Émilie_" from him, from her other lover, and from her husband. This
legal husband was less inconsolable than Voltaire, whose almost
incredible reproach to the third man in the case makes Morality hold
her hand before her face--peeping between the fingers, naturally--while
Immorality shakes with frank laughter. On the second floor of this
house, Voltaire remained, "_de moitié avec le Marquis du Châtelet_;"
the first floor, which had been her own, being thenceforward closed to
them both. Here he tried to find companionship with his selfish and
stolid niece, Madame Denis, and with his _protégé_ Lekain. He
transformed the garret into a private theatre, for the production of
his plays, free from the royal or the popular censor; and for the
training of Lekain in the part of Titus, in "Brutus." That promising,
and soon accepted, actor made his _début_ at the Théâtre Français in
September, 1750, and his patron was not among the audience. From this
house, Voltaire went frequently across the river to visit Mlle.
Clairon in her apartment in Rue Visconti, so well known to him when
tenanted by Mlle. Lecouvreur, twenty years earlier. And from this
house, wherein he came to be too desolate and lonely, Voltaire went
forth from France in 1751, to find a still more uncongenial home at
Potsdam. With his queer life there, and his absurd quarrels with
Frederick the Great, this chronicle cannot concern itself.
"_Café à la Voltaire_" is the legend you may read to-day on a pillar
of the Café Procope, in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, directly opposite
the old Comédie Française. We have seen the mixed delight and doubt
with which coffee was first sipped by the Parisians of the end of the
seventeenth century, but it won its way, and in 1720 the Sicilian
Procope opened this second Paris _café_. It soon became the favorite
resort by night of the playwrights and play-actors, and the swells
among the audience, of the playhouse across the street. Gradually the
men of letters, living in and visiting the capital, made this _café_
their gathering-place of an afternoon; so that, on any day in the
middle years of the eighteenth century, all the men best worth knowing
might be found here. Their names are lettered and their atrocious
portraits painted on its inner walls. In the little room on the left,
as you walk in on the ground floor, they treasure still, while these
lines are written, Voltaire's table. He sat here, near the stage that
produced his plays, sipping his own special and abominable blend of
coffee and chocolate. With him sat, among the many not so notable,
Diderot, d'Alembert, Marmontel, Rousseau, with his young friend
Grimm--hardly yet at home in Paris, not at all at home with its
language--and Piron, Voltaire's pet enemy, who wrote his own epitaph:
"_Ci-gît Piron,
Que ne fut rien,
Pas même Académicien._"
Here, on an evening in 1709, sat Alain-René Le Sage, awaiting in
suspense the verdict on his "Turcaret," brought out in the theatre
opposite, after many heart-breaking delays; for the misguided author
had convinced himself that his title to fame would be founded on this
now-forgotten play, rather than on his never-to-be-neglected "Gil
Blas"!
During the Revolution, while the Café de la Régence, which faces the
present Comédie Française, was the pet resort of the royalist writers,
this Café Procope was the gathering-place of the Republican penmen;
and they draped its walls in black, and wore mourning for three days,
when word came across the water in 1790 of the death of Benjamin
Franklin, the complete incarnation to them of true republicanism.
Toward the unlamented end of the Second Empire, a small group of young
American students was to be found, of an evening, in the Café Procope,
harmlessly mirthful over their beer. After a while, they were content
to sit night after night in silence, all ears for the monologue at a
neighboring table; a copious and resistless outburst of argument and
invective, sprinkled with Gallic anecdote and with _gros mots_, and
broken by Rabelaisian laughter, from a magnificent voice and an ample
virility. They were told that the speaker was one Léon Gambetta, an
obscure barrister, already under the suspicion of the police of the
"lurking jail-bird," whom he helped drive from France, within a few
years.
The old house is to-day only a pallid spectre of its aforetime
red-blooded self, and is nourished by nothing more solid than these
uncompact memories. Loving them and all his Paris, its kindly
proprietor tries to revitalize its inanimate atmosphere by his
"_Soirées littéraires et musicales_." In a room upstairs "ancient
poems, ancient music, old-time song," are listened to by unprinted
poets, unplayed dramatists, unhung painters. Some of them read their
still unpublished works. The _patron_ enjoys it all, and the waiters
are the most depressed in all Paris.
Denis Diderot gives the effect in his work, as Gambetta did in the
flesh, of a living force of nature. When, at that same table, Diderot
opened the long-locked gate, the full and impetuous outflow swept all
before it, submerged and breathless. In his personality, as vivid as
that of Mirabeau, we see a fiery soul, a stormy nature, a daring
thinker, a prodigious worker. His head seemed encyclopædic to Grimm,
his life-long friend; and Rousseau, first friend and later enemy,
asserted that in centuries to come that head would be regarded with
the reverence given to the heads of Plato and of Aristotle. Voltaire
could imagine no one subject beyond the reach of Diderot's activity.
Arsène Houssaye names him "the last man of the day of dreaming in
religion and royalty, the first man of the day of the Revolution." And
John Morley, looking at him from a greater distance than any of these,
and with keener eyes, ranks him higher as a thinker than either
Rousseau or Voltaire. As thinker, essayist, critic, cyclopædist,
Diderot is indeed the most striking figure of the eighteenth century.
Rugged, uncouth, headlong, we see him, "_en redingote de peluche grise
éreintée_," in the philosophers' alley of the Luxembourg garden,
strolling with more energy than others give to striding. Striking and
strong he is in the exquisite bust by Houdon in the Louvre, yet with a
refinement of expression and a delicacy of poise of the head that are
very winning. This effect might have been gained by a Fragonard
working in the solid.
Here, under the trees where meet Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rues de
Rennes and Bonaparte, it is the student whom we see in bronze, leaning
forward in his chair, a quill pen in hand, his worn face bent and
intent. This spot was selected for the statue because just there
Diderot resided for many years. His house was at No. 12 Rue Taranne,
on the corner of Rue Saint-Benoît, and it was torn down when the
former street was widened into the new boulevard. Here, young Diderot,
refusing to return to the paternal home at Lancres, when he left the
Collége d'Harcourt--the school of Boileau and Racine--lived in a
squalid room, during his early days of uncongenial toil in a lawyer's
office and of all sorts of penwork that paid poorly--translations,
sermons, catalogues, advertisements. Here he was hungry and cold and
unhappy; here, in 1743, he married the pretty sewing-girl who lived in
this same house with her mother, and who became a devoted and faithful
wife to a trying husband. For her he had the only clean love of his
not-too-clean life. From this garret he poured forth prose, his chosen
form of expression, when poetry was the only vogue, and it is by his
persistence, perhaps, that prose has come to the throne in France. And
it was while living here that he originated the art-criticism of his
country; clear and thorough, discriminating and enthusiastic. Earlier
notices of pictures had been as casual as the shows themselves; begun
in 1673, under Colbert's protection and the younger Mansart's
direction, in a small pavilion on the site of the present Théâtre
Français, having one entrance in Rue de Richelieu, another in the
garden, into which the pictures often overflowed. When Diderot wrote
his notices for Grimm, the exhibitions had permanent shelter in the
halls of the Louvre. In 1746, still in this house, he published his
"Philosophic Thoughts" and other essays that were at first attributed
to Voltaire, and that at last sent the real author to Vincennes. There
he was kept for three maddening months by an outraged "Strumpetocracy"
and a spiteful Sorbonne, on its last legs of persecution for opinion.
You may go to this prison by the same road his escort took, now named
Boulevard Diderot, with unconscious topographic humor.
To visit "great Diderot in durance," Grimm and Rousseau came by this
road; stopping, before taking the Avenue de Vincennes, at a farm-house
on the edge of Place du Trône--now, Place de la Nation--where the
sentimentalist quenched his thirst with milk. That was the day when
Rousseau picked up the paradox, from Diderot, which he elaborated into
his famous essay, showing the superiority of the savage man over the
civilized man. There is as slight trace to be found of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau in the Paris of to-day as in the minds of the men of to-day.
We see him first, in 1745, at the Hôtel Saint-Quentin of our Balzac
chapter, carrying from there the uncomely servant, Thérèse le Vasseur.
After this he appears fitfully in Paris through many years. In 1772 he
is in Rue Plâtrière--a street now widened and named for him--on the
fourth floor of a wretched house opposite the present Post-office.
There he was found by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre--as thin-skinned and
touchy as Rousseau, yet somehow the two kept friendly--with his
repulsive Thérèse, whom he had made his wife in 1768. This preacher of
the holiness of the domestic affections had sent their five children
to the foundling hospital, according to his own statement, which is
our only reason for doubting that he did it. Bernardin found him, clad
in an overcoat and a white _bonnet_, copying music; of which Rousseau
knew nothing, except by the intuition of genius. For those who wish,
there are the pilgrimages to the Hermitage at Montmorenci, occupied by
him in 1756, and nearly forty years later by a man equally attractive,
Maximilien Robespierre; and to Ermenonville, the spot of Rousseau's
death in 1778. It is easier to stroll to the Panthéon, where, on one
side, is a statue of the author of "Le Contrat Social" and "Émile,"
which gives him a dignity that was not his in life. This tribute from
the French nation was decreed by the National Convention of _15
Brumaire, An II_, and erected by the National Assembly in 1791.
Durable as its bronze this tribute was meant to be, at the time when
he was deified by the nation; since then, his body and his memory have
been "cast to the dogs; a deep-minded, even noble, yet wofully
misarranged mortal." While acknowledging his impress on his generation
as an interpreter of moral and religious sentiment, and without
denying the claim of his admirers, that he is the father of modern
democracy, we may own, too, to a plentiful lack of liking for the man.
Released and returned to his wife in Rue Taranne, Diderot lost no time
in beginning again that toil which was his life. With all his other
work--"Letters on the Blind, for the use of those who can see," dramas
now forgotten, an obscene novel that paid the debts of his
mistress--he began and carried out his Encyclopædia. "No sinecure is
it!" says Carlyle: "penetrating into all subjects and sciences,
waiting and rummaging in all libraries, laboratories; nay, for many
years fearlessly diving into all manner of workshops, unscrewing
stocking-looms, and even working thereon (that the department of 'Arts
and Trades' might be perfect); then seeking out contributors, and
flattering them, quickening their laziness, getting payment for them,
quarrelling with bookseller and printer, bearing all miscalculations,
misfortunes, misdoings of so many fallible men on his single back." On
top of all, he had to bear the spasmodic persecution of the Government
instigated by the Church. The patient, gentle d'Alembert, with his
serenity, his clearness, and his method, helped Diderot more than all
the others. And so grew, in John Morley's words, "that mountain of
volumes, reared by the endeavor of stout hands and faithful," which,
having done its work for truth and humanity, is now a deserted ruin.
As he brought it to an end after thirty years of labor, Diderot found
himself grown old and worn, and the busiest brain and hand in France
began to flag. By now, he stood next in succession to the King,
Voltaire. Yet, for all the countless good pages he has written, it has
been truly said that he did not write one great book. Other urgent
creditors, besides old age, harassed him, and he had to sell his
collection of books. They were bought by the Empress Catharine of
Russia, at a handsome value, and she handsomely allowed him to retain
them for her, and furthermore paid him a salary for their care. Grimm
urged on her, in one of his gossiping _feuilles_, that have given
material for so much personal history, the propriety of housing her
library and its librarian properly, and this was done in the grand
mansion now No. 39 Rue de Richelieu. We have come to this street with
Molière and with Mignard, and there are other memories along this
lower length, to which a chapter could be given. We can awaken only
those that now belong to No. 50. Here lived a couple named Poisson,
and on March 19, 1741, they gave in marriage to Charles Guillaume le
Normand their daughter Jeanne-Antoinette, a girl of fifteen. That
blossom ripened and rottened into La Pompadour. The house is quite
unchanged since that day. In a large rear room on its first floor, in
the year 1899, future chroniclers will be glad to note that Moncure
D. Conway made an abbreviation of his noble life of Thomas Paine for
its French translation. His working-room was in the midst of the
scenes of Paine's Paris stay, but not one of them can be fixed with
certainty.
The house numbered 39 of this street is occupied by the "_Maison
Sterlin_," a factory of artistic metal-work in locks and bolts and
fastenings for doors and windows. It is an attractive museum of fine
iron and steel workmanship, ancient and modern. There, in a case, is
preserved the superbly elaborate key of Corneille's birth-house in
Rouen. The brothers Bricard have had the reverent good taste to retain
the late seventeenth-century interior of their establishment, and you
may mount by the easy stairs, with their fine wrought-iron rail, to
Diderot's dining-room on the first floor, its panelling unaltered
since his death there, on July 31, 1784. He had enjoyed, for only
twelve days, the grandest residence and the greatest ease his life had
known. They had been made busy days, of course, spent in arranging his
books and pictures. Sitting here, eating hastily, he died suddenly and
quietly, his elbows on the table. On August 1st his body was buried in
the parish church of Saint-Roch, and the tablet marking the spot is
near that commemorating Corneille, who had been brought there exactly
one hundred years before.
This church is eloquent with the presence of these two, with the voice
of Bossuet--"the Bible transfused into a man," in Lamartine's
phrase--and with the ping of Bonaparte's bullets on its porch; yet
there is a presence within, less clamorous but not less impressive
than any of these. In the fourth chapel, on your left as you enter, is
a bronze bust of a man, up to which a boy and a girl look from the two
corners of the pedestal. This is the monument of Charles Michel, Abbé
de l'Épée, placed above his grave in the chapel where he held services
at times, and the boy and girl stand for the countless deaf-and-dumb
children to whom he gave speech and hearing. The son of a royal
architect, with every prospect of preferment in the Church, with some
success as a winning preacher, his liberal views turned him from this
career. His interest in two deaf-mute sisters led him to his
life-work. There were others in England, and there was the good
Pereira in Spain, who had studied and invented before him, but it is
to this gentle-hearted Frenchman that the world of the deaf and dumb
owes most for its rescue from its inborn bondage. He gave to them all
he had, and all he was; for their sake he went ill-clad always, cold
in winter, hungry often. He had but little private aid, and no
official aid at all. He alone, with his modest income, and with the
little house left him by his father, started his school of instruction
for deaf-mutes in 1760.
The house was at No. 14 Rue des Moulins, a retired street leading
north from Rue Saint-Honoré, and so named because near its line were
the mills of the Butte de Saint-Roch--where we are to find the
head-quarters of Joan the Maid. One of these mills may be seen to-day,
re-erected and in perfect preservation, at Crony-sur-Ourcq, near
Meaux, and above its doorway is the image of the patron-saint, to whom
the mill was dedicated in the fifteenth century. This quarter of the
town had become, during the reign of Louis XIV., the centre of a
select suburb of small, elegant mansions, tenanted by many illustrious
men. On the rear of his lot the good _abbé_ built a small chapel, and
in it and in the house he passed nearly thirty years of
self-sacrifice, ended only by his death on December 23, 1789. When the
Avenue de l'Opéra was cut in 1877-8, his street was shortened and his
establishment was razed. At the nearest available spot, on the wall of
No. 23 Rue Thérèse, two tablets have been placed, the one that fixes
the site, the other recording the decree of the Constituent Assembly
of July, 1789, by which the Abbé de l'Épée was placed on the roll of
those French citizens who merit well the recognition of humanity and
of his country. And, in 1791, amid all its troubled labors, the
Assembly founded the Institution National des Sourds-Muets of Paris,
on the base of his humble school. The big and beneficent institution
is in Rue Saint-Jacques, at its intersection with the street named in
his honor. And it is an honor to the Parisians that they thus keep
alive the memory of their great men, so that, in a walk through their
streets, we run down a catalogue of all who are memorable in French
history. In the vast court-yard, at that corner, under a glorious
elm-tree, is a colossal statue of the _abbé_, standing with a youth to
whom he talks with his fingers. It is the work of a deaf-mute, Félix
Martin, well named, for he is most happy in this work.
Like the Abbé de l'Épée, and for as many years--almost thirty of his
half-voluntary, half-enforced exile--Voltaire had devoted himself in
his own way to the bettering of humanity, crippled mentally and
spiritually. He had given vision to the blind, hearing to the deaf,
voice to the speechless. He took in the outcast, and cherished the
orphan. With his inherent pity for the oppressed, and his deep-rooted
indignation with all cruelty, he had made himself the advocate of the
unjustly condemned; and none among his brilliant pages will live
longer than his impassioned pleadings for the rehabilitation of the
illegally executed Jean Calas. And now he comes back from Ferney,
through all the length of France, in a triumphal progress without
parallel, welcomed everywhere by exultant worshippers. At four in the
afternoon of February 10, 1778, his coach appears just where his
statue now stands at the end of Quai Malaquais, then Quai des
Théatins. He wears a large, loose cloak of crimson velvet, edged with
a small gold cord, and a cap of sable and velvet, and he is "smothered
in roses." His driver makes his way slowly along the quay, through the
acclaiming crowd, to the home of "_la Bonne et Belle_," the girl he
had rescued from a convent and adopted, now the happy wife of the
Marquis de Villette. Their eighteenth-century mansion stands on the
corner of Rue de Beaune and present Quai Voltaire, unaltered in its
simple stateliness. Here Voltaire is visited by all Paris that was
allowed to get to him. Mlle. Clairon is one of the first, on her knees
at the bedside of her old friend, exhausted by his triumph. She is no
longer young, and shows that she owns to fifty-five years, by her
retired life at the present numbers 34 and 36 Rue du Bac. There she
has her books and her sewing and her spendthrift Comte Valbelle
d'Oraison, who lives on her.
[Illustration: The Seventeenth-century Buildings on Quai Malaquais,
with the Institute and the Statue of Voltaire.]
D'Alembert and Benjamin Franklin are among his visitors, and the
dethroned Du Barry, and thirty _chefs_, each set on the appointment of
cook for the master. He goes to the Academy, then installed in the
Louvre, and to the Comédie Française, temporarily housed in the
Tuileries, the Odéon not being ready. There his "Irène," finished just
before leaving Switzerland, is produced, and at the performance on the
evening of March 30th he is crowned in his box, his bust is crowned on
the beflowered stage, and the palms and laurels and plaudits leave him
breath only to murmur: "My friends, do you really want to kill me with
joy?" That was the last seen of him by the public. He had come to
Paris, he said, "to drink Seine water"; and either that beverage
poisoned him, or the cup of flattery he emptied so often. One month
after that supreme night, on May 30, 1778, at a little after eleven at
night, he died in that corner apartment on the first floor. For thirty
years after it was unoccupied and its windows were kept closed.
Almost his last words, as he remembered what the Church had meant to
him, and what it might mean for him, were: "I don't want to be thrown
into the roadway like that poor Lecouvreur." That fate was spared his
wasted frame by the quickness of his nephew, the Abbé Mignot. Here, at
the entrance-gate in Rue de Beaune, this honest man placed his uncle's
body, hardly cold, in his travelling carriage, and with it drove
hastily, and with no needless stops, to Scellières in Champagne. There
he gave out the laudable lie of a death on the journey, and procured
immediate interment in the nave of his church, under all due rites.
The grave was hardly covered before orders from the Bishop of Troyes
arrived, forbidding the burial. The trick would have tickled the
adroit old man. His body was allowed to rest for thirteen years, and
then it was brought back in honor to Paris. A great concourse had
assembled, only two weeks earlier, at the place where the Bastille had
been, hoping to hoot at the royal family haled back from Varennes.
Now, on July 11, 1791, a greater concourse was stationed here, to look
with silent reverence on this _cortége_, headed by Beaumarchais, all
the famous men of France carrying the pall or joining in the
procession. They entered by the Vincennes road, passed along the
boulevards, crossed Pont Royal to stop before this mansion, and went
thence to the Panthéon. There his remains lay once more in peace,
until the Bourbons "de-Panthéonized" both Voltaire and Rousseau.