THE PLACE DES VOSGES AND HUGO'S HOUSE
A Beautiful Square--The Palais des Tournelles--Revolutionary
Changes--Madame de Sevigne and Rachel--Hugo's Crowded
Life--A Riot of Relics--Victorious Versatility--Dumas'
Pen--The Age of Giants--Dickens--"Les Trois Dumas".
Were we to walk a little farther along the busy Rue St. Antoine
towards the Place de la Bastille, we should come, on the left, a few
yards past the church of St. Louis, to the Rue de Birague, at the head
of which is the beautiful red gateway of which Mr. Dexter has made
such a charming picture. This is the southern gateway of the Place des
Vosges, a spacious green square enclosed by massive red and white
houses of brick and stone which once were the abode, when the Place
des Vosges was the Place Royale, of the aristocracy of France.
Before that time the courtyard of the old Palais des Tournelles was
here, where Henri II. was killed in a tournament in 1559, through an
accident for which Captain Montgomery of the Scotch Guard, whose fault
Catherine de Medicis deemed it to be, was executed, as we have just
seen, in the Place de l'Hotel-de-Ville. Catherine de Medicis, not
content with thus avenging her husband's death, demolished the Palais
des Tournelles, and a few years later Henri IV., to whom old Paris
owes so much, built the Place Royale, just as it is now. His own
pavilion was the centre building on the south side, comprising the
gateway which Mr. Dexter has drawn; the Queen's was the corresponding
building on the north side.
Around dwelt the nobles of the Court--such at any rate as were not
living in the adjoining Marais. Richelieu's hotel embraced Nos. 21-23
as they now are. It was in front of that mansion that the famous duel
between Montmorency-Bouteville and Des Chapelles against Bussy and
Beuvron was fought. The spirit of the great Dumas, one feels, must
haunt this Place: for it is peopled with ghosts from his brave
romances.
The decay of the Place des Vosges began, of course, when the
aristocracy moved over to the Faubourg St. Germain, although it never
sank low. The Revolution then took it in hand, and naturally began by
destroying the statue of Louis XIII. in the centre, which Richelieu
had set up, while its name was changed from Place Royale to its
present style in honour of the Department of the Vosges, the first to
contribute funds to the new order. In 1825, under Charles X., Louis
XIII. in a new stone dress returned to his honoured position in the
midst of the square, and all was as it should be once more, save that
no longer did lords and ladies ruffle it here or in the Marais.
[Illustration: THE PLACE DES VOSGES
(SOUTHERN ENTRANCE, IN THE RUE BIRAGUE)]
The most picturesque associations of the Place des Vosges are
historical; but it has at any rate three houses which have an artistic
interest. At No. 1 was born that gifted and delightful lady in whose
home in later years we have spent such pleasant hours--Madame de
Sevigne, or as she was in those early days (she was born in 1626)
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal. At No. 13 lived for a while Rachel the
tragedienne. According to Herr Baedeker, who is not often wrong, she
died here too: but other authorities place her death at Carmet, near
Toulon. I like to think that this rare wayward and terrible creature
of emotion was once an inhabitant of these walls. The third house is
No. 6, in the south-eastern corner, the second floor of which, from
1833 to 1848, was the home of Victor Hugo. It is now a Hugo museum.
Although Hugo occupied only a small portion, the whole house is now
dedicated to his spreading memory. Let us enter.
There is nothing in England like the Hugo museum. I have been to
Carlyle's house in Cheyne Row; to Johnson's house at Lichfield; to
Wordsworth's house at Grasmere; to Milton's house at Chalfont St.
Giles; to Leighton's House at Kensington; and the impression left by
all is that their owners lived very thin lives. The rooms convey a
sense of bareness: one is struck not by the wealth of relics but by
the poverty of them; while for any suggestion that these men were
pulsating creatures of friendship one seeks in vain. But Hugo--Hugo's
house throbs with life and energy and warm prosperous amities. Every
inch is crowded with mementoes of his vigour and his triumphs, yes,
and his failures too.
Here are portraits of him by the hundred, at all ages, caricatures,
lampoons, play bills, first editions, popular editions, furniture by
Hugo, decorations by Hugo, drawings by Hugo, scenes in Hugo's life in
exile, wreaths, busts, portraits of his grandchildren (who taught him
the exquisite art of being a grandfather), his death-bed, his
death-mask, the cast of his hands. Hugo, Hugo, everywhere, always
tremendous and splendid and passionate and French.
Among the more valuable possessions of this museum are
Bastien-Lepage's charcoal drawing of the master; Besnard's picture of
the first night of Hernani with the young romantic on the stage taking
his call and hurling defiance at the gods; Steinlen's oil painting
(there are not many oil paintings by this great draughtsman and great
Parisian) "Les Pauvres Gens"; Daumier's cartoon "Les Chatiments";
Henner's "Sarah la Baigneuse" from _Les Orientales_; allegories by
Chifflart; beautiful canvases by Carriere and Fantin-Latour; and
Devambez's "Jean Valjean before the tribunal of Arras," in which Jean
is curiously like Gladstone in a bad coat; Vierge's drawing of the
funeral of Georges Hugo, during the siege; and Yama Motto's curious
scene of Hugo's own funeral, of which there are many photographs,
including one of the coffin as it lay in state for two days under the
Arc de Triomphe. There are also a number of Hugo relics which the
camelots of that day were selling to the crowds.
Hugo, it is well known, nursed a private ambition to be a great
artist, and in my opinion he was a great artist. There are on these
walls drawings from his hand which are magnificent--mysterious and
sombre fortresses on impregnable cliffs, scenes in enchanted lands
with more imagination than ever Dore compassed, and some of the
sinister cruelty and power of Meryon. Hugo was ingenious too: he
decorated a room with coloured carvings in the Chinese manner and he
made the neatest folding table I ever saw--hinged into the wall so
that when not in use it takes up no floor-space whatever.
It is amusing to follow Hugo's physiognomy through the ages, at first
beardless, looking when young rather like Bruant, the chansonnier of
to-day; then the coming of the beard, and the progress of it until the
final stage in which the mental eye now always sees the old
poet--white and strong and benevolent--the Hugo, in short, of Bonnat's
famous portrait.
On a table is a collection of literary souvenirs of intense interest:
Hugo's pen and inkstand, and the great Dumas' pen presented to Hugo in
1860 after writing with it his last "15 or 20" volumes (fifteen _or_
twenty--how like him!); Lamartine's inkstand, offered "to the master
of the pen"; George Sand's match-box for those endless cigarettes, and
with it her travelling inkstand. In another room upstairs are the six
pens used by Hugo in writing _Les Humbles_. Dumas' pen is not by any
means the only Dumas relic here; portraits of him are to be seen, one
of them astonishingly negroid. Had he too worked for liberty and
carried in his breast or even on his sleeve a great heart that, like
Hugo's, responded to every call and beat furiously at the very whisper
of the word injustice, he too would have his museum to-day not less
remarkable than this. But to write romances was not enough: there must
be toil and suffering too.
Dumas and Hugo were born in the same year, 1802: Balzac was then
three. In 1809 came Tennyson and Gladstone; in 1811 Thackeray and in
1812 Browning and Dickens. What was the secret of that astounding
period? Why did the first twelve years of the last century know such
energy and abundance? To walk through the rooms of this Hugo museum,
however casually, is to be amazed before the vitality and exuberance
not only of this man but of the French genius. It is truly only the
busy who have time. I wish none the less that there was a museum for
Alexandre the Great. I would love to visit it: I would love to see his
kitchen utensils alone. The generous glorious creature, "the seven and
seventy times to be forgiven"! As it was, no one being about, I kissed
the pen with which he had written his last "15 or 20" novels (the
splendid liar!).
I wish too that we had a permanent Dickens' museum in London--say at
his house in Devonshire Terrace, which is now a lawyer's office. What
a fascinating memorial of Merry England it might become, and what a
reminder to this attenuated specialising day of the vigour and
versatility and variety and inconquerable vivacity of that giant! Just
as no one can leave Hugo's house without a quickening of imagination
and ambition, so no one could leave that of Charles Dickens.
In addition to this museum Hugo has his monument in the Place Victor
Hugo, far away in a residential desert in the north-west of Paris, a
bronze figure of the poet as a young man seated on a rock, with
Satire, Lyric Poetry and Fame attending him; while on the facade of
the house where he died, No. 124 Avenue Victor Hugo, is a medallion
portrait. He figures also in a fresco in the Hotel de Ville. Dumas'
monument is in the garden of the Place Malesherbes in the Avenue de
Villiers. Dore designed it, as was perhaps fitting. The sturdy
Alexandre sits, pen in hand, on the summit, his West Indian hair
curling vigorously into the sky, with d'Artagnan and three engrossed
readers at the base. It is not quite what one would have wished; but
it is good to visit. His son, the dramatist, the author of that
adorable joke against his father's vanity--that he was capable of
riding behind his own carriage to persuade people that he kept a black
servant--has a monument close by; and the gallant general of whom one
reads such brave stories in the first volume of the _Memoires_ is to
be set there too, and then the Place, I am told, will be re-named the
Place des Trois Dumas.