great court where all men grew sleek and servile, and where no
pen-worker seemed able to escape becoming a courtier. His caustic
audacity salted his sycophancy and made him a man apart from the herd
of flatterers. His thrust was so suave, as well as sharp, that the
spoiled monarch himself accepted admonition from that courageous
cleverness. "I am having search made in every direction for Monsieur
Arnauld," said Louis, when eager in his pursuit of the Jansenists.
"Your Majesty is always fortunate; you will not find him," was
Boileau's quick retort, received with a smile by the King. When money
was needed for Dr. Perrault's new eastern façade of the Louvre and for
its other alterations, the King naturally economized in the incomes of
other men. The pensions of literary men--in many instances the sole
source of their livelihood--were allowed to lapse; that of Boileau was
continued by an order that his name should be entered on the Louvre
pay-roll as "an architect paid for mason's work." His mordant reply to
the questioning pay-clerk was: "Yes, I am a mason." His masonry in the
stately fabric of French literature stands unmarred to-day; coldly
correct, it may be, yet elegant, faultless, consummate.
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was long believed to have been born in the
country and to have played in the fields as a child, and so to have
got his added name _des préaux_; but it is now made certain that the
house of his birth, in 1636, was in Rue de Jérusalem, a street that
led to the Sainte-Chapelle, from about the middle of the present Quai
des Orfèvres. The only field he knew lay at the foot of his father's
garden at Crosne, where the lad was sometimes taken. Fields and
gardens had never anything to say to this born cockney, and there is
not a sniff of real country air in all his verse. The street of his
birth was one of the narrow, dark streets of oldest Paris, on Île de
la Cité; and the house, tall and thin, had its gable end on the court
of the old Palais de Justice. The earliest air breathed by this baby
was charged with satire, it would seem. For the room of his birth had
been occupied, nearly half a century earlier, by Jacques Gillot, the
brilliant canon of Sainte-Chapelle. In this room assembled in secret
that clever band of talkers and writers, who planned and wrote "La
Ménippée"; the first really telling piece of French political satire,
so telling, in its unbridled buffoonery, that it gave spirit to the
arms that shattered the League, and helped to put Henry of Navarre on
the throne of France.
After his father's death, young Nicolas kept his home with his elder
brother Jérôme, who had succeeded to the paternal mansion, and who
gave the boy a sort of watch-tower, built above the garrets, in which
he could hardly stand upright. The house, the court, the old palace,
were long since swept away, and with them went all the melodramatic
stage-setting of Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris" and Sue's "Mystères de
Paris." Only the Sainte-Chapelle is left of the scenes of Boileau's
early years.
He was sent for a while to Collége d'Harcourt, where young Racine
came a little later, and was then put to the study of law, the family
trade; passing by way of Beauvais College to the Sorbonne. He is known
to have pleaded in but one case, and then with credit to himself.
Still the law did not please him, any more than did the dry theology
and the pedantic philosophy that he listened to on the benches of the
Sorbonne. He was enamoured early of poetry and romance, and soon
affianced himself to the Muse. This was his only betrothal, and he
made no other marriage. He was born an old bachelor, and he soon
sought bachelor quarters, driven by the children's racket from his
nephew's house--also in the Cour du Palais--where he had found a home.
This nephew and this house were well known to Voltaire when a boy, as
he tells us in his "Épître à Boileau":
"_Chez ton neveu Dongois je passai mon enfance,
Bon bourgeois, qui se crut un homme d'importance._"
It is first in the year 1664 that we can place with certainty
Boileau's residence in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, in that small apartment
which fills a larger place in the annals of literary life than any
domicile of that day, perhaps of any day. It was the gathering-place
of that illustrious quartette--
"The goodliest fellowship of famous knights
Whereof this world holds record."
Molière comes from his rooms in Rue Saint-Honoré, or from his theatre;
crossing the Seine by the Pont-Neuf, and passing along Rues Dauphine
and de Bucy, and through the Marché Saint-Germain; moody from domestic
dissensions, heavy-hearted with the recent loss of his first-born.
Once among his friends, he listens, as he always listened, talking but
little. La Fontaine saunters from the Hôtel de Bouillon, by way of Rue
des Petits-Augustins--now Rue Bonaparte--and of tortuous courts now
straightened into streets. Sitting at table, he is yet in his own land
of dreams, until, stirred from his musing, his fine eyes brighten, and
he chatters with a curious blending of simplicity and _finesse_.
Racine steps in from his lodging in Rue de Grenelle, hard by; the
youngest of the four, he, unlike those other two, is seldom silent,
and gives full play to his ironical raillery. Next above him in age is
the host; shrewd, brusque, incisive of speech and manner. So he shows
in Girardon's admirable bust in the Louvre. The enormous wig then worn
cannot becloud the bright alertness of his expression, or over-weigh
the full lips that could sneer and the square chin, so resolute. These
comrades talked of all sorts of things, and read to one another what
each had written since they last met; read it for the sake of honest
criticism from the rest, and with no other thought. For never were
four men so absolutely without pose, without any pretence of
earnestness, while immensely in earnest all the time. In "Les Amours
de Psyché," La Fontaine assures us that they did not absolutely banish
all serious discourse, but that they took care not to have too much of
it, and preferred the darts of fun and nonsense that were feathered
with friendly counsel. Best of all, his fable makes plain that there
were no cliques nor cabals, no envy nor malice, among the men that
made this worshipful band.
[Illustration: Boileau-Despréaux.
(From the portrait by Largillière.)]
Their table served rather to sit around than to eat from, for their
suppers were simple, and the flowing bowl was passed only when
boisterous Chapelle or other _bon-vivant_ dropped in. For others were
invited at times, men of the world, the court, and the camp. And
Boileau was the common centre of these excentric stars, and when each,
in his own special atmosphere of coolness, swayed from the others'
vicinage, Boileau alone let no alienation come between him and any one
of them. For each, he was what Racine had found him, "the best friend
and the best man in the world."
The house was near a noted _cabaret_, to which they sometimes
resorted, at the Saint-Sulpice end of the street. The _cabaretier_ was
the illustrious Cresnet, made immortal in Boileau's verse. For the
poet was no prude, and enjoyed the pleasures of the table so far as
his health permitted; and, a trained gastronomic artist, he knew how
to order a choicely harmonized repast. His street is widened, his
house is gone, and no one can fix the spot. Yet the turmoil of that
crowded thoroughfare of to-day is deadened for us by the mute voices
of these men.
We have noted Boileau's camp-following with Racine, in their rôles of
royal historiographers--in 1678 and later--but he was not strong
enough for these excursions, even though they were made a picnic for
the court. He was never at home on a horse, and yet out of place in
the mud, and he could not enjoy the laughter he caused in either
attitude, before or after he was thrown; laughter that is recorded in
the letters of Madame de Sévigné.
It was probably because of Molière's taking a country place at Auteuil
that Boileau began to make frequent excursions to that quiet suburb
about 1667, and went to live in his tiny cottage there in 1685. "He
had acquired it," to use his biographer's words, "partly by his
Majesty's munificence, and partly by his own careful economy," so that
he was opulent, for a poet. His purchase papers were made out by the
notary Arouet--Voltaire's father--who drew up Boileau's pension papers
in 1692, and who did much notarial work for the Boileau family. The
cottage stood exactly on the ground now covered by the rear wing of
the Hydropathic Establishment, at No. 12 Rue Boileau, Auteuil. Here he
spent the spring and summer months of many a year, always alone, but
with a hand-shake and a smile for his many visitors, men of birth as
well as men of brains. Hither Voltaire certainly came, when a lad
living with Dongois, for he says, in his pleasant rhymed epistle to
Boileau:
"_Je vis le jardinier de ta maison d'Auteuil._"
To this same "_laborieux valet_," to this same
"_Antoine, gouverneur de mon jardin d'Auteuil_,"
Boileau wrote his letter in verse in 1695. The widow Racine came,
too, for frequent outings with her children, who loved the garden and
adored Boileau, for the peaches he picked for them and the ninepins he
played with them. Louis Racine, a sort of pupil of his, says that the
old poet was nearly as skilful at this game as in versifying, and
usually knocked over the entire nine with one ball. And when he went
to town, no warmer welcome met the crusty old bachelor than in Rue des
Marais-Saint-Germain, still the dwelling-place of Racine's family.
In great mansions, too, he had long been cordially received. He was a
visitor at that of Madame de Guénégaud, which has given its site to
the Hôtel de la Monnaie, and its name to the street alongside. He was
fond of meeting kindred spirits and kindly hosts in the _hôtel_ of the
great Condé and his younger brother Conti. He was one of the select
set that sat about the table of Lamoignon, every Monday, at his home
in the Marais, to be visited by us later. And whenever old Cardinal
Retz came to town, Boileau hastened to the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, of
which no stone stands in the street of its name. Here the
white-headed, worn-out old fighter, compelled to live in retirement,
after the storms and scandals of his active life, was made at home by
his admirable niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and here he was encircled
by admiring men and women. Here, writes Madame de Sévigné, his other
niece, who came often to sit with him, Boileau presented to Retz early
copies of "Le Lutrin," and of "L'Ars Poétique."
Boileau could not live in the country in winter, and even in summer he
had to go often into town to get the care of his trusted physician.
For he was an invalid from boyhood, and all his life an uncomplaining
sufferer. But he hurried back, whenever permitted, to the pure air and
the congenial solitude of his small cottage, where three faithful
servants cared for him; not as would have cared the wife, whom he
ought to have had, all his friends said, and so, too, he thought
sometimes. He grew lonely as life lengthened, and as he saw his
cronies passing away, fast and faster, old Corneille being the last of
them to go.
His winters in the great city were spent in lodgings on the island, in
the cloisters of Notre-Dame. Their quiet had always attracted him, as
he avows in the verse that quivers with his nervous irritability,
caused by the noises of the noisiest of towns. He cries, "Does one go
to bed to be kept awake?" Indeed, he had rooms in the cloisters as
early as 1683, keeping them for town quarters, in the official
residence of l'Abbé de Dreux, his old friend, a canon of Notre-Dame.
To this address Racine sent him a letter as late as 1687. The
ecclesiastical settlement within the cathedral cloisters, and its only
remaining cottage, have been spoken of in an earlier chapter. The
cloisters themselves survive only in the name of the street that has
been cut through their former site.
In 1699 we find Boileau living with his confessor, the Abbé Lenoir,
also a canon of the cathedral, who had the privilege of residing
within the cloisters. This house stood exactly where now is the
southern edge of the fountain behind Notre-Dame, above Le Terrain and
the Seine. His rooms were on the first floor, his bed in an alcove,
and his windows looked out on the terrace over the river, as we learn
by the amiable accuracy of the lawyer who drew up his will. Here
Boileau lived through painful years of breaking bodily health, but
with unbroken faculties. He yearned for his old home at Auteuil, and
yet he was too feeble to go so far. He had sold his cottage to a
friend, under the condition that a room should be reserved always for
his use. That use never came. One day toward the end, he summoned up
strength to drive to the beloved place; but all was changed, he
changed most of all, and he hurried home to his lonely quarters, where
death found him at ten o'clock in the morning of March 2, 1711.
His devoted servants were requited for years of faithful service by
handsome legacies, then the relatives were provided for, and no friend
was forgotten. The remainder of his fortune went to the "_pauvres
honteux_" of six small parishes in the City. A vast and reverent
concourse of mourners of every rank followed his coffin to its first
resting-place. This was in the lower chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle, as
he had ordered; the church of his baptism, and of the burial of his
mother and father. By a strange chance, his grave had been dug under
that very reading-desk which had suggested to him the subject of his
most striking production, the heroic-comic poem "Le Lutrin." Early in
the Revolution his remains were removed, to save them from fortuitous
profanation by the "Patriots," to the Museum of French Monuments
established in the convent of the Petits-Augustins, in the street of
that name, now Rue Bonaparte. In 1819 his bones were finally placed in
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where, in the chapel of Saint-Peter and
Saint-Paul, they are at rest behind a black marble tablet carved with
a ponderous Latin inscription.
FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS
[Illustration: Voltaire.
(From the statue by Houdon in the foyer of the Comédie Française.)]
FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS
"_Dans la cour du Palais, je naquis ton voisin_," wrote Voltaire to
Boileau, in one of those familiar rhymed letters that soften the
austere rhetoric of the French verse of that day. The place of
Voltaire's birth, nearly sixty years after that of Boileau, was in the
same Street of Jerusalem, at its corner with the Street of Nazareth,
and it was only thus as a baby that he came ever in touch with the
Holy Land. On November 22, 1694, the day after his birth, he was
carried across the river to Saint-André-des-Arts--no one knows why his
baptism was not in the island church of the parish--and there
christened François-Marie Arouet. His earlier years were passed in the
house of Boileau's nephew Dongois, whose airs of importance did not
escape the keen infant eyes, as we have seen in the same letter in
verse in our preceding chapter. Then he was sent to Lycée
Louis-le-Grand, whither we have gone with young Poquelin, seventy
years earlier. The college stands in its new stone on its old site in
widened Rue Saint-Jacques.
We hear of no break in the tranquil course of young Arouet's studies,
beyond the historic scene of his presentation to Mlle. Ninon de
Lenclos at her home in the Marais, to which we shall go in a later
chapter. This was in 1706, when she owned to ninety years of age at
least, and she was flattered by the visit of the youth of twelve, and
by the verse he wrote for her birthday. Dying in that year, she left a
handsome sum to her juvenile admirer, to be spent for books. So,
"_secondé de Ninon, dont je fus légataire_," the lad was strengthened
in his inclination for the career of literature he had already planned
for himself, and in his disinclination for the legal career planned
for him by his father. The elder Arouet was a flourishing
notary--among his clients was the Boileau family--who considered his
own the only profession really respectable. He placed his boy, the
college days being done, with one Maître Alain, whose office was near
Place Maubert, between Rues de la Bucherie and Galande, a quarter
crowded then with notaries and advocates, now all swept into limbo.
But young Arouet spent too many of his days and nights with the
congenial comrades that met in the Temple; "an advanced and dangerous"
troop of swells and wits and pen-workers, light-heartedly bent on fun,
amid the general gloom brought by Marlborough's victories, and by
Madame de Maintenon's persistence in making Paris pious. Father Arouet
sent his son away to The Hague; the first of his many journeys,
enforced and voluntary. When allowed to return in 1715, he lost no
time in hunting up his old associates; and soon, stronger hands than
those of his father settled him in the Bastille, in punishment for
verse, not written by him, satirizing the Regent and his daughter,
Duchesse de Berri. There he spent his twenty-third year, utilizing his
leisure to plan his "Henriade," and to finish his "Oedipe." When set
free, he came out as Voltaire. Whether he took this new name from a
small estate of his mother, or whether it was an anagram of _Arouet
fils_, is not worth the search; enough for us that it is the name of
him, who was to become, as John Morley rightly says, "the very eye of
eighteenth-century illumination," and to whom we may apply his own
words, used magnanimously of his famous contemporary, Montesquieu;
that humanity had lost its title-deeds, and he had recovered them.
Once again in the world, he produced his "Oedipe" in 1718, with an
immediate and resounding success, which was not won by his succeeding
plays between 1720 and 1724. It was during this period that he
spasmodically disappeared from Paris, reappearing at Brussels,
Utrecht, The Hague; "_jouant à l'envoyé secret_," as was his mania
then and in later years. During one of these flittings as an
ambassador's ghost, he met Rousseau, and they were close friends until
the day when Rousseau, showing to Voltaire his "Letter to Posterity,"
was told that it would never reach its address! That gibe made them
sworn enemies. In Paris, during these years, Voltaire had no settled
home. We have seen him in the _salon_ of Mlle. Lecouvreur, in Rue
Visconti, and we have seen him there, a sincere mourner at her
death-bed. It has been told in an earlier chapter, how that fine
creature had sat by Voltaire's sick-bed, careless of her own danger
from the small-pox, with which he was stricken in November, 1723. He
frequented many haunts of the witty and the wicked during these years,
and a historic scene in one of these has been put on canvas by Mr.
Orchardson. One evening in the year 1725, Voltaire was a saucy guest
at the table of the Duc de Sully, descendant of Henri IV.'s great
minister, in the noble mansion in Rue Saint-Antoine, to be visited by
us later. On going out, he was waylaid and beaten by the lackeys of
the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, who desired to impress by cudgels the
warning that, while princes are willing to be amused at the table
where sit "only princes and poets," the poets must not presume on the
privilege. In the painting, Voltaire reappears in the room to the
remaining guests, dishevelled and outraged. Later he challenged Rohan,
whose reply came in an order of committal to the Bastille. After two
weeks in a cell, Voltaire's request to go to England in exile was
gladly accorded by the government.
We all know well the Voltaire of an older day, in his statues beside
the Institute and within that building, beside the Panthéon, in Square
Monge, and in the _foyer_ of the Théâtre Français. To see him at this
younger day, we must turn into the court-yard of the Mairie of the
Ninth Arrondissement at No. 6 Rue Drouot--an ancient and attractive
family mansion. In the centre of the court is a modern bronze, showing
"the ape of genius" at the age of twenty-five, a dapper creature with
head perked up and that complacent smile so marked in all his
portraits. This smirk may be due less to self-satisfaction than to
that physical peculiarity, claimed by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his
own case, which is caused by the congenital shortening of the levator
muscles of the mouth. The statue's right hand rests jauntily on the
hip, in the left hand is a book, and the left skirt of the long coat
is blown back, showing the sword that was worn by young philosophers
who would be young bloods. The pedestal holds two bas-reliefs; the
youth in Ninon's _salon_, the patriarch at Ferney, and cut in it are
his words: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent
him."
During his years in England, Voltaire made acquaintance with all the
notable men of letters then living, and with William Shakespeare in
his works. In them he tolerantly found much merit, but always styled
their author a barbarian. Those barbarisms and savageries he civilized
and smoothed to his pattern, for his "Brutus" is an unconscious echo
of "Julius Cæsar," his "Zaïre" a shadow of "Othello." He refused to
call on Wycherly "the gentleman," as Wycherly insisted, but was glad
to meet Wycherly the playwright. Nor did Voltaire turn his back on men
and women of fashion, but used them so cleverly as to enable him to
carry home to France a small fortune, from the subscriptions to his
English edition of the "Henriade." He was shrewd in money matters, and
a successful speculator for many years. We first hear of him again in
Paris in 1729, getting army contracts and making money in queer ways.
Yet all through life his pen was always busy, and in this same year
it is at work in a grand apartment of the Hôtel Lambert. This was the
mansion of M. du Châtelet, husband--officially only--of "_la sublime
Émilie_," with whom Voltaire had taken up his abode. The Hôtel Lambert
remains unchanged at the eastern end of Île Saint-Louis, looking, from
behind its high wall and its well-shaded garden, at its incomparable
prospect. Its entrance at No. 2 Rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Île opens on a
grand court and an imposing façade. "This is a house made for a king,
who would be a philosopher," wrote Voltaire to his august
correspondent Frederick the Great. He himself was neither king of this
realm nor proved himself a philosopher in its grotesque squabbles.
Madame du Châtelet was as frankly unfaithful to him as to her husband,
who was frequently called in to reconcile the infuriated lovers. She
was a woman of unusual abilities as well as of unusual indelicacies,
with an itch for reading, research, and writing, her specialties being
Newton and mathematics.
[Illustration: The Hôtel Lambert.]
In 1733 this queer couple found it to their comfort to quit Paris, where
Voltaire was ceaselessly beset by the suspicions of the powers that
regulated thought in France. They moved about much, to Voltaire's
discomfort, living sometimes at Cirey, on the borders of Champagne and
Lorraine, with or without the complaisant du Châtelet; sometimes in a
mansion taken by Voltaire in Paris. This stood on the corner of two
streets no longer existing, Rues du Clos-Georgeau and Traversière-Saint-
Honoré, at No. 25 of the latter; and its site now lies under the
roadway of new Avenue de l'Opéra. The cutting of this avenue has left
unchanged only the northern end of Rue Traversière, and this has been
renamed in honor of Molière. To place Voltaire's residence in the old
mansion at the new number 25 in this street, as a recent topographer
has done, is an ingenuous flight of fancy.