temperate and modest, when one dwells on the character and qualities,
the blameless life and the ignominious death, of Marie-Jean-Antoine-
Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. We may look up at his
thoughtful face in bronze on Quai Conti, alongside the Mint, where he
lived in the _entresol_ of the just completed building, when appointed
Director of the Hôtel de la Monnaie by his old friend Turgot, in 1774.
We may look upon the house in Rue Servandoni where he hid, and from
which he escaped to his death. His other Paris homes have no existence
now. His college of Navarre--oldest of all those in the
University--has been made over into the École Polytechnique; and the
house he built for himself in Rue Chantereine, which was afterward
owned by Josephine Beauharnais, has long since disappeared. When only
twenty-two years of age he wrote his famous essay on the Integral
Calculus, when twenty-six he was elected to the Academy of Sciences.
Made Perpetual Secretary of that body in 1777, it came in the course
of his duties to deliver eulogies on Pascal, d'Alembert, Buffon, and
Franklin, and others of the great guild of science. These are more
than perfunctory official utterances, they are of an eloquence that
shows his lovable character as well as his scientific authority. He
contributed largely to Diderot's Encyclopædia, and put forth many
astronomical, mathematical, and theological treatises during his busy
life. He wrote earnestly in favor of the independence of the American
colonies, and was one of the earliest advocates of the people's cause
in France. But he was much more than a man of science and of letters;
he was a man with a great soul, "the Seneca of the modern school,"
says Lamartine; the most kindly and tolerant friend of humanity, and
protector of its rights, since Socrates. He believed in the indefinite
perfectibility of the human race, and he wrote his last essay, proving
its progress upward, while hiding in a garret from those not yet quite
perfect fellow-beings, who were howling for his head! He was beloved
by Benjamin Franklin and by Thomas Paine. Members of the Convention
together, he and Paine prepared the new Constitution of 1793, in which
political document they found no place for theological dogma.
Robespierre prevented the adoption of this Constitution, having taken
God under his own protection. Condorcet made uncompromising criticism,
and was put on the list of those to be suspected and got rid of. Too
broad to ally himself with the Girondists, he was yet proscribed with
them, on June 2, 1793. His friends had forced him to go into hiding,
until he might escape. They had asked Madame Vernet--widow of the
painter Claude-Joseph, mother of Carle, grandmother of Horace--to give
shelter to one of the proscribed, and she had asked only if he were
an honest man. This loyal woman concealed him in her garret for nearly
one year, and would have kept him longer, but that he feared for her
safety, and for that of his wife and daughter, who might be tracked in
their visits to him by night. He had finished his "Esquisse d'un
Tableau historique des Progrès de l'Esprit humain," full of hope for
humanity, with no word of reproach or repining, and then he wrote his
last words: "Advice of one proscribed, to his Daughter." This is to be
read to-day for its lofty spirit. He gives her the names of certain
good men who will befriend her, and among them is Benjamin Franklin
Bache, the son of our Franklin's daughter Sally, who had been in Paris
with his grandfather.
Then, this letter finished, early on the morning of April 5, 1794, he
left it on his table and slipped out, unseen by the good widow Vernet,
from the three-storied plaster-fronted house now No. 15 of Rue
Servandoni, and still unaltered, as is almost the entire street.
Through it he hurried to Rue de Vaugirard, where he stood undecided
for a moment, the prison of the Luxembourg on his left, and the prison
of the Carmelites on his right, both full of his friends. And on the
walls, all about, were placards with big-lettered warning that death
was the penalty for harboring the proscribed. Here at the corner, he
ran against one Sarret, cousin of Madame Vernet, who went with him,
showing the way through narrow streets to the Barrière du Maine, which
was behind the present station of Mont-Parnasse. Safely out of the
town, the two men took the road to Fontenay-aux-Roses, and at night
Sarret turned back. Condorcet lost his way, and wandered about the
fields for two days, sleeping in the quarries of Clamart, until driven
by hunger into a wretched inn. Demanding an omelet, he was asked how
many eggs he would have; the ignorant-learned man ordered a dozen, too
many for the working-man he was personating, and suspicions were
aroused. The villagers bound and dragged him to the nearest guardhouse
at Bourg-la-Reine. He died in his cell that night, April 7, 1794, by
poison, it is believed. For he wore a ring containing poison; the same
sort of poison, it is said, that was carried by Napoleon, with which
he tried--or pretended to try--to kill himself at Fontainebleau. In
the modern village of Bourg-la-Reine, five and a half miles from
Paris, the principal square bears the name of Condorcet, and holds his
bust in marble.
"_La Veuve Condorcet_" appears in the Paris _Bottin_ every year until
1822, when she died. She had been imprisoned on the identification of
her husband's body, but was released after Robespierre's death. She
passed the Duplay house every day during those years, going to her
little shop at 232 Rue Saint-Honoré. There she had set up a linen
business on the ground floor, and above, she painted portraits in a
small way. She was a woman of rare beauty and of fine mind, with all
womanly graces and all womanly courage. Married in 1786, and much
younger than her husband, timorous before his real age and his
seeming austerity, she had grown up to him, and had learned to love
that "volcano covered with snow," as his friend d'Alembert had said he
was. She had a pretty gift with her pen, and her translation into
French of Adam Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" is still extant.
Her little _salon_ came to be greatly frequented in her beautiful old
age.
Condorcet's famous fellow-worker in science, Antoine-Laurent
Lavoisier, was guillotined in May, 1794, the two men having the same
number of years, fifty-one. He was condemned, not for being a chemist,
albeit his enlightened judges were of the opinion that "the Republic
has no need of chemists," but because he had filled, with justice and
honesty, his office of Farmer-General under royalty. Their
contemporaries of nearly equal age, Gaspard Monge and Claude-Louis
Berthollet, escaped the guillotine, and were among the _savants_ in
the train of General Bonaparte in his Italian and Egyptian campaigns.
After many years of useful labors, they died peacefully under the
Restoration.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, of almost equal years with these four, lived to
a greater age, and received higher honors from the Emperor and the
Bourbons. Coming from his birth-place in Calvados in 1767, his first
Paris home to be found is in Rue des Noyers; one side of which ancient
street now forms that southern section of Boulevard Saint-Germain
opposite Rue des Anglais, its battered houses seeming to shrink back
from the publicity thrust upon them. In that one now numbered 57 in
the boulevard, formerly No. 33 Rue des Noyers, Alfred de Musset was
born in 1810; and in the same row lived Laplace in 1777. In 1787 we
find him in Rue Mazarine, and in 1790 in Rue Louis-le-Grand, and this
latter residence represents his only desertion of the University side
of the Seine. He returned to that bank when placed by the Consuls in
the Senate, and made his home in 1801 at No. 24 Rue des
Grands-Augustins, and in the following year at No. 2 Rue Christine.
These stately mansions of that period, only a step apart, remain as he
left them. When Laplace was made Chancellor of the Senate, in 1805,
his official residence was in the Luxembourg, and there it continued
until 1815, the year of the Restoration. His private residence, from
1805 to 1809, was at No. 6 Rue de Tournon, a house still standing in
all its senatorial respectability. He gave this up, and again took up
his quarters in the Luxembourg, when made a Count of the Empire and
Vice-President of the Senate.
From the Medician palace, which appears in the _Bottin_ of those years
as simple No. 19 Rue de Vaugirard, Laplace removed to No. 51 of that
street, when the returned Bourbons made him a Peer of France. This
house, near Rue d'Assas--named for the Chevalier Nicolas d'Assas, the
heroic captain of the regiment of Auvergne during the Seven Years'
War--is unaltered since his time. His last change of abode was made in
1818, to Rue du Bac, 100, where he died in 1827. It is a mansion of
old-fashioned dignity, with a large court in front and a larger garden
behind, and is now numbered 108. The growing importance of his
successive dwellings, every one of which may be visited to-day, mark
his growth in importance as a man of state. The growth of the man of
science is represented by his colossal "La Mécanique Céleste," which
first appeared in 1799, and was continued by successive volumes until
its completion in 1825. Its title, rather than his titles, should be
inscribed on his monument.
A little later than these famous _confrères_, Georges Cuvier appears
in Paris--in Hugo's half-truth--"with one eye on the book of Genesis
and the other on nature, endeavoring to please bigoted reaction by
reconciling fossils with texts, and making the mastodons support
Moses." His first home, at the present 40 Rue de Seine, is a fine
old-fashioned mansion. He removed to the opposite side of that street
in 1810, and there remained until 1816, his house being now replaced
by the new and characterless structure at No. 35. Full of character,
however, is his official residence as Professor in the Jardin des
Plantes, which took again its ancient title of Jardin du Roi during
the Restoration. "_La Maison de Cuvier_" is a charming old building
near the garden-entrance in Rue Cuvier, and within is the bust of this
most gifted teacher of his time. His genuine devotion to science and
his tolerance for all policies carried him through the several changes
of government during his life. He completed the Napoleonic conquest of
Italy and Holland by his introduction of the French methods of
education, perfected by him. The Bourbons made him Baron and
Chancellor of the University, and the Orleans king elevated him to
the Peerage of France. He died in 1832.
Paul-François-Jean-Nicolas, Comte de Barras--soldier, adventurer, a
power in the Convention, the power of the Directory, practically
dictator for a while--has added to the hilarity of the sceptical
student of history by his "Memoirs," kept concealed since his death,
in 1829, until their publication within a few years. Splendidly
mendacious in these pages as he was in life, Barras posed always as
the man on horseback of _his "13 Vendémiaire_." On that day,
unwittingly yet actually, he put into the saddle--where he stayed--his
young friend Buonaparte, whose qualities he had discovered at the
siege of Toulon. This artillery officer, while planting his batteries
to cover every approach to the Tuileries, where cowered the frightened
Convention, took personal command of the guns that faced Saint-Roch.
The front of that church still shows the scars of the bullets that
stopped the rush of the Sections in that direction. This battery was
placed at the Rue Saint-Honoré end of the narrow lane leading from
that street to the gardens of the Tuileries--there being then no Rue
de Rivoli, you will bear in mind. This lane was known as Rue du
Dauphin, because of the royal son who had used it, going between the
Tuileries and the church; after that day, it was popularly called Rue
du 13-Vendémiaire, until it received its official appellation of Rue
Saint-Roch, when widened and aligned in 1807. At this time there were
only two houses in the street, near its southern end, and one of them
was a _hôtel-garni_, in which young Buonaparte caught a short sleep
on that night of October 5, 1795. The oldest structure in Rue
Saint-Roch to-day is that with the two numbers 4 and 6, and it is
known to have been already a _hôtel-garni_ in the first years of the
nineteenth century, when it was refaced. So that it is well within
belief that we have found here Buonaparte's head-quarters for that one
night.
Let us now, crossing the river, get on the ground of positive proof,
safe from doubts or conjectures. The Duchesse d'Abrantès, wife of that
adorable ruffian, Andoche Junot, made a duke in 1807 by the Emperor,
writes in her "Memoirs": "To this day, whenever I pass along Quai
Conti, I cannot help looking up at the garret windows at the left
angle of the house, on the third floor. That was Napoleon's chamber,
when he paid us a visit; and a neat little room it was. My brother
used to occupy the one next it." Madame Junot had been Mlle. Laure
Permon, whose father, an army contractor, had brought his family to
Paris early in 1785, and leased for his residence the Hôtel Sillery,
formerly the Petit Hôtel Guénégaud. Madame Permon, a Corsican lady,
had been an early friend of Madame Buonaparte, and had rocked young
Buonaparte in his cradle; so that he was called by his first name in
her family, as her daughter shows in this quotation. Finding him at
the École Royale Militaire in Paris, she invited him to her house for
frequent visits, once for a week's stay, whenever permission could be
got from the school authorities. He was a lank, cadaverous,
dishevelled lad, solitary, taciturn, and morose; brooding over the
poverty that had forced him to seek an unpaid-for scholarship, and not
readily making friends with the more fortunate Albert Permon. Yet he
came often, and was nowhere so content as in this house before us. It
stands far back from the front of the quay, half-hidden between the
Institute and the Mint, and is numbered 13 Quai Conti, and its
entrance is on the side at No. 2 Impasse Conti. Its upper portion is
now occupied by a club of American art students. Constructed by
Mansart, its rooms are of admirable loftiness and proportion, and
retain much of their sixteenth-century decoration. Here in this
_salon_ after dinner, young Buonaparte would storm about the "indecent
luxury" of his schoolmates, or sit listening to Madame Permon, soothed
by her reminiscent prattle about Corsica and his mother, to whom he
always referred as Madame Letitia. Here he first showed himself to the
daughters in his new sub-lieutenant's uniform, before joining his
regiment on October 30, 1785, and they laughed at his thin legs in
their big boots.
[Illustration: No. 13 Quai Conti.]
The École Supérieure de Guerre, commonly called the "École Militaire,"
remains nearly as when constructed under Louis XV., but it is
impossible to fix on the room allotted to this student during his year
there--a small, bare room, with an iron cot, one wooden chair, and a
wash-stand with drawers. The chapel, now unused, remains just as it
was when he received his confirmation in it. He arrived at this
school, from his preparatory school at Brienne, on the evening of
October 19, 1784, one of a troop of five lads in the charge of a
priest. They had disembarked, late that afternoon, at Port Saint-Paul,
from the huge, clumsy boat that brought freight and passengers, twice
a week, from Burgundy and the Aube down the Seine. The priest gave
the lads a simple dinner near their landing-place, and led them across
the river and along the southern quays--where the penniless young
Buonaparte bought a "Gil-Blas" from a stall, and a comrade in funds
paid for it--and, stopping for prayers at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he
handed them over to the school authorities.
From that moment every hour of young Buonaparte's year in Paris can be
accounted for. And no foundation can be discovered or invented for the
fable, mendaciously upheld by the tablet, placed by the Second Empire
in the hallway of No. 5 Quai Conti, which claims a garret in that
tall, up-climbing, old house as his lodging at that time or at any
later time. This flimsy legend need no longer be listened to. Not far
away, however, is a garret that did harbor the sub-lieutenant in the
autumn of 1787. It is to M. Lenôtre that we owe this delightful find.
Arriving in Paris from Corsica, after exactly two years of absence,
Buonaparte took room No. 9, on the third floor of the Hôtel de
Cherbourg, Rue du Four-Saint-Honoré. That street is now Rue
Vauvilliers, its eastern side taken up by the Halles, and its present
No. 33, on the western side, is the former _hôtel-garni_, quite
unchanged as to its fabric. Here he was always writing in his room,
going out only for the frugal meals that cost him a few _sous_, and
here he had his first amorous adventure, recited by him in cynical
detail under the date: "_Jeudi 22 Novembre 1787, à Paris, Hôtel de
Cherbourg, Rue du Four-Saint-Honoré._"
On August 10, 1792, Buonaparte saw the mob carry and sack the
Tuileries. He was in disgrace with the army authorities, having
practically deserted to Corsica, and he had come back for
reinstatement and a job. In his Saint-Helena "Memorial," he says that
he was then lodging at the Hôtel de Metz in Rue du Mail. This is
evidently the same lodging placed by many writers in Rue d'Aboukir,
for many of the large houses that fronted on the first-named street
extended through to the latter, as shall be shown later. The hotel is
gone, and the great mercantile establishment at No. 22 Rue du Mail
covers its site.
Gone, too, is the shabbily furnished little villa in Rue Chantereine,
where he first called on Josephine de Beauharnais, where he married
that faded coquette--dropping the _u_ from his name then, in March,
1796--and whence he went to his _18 Brumaire_. The court-yard, filled
with resplendent officers on that morning, is now divided between the
two courts numbered 58 and 60 Rue de la Victoire; that name having
been officially granted to the street, on his return from his Italian
campaign in 1797. The villa, kept by the Emperor, and lent at times to
some favorite general, was not entirely torn down until 1860. Its site
is now covered by the houses Nos. 58 and 60.
Rue Chantereine was, in those days, almost a country road, bordered by
small villas; two of them were associated with Napoleon Bonaparte. In
one of them, Mlle. Eléonora Dennelle gave birth, on December 13, 1806,
to a boy, who grew up into a startling likeness of the Emperor, as to
face and figure, but who inherited from him only the half-madness of
genius. He lived through the Empire, the Restoration, the Second
Republic, the Second Empire, and into the Republic that has come to
stay, dying on April 15, 1881. To another modest dwelling in this same
street, there came the loving and devoted Polish lady, Madame
Walewski, who had thrown herself into the Emperor's arms, when she was
full of faith in his intent to liberate her native land. Their son,
Alexandre Walewski, born in 1810, was a brilliant figure in Paris,
where he came to reside after the fall of Warsaw. A gifted soldier,
diplomat, and writer, he died in 1868.
So, of the roofs that sheltered the boyhood of Napoleon, three still
remain. Of those loftier roofs that sheltered his manhood, there are
also three still to be seen. In the Paris _Bottin_ of the first year
of the nineteenth century, the name of Napoleon Bonaparte appears as a
member of the Institute, Section of Mechanism, living in the palace of
the Luxembourg. In 1805 his address is changed to the palace of the
Tuileries, and he is qualified "Emperor of the French;" enlarging that
title in 1806 to "Emperor of the French and King." The Tuileries are
swept away, and Saint-Cloud has left only a scar. The Luxembourg
remains, and so, too, the Palais de l'Élysée, where he resided for a
while, and the _château_ of Malmaison has been restored and
refurnished in the style of Josephine, as near as may be, and filled
with souvenirs of her and of her husband. Her body lies, with that of
her daughter Hortense, in the church of the nearest village, Reuil,
and his remains rest under the dome of the Invalides--his last roof.
There is a curious letter, said to be still in existence, written by
young Buonaparte to Talma, asking for the loan of a few francs, to be
repaid "out of the first kingdom I conquer." He goes on to say that he
has found nothing to do, that Barras promises much and does little,
and that the writer is at the end of his resources and his patience.
This letter was evidently written at that poverty-stricken period
between 1792 and 1795, when he was idly tramping Paris streets with
Junot, the lovable and generous comrade from Toulon; or with
Bourrienne, now met first since their school-days at Brienne, who was
to become the Emperor's patient confidential secretary. At that period
Talma had fought his way to his own throne. Intimate as he had been
with Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins, Joseph-Marie de Chénier and David,
he had, also, made friends with the Corsican officer, either during
these years of the letter or probably earlier. He made him free of the
stage of the Théâtre Français, and lent him books. His friendship
passed on to the general, the Consul, and the Emperor, and it was
gossipped that he had taught Bonaparte to dress and walk and play
Napoleon. Talma always denied this, avowing that the other man was, by
nature and training, the greater actor!
Joseph-François Talma used to say that he first heard of a theatre,
from seeing and asking about the old Théâtre de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne,
whose entrance was in Rue Mauconseil, opposite the place of his birth,
on January 15, 1763. As he grew up he learned a good deal more about
the theatre, for he went early and often. He was only fifteen when he
was one of the audience in the Théâtre Français, on that night of the
crowning of Voltaire, and one of the crowd that tried to unharness the
horses, and drag the old man from the Tuileries to his house on the
quay. By day the lad was learning dentistry, his father's
profession--it was then a trade--and the two went to London to
practice. For a while young Talma got experience in that specialty
from the jaws of the sailor-men at Greenwich, and got gayer and more
congenial experience in amateur theatricals in town. They returned to
Paris, and the father's sign, "_M. Talma, Dentiste_," was hung by the
doorway of No. 3 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, next to the corner of Rue
Saint-Honoré. From the house that was there before the present modern
structure, young Talma went across the river to the Comédie Française,
on the night of November 21, 1787, and made his _début_ as Seide in
"Mahomet."
In our chapter on Molière, we left the Comédie Française, on its
opening night in 1689, at the house in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie.
There it remained for nearly a century, until forced, by overflowing
houses, to find a larger hall. While this was in course of
construction the company removed, in 1770, to the Salle des Machines
in the Tuileries, already transformed into a theatre by the Regent
for his ballets. Here the troupe played until the completion of the
new theatre in 1782. That new Comédie Française is now the Second
Théâtre Français, the Odéon, the second largest hall in Paris. It was
burned in 1799 and again in 1818. In 1789 it took the title of Théâtre
National; in 1793, Théâtre de l'Égalité was the newest name forced
upon the unwilling comedians, who were, as always with that profession,
fond of swelldom and favorites of princes. The house being in the very
centre of the Cordeliers quarter, in _la Section Marat_, there was
always constant friction between players and audience, and by 1793
this had so exasperated the ruling powers--the _sans-culottes_--that
nearly the whole troupe was sent to prison, charged with having
insulted the Patriots on the boards, and with having given "proofs of
marked incivism." The ladies of the company, aristocrats by strength
of their sex, occupied cells in Sainte-Pélagie, where we have already
listened to their merriment. They escaped trial through the
destruction of their _dossiers_ by a humane member of the Committee of
Safety, and the _9 Thermidor_ set them free. Talma had already left
the troupe in April, 1791, driven away, with two or three friends, by
dissensions and jealousies. They went over to the new house which had
been constructed, in 1789, at a corner of the Palais-Royal, by
enterprising contractors with influential politicians between them. It
was called at first Théâtre Français de la Rue de Richelieu, and, in
1792, Théâtre de la République. On Talma's desertion of the old
house, there began a legal process against him, exactly like that
instituted by the same Comédie Française against M. Coquelin, a
century later, when the theatre had for its lawyer the grandson of its
advocate of 1792; and the decision of the two tribunals was the same
in effect. Talma stayed at the theatre in the Palais-Royal, to which
he drew the discerning public, and, after ten years of rivalry, the
two troupes joined hands on those boards, and so the Comédie Française
came to the present "House of Molière."
It would seem that Talma was a shrewd man of business, and drew money
in his private rôle of landlord. He owned the house in which Mirabeau
died, in Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and always referred to the great
tribune as "_mon ancien locataire, Mirabeau_." Just beyond, in Rue
Chantereine, Talma was attracted by the small villa built by the
architect Ledoux, for Condorcet, it is said. Perhaps the actor had
seen, in that street, an even more plausible actor, Giuseppe Balsamo
by name, calling himself the Count Cagliostro. He had established
himself in one of the villas in this street, on coming to Paris to ply
his trade, toward 1784. And in 1778 the wonder-working Mesmer had set
up his machinery and masqueraded as a magician in a house in the same
street. Benjamin Franklin went there, one of a government commission
sent to investigate the miracles.