Neuve-Saint-Étienne, and it was bordered by cottages standing in their
own gardens, looking down the slope across the town to the river, this
being the highest street on the hill-side. Its length has been
lessened by Rue Monge, and that portion left to the east of the new
street is now Rue de Navarre. Rue Monge was cut through the crest of
the hill, so that one must mount by stone steps to the old level of
the western end of Rue Neuve-Saint-Étienne, named anew in honor of the
scholar and historian, who has given his name also to the great
college, since removed from this quarter to Boulevard Rochechouart,
away off on the northern heights. Charles Rollin was an earnest
student, an unusually youthful Rector of the University, and
principal of the College of Beauvais in 1696, and a writer of history
and _belles-lettres_ of great charm but little weight. He was, withal,
an honest soul, somewhat naïve, of simple tastes and of quiet life. So
he came to this secluded quarter, when a little over seventy, and here
he died in 1741. His cottage is numbered 8 in the street, and is
occupied by the school of Sainte-Geneviève, whose demure maidens do no
violence to his tranquil garden in which they stroll. For their use a
small pavilion has been built in the rear of the garden, but there is
no other change. The two Latin lines, inscribed by him in praise of
his rural home within the town, remain on an inner wall of his cottage
at your left as you enter.
Fifty years later another writer found a quiet home in this same
street. Hidden behind the heavy outer door of No. 4, a roomy mansion
built in 1623 by a country-loving subject of Louis XIII., is a tablet
that tells of the residence here, from 1781 to 1786, of Jacques-Henri
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. A man of finer qualities and subtler charm
than Rollin, his work is of no greater weight in our modern eyes, for
with all the refinement of imagination and the charm of description
that made his pen "a magic wand" to Sainte-Beuve, his emotional
optimism grows monotonous, and his exuberant sensibility flows over
into sentimentality. In the court of his house is an ancient well, and
behind lies a lovable little garden, with a rare iron rail and
gateway. This traveller in many lands, this adorer of nature, took
keen delight in his outlook, from his third-story windows, over this
garden and the gardens beyond, to the Seine. Here in 1784 he wrote
"Studies from Nature," an instantaneous success, surpassed only by the
success of "Paul and Virginia," published in 1786. Possibly no book
has ever had such a vogue. It was after reading this work, in Italy,
that the young Bonaparte wrote to Bernardin: "Your pen is a painter's
brush." Yet his reading of the manuscript, before its publication, in
the _salon_ of Madame Necker, had merely bored his hearers, and the
humiliated author had fled from their yawns to this congenial
solitude.
The narrow street has suffered slight change since those days, or
since those earlier days, when René Descartes found a temporary home,
probably on the site of present No. 14, a house built since his day
here. That was between 1613, when he first came from Brittany, and
1617, when he went to the Netherlands. But there can be found no trace
of the stay in this street, nor of the secluded home in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, of the founder of Cartesian philosophy--the first
movement in the direction of modern philosophy--the father of modern
physiology, as Huxley claims, and of modern psychology, as its
students allow. His wandering life, in search always of truth, ended
in 1650, at the court of Christina of Sweden. His body was brought
back to France by the ambassador of Louis XIV., and placed in the old
Church of Sainte-Geneviève. In 1793, the Convention decreed its
removal to the recently completed and secularized Panthéon, and from
there it was carried for safe keeping, along with so many others, to
the Museum of French Monuments. In 1819 it found final resting-place
in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the third chapel on the southern side of
the choir. The man himself lives for us on the wonderful canvas of
Franz Hals in the gallery of the Louvre.
[Illustration: René Descartes.
(From the portrait by Franz Hals, in the Musée du Louvre.)]
The Paris of the north bank has its slope, that looks across the Seine
to this southern slope, and that has come to be its Scholarly Quarter.
The high land away behind the lowlands stretching along the northern
bank was taken early by the Romans for their villas, and then by
nobles for their _châteaux_, and then by the _bourgeoisie_ for their
cottages. As _la Ville_ grew, its citizens gave all their thought to
honest industry and to the honest struggle for personal and municipal
rights, so that none was left for literature. When its time came, the
town had spread up and over these northern heights, and men of letters
and of the arts were attracted by their open spaces and ample outlook.
So large a colony of these workers had settled there, early in the
nineteenth century, that some among them gave to their hill-side the
name of "_la Nouvelle Athènes_." Its vogue has gone on growing, and it
is crowded with the memories of dead pen-workers, and with the
presence of living pen-workers. So, too, are the suburbs toward the
west, and this Scholars' Quarter on the southern bank, which is barely
touched on in this book, given so greatly as it is to history,
archæology, architecture, and other arts. All this wide-spread
district awaits the diligent pen that has given us "The Literary
Landmarks of London," to give us, as completely and accurately, "The
Literary Landmarks of Paris."
MOLIÈRE AND HIS FRIENDS
MOLIÈRE AND HIS FRIENDS
In the early years of the seventeenth century there stood a low, wide,
timbered house on the eastern corner of Rues Saint-Honoré and des
Vieilles-Étuves. To the dwellers in that crowded quarter of the Halles
it was known as "_la Maison des Singes_," because of the carved wooden
tree on its angle, in the branches of which wooden monkeys shook down
wooden fruit to an old wooden monkey at its foot. This house, that
dated from the thirteenth century surely, and that may have been a
part of Queen Blanche's Paris, was torn down only in 1800, and a slice
of its site has been cut off by Rue Sauval, the widened and renamed
Rue des Vieilles-Étuves. The modern building on that corner, numbered
92 Rue Saint-Honoré, is so narrow as to have only one window on each
of its three floors facing that street. Around the first story, above
the butcher's shop on the entrance floor, runs a balcony with great
gilt letters on its rail, that read "_Maison de Molière_." High up on
its front wall is a small tablet, whose legend, deciphered with
difficulty from the street, claims this spot for the birthplace of
Molière. This is a veracious record. The exact date of the birth of
the eldest son of Jacques Poquelin and Marie Cressé, his wife, is
unknown, but it was presumably very early in January, 1622, for, on
the fifteenth of that month, the baby was baptized "Jean Poquelin," in
his father's parish church of Saint-Eustache--a new church not quite
completed then. The name "Baptiste" was, seemingly, added a little
later by his parents.
On this corner the boy lived for eleven years; here his mother died,
ten years after his birth, and here his father soon married again; he
removed, in 1633, to a house he had inherited, the ground floor of
which he made his shop of upholstery and of similar stuffs, the family
residing above. It was No. 3 Rue de la Tonnellerie, under the pillars
of the Halles, possibly, but not certainly, on the site of the present
No. 31 Rue du Pont-Neuf. In a niche, cut in the front wall of this
modern building, has been placed a bust of Molière and an inscription
asserting that this was his birthspot, a local legend that harms no
one, and comforts at least the _locataire_.
Hereabout, certainly, the boy played, running forward and back across
the market. On its northern side, near the public pillory, was another
house owned by his father, on the old corner of Rue de la Réale, and
its site is now covered by the pavement of modern Rue Rambuteau. It is
pleasant to picture the lad in this ancient quarter, as we walk
through those few of its streets unchanged to this day, notably that
bit of Rue de la Ferronerie, so narrow that it blocked the carriage of
Henri IV., a few years before, and brought him within easy reach of
the knife of Ravaillac as he sprang on the wheel.
François Coppée, not yet an old man, readily recalls the square squat
columns of the old Halles, and, all about, the solid houses supported
by pillars like the arcades of Place des Vosges; all just as when
young Poquelin played about them. Plays, as well as play, already
attracted him; he loved to look at the marionettes and the queer
side-shows of the outdoor fairs held about the Halles; and his
grandfather, Louis Cressé, an ardent playgoer, often took him to laugh
at the funny fellows who frolicked on the trestles of the Pont-Neuf,
and at the rollicking farces in the Théâtre du Marais. No doubt he
saw, too, the tragedies of the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and
this observant boy may well have anticipated the younger Crébillon's
opinion, that French tragedy of that day was the most absolute farce
yet invented by the human mind. For this was a little while before the
coming of Corneille with true tragedy.
This son of the King's upholsterer cared nothing for his father's
trade, and not much for books. He learned, early, that his eyes were
meant for seeing, and he not only saw everything, but he remembered
and reflected; showing signs already of that bent which gave warrant,
in later life, for Boileau's epithet, "Molière the Contemplator."
He was sent, in 1636, being then fourteen years old, to the Collége de
Clermont, named a little later, and still named, Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
Rebuilt during the Second Empire, it stands on its old site behind
the Collége de France, in widened Rue Saint-Jacques. Here, during his
course of five years, he was sufficiently diligent in such studies as
happened to please him; and was prominent in the plays, acted by the
scholars at each prize-giving. He made many friendships with boys who
became famous men; with one, just leaving school as he came, who
especially stood his friend in after life--the youthful Prince de
Conti, younger brother of the great Condé. And this elder brother
became, years after, the friend and protector of the young
actor-playwright, just as he was of some others of that famous group,
Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau. All these, along with all men eminent in
any way, were welcomed to his grand seat at Chantilly, and were
frequent guests at his great town-house, whose _salon_ was a rival to
that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. His mansion, with its grounds,
occupied the whole of that triangular space bounded now by Rues de
Vaugirard, de Condé, and Monsieur-le-Prince. At the northern point of
that triangle, nearly on the ground now covered by the Second Théâtre
Français, the Odéon, stood the prince's private theatre; wherein
Molière, by invitation, played the rôles of author, actor, manager.
Molière's customary rôle in this great house was that of friend of the
host, who wrote to him: "Come to me at any hour you please; you have
but to announce your name; you visit can never be ill-timed."
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin betook himself early to the boards for which
he was born, from which he could not be kept by his course at college
or at law. He studied law fitfully for a while; sufficiently, withal,
to lay up a stock of legal technicalities and procedure, which he
employed with precision in many of his plays. So, too, he took in, no
doubt unconsciously, details of his father's business; and his
references, in his stage-talk, to hangings, furniture, and costumes,
are frequent and exact.
The father, unable to journey with the King to Narbonne in the spring
of 1642, as his official duties demanded, had his son appointed to the
place, and the young man, accompanying the court and playing
_tapissier_ on this journey, saw, it is said, the execution of
Cinq-Mars and de Thou. In the provinces at this time, or it may have
been in Paris earlier, he met, became intimate with, and soon after
joined, a troupe of strolling players, made up of Joseph Béjart, his
two sisters Madeleine and Geneviève, and other young Parisians.
This troupe was touring in Languedoc early in 1642, and was rather
strong in its talent and fortunate in its takings; in no way akin to
that shabby set of barnstormers satirized by Scarron in his "Roman
Comique." We cannot fix the date of Poquelin's _début_ in the company,
but we know that--with the unhallowed ambition of the born and
predestined comedian--he began in tragedy, and that he was greeted by
his rural audiences with hootings, punctuated by the pelting of fried
potatoes, then sold at the theatre door. And we know that the troupe
came north to Rouen in the autumn of 1643, playing a night or two in
the natal town of Corneille. It is a plausible and a pleasing fancy
that sees the glory of French dramatic art of that day, at home on a
visit to his mother, receiving free tickets for the show, with the
respects of the young recruit to the stage, the glory of French
dramatic art at no distant day. The troupe had gone to Rouen and to
other provincial towns only while awaiting the construction of their
theatre in the capital, contracted for during the summer. At last, on
the evening of December 31, 1643, it raised its first curtain to the
Parisian public, under the brave, or the bumptious, title of
"l'Illustre Théâtre."
To trace, from his first step on Paris boards, the successive sites of
Molière's theatres is a delightful task, in natural continuation of
that begun in an earlier chapter, where those theatres in existence
before his time were pointed out. In England, we know, stage-players
were "strollers and vagabonds" by statute; not allowed to play within
London's walls. All their early theatres were outside the City limits.
The Globe, the summer theatre of Shakespeare and his "fellows"--"whereon
was prepared scaffolds for beholders to stand upon"--was across the
Thames, on Bankside, Southwark. So, too, were the Hope, the Rose, the
Swan. The Curtain was in Shoreditch, Davenant's theatre in Lincoln's
Inn Fields, and the Blackfriars theatre on Ludgate Hill, just without
the old wall.
The early playhouses of Paris were built--but for another reason--on
the outer side of the town wall of Philippe-Auguste, and their
seemingly unaccountable situations are easily accounted for by
following on either bank the course of that wall, already plainly
mapped out in preceding pages.
This magnificent wall of a magnificent monarch had lost much of its
old significance for defence with the coming of gunpowder, and a new
use was found for it, in gentler games than war, as the town outgrew
its encircling limits. In the Middle Ages, tennis--the oldest
ball-game known--was a favorite sport of kings and of those about
them. It was called _le jeu de paume_, being played with the hand
until the invention of the racket; the players standing in the ditch
outside the wall, against which the ball was thrown. Beyond the ditch
was built the court for onlookers, the common folk standing on its
floor, their betters seated in the gallery. When the game lost its
vogue, these courts were easily and cheaply turned into the rude
theatres of that day, with abundant space for actors and spectators;
those of low degree crowding on foot in the body of the building,
those who paid a little more seated in the galleries, those of high
degree on stools and benches at the side of the stage, and even on the
stage itself. This encroachment on the stage, within sight of the
audience, grew to such an abuse that it was done away with in 1759,
and the scene was left solely to the players.
Where a tablet is let into the wall of the present Nos. 12 and 14 Rue
Mazarine, then named the Fossé-de-Nesle--the ancient outer ditch of
the old wall--a roomy playhouse had been contrived from a former
tennis-court owned by Arnold Mestayer, a solid citizen of the town,
captain of the Hundred Musketeers of Henri IV.'s day. This was the
theatre taken by the Béjart troupe and named "l'Illustre Théâtre."
Here young Poquelin made his first bow to Paris. The building stood on
the sites of the present Nos. 10, 12, and 14 Rue Mazarine, its only
entrance for spectators reached by an alley that ran along the line
between Nos. 14 and 16, and so through to Rue de Seine, to where the
buildings extended over the ground now covered by Nos. 11 and 13.
These latter houses are claimed by local legend for Molière's
residence, and it may well be that the rear part of the theatre served
as sleeping-quarters for the troupe. The interior of No. 11 is of very
ancient construction, its front being of later date. In the wall
between it and No. 9--a low wooden structure, possibly a portion of
the original fabric--is hidden the well that served first the
tennis-players and then the stage-players. There is no longer any
communication between these houses in Rue de Seine and those in Rue
Mazarine. These latter were built in 1830, when the street was
widened, that portion of the old theatre having been demolished a few
years earlier.
It was in June, 1644, that the name Molière first appears, signed--it
is his earliest signature in existence--among the rest of the company,
to a contract with a dancing man for the theatre. How he came to
select this name is not known, nor was it known to any of his young
comrades; for he always refused to give his reasons. What is known, is
that it was a name of weight even then, proving that, within the first
six months of the theatre's existence, his business ability had made
him its controlling spirit. But his abilities as manager and as actor
could not bring success to the theatre. Foreign and civil wars made
the State poor; wide-spread financial troubles made the people poor;
that cruelly cold winter froze out the public. "_Nul animal vivant
n'entra dans notre salle_," are the bitterly true words, put into the
mouth of the young actor-manager, by an unknown writer of a scurrilous
verse.
He and the troupe were liberated from their lease within the year,
and, early in 1645, they migrated over the river to the _Jeu de Paume
de la Croix-Noire_. On either end of the long, low building at No. 32
Quai des Célestins is a tablet; the western one showing where stood
the Tour Barbeau that ended the wall on this river-bank; that at the
eastern end marking the site of this theatre, just without the wall.
It had an entrance on the quay-front for the boatmen and other water-side
patrons, another in Rue des Barrés for its patrons coming by coach.
Molière lodged in the house--probably a portion of the theatre--at the
corner of the quay and of Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul--that country
lane wherein had died Rabelais, nearly a century earlier. Little Rue
des Barrés, already seen taking its name from the barred or striped
gowns of the monks who settled there, is now Rue de l'Ave-Maria, and
at its number 15 you will find the stage entrance of this theatre,
hardly changed since it was first trodden by the players from over the
river. There is the low and narrow door, one of its jambs bent with
the weight of the more modern structure above, and beyond is the
short alleyway, equally narrow, by which they passed to the stage. At
its inner end, where it opens into a small court, is the stone rim of
a well, half hidden in the wall. It is the well provided in each
tennis-court for the players, and handed on, with the court itself,
for the use of the actors. Molière has leaned over this well-curb to
wash away his rouge and wrinkles. It is an indisputable and attractive
witness of his early days. In Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, where he
knelt at the altar for his marriage and stood at the font with his
son; in Saint-Eustache, where he carried his second son for baptism;
in Saint-Roch, where he wrote his name as godfather of a friend's
daughter--within these vast and dim aisles, his bodily presence is
vaguely shadowed forth; _here_ we can touch the man.
[Illustration: Stage Door of Molière's Second Theatre in Paris.]
What sort of plays were presented at this house we do not know, the
only record that remains referring to the production of "Artaxerxes"
by one Mignon. Whatever they played, neither the rough men of the quay
and of Port Saint-Paul, nor the _bourgeoisie_ of the Marais, nor the
fine folk of Place Royale, crowded into the new theatre.
During this disastrous season, the troupe received royal commands to
play at Fontainebleau before the King and court, and later, by
invitation of the Duc de l'Éperon, at his splendid mansion in Rue de
la Plâtrière--that mansion in which lived and died La Fontaine, half a
century later. Neither these fashionable flights, nor the royal and
noble patronage accorded to the troupe, could save it from failure and
final bankruptcy. Molière, the responsible manager, was arrested for
the theatre's poor little debt for candles and lights. He was locked
up for a night or two in the dismal prison of the Grand Châtelet, once
the fortress of Louis "le Gros," torn down only in 1802, on whose site
now sparkles the fountain of Place du Châtelet. From this lock-up,
having petitioned for release to M. d'Aubray, Civil Lieutenant of the
town and father of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, Molière was released
by the quickly tendered purse of Léonard Aubry, "Royal Paver and
Street Sweeper," who, when filling in the Fossé-de-Nesle and laying
out over it the present Rue Mazarine a year before, had made fast
friends with the young actor. "For his good service in ransoming the
said Poquelin," the entire troupe bound itself to make Aubry whole for
his debt.
Now they cross the river again to their former Faubourg Saint-Germain,
taking for their house the _Jeu de Paume de la Croix-Blanche_, outside
the wall on the south side of the present Rue de Buci, between the
_carrefour_ at its eastern end and Rue Grégoire-de-Tours. Here they
played, still playing against disaster, from the end of 1645 to the
end of 1646, and then they fled from Paris, fairly beaten, and betook
themselves to the southern provinces. We cannot follow their
wanderings, nor record their ups and downs, during the twelve years of
their absence. In the old play-bills we find the names of Béjart
_aîné_ and of his brother Louis, of their sisters Madeleine and
Geneviève. Toward the end of their touring they added to the family,
though not to the boards, Armande, who had been brought up in
Languedoc, and who was claimed by them to be their very young sister,
and by others to be the unacknowledged daughter of Madeleine.
Molière, the leader and manager of the troupe from the day they
started, was then only twenty-five years of age, not yet owning or
knowing his full powers. These he gained during that twelve years'
hard schooling and rude apprenticeship, so that he came back to the
capital, in 1658, master of his craft, with a load of literary luggage
such as no French tourist has carried, before or since.
Under princely patronage, won in the provinces, his troupe appeared
before Louis XIV., the Queen-Mother, and the entire court, on October
24, 1658, in a theatre improvised in the Salle des Gardes of the old
Louvre, now known as the Salle des Caryatides. The pieces on that
opening night were Corneille's "Nicomède" and the manager's "Le
Docteur Amoureux." In November, the "_troupe de Monsieur_"--that title
permitted by the King's brother--was given possession of the theatre
in the palace of the Petit-Bourbon. It stood between the old Louvre,
with which it was connected by a long gallery, and the Church of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, and was torn down in 1660 to make place for
the new colonnade that forms the present eastern face of the Louvre.
The dainty Jardin de l'Infante covers the site of the stage, just at
the corner of the Egyptian Gallery.
In this hall Molière's company played for two years, on alternate
nights with the Italian comedians, presenting, along with old standard
French pieces--for authors in vogue held aloof--his provincial
successes, as well as new plays and ballets invented by him for the
delectation of the _Grand Monarque_. From this time his remaining
fifteen years of life were filled with work; his brain and his pen
were relentlessly employed; honors and wealth came plentifully to him,
happiness hardly at all.