his functions in the Criminal Court, because of his conscientious
objections to capital punishment--he found squalid quarters, suiting
his purse--which remained empty all through life--in Rue Saintonge.
That street, named for a province of old France, remains almost as he
saw it, one of the few Paris streets that retain their original
buildings and ancient atmosphere. The high and sombre house, wherein
he lodged from October, 1789, to July, 1791, is quite unaltered, save
for its number, which was then 8 and is now 64. From here, Robespierre
was snatched away, suddenly and without premeditation on his part, and
planted in the bosom of the Duplay family. They had worshipped him
from afar, and when, from their windows, they saw him surrounded by
the acclaiming crowd, on the day after the so-called massacres of the
Champ-de-Mars of July 17, 1791, the peaceful carpenter ran out and
dragged the shrinking great man into his court-yard for temporary
shelter. The house was then No. 366 Rue Saint-Honoré. If any reader
wishes to decide for himself whether the modern No. 398 is built on
the site of the Duplay house, of which no stone is left, as M. Ernest
Hamel asserts; or whether the present tall structure there is an
elevation on the walls of the old house, every stone of which is left,
as M. Sardou insists; he must study the pamphlets issued by these
earnest and erudite controversialists. There is nothing more
delightful in topographical sparring. The authors of this book can
give no aid to the solicitous student; for they have read all that has
been written concerning the subject, they have explored the house,
and they have settled in silence in the opposing camps!
In the Duplay household, to which he brought misery then and
afterward, Robespierre was worshipped during life and deified after
death. To that misguided family, "this cat's head, with the prominent
cheekbones, seamed by small-pox; his bilious complexion; his green
eyes rimmed with red, behind blue spectacles; his harsh voice; his
dry, pedantic, snappish, imperious language; his disdainful carriage;
his convulsive gestures--all this was effaced, recast, and transformed
into the gentle figure of an apostle and a martyr to his faith for the
salvation of men." From their house, it was but a step to the sittings
of the Assembly. It was but a few steps farther to the garden of the
Tuileries and to the "_fête de l'Être Suprême_," planned by him, when
he had induced the Convention to decree the existence of God and of an
immortal soul in man. He cast himself for the rôle of High Priest of
Heaven, and headed the procession on June 8, 1794, clad in a blue
velvet coat, a white waistcoat, yellow breeches and top-boots;
carrying in his hand flowers and wheat-ears. He addressed the crowd,
in "the scraggiest prophetic discourse ever uttered by man," and they
had games, and burned in effigy Atheism and Selfishness and Vice! Such
of the stage-setting of this farce as was constructed in stone remains
intact to-day, for our wonder at such childishness, and our admiration
of the architectural perfection of the out-of-door arena.
From this Duplay house, Robespierre used to go on his solitary
strolls, accompanied only by his dogs, in the woods of Monceaux and
Montmorenci, where he picked wild-flowers. From this house he went to
his last appearance in the Convention on the _9 Thermidor_, and past
it he was carted to the scaffold, on the following day, July 28, 1794.
He had followed Danton within a few months, as Danton had predicted.
They were of the same age at the time of their death, each having
thirty-five years; the younger Robespierre was thirty-two, Saint-Just
was twenty-six, Desmoulins thirty-four, when their heads fell.
Mirabeau died at the age of forty-two, Marat was forty-nine when
stabbed. Not one of the conspicuous leaders of the Revolution and of
the Terror had come to fifty years!
[Illustration: The Carré d'Atalante in the Tuileries Gardens.]
When the tumbrils and their burdens did not go along the quays to
Place de la Révolution, they went through Rue Saint-Honoré, that being
the only thoroughfare on that side of the river. From the
Conciergerie they crossed Pont au Change, and made their way by narrow
and devious turnings to the eastern end of Rue Saint-Honoré, and
through its length to Rue du Chemin-du-Rempart--now Rue Royale--and so
to the scaffold. Short Rue Saint-Florentin was then Rue de
l'Orangerie, and was crowded by sightseers hurrying to the _place_.
Those of the victims not already confined in the Conciergerie were
sent to the condemned cells there, for the night between sentence and
execution. The trustworthy history of the prisons of Paris during the
Revolution remains to be written, and there is wealth of material for
it. There were many smaller prisons not commonly known, and of the
larger ones that we do know, there are several, quite unchanged
to-day, well worth unofficial inspection. The Salpêtrière, filling a
vast space south of the Jardin des Plantes, was built for the
manufacture of saltpetre, by Louis XIII.; and, by his son, was
converted into a branch, for women, of the General Hospital. A portion
of its buildings was set apart for young women of bad character, and
here Manon Lescaut was imprisoned. The great establishment is now
known as the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, and is famous for its
treatment of women afflicted with nervous maladies, and with insanity.
The present Hospice de la Maternité was also perverted to prison
usages during the Revolution. Its formal cloisters and steep tiled
roofs cluster about its old-time square, but its ancient gardens, and
their great trees, are almost all buried beneath new masonry. The
façade of the chapel, the work of Lepautre, is no longer used as the
entrance, and may be seen over the wall on Boulevard de Port-Royal.
Another prison was that of Saint-Lazare, first a lazar-house and then
a convent, whose weather-worn roofs and dormers show above the wall on
Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. On the dingy yellow plaster of the arched
entrance-gate one may read, in thick black letters: "_Maison d'Arrêt
et de Correction._" Unaltered, too, is the prison in the grounds of
the Carmelites, to be visited later in company with Dumas; and the
Luxembourg, that was reserved for choice captives. The prison of the
Abbey of Saint-Germain was swept away by the boulevard of that name.
Its main entrance for wheeled vehicles was through Rue Sainte-Marguerite,
the short section left of that street being now named Gozlin. Of the
other buildings of the abbey, there remain only the church itself, the
bishop's palace behind in Rue de l'Abbaye, and the presbytery glued to
the southern side of the church-porch. Its windows saw the massacres
of the priests and the prisoners, which took place on the steps of the
church and in its front court. When you walk from those steps across
the open _place_, to take the tram for Fontenay-aux-Roses, you step
above soil that was soaked with blood in the early days of September,
1792. Some few of the abbey prisoners were slaughtered in the garden,
of which a portion remains on the south side of the church, where the
statue of Bernard Palissy, by Barrias, stands now. In other chapters,
the destruction of the Grand-and the Petit-Châtelet has been noted.
La Force has gone, and Sainte-Pélagie is soon to go. And the
Conciergerie has been altered, almost beyond recognition, as to its
entrances and its courts and its cells. Only the Cour des Femmes
remains at all as it was in those days.
There are three victims of the Terror who have had the unstinted pity
of later generations, and who have happily left traces of their
presence on Paris brick and mortar. The last of these three to die was
André-Marie de Chénier, and we will go first to his dwelling. It is an
oddly shaped house, No. 97 Rue de Cléry--Corneille's street for many
years--at its junction with Rue Beauregard; and a tablet in its wall
tells of de Chénier's residence there. Born in Constantinople in 1762,
of a French father--a man of genius in mercantile affairs--and a Greek
mother, the boy was brought to Paris with his younger brother,
Joseph-Marie, in 1767. They lived with their mother in various streets
in the Marais, before settling in this final home. Here Madame de
Chénier, a poet and artist in spirit, filled the rooms with the poets
and artists and _savants_ of the time, the friends of her gifted sons.
Hither came David, gross of body, his active mind busied with schemes
for his annual exhibitions of paintings, the continuation of those
begun by Colbert, and the progenitor of the present _Salons_; Alfieri,
the poet and splendid adventurer; Lavoisier, absorbed in chemical
discovery. Here in his earlier years, and later, when he hurried home
from the French Embassy in London on the outbreak of the Revolution,
André de Chénier produced the verse that revived the love of nature,
dead in France since Ronsard, and brought a lyric freshness to poetry
that shamed the dry artificialities so long in vogue. That poetry was
the forerunner of the Romantic movement. In his tranquil soul, he
hoped for the pacific triumph of liberty and equality, and his
delicate spirit abhorred the excesses of the party with whose
principles he sympathized. He was taken into custody at Passy, early
in 1794, while visiting a lady, against whose arrest he had struggled,
locked up in Saint-Lazare for months, convicted, and sent to the
Conciergerie. He was guillotined in Place de la Nation on July 26,
1794, only the day before Robespierre's fall, and was one of the last
and noblest sacrifices to the Terror. We shall look on his
burial-place in our later rambles. Müller has made André de Chénier
the central figure of his "Roll-Call," now in the Louvre. He sits
looking toward us with eyes that see visions, and his expression seems
full of the thought to which he gave utterance when led out to
execution: "I have done nothing for posterity, and yet," tapping his
forehead, "I had something here!"
In 1795 this little house was surrounded by a great crowd of citizens
come to bury Louis de Chénier, the father. The Section of Brutus
guarded the bier, draped with blue set with silver stars, to suggest
the immortality of the soul! And they gave every honor they could
invent to the "_Pompe funèbre d'un Citoyen Vertueux_," whose worthy
son they had beheaded.
Joseph-Marie de Chénier lived for many years under suspicion of having
given his assent if not his aid to his brother's death, albeit the
mother always asserted that he had tried to save André. Joseph was a
fiery patriot, and a man of genius withal. He wrote the words of the
"Chant du Départ" which, set to music by Méhul, proved almost as
stirring as the "Marseillaise" to the pulses of the Patriots. Music
was one of the potent intoxicants of the time, and the Revolution was
played and sung along to the strains of these two airs, and of "Ça
ira" and the "Carmagnole." The classic style, which had hitherto
prevailed, gave way before the paltry sentimentality and the tinkling
bombast of the music adored by the mob. David planned processions
marching to patriotic airs, and shallow operas were performed in the
streets. Yet Rouget-de-l'Isle, the captain of engineers who had given
them the "Marseillaise," was cashiered and put into a cell; being
freed, he was left to starve, and no aid came to him from the Empire
or the Bourbons, naturally enough. Louis-Philippe's government found
him in sad straits, in that poor house No. 21 of the poor Passage
Saulnier, and ordered a small pension to be paid to him during his
life. His death came in 1836.
Joseph-Marie de Chénier was a playwright, also, and in 1798 he had
created a sensation by his "Charles IX.," produced at the Comédie
Française, now the Odéon. In the part of the King, wonderfully made up
and costumed, Talma won his first notable triumph. "This play," cried
Danton from the pit, "will kill royalty as 'Figaro' killed the
nobility." Joseph-Marie lived, not too reputably, but very busily,
until January 10, 1811; a fussy politician, a member of the
Convention, of the Council of Five Hundred, and of the Institute,
Section of the French Tongue and Literature, always detested by his
associates, by the Emperor, and by the common people.
When the Place Dauphine of Henri IV. was finished, the new industry of
the spectacle-makers established itself in the same buildings we see
to-day, and gave to the place the name of Quai des Lunettes. Later
came the engravers, who found all the light they needed in these
rooms, open on three sides. Among them was a master-engraver, one
Phlipon, bringing his daughter, Marie-Jeanne--her pet name being
Manon--from the house of her birth, in 1754, in Rue de la Lanterne,
now widened into Rue de la Cité. It is not known whether the site of
that house is under the Hôtel-Dieu or the Marché-aux-Fleurs. Their new
home stood, and still stands, on the corner of the northern quay, and
is now numbered 28 Place Dauphine and 41 Quai de l'Horloge. The small
window of the second floor lights the child's alcove bedroom, where
this "daughter of the Seine"--so Madame Roland dubs herself in her
"Memoirs"--looked out on the river, and up at the sky, from over Pont
au Change to beyond the heights of Chaillot, when she could lift her
eyes from her Plutarch, and her thoughts from the altar she was
planning to raise to Rousseau. It must be owned that this all
too-serious girl was a prig; a creature over-fed for its size, the
word has been happily defined. At the age of eleven, she was sent to
the school of the "_Dames de la Congrégation_," in the Augustinian
convent in Rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne. It has been told how that ancient
street was cut in half by Rue Monge. In its eastern section, now named
Rue de Navarre, was Manon's school, directly above the Roman
amphitheatre, discovered only of late years in the course of
excavations in this quarter. The portion that is left of this
impressive relic is in good preservation and in good keeping. Her
school-days done, the girl spent several years in this house before
us, until her mother's death, and her father's tipsiness, sent her
back to her convent for a few months. Then, having refused the many
suitors who had thronged about her in her own home, she found the
philosopher she wanted for a husband in Jean-Marie Roland de la
Platrière, a man much older than she; lank, angular, yellow, bald,
"rather respectable than seductive," in the words of the girl-friend
who had introduced him. But Manon Phlipon doubtless idealized this
wooden formalist who adored her, as she idealized herself and all her
surroundings, including The People, who turned and rent her at the
last. She gave to her husband duty and loyalty, and it was not until
she counted herself dead to earth and its temptations, in her cell at
Sainte-Pélagie, that she addressed her last farewell to him, whom "I
dare not name, one whom the most terrible of passions has not kept
from respecting the barriers of virtue." This farewell was meant for
François-Léonard-Nicolas Buzot, Girondist member of the Assembly
and later of the Convention. He remained unnamed and unknown, until
his name and their secret were told by a bundle of old letters, found
on a book-stall on Quai Voltaire in 1864. She had met him first when
her husband came from Lyons, with petitions to the Assembly, in
February, 1791, and took rooms at the Hôtel Britannique, in Rue
Guénégaud. Her _salon_ soon became the gathering-place of the
Girondists, where those austere men, who considered themselves the
sole salvation of France, were austerely regaled with a bowl of sugar
and a _carafe_ of water. Their hostess could not bother with
frivolities, she, who in her deadly earnestness, renounced the theatre
and pictures, and all the foolish graces of life! The Hôtel
Britannique was the house now numbered 12 Rue Guénégaud, a
wide-fronted, many-windowed mansion of the eighteenth century. Its
stone steps within are well worn, its iron rail is good, its second
floor--the Roland apartment--still shows traces of the ancient
decorations.
[Illustration: The Girlhood Home of Madame Roland.]
Buzot lived at No. 3 Quai Malaquais, an ancient mansion now replaced
by the modern structure between the seventeenth-century houses
numbered 1 and 5. For when the Convention outlawed the Girondists, and
Buzot fled, it was decreed that his dwelling should be levelled to the
ground, and on its site should be placed a notice: "_Là fut la maison
du roi Buzot._" So that it would seem that his colleagues of the
Convention had found him an insufferably Superior Person.
Leaving this apartment on his appointment to office in 1792, Roland
took his wife to the gorgeous _salons_ of the Ministry of the
Interior, in the _hôtel_ built by Leveau for the Comte de Lionne, and
beautified later by Calonne. It occupied the site of the present annex
of the Bank of France just off Rue des Petits-Champs, between Rues
Marsollier and Dalayrac. Here, during his two terms of office in 1792
and 1793, Roland had the aid of his wife's pen, as well as the
allurements of her personal influence, in the cause to which she had
devoted herself. The masculine strength of her pen was weakened, it is
true, by too sharp a feminine point, and she embittered the Court, the
Cordeliers, the Jacobins, all equally against her and her party. For
"this woman who was a great man," in Louis Blanc's true words, was as
essentially womanly as was Marie Antoinette; and these two most
gracious and pathetic figures of their time were yet unconscious
workers for evil to France. The Queen made impassable the breach
between the throne and the people; Madame Roland hastened on the
Terror. And each of them was doing exactly what she thought it right
to do!
On January 23, 1793, two days after the King's death, Roland left
office forever and removed to a house in Rue de la Harpe, opposite the
Church of Saint-Cosme. That church stood on the triangle made by the
meeting of Rues de l'École-de-Médecine and Racine with Boulevard
Saint-Germain. On the eastern side of that boulevard, once the eastern
side of Rue de la Harpe, where it meets modern Rue des Écoles, stood
the Roland house. The students and studentesses, who sip their coffee
and beer on the pavement of Vachette's, are on the scene of Madame
Roland's arrest, on the night between May 31st and June 1st. On the
former day, seeing the end so near, Roland had fled. His wife was
taken to the prison of the Abbaye, and given the cell which was to be
tenanted, six weeks later, by Charlotte Corday. Released on June 22d
and returned to her home in Rue de la Harpe, she was re-arrested on
the 24th and locked up in Sainte-Pélagie. It was an old prison, long
kept for the detention of "_femmes et filles, dont la conduite est
onéreuse_," and its character had not been bettered by the character
of the female prisoners sent there by the Terror. This high-minded
woman, subjected to infamous sights and sounds, preserved her serenity
and fortitude in a way to extort the "stupefied admiration" of her
fellow-prisoners, as one of these has testified. It was only in her
cell that the great heart gave way. There she found solace, during her
four months' confinement, with Thomson's "Seasons," "done into choice
French," with Shaftesbury and an English dictionary, with Tacitus, and
her girlhood companion, Plutarch. And here she busied herself with her
"Memoirs," "writing under the axe," in her own phrase. In the solitude
of her cell, indeed, she was sometimes disturbed by the unseemly
laughter of the ladies of the Comédie Française, at supper with the
prison-governor in an adjacent cell. We shall see, later, how these
ladies came to be here. More acceptable sounds might have come almost
to her ears; that of the hymn-singing or of the maiden laughter of
the girls in her old convent, only a few steps away. The
prison-register contains her description, probably as accurate as
matter-of-fact: "Height, five feet; hair and eyebrows, dark chestnut;
brown eyes; medium nose; ordinary mouth; oval face, round chin, high
forehead." From Sainte-Pélagie she went to the Conciergerie on
November 1st, the day after the guillotining of the Girondists, and
thence in eight days to her own death. It has been told, by every
writer, that she could look over at her girlhood home, as her tumbril
crossed Pont au Change. It has not been told, so plainly as it
deserves, that her famous utterance on the platform was made fine for
historic purposes, as was done with Cambronne's magnificent
monosyllable at Waterloo. She really said: "_O Liberté, comme on t'a
jouée!_" With these words, natural and spontaneous and without pose,
she is, indeed, "beautiful, amazonian, graceful to the eye, more so to
the mind."
Within a few days of her death died her husband and her lover. Roland,
on hearing of her execution, in his hiding-place near Rouen, thrust
his cane-sword into his breast; Buzot, wandering and starving in the
fields, was found half-eaten by wolves. She had confided her daughter
Eudora and her "Memoirs" to the loyal friend Bosc, who hid the
manuscript in the forest of Montmorenci, and in 1795 published it for
the daughter's benefit. The original is said to be in existence, on
coarse gray paper, stained with her tears. Sainte-Beuve speaks of them
as "delicious and indispensable memories," deserving a place "beside
the most sublime and eloquent effusions of a brave yet tender
philosophy." When he praises that style, clearer and more concise than
that of Madame de Staël, "that other daughter of Rousseau," he does
not say all; he might have added that, like Rousseau, she occasionally
speaks of matters not quite convenient to hear.