of the Seine from Passy, in which retired suburb he was then living.
The traces he has left in the capital are to be found in two
inscriptions and a tradition. We know that he had rooms, during a part
of the year 1776, in Rue de Penthièvre, and his name, carved in the
pediment of the stately façade of the house numbered 26 in that
street, is a record of his residence in it or on its site. There is
another claimant to his tenancy for a portion of this same year. The
American who happens to go to or through Passy, on a Fourth of July,
will have opportune greeting from the Stars and Stripes, draped over
the doorway of the old-fashioned building, more a cottage than a
mansion, now numbered 21 Rue Franklin. Its owners do this each year,
they tell you, in honor of the great American who occupied the cottage
in 1776. Their claim is the more credible, inasmuch as the street has
been given his name since his day there, when it was Rue Basse. In the
following year he went farther afield, and for nine years he remained
in a villa in the large garden, now covered by the ugly École des
Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne, at the corner of Rues Raynouard and
Singer. The Historical Society of Passy and Auteuil has placed a
tablet in this corner wall, recording Franklin's residence at this
spot from 1777 to 1785. His friend, M. Ray de Chaumont, occupied only
a portion of his Hôtel de Valentinois, and gave up the remaining
portion to Franklin for his residence and his office, eager to show
his sympathy for the colonies and his fondness for their envoy. Only
John Adams, when he came, was shocked in all his scrupulosity to find
an American agent living rent-free! In this garden he put up the
first lightning-conductor in France, and in this house he negotiated
the treaty that gave the crown's aid to the colonies and made possible
their independence. To this spot came the crowd to catch a glimpse of
the homely-clad figure, and men of science and letters to learn from
him, and ladies from the court to caress him. And it may have been
here that he made answer to the enamoured _marquise_, in words that
have never been topped for the ready wit of a gallant old gentleman.
The _cortége_ that accompanied Voltaire's remains to the Panthéon was
headed, it has been said, by Beaumarchais; fittingly so, for
Beaumarchais was then heir-presumptive to the dramatic crown, and his
"Figaro" had already begun to laugh the nobility from out of France.
Louis XVI. saw clearly, for once, when he said: "If I consent to the
production of the 'Marriage of Figaro,' the Bastille will go." He did
consent, and it was played to an immense house on April 27, 1784, in
the Comédie Française, now the Odéon. That night the old order had its
last laugh, and it rang strangely and sadly. Yet in this comedy, that
killed by ridicule--the most potent weapon in France--once played a
queen that was, and once a queen that was to be. On August 19, 1785,
on the stage of the Little Trianon at Versailles, the Comte
d'Artois--brother to Louis XIV., later to be Charles X.--appeared as
the Barber, to the Rosina of Marie Antoinette. And, in the summer of
1803, during the Consulate, when Malmaison was the scene of gayeties,
a theatre was constructed in the garden, and on its boards, Hortense
(soon after Queen of Holland) made a success as Rosina.
Playwriting was merely a digression in the diversified career of this
man of various aptitudes, whose ups and downs we have no excuse for
dwelling on, as we trace him through Paris streets. There is no tablet
to mark his birth, on January 24, 1732, in the house of his father,
Caron, the watchmaker of Rue Saint-Denis, opposite the old Cemetery of
the Innocents, nearly at Rue de la Ferronerie. Pierre-Augustin Caron
he was christened, and it was in his soaring years that he added "de
Beaumarchais." This quarter is notable in that it was the scene of the
birth and boyhood of four famous dramatists--of Molière, as we have
seen, and of Regnard, as we shall see; of Beaumarchais and of Eugène
Scribe. To record this latest birth, on December 24, 1791, a tablet is
set in the wall of No. 32 Rue Saint-Denis, at the corner of Rue de la
Reynie, only a few steps south of the Caron house. It is a plain,
old-style house of four stories and a garret, and has become a shop
for chocolates and sweets. It has on its sign, "_Au Chat Noir_"; black
cats are carved wherever they will cling on its front and side, and a
huge, wooden, black cat rides on the cart that carries the chocolate.
Beaumarchais had a residence at No. 6 Rue de Condé in 1773, and at the
Hôtel de Hollande, Rue Vielle-du-Temple 47, in 1776. We shall go there
later. On the wall of the house, No. 2 Boulevard Beaumarchais, a
tablet marks the site of his great mansion and its spacious gardens.
These covered the entire triangle enclosed by Rues Amelot, Daval, and
Roquette. He had found the money for this colossal outlay, not in his
plays, but in all sorts of mercantile transactions, some of them
seemingly shabby. It is claimed that he lost large sums in supplying,
as the unavowed agent of the crown, war equipment to the struggling
American colonies. His palace went up in sight of the Bastille, then
going down. The Parisians came in crowds to see his grounds, with
their grottoes, statues, and lake; and he entertained all the swelldom
of France. There, one day in 1792, the mob from the too-near Faubourg
Saint-Antoine came uninvited, and raided house and grounds for hidden
arms and ammunition, not to be found. The owner went to the Abbaye
prison and thence into exile and poverty. Returning in 1796, he spent
his last years in a hopeless attempt to gather up remnants of his
broken fortunes, a big remnant being the debt neglected and rejected
by the American Congress. The romance of this "Lost Million" cannot be
told here. Beaumarchais died in this house in 1799, and was buried in
the garden. When the ground was taken for the Saint-Martin Canal in
1818, his remains were removed to Père-Lachaise. The grave is as near
that of Scribe as were their birthplaces. His name was given to the
old Boulevard Saint-Antoine in 1831, and in 1897 his statue was placed
in that wide space in Rue Saint-Antoine that faces Rue des Tournelles.
The pedestal is good, and worthy of a more convincing statue of this
man of strong character and of contrasting qualities. And at the
Washington Head-quarters at Newburgh-on-Hudson, and at the various
collections of Revolutionary relics in the United States, you will
find cannon that came from French arsenals, and that, it was hinted,
left commissions in the hands of Caron de Beaumarchais.
THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION
[Illustration: Charlotte Corday.
(From the copy by Baudry of the only authentic portrait, painted in
her prison.)]
THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION
It is no part of the province of this book to reconstruct the Paris of
the Revolution, nor is there room for such reconstruction, now that M.
G. Lenôtre has given us his exhaustive and admirable "Paris
Révolutionnaire." Despite the destruction of so much that was worth
saving of that period, there yet remain many spots for our seeing. The
cyclone of those years had two centres, and one of them is fairly well
preserved. It is the Cour du Commerce, to which we have already come
in search of the tower and wall of Philippe-Auguste. Outside that
wall, close to the Porte de Buci, there had been a tennis-court, which
was extended, in 1776, into a narrow passage, with small dwellings on
each side. The old entrance of the tennis-court was kept for the
northern entrance of the new passage, and it still remains under the
large house, No. 61 Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. The southern entrance of
the passage was in the western end of Rue des Cordeliers, now Rue de
l'École-de-Médecine. In 1876, exactly one hundred years after the
construction of this Cour du Commerce, its southern half and its
southern entrance were cut away by modern Boulevard Saint-Germain, on
the northern side of which a new entrance to the court was made. At
the same time the houses on the northern side of Rue de
l'École-de-Médecine were demolished, and replaced by the triangular
space that holds the statues of Danton and Paul Broca among its trees.
Those houses faced, across the street, whose narrowness is marked by
the two curbstones, the houses, of the same age and the same style,
that are left on the southern side of this section of the modern
boulevard. One of the houses then destroyed had been inhabited by
Georges-Jacques Danton. It stood over the entrance of the court, and
his statue--a bronze of his own vigor and audacity--has been placed
exactly on the spot of that entrance, exactly under his
dwelling-place. The pediment of this entrance-door is now in the
grounds of M. Victorien Sardou, at Marly-le-Roi. Danton's apartment,
on the first floor above the _entresol_, had two _salons_ and a
bedroom looking out on Rue des Cordeliers, while the dining-room and
working-room had windows on the Cour du Commerce. Here in 1792 he had
his wholesome, peaceful home, with his wife and their son; and to them
there sometimes came his mother, or one of his sisters, for a visit.
In the _entresol_ below lived Camille Desmoulins and his wife in 1792.
The two young women were close friends, and M. Jules Claretie has
given us a pretty picture of them together, in terrified suspense on
that raging August 10th. Lucile Desmoulins knew, on the next day, that
the mob had at least broken the windows of the Tuileries, for someone
had brought her the sponges and brushes of the Queen! And on the
12th, Danton carried his wife from here to the grand _hôtel_ in Place
Vendôme, the official residence of the new Minister of Justice. His
short life in office being ended by his election to the Convention in
the autumn of that year, he returned to this apartment; to which,
three months after the death of his first wife in that same year, he
brought a youthful bride. And here, on March 30, 1794, he was
arrested. Before his own terrible tribunal his reply, to the customary
formal questions as to his abode, was: "My dwelling-place will soon be
in annihilation, and my name will live in the Panthéon of history." He
spoke prophetically. The clouds of a century of calumny have only
lately been blown away, and we can, at last, see clearly the heroic
figure of this truest son of France; a "Mirabeau of the
_sans-culottes_," a primitive man, unspoiled and strong, joyous in his
strength, ardent yet steadfast, keen-eyed for shams, doing when others
were talking, scornful of phrasemongers, and so genuine beside the
petty schemers about him that they could not afford to let him live.
Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist Desmoulins had, in his queer and not
unlovable composition, a craving for a hero and a clinging to a strong
nature. His first idol was Mirabeau. That colossus had died on April
2, 1791, and Desmoulins had been one of the leaders in the historic
funeral procession that filled the street and filed out from it four
miles in length. Mont-Blanc was then the street's name, and for a few
days it was called Rue Mirabeau, but soon took its present name,
Chaussée-d'Antin, from the gardens of the Hôtel d'Antin, through which
it was cut. The present No. 42, with a new front, but otherwise
unchanged, is the house of Mirabeau's death, in the front room of its
second floor. Mirabeau's worthy successor in Camille's worship was
Danton, near whom he lived, as we have seen, and with whom he went as
secretary to the Ministry of Justice. After leaving office, Camille
and his wife are found in his former bachelor home in Place du
Théâtre-Français, now Place de l'Odéon. The corner house there, that
proclaims itself by a tablet to have been his residence, is in the
wrong; and that tablet belongs by right to the house on the opposite
corner, No. 2 Place de l'Odéon and No. 7 Rue Crébillon. From his end
windows in this latter street, when he had lived there as a bachelor,
Camille could look slantwise to the windows of an apartment at No. 22
Rue de Condé, and he looked often, attracted by a young girl at home
there with her parents. There is still the balcony on the front, on
which Lucile Duplessis ventured forth, a little later, to blow kisses
across the street. At the religious portion of their marriage, in
Saint-Sulpice on December 29, 1790, the _témoins_ of the groom were
Brisson, Pétion, Robespierre. The last-named had been Camille's
schoolfellow and crony at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and remained his
friend as long as it seemed worth while. The wedding party went back
to this apartment--on the second floor above the _entresol_--for the
_dîner de noces_. Everything on and about the table--it is still
shown at Vervins, a village just beyond Laon--was in good taste, we
may be sure, for Desmoulins was a dainty person, for all his tears
over Marat; his desk, at which he wrote the fiery denunciations of "Le
Vieux Cordelier," had room always for flowers. It was here that he was
arrested, to go--not so bravely as he might--to prison, and then to
execution with Danton, on April 5, 1794. His Lucile went to the
scaffold on the 12th of the same month, convicted of having conspired
against the Republic by wandering about the gardens of the Luxembourg,
trying to get a glimpse of her husband's face behind his prison
window. To us he is not more visible in this garden than he was to
her, but in the garden of the Palais-Royal he leaps up, "a flame of
fire," on July 12, 1789, showing the Parisians the way they went to
the Bastille on the 14th.
In the same section with Danton and Desmoulins, and equally vivid with
them in his individuality, we find Jean-Paul Marat. His apartment,
where lived with him and his mistress, Simonne Evrard, his two
sisters, Albertine and Catherine--all three at one in their devotion
to his loathsome body--was in a house a little easterly from Danton's,
on the same northern side of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine. It was at
this house that Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday d'Armans, on July 13,
1793, presented herself as "_l'ange de l'assassination_," in
Lamartine's swelling phrase. She had driven across the river, from the
Hôtel de la Providence. In our Dumas chapter we shall try to find her
unpretending inn, and shall find only its site. In the Musée Grévin,
in Paris, you may see the _baignoire_ in which Marat sat when he
received Charlotte Corday and her knife--a common kitchen-knife,
bought by her on the day before at a shop in the Palais-Royal. The
bath is shaped like a great copper shoe, and on its narrow top,
through which his head came, was a shelf for his papers.
The printing-office of Marat's "L'Ami du Peuple," succeeded in 1792 by
his "Journal de la République Française," was in that noisiest corner
of Paris, the Cour du Commerce. It was in that end of the long
building of two low stories and attic, numbered 6 and 8, now occupied
by a lithographer. After Marat's death, and that of his journal, the
widow Brissot opened a modest stationer's shop and reading-room in the
former printing-office, we are told by M. Sardou. It is an error that
places the printing-office at the present No. 1 of the court, in the
building which extended then through to No. 7 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie.
These two lots do, indeed, join in their rear, but Marat has no
association with either. In Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, certainly, the
"Friend of the People" had storage room in the cellar and an office on
an upper floor, but it was in one of the tall houses on the western
side of the street, just north of the old theatre.
The only claim to our attention of No. 1 Cour du Commerce--a squalid
tavern which aspires to the title of "_La Maison Boileau_"--comes from
the presence of Sainte-Beuve. The great critic is said to have rented
a room, under his pen-name of "Joseph Delorme," for a long time in
this then cleanly _hôtel-garni_, for the ostensible purpose of working
in quiet, free from the importunate solicitors of all sorts who
intruded on his home in Rue du Mont-Parnasse, No. 11.
Marat's death was frantically lamented by the rabble, that was quite
unable to recognize the man's undeniable abilities and attainments,
and that had made him its idolized leader because of his atrocious
taste in saying in print exactly what he meant. They carried his body
to the nave of the church, and later to its temporary tomb in the
garden, of the Cordeliers, a step from his house. In the intervals of
smiling hours spent in watching heads fall into the basket, in new
Place de la Révolution, they crowded here to weep about his bedraped
and beflowered bier. The remains were then placed, with due honors, in
the Panthéon. Then, within two years, the same voices that had
glorified him shrieked that his body and his memory should be swept
into the sewer. It was the voice of the people--the voice of Deity, in
all ages and in all lands, it is noisily asserted.
When the Franciscan monks, who were called Cordeliers because of their
knotted cord about the waist, came to Paris early in the thirteenth
century, they were given a goodly tract of ground just within the
Saint-Germain gate, stretching, in rough outlines, from Rues
Antoine-Dubois and Monsieur-le-Prince nearly to Boulevards
Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel. The church they built there was
consecrated by the sainted Louis IX. in 1262, and when burned, in
1580, was rebuilt mainly by the accursed Henri III. New chapels and
cloisters were added in 1672, and there were many other structures
pertaining to the order within these boundaries. Of all these, only
the Refectory remains to our day. The site of the church, once the
largest in Paris, is covered by Place de l'École-de-Médecine and by a
portion of the school; something of the shape and some of the stones
of the old cloisters are preserved in the arched court of the
Clinique; bits of the old walls separate the new laboratories, and
another bit, with its strong, bull-nosed moulding, may be seen in the
grounds of the water-works behind No. 11 Rue Racine, this street
having been cut through the monks' precincts, so separating the
Infirmary, to which this wall belonged, and that stretched nearly to
the rear walls of Lycée Saint-Louis, from the greater portion of "_Le
Grand Couvent de l'Observance de Saint François_."
Turn in at the gateway in the corner of Place de l'École-de-Médecine,
and the Refectory stands before you, a venerable fabric of Anne of
Brittany's building, with sixteenth and seventeenth century
adornments, all in admirable preservation. The great hall, filled with
the valuable collection of the Musée Dupuytren, attracts us as a relic
of ancient architecture, and as the last existing witness of the
Revolutionary nights of the Cordeliers Club. That club had its hall
just across the garden alongside the Refectory, in one of the
buildings of the cloisters, which, with the church, had been given
over to various uses and industries. Hence the name of the club,
enrolled under the leadership of Danton, on whom the men of his
section looked as the incarnation of the Revolution. To him
Robespierre and his republic were shams, and to his club the club of
the Jacobins was at first distinctly reactionary. It took but little
time, in those fast-moving days, for the Cordeliers, in their turn, to
be suspected for their unpatriotic moderation!
[Illustration: The Refectory of the Cordeliers.]
We must not leave our Cour du Commerce, without a glance at the small
building on the northern corner of its entrance from Rue de
l'Ancienne-Comédie. It was here that the first guillotine was set up
for experiments on sheep, by Dr. Antoine Louis, Secretary of the
Academy of Surgeons, and the head of a committee appointed by the
National Assembly on October 6, 1791. On that day a clause in the new
penal code made death by decapitation the only method of execution,
and the committee had powers to construct the apparatus, which was to
supersede Sanson's sword. It was not a new invention, for the mediæval
executioners of Germany and Scotland had toyed with "the Maiden," but
for centuries she had lost her vogue. On December 1, 1789, Dr.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had tried to impress on the Assembly the need
of humane modes of execution, and had dwelt on the comfort of
decapitation by his apparatus until he was laughed down. That grim
body could find mirth only in a really funny subject like the cutting
off of heads! After two years and more, the machine, perfected by Dr.
Louis, and popularly known as "_La Louisette_," was tried on a
malefactor in the Place de Grève on April 25, 1792. Three days later
the little lady received her official title, "_La Guillotine_."
Dr. Guillotin had made his model and his experiments at his residence,
still standing, with no external changes, at No. 21 Rue
Croix-des-Petits-Champs. It was already a most ancient mansion when he
came here to live, and perhaps to remain until his death--in bed--in
1814. It had been known as the Hôtel de Bretagne, and it is rich in
personal history. To its shelter came Catherine de Lorraine, the young
widow of the Duc de Montpensier, the "lame little devil" whom Henri
III. longed to burn alive, for her abuse of him after the murder of
her brother Guise. Within its walls, Anne of Austria's treasurer, the
rich and vulgar Bertrand de la Bazinière--whom we have met on Quai
Malaquais--hoarded the plunder which he would not, or dared not,
spend. Louis XIV. gave him, later, lodgings in the Bastille, in that
tower named Bazinière always after. In this same Hôtel de Bretagne,
Henrietta of France, widowed queen of England, made her temporary home
in the winter of 1661, near her daughter, lately installed as
"Madame," wife of the King's brother, in the Palais-Royal. Returning
from England in 1665, this unhappy queen went to the last refuge of
her troubled life in the convent she had founded on the heights of
Chaillot. From that farther window of the first story on the right of
the court, the Comte de Maulevrier, Colbert's nephew, threw himself
down to his death on the pavement on Good Friday, 1706. In time the
stately mansion became a _hôtel-garni_, was appropriated as National
Domain in the Revolution, and sold in a lottery.
"_La Guillotine_," having proved the sharpness of her tooth, was
speedily promoted from Place de Grève to a larger stage in Place de la
Réunion, now Place du Carrousel, and thence in May, 1793--that she
might not be under the windows of the Convention--to Place de la
Révolution, formerly Place de Louis XV., at present Place de la
Concorde. This wide space, just beyond the moat of the Tuileries
gardens, had in its centre, where now is the obelisk of Luxor, a
statue of the late "well-beloved," then altogether-detested, King for
whom the place had been named; and a little to the east of that point
the scaffold was set up. Lamartine puts it on the site of the southern
fountain, for the effect he gets of the flowing of water and of blood;
this is one of his magniloquent phrases, which scorn exactness. On
January 21, 1793, for the execution of Louis XVI., the guillotine was
removed to a spot just westward of the centre, that it might be well
protected by the troops deploying about the western side of the
_place_, and into the Champs Élysées and Cours la Reine. For a while
in 1794, the guillotine was transferred to the present Place de la
Nation--where we shall find it in a later chapter--to come back to
Place de la Révolution in time to greet Robespierre and his friends.
Standing here, we are near the other centre of Revolutionary Paris,
made so by the Club of the Jacobins, that met first in the refectory,
later in the church of the monastery from which it took its name. The
site of these buildings is covered by the little Marché Saint-Honoré
and by the space about. The club of the more moderate men, headed by
Bailly and Lafayette, had its quarters in the monastery of the
Feuillants, which gave its name to the club, and which extended along
the south side of Rue Saint-Honoré, eastwardly from Rue de
Castiglione; this street being then the narrow Passage des Feuillants,
leading from Rue Saint-Honoré to the royal gardens, and to the
much-trodden Terrasse on the northern side of those gardens facing the
Manège. This building had been erected for the equestrian education of
the youth who afterward became Louis XV., and was converted into a
hall for the sitting of the Assembly, after that body had been crowded
for about three weeks, on coming to Paris from Versailles, into the
inadequate hall of the Archbishop's palace, on the southern shore of
the City Island, alongside Notre-Dame. The Convention took over the
Manège from the Assembly, and there remained until May, 1793, when it
removed to the more commodious quarters, and more befitting
surroundings, of the Tuileries. The old riding-school, whose site is
marked by a tablet on the railing of the garden opposite No. 230 Rue
de Rivoli, was swept away by the cutting of the western end of that
street, under the Consulate in 1802.