the portrait by Porbus le Jeune, in a private collection.)]
It was during one of his visits in later life to Paris that Erasmus
came to be among these _convives_; perhaps at the time he was
considering, before declining, the offer of François I. to make him
the head of the great Collége Royal, planned--and no more than
planned--by the King on the site of the Hôtel de Nesle, where Mazarin
afterward placed his College of the Four Nations, now the seat of the
Institute. Many years before this visit, some time between 1492 and
1497, Erasmus had lived in Paris, a poor and unhappy student in the
Collége Montaigu. It had earned the nickname of "_Collége des
Haricots_," because of the Lenten fare lavished on its inmates--beans,
stale eggs, spoiled fish, and that monotony broken by frequent fasts.
Erasmus had a Catholic conscience, as he owns, but a Lutheran stomach
withal, and this semi-starvation, with the filth and fleas in the
rooms, sickened him and drove him home to cleanly and well-fed
Flanders. From this college, he says in his "Colloquia," "I carried
nothing but a body infected with disease, and a plentiful supply of
vermin." A few years later young Rabelais suffered similar horrors at
the same college, and has cursed its memories through Grangousier's
capable lips. This "galley for slaves" was indeed used as a prison
during the Revolution, and was torn down in 1845, to give place to
the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.
From Place Maubert we walk up Rue Monge--named from the great _savant_
of the First Empire--and down to the seventeenth century, to where, on
the corner of Rue Rollin, we find the tablet that records the scene of
Blaise Pascal's death in 1662. He lived and died in the house of his
sister, in the fields just beyond Porte Saint-Marcel. Thirty-one years
before, he had left Auvergne for Paris, a precocious lad of eight,
already so skilled in mathematics and geometry that he produced his
famous treatises while still in his teens, and at the age of
twenty-three was known for his abilities throughout Europe. No man
dying, as he did, not yet forty years of age, has left so distinct and
permanent an impress on contemporary, and on later, thought.
He gained the honor of being hated by the Church, and the Jesuits
named him "_Porte d'Enfer_." His only answer was the philosophic
question, "How can I _prove_ that I am not the gate of Hell?" This
many-sided genius invented the first calculating machine and the first
omnibus. The line was started on March 18, 1662, and ran from the
Palace of the Luxembourg to the Bastille. Its route was probably by
Rue de la Harpe--almost all gone under Boulevard Saint-Michel--across
Petit-Pont and the Island and Pont Notre-Dame, to Place de Grève, and
thence by Rues François-Miron and Saint-Antoine, to the gate and the
prison at the end.
It was long a matter of dispute between the towers of
Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie and Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas--this
latter much nearer his home--as to which one had been selected by
Pascal for the experiments he made, to prove his theory of atmospheric
pressure, and to refute the theory of his opponents. Within a few
years this question has been answered by an old painting, found in a
curiosity shop, which represents Pascal, barometer in hand, standing
on the top of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, beside the statue of the
Chimæra, that has been carried to the Cluny Museum. This figure alone
would fix the spot, but, in addition, the picture gives a view of old
Paris that could be seen only from this point of view. This elegant
isolated tower--all that is left of a church dating from the
beginnings of Christian construction, and destroyed during the
Revolution--was itself erected late in the fifteenth and early in the
sixteenth century, and shows the last effort of mediæval Gothic in
Paris. It is now used as a weather observatory. Pascal's statue, by
Cavelier, has been placed under the great vaulted arch that forms its
base, and all about, in the little park, are instruments for taking
and recording all sorts of atmospheric changes.
It may have been while driving between this tower and his sister's
house, that Pascal's carriage was overturned on Pont-Neuf, and he
narrowly escaped death by falling or by drowning. From that day he
gave up his service to science, and gave himself up solely to the
service of God. Into his "Thoughts" he put all his depth of
reflection and his intensity of feeling, all his force and finish of
phrase. Yet, always behind this Christian philosopher, we are
conscious of the man of feeling, who owns that he could be drawn down
from his high meditations, and could be drawn up from his profound
melancholy, by "_un peu de bon temps, un bon mot, une louange, une
caresse_."
His body was laid in the Abbey Church of Sainte-Geneviève, and was
removed, on the destruction of that edifice in 1807, to its successor
in tradition and sentiment, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. It rests at the
base of one of the outer pillars of the Lady Chapel, opposite the spot
of Racine's final sepulture. The two tablets from their original tombs
have been set in the pillars of the first chapel on the southern side
of the choir, just behind the exquisite rood-screen.