Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
On page 149, camelias is a possible typo for camellias.
The index entry for the Latin Quarter refers to a non-existent
index entry to the Scholars' Quarter.
THE STONES OF PARIS
IN HISTORY AND LETTERS
[Illustration: Madame de Sévigné.
(From the portrait by Mignard.)]
THE STONES OF PARIS
IN HISTORY AND LETTERS
BY
BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN
AND
CHARLOTTE M. MARTIN
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
MDCCCXCIX
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOK BINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
Page
The Southern Bank in the Nineteenth Century 1
The Paris of Honoré de Balzac 51
The Paris of Alexandre Dumas 89
The Paris of Victor Hugo 123
The Making of the Marais 163
The Women of the Marais 213
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_From drawings by John Fulleylove, Esq. The portraits from photographs
by Messrs. Braun, Clément et Cie._
Madame de Sévigné (from the portrait by Mignard).
Frontispiece
PAGE
Alphonse de Lamartine (from a sketch by David d'Angers,
"_un soir chez Hugo_") facing 10
Madame Récamier (from the portrait by Gros) facing 40
The Abbaye-aux-Bois 43
Portal of Châteaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac 46
The Court of the Pension Vauquer facing 52
Honoré de Balzac (from the portrait by Louis Boulanger) facing 64
Les Jardies 70
The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the house where
Voltaire died facing 78
The Pension Vauquer 80
The Commemorative Tablet to Balzac 84
The Figure of d'Artagnan (from the Dumas Monument by
Gustave Doré) facing 90
Alexandre Dumas facing 104
The Wall of the Carmelites 113
Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hôtel de Picardie facing 118
The Hôtel de Toulouse 128
Alfred de Musset (from the sketch by Louis-Eugène Lami)
facing 144
The Cemetery of Picpus 153
Victor Hugo (from the portrait by Bonnat) facing 160
The Hôtel du Prévôt 175
Anne de Bretagne (from a portrait by an unknown artist in a
private collection) facing 186
Louis XII (from a water-color portrait by an unknown artist,
in a private collection) facing 190
Sully (from a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musée
Condé at Chantilly) facing 194
The Court of the Hôtel de Béthune. Sully's Residence 196
The Hôtel de Mayenne. In the distance, the Temple Sainte-Marie,
called the Church of the Visitation facing 198
The Place des Vosges facing 214
The Hôtel de Beauvais facing 238
The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de Brinvilliers
facing 246
The Hôtel de Sens facing 254
Marguerite de Valois (from a portrait by an unknown artist, in
the Musée de Montpellier) facing 258
The Hôtel Lamoignon facing 262
The Tourelle of the Hôtel Barbette 268
The Gateway of the Hôtel de Clisson 276
THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
In preceding chapters we have come upon the small beginnings of the
Scholars' Quarter; we have had glimpses of the growth of the great
mother University and of her progeny of out-lying colleges; and we
have trodden, with their scholars and students, the slope of "the
whole Latin Mountain," as it was named by Pantaléon, that nephew of
Pope Urban IV., who extolled the learning he had acquired here.
Looking down from its crest, over the hill-side to the Seine, we have
had under our eyes the mediæval _Pays Latin_, filling up the space
within its bounding wall, built by Philippe-Auguste and left untouched
by Charles V.; we have seen that wall gradually obliterated through
the ages, its gate-ways with their flanking towers first cut away, its
fabric picked to pieces, stone by stone; while, beyond its line, we
have watched the building up, early in the seventeenth century, of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, over the Pré-aux-Clercs, and in the fields
beyond, and along the river-bank toward the west. In the centre of
this new quarter the nobility of birth was soon intrenched behind its
garden-walls, and in the centre of the old quarter the aristocracy of
brains was secluded within its courts. The boundary-line of the two
quarters, almost exactly defined by the straight course from the
Institute to the Panthéon, speedily became blurred, and the debatable
neutral ground between was settled by colonists from either region,
servants of the State, of art, of letters. In our former strollings
through long-gone centuries, we have visited many of these and many of
the dwellers on the University hill; we are now to turn our attention
to those brilliant lights on the left bank who have helped to make
Paris "_la ville lumière_" during the forenoon of the nineteenth
century.
Through the heart of the _faubourg_ curved the narrow Rue
Saint-Dominique, from Esplanade des Invalides to Rue des Saints-Pères.
This eastern end, nearly as far west as Rue de Bellechasse, has been
carried away by new Boulevard Saint-Germain, and with it the _hôtel_
of the de Tocqueville family, which stood at No. 77 of the ancient
aristocratic street. Here in 1820 lived the Comtesse de Tocqueville,
with her son, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, a lad of fifteen. Here he
remained until the events of 1830 sent him to the United States, with
a mission to study their prison systems; a study extended by him to
all the institutions of the Republic, which had a profound interest
for the French Republicans of that time. His report on those prisons
appeared in 1832, and in 1835 he put forth the first volume of "De la
Démocratie en Amérique," its four volumes being completed in 1840.
That admirable survey of the progress of democracy--whose ascendancy
he predicted, despite his own predilections--still carries authority,
and at the time created a wide-spread sensation. It made its author
famous, and promoted him to the place of first-assistant lion in the
_salon_ of Madame Récamier, whose head lion was always Châteaubriand.
De Tocqueville had settled, on his return to Paris, in this same
_faubourg_; residing until 1837 at 49 Rue de Verneuil, and from that
date to 1840 at 12 Rue de Bourgogne. Elected Deputy in 1839, he soon
crossed the Seine, and we cannot follow him to his various residences
in the quarter of the Madeleine. For a few months in 1849 he served as
Minister for Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of the Prince-President,
and was among the Deputies put into cells in December, 1851. His
remaining years, until his death at Cannes in 1859, were spent in
retirement from all public affairs.
A notable inhabitant of the University quarter, in the early years of
the nineteenth century, was François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot, a young
professor at the Sorbonne. His classes were crowded by students and by
men from outside, all intent on his strong and convincing presentation
of his favorite historical themes. He lived, near his lecture-room, at
No. 10 Rue de la Planche, a street that now forms the eastern end of
Rue de Varennes, between Rues du Bac and de la Chaise. From 1823 to
1830 his home was at 37 Rue Saint-Dominique, where now is No. 203
Boulevard Saint-Germain, next to the Hôtel de Luynes, already visited
with Racine. This latter period saw Guizot, after a temporary
dismissal from his chair by the Bourbon King, at the height of his
powers and his prestige as a lecturer. He carried his oratory to the
Chamber of Deputies in 1830, and there compelled equal attention. In
1832 we find him, Minister of Public Instruction, installed in the
official residence at 116 Rue de Grenelle, on the corner of Rue de
Bellechasse. His work while there still lasts as the basis of the
elementary education of France, and it is to him that she owes her
primary schools. Pushed out from this office in 1836 by the pushing
Thiers, he went to England as Ambassador for a few months in 1840, and
in the autumn of that year he took up his abode in the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, where he remained until he was driven out in 1848.
That ancient mansion, no longer in existence, stood on the triangle
made by Boulevard and Rue des Capucines. With his desertion of this
Southern Bank, we lose sight of his dwellings, always thereafter in
the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Guizot and Louis-Philippe failed in their
fight against a nation, and the men of February, 1848, revolted
against the Prime Minister as well as against the King of the French.
That _opéra-bouffe_ monarch with the pear-shaped face, under the guise
of Mr. Smith, with a fat umbrella, slipped out of the back door of the
Tuileries and away to England; Guizot got away to the same safe shores
in less ludicrous disguise. He returned to his own land in 1849, and
lived until 1874, always poor, always courageous, and always at work.
Among his many volumes of these years, all marked by elevation of
thought and serenity of style, as well as by absence of warmth and
color, were his "Mémoires," wherein he proves, to the satisfaction of
his austere dogmatism, that he had always been in the right throughout
his public career.
The Revolution of 1830, that sent de Tocqueville on his voyage, and
that started Guizot in political life, brought Alphonse-Marie-Louis de
Lamartine to the public ear as an orator. He had filled the public eye
as a poet since 1820, when his "Méditations Poétiques" appeared. In
1830, his "Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses" had made it sure that
here was a soul filled with true harmony. And while he sang the
consolations of religion, as Châteaubriand had sung its splendors, he
gave proof of his devotion to the Church and throne. But he bore the
Revolution of 1830, and the flight of the Bourbons, with the same
equanimity he always summoned for the reverses of others, as well as
for his own. When a literary genius is out of work, says Sainte-Beuve,
he takes to politics and becomes an Illustrious Citizen, for want of
something better to do. Lamartine was elected a Deputy soon after the
upset of 1830, and sprang at once into the front rank of parliamentary
orators. His speeches in the Chamber, and his "History of the
Girondists"--enthralling and untrustworthy--helped to bring on the
Revolution of 1848, quite without his knowing or wishing it. It was
his superb outburst of rhetoric, as he stood alone on the steps of the
Hôtel de Ville, on February 25th, backed by no colleague and clad in
no authority, that saved to France her Tricolor--"that has swept all
around the world, carrying liberty and glory in its folds"--in place
of the white flag of the Bourbons that had gone, and the red rag of
the mob that was near coming. Between that month of February and June
of that same year, Lamartine had been on the crest of his highest
wave, and had sunk to his lowest level in the regard of his Parisians.
Their faith was justified in his genius and his rectitude, but a
volcano is not to be squirted cold by rose-water, and the new republic
could not be built on phrases. After his amazing minority in the
election for president, Lamartine sank out of sight, accepting without
complaint his sudden obscurity, as he had accepted without intrigue
his former lustre. The conspiracy of December, 1851, sent him into
retirement, and he lived alone with his pen, his only weapon against
want--a pathetically heroic figure during these last years. George
Sand had seen a good deal of Lamartine in the days of 1848, and he
struck her as "a sort of Lafayette without his shrewdness. He shows
respect for all men and all ideas, while believing in no ideas and
loving no man." A more just and complete judgment is that of Louis
Blanc: "He is incessantly laboring under a self-exalting
hallucination. He dreams about himself marvellous dreams, and believes
in them. He sees what is not visible, he opens his inward ear to
impossible sounds, and takes delight in narrating to others any tale
his imagination narrates to him. Honest and sincere as he is, he
would never deceive you, were he not himself deceived by the familiar
demon who sweetly torments him."
For twenty years he had been a resident of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Indeed, when he came to Paris for a while, in 1820, to see to the
publication of his first poems, he found rooms on Quai d'Orsay. From
there he went to make that call on young Hugo, to be narrated later.
From 1835 to 1855 his apartment was in the grand mansion, "between
court and garden," No. 82 Rue de l'Université. His reception-room was
decorated with portraits and busts of Alphonse de Lamartine, we are
told by Frederick Locker-Lampson, who visited him there. His host was
a handsome and picturesque figure, he says, albeit with an
over-refinement of manner. No keener criticism of the poet and his
poetry, at this period, has been made than that by Locker-Lampson, in
one curt sentence. His sane humor is revolted by that "prurient
chastity, then running, nay, galloping, to seed in an atmosphere of
twaddle and toadyism."
The desolate fallen idol was rescued from oblivion and poverty by the
Second Empire, whose few honorable acts may not be passed over. In
1867, in its and his dying years, that government gave him money, and
the municipality gave him a house. These gifts came to him in Rue
Cambacérès, in a small hotel now rebuilt into No. 7 of that street.
Where it meets with Rue de Penthièvre, just above, you will find the
attractive old mansion, with its ancient number 43 cut in the stone
over the doorway, in which, during the years after leaving the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, he carried on his courageous struggle with his
pen against debt and poverty. He had but few months' enjoyment of his
last home, the gift of the people of Paris, for he died there in 1869.
It was at Passy, not far from the square in Avenue Henri-Martin, named
for him and holding his statue. The chair in which he is seated might
be a theatrical property, perhaps humorously and fittingly so
suggested by the sculptor; who has, however, done injustice to his
subject, in robbing him of his natural grace and suavity, and in
giving him a pedantic angularity that was never his.
When Lamartine writes to Sainte-Beuve, "I have wept, I who never
weep," we are amused by the poet's naïve ignorance of his persistent
lachrymose notes. The "smiling critic" accepted them simply as a
pardonable overflow of the winning melancholy of that nature, in which
he recognized all that was genuine and laudable. This wide-minded
tolerance is perhaps the secret of Sainte-Beuve's strength as a
critic. With his acute discernment of the soul of a book and of its
author, his subtle appreciation of all diverse qualities, he was
splendidly impartial. He could read anything and everything, with a
keenness of appraisement that did not prejudice his enjoyment of that
which was alive, amid much that might be dead. "A pilgrim of ideas,
but lacking the first essential of a pilgrim--faith"--he gave all that
he was to literature through all his life, and when near its end, he
had the right to say: "Devoted with all my heart to my profession
of critic, I have tried to be, more and more, a good and--if
possible--a skilful workman."
[Illustration: Alphonse de Lamartine.
(From a sketch by David d'Angers. "_un soir chez Hugo._")]
He devoted himself so entirely to his profession, that his life was
like a mill, as he said, perpetually feeding and grinding. On the
Monday morning, he would shut himself in with the new volumes, which
he was to feed into himself and assimilate, during the twelve hours of
each of the five following days; on Saturday he was ready to grind out
the result. His Sunday holiday was given to the proof-reading of his
next day's "Causerie du Lundi." On that evening he took his only
relaxation, in the theatre. His work-room was bare of all
superfluities, and his daily life went in a round, with simple diet,
no wine, nor coffee, nor tobacco.
At the age of twenty-five, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was living,
with his mother, in a small apartment on the fourth floor of No.
19--now 37--Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He had given himself to letters
instead of medicine, for which he had studied, and had become a
regular contributor of critical papers to the press. His name was
already spoken along with the names of Victor Cousin, Villemain,
Guizot, Mérimée. He had produced his "Historical and Critical
Pictures," his "French Poetry and French Theatre of the Sixteenth
Century," and the "Poems of Joseph Delorme"--his selected pen-name.
The poet in him had abdicated to the critic, handing down many choice
gifts. In this apartment he received for review a volume of poems,
"by a young barbarian," his editor wrote. This was the "Odes et
Ballades" of Victor Hugo, with whom the critic soon made acquaintance,
and at whose house, a few doors away in the same street, he became a
constant visitor. From here Madame Sainte-Beuve removed, with her son,
in 1834, to Rue du Mont-Parnasse, and in that street he had his home
during his remaining years. His official residence, from 1840 to 1848,
as a Keeper of the Mazarin Library, was in that building now occupied
by the Institute. He found installed there, among the other Keepers,
Octave Feuillet. The upheaval of February, 1848, drove Sainte-Beuve
into Belgium. On his return in the following year, he settled in the
house left him by his mother, and there he died in 1869. This
two-storied, plaster-fronted, plain little No. 11 Rue du
Mont-Parnasse, saw his thirty years of colossal work. From here, he
went to take his chair of Latin poetry in the Collège de France, where
he was hissed by the students, who meant to hiss, not the critic and
lecturer, but the man who had accepted the Second Empire in accepting
that chair. He was no zealous recruit, however, and preserved his
entire independence; and when he consented to go to the Senate in
1865, it was for the sake of its dignity and its salary. He was always
poor in money.
To his workroom in this house, came every French writer of those
thirty years, anxious to plead with or to thank that Supreme Court of
Criticism. Among those who bowed to its verdicts and who have owned
to its influence, Edmond de Goncourt has given us the most vivid
sketch of the critic in conversation: "When I hear him touch on a dead
man, with his little phrases, I seem to see a swarm of ants invading a
body; cleaning out all the glory, and in a few minutes leaving a very
clean skull of the once illustrious one." And, in his written reviews,
Sainte-Beuve had the supreme art of distilling a drop of venom in a
phial of honey, so making the poison fragrant and the incense deadly.
There is no more constant presence than his on this southern
hill-side, where all his days and nights were spent. We seem to see
there the short, stout figure, erect and active, the bald head covered
with a skull-cap, the bushy red eyebrows, the smooth-shaven face,
redeemed from ugliness by its alert intelligence. His walks were down
this slope of Mont-Parnasse, which he thought of as the
pleasure-ground of the mediæval students of the University, to the
quays, where he hunted among the old-book stalls. And he loved to
stroll in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens. In the Poets' Corner,
now made there, you will find his bust along with those of Henri
Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, and Paul Verlaine.
Crossing the street from Sainte-Beuve's last home to No. 32, we find a
modest house set behind its garden-wall, in which is a tablet
containing the name of Edgar Quinet. More than passing mention of his
name is due to this fine intellect and this great soul. His mother
thought that "an old gentleman named M. Voltaire"--whom she might have
seen in her childhood, as her village crowded about his carriage on
its way to Paris--was the cleverest man who ever lived. She brought up
her boy to think for himself, after that philosopher's fashion, and
the boy bettered her teachings. He spent his life in looking into the
depths of beliefs and institutions, in getting at the essence of the
real and the abiding, in letting slip that which was shallow and
transitory; so that, towards the end, he could say: "I have passed my
days in hearing men speak of their illusions, and I have never
experienced a single one." He became, in Professor Dowden's apt
phrase, "a part of the conscience of France," and as such, his
influence was of higher value than that exerted by his busy pen in
politics, history, poetry. Indeed, his enthusiasms for the freedom and
progress of his fellow-beings carried his pen beyond due restraint. Of
course he was honored by exile during the Second Empire, and when it
tumbled to pieces, he returned to Paris, and soon went to Versailles
as a Deputy. At his grave, in 1875, Hugo spoke of him as living and
dying with the serene light of truth on his brow, and he can have no
happier epitaph.
Quinet had outlived, by only a few months, his life-long friend Jules
Michelet, who died in 1874. He, too, had his homes and did his work,
private and public, on this same hill-side. His birth-place, far away
on the northern bank, on the corner of Rues de Tracy and Saint-Denis,
is now given over to business. It was a church, built about 1630 in
the gardens of "_Les Dames de Saint-Chaumont_," and had been closed
in 1789, along with so many other churches. Going fast to ruin, it
was fit only for the poverty-stricken tenant, who came along in the
person of the elder Michelet, a printer from Laon. He set up his
presses in the nave and his household gods in the choir, where the boy
Jules was born on August 22, 1798. The building is unchanged as to its
outer aspect, with its squat columns supporting the heavy pediment of
the façade, except that two stories have been placed above its main
body. In these strange surroundings for a child, and in the shelters
equally squalid, to and from which his father removed during many
years, the boy grew up, haunted and nervous, cold, hungry and
ill-clad, and always over his books when set free from type-setting.
He got lessons and took prizes at the Lycée Charlemagne, but the
pleasantest lesson and the dearest prize of his youth did not come in
school. They were his first sight, from his father's windows in Rue
Buffon, of the sun setting over beyond the trees, tuneful with birds,
of the Jardin du Roi. Grass and foliage, and a sky above an open
space, had been unknown to his walled-in boyhood. When he became able
to choose a home for himself, it had always its garden, or a sight of
one. At an early age he went to tutoring; in 1821 he was appointed
lecturer on history in the Collège Rollin, then in its old place on
the University hill; soon after 1830 he succeeded to Guizot's chair in
the Sorbonne, and in 1838 the Collège de France made him its professor
of History and Moral Science. In that institution, he and his
colleague Quinet caused immense commotion by their assaults on the
Church intrenched in the State, and from their halls the hootings of
the clericals, and the plaudits of the liberals, re-echoed throughout
France. The priesthood complained that "the lecturer on history and
morals gave no history and no morals," and it began to be
believed--rightly or wrongly--that he was using his professor's
platform as a band-stand, and was beating a big drum for the
gratification of the groundlings. He was speedily dismissed, he was
reinstated soon after 1848, and was finally thrown aside by the Second
Empire.
At this period only, he disappears from the Scholars' Quarter for a
while. His earliest residence there was, soon after his marriage in
1827, at 23 Rue de l'Arbalète, a street named from the "_Chevaliers de
l'Arbalète_," who had made it their archery grounds in mediæval days.
The site of Michelet's residence is fittingly covered by a large school,
on the corner of that street and of the street named for Claude
Bernard. After a short stay in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor--that
street nearly all gone now--he returned to this neighborhood, and
settled in Rue des Postes, which, in 1867, received the name of the
grammarian Lhomond. Otherwise, no change has come to this quiet
street, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century buildings, among
which is the Hôtel Flavacourt, set in the midst of gardens. On its
first floor Michelet lived from 1838 to 1850. At No. 10 is the arched
gateway through which he went, in its keystone the carved head of a
strong man with thick beard and curling locks. Above the long
yellow-drab wall shows the new chapel of the priests, who, with
unknowing irony, have taken his favorite dwelling for their schools.
Absent from this quarter during the early years of the Second Empire,
and absent from Paris during part of that time, it was in 1856 that
Michelet settled in his last abode. It was at 44 Rue de l'Ouest, and
his garden here was the great Luxembourg Garden. In 1867, the street
was renamed Rue d'Assas, and his house renumbered 76. After his death
in the south of France in 1874, his widow lived there until her own
death in 1899, and kept that modest home just as he had left it. She
was his second wife, and had been of great help to him in his work,
and had done her own work, aided by his hand, which sprinkled
gold-dust over her manuscript, as she prettily said. That hand had not
been idle for over fifty years. He gave forty years of labor, broken
only by his other books, to his "History of France," which at his
death was not yet done, as he had meant that it should be done. It is
a series of pictures, glowing and colored by his sympathetic
imagination, which let him see and touch the men of every period, and
made him, for the moment, the contemporary of every epoch. And Taine
assures us, contrary to the general belief, that we may trust its
accuracy. His style has a magic all its own. He had said: "Augustin
Thierry calls history a narration, Guizot calls it an analysis; I
consider that history should be a resurrection." This idea is
translated into durable marble on his striking tombstone in
Père-Lachaise, done in high relief by the chisel of Mercié.
The life of Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littré, a few years longer than that
of Michelet and equally full of strenuous labor, was passed on this
same slope and ended in this same Street of Assas. Born on February 1,
1801, in the plain house of three stories and attic at No. 21 Rue des
Grands-Augustins, he got his schooling at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where
we have seen other famous scholars. He appears for a day and a night
on the barricades of 1830, and then settles quietly at No. 11 Rue du
Colombier, now Rue Jacob. On his marriage, in 1835, he removed to No.
21 Rue des Maçons, now Rue Champollion, once Racine's street, in the
heart of the University. In 1838 he made his home in Rue de l'Ouest,
and in that home he remained until his death on June 2, 1881. His
apartment took up the entire second floor of present 44 Rue
d'Assas--the new name of Rue de l'Ouest--at the corner of Rue de
Fleurus, and its windows on the curve opened on ample light and air.
Like Sainte-Beuve, Littré gave up medicine, to which he had been
trained, for journalistic work; some of which, in his early days, was
done for the Gazette Médicale, and much of it all through life for the
political press. He was an ardent Liberal, and after the fall of the
Empire, was elected a Deputy, and later a Senator, of the Third
Republic. Nothing in the domain of literature seemed alien to this
catholic mind, equally at ease in science and philosophy, philology
and history. The enduring achievement of his life is his Dictionary of
the French Language. It was begun in 1844 and completed in 1872, and a
supplement was added in 1877. In his fortieth year, he was attracted
by the teachings of Comte, and became a leader of the Positivists and
a copious contributor to their review. His career is that of an
earnest and a self-denying student; a teacher of unfettered thinking
in science, religion, politics; a modest and disinterested
fellow-worker in letters.
His master in the cult that won him solely by its scientific
fascinations, Auguste Comte, had lived for the last fifteen years of
his life at No. 10 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and there he died in 1857.
We can but glance at the tablet in passing, and we cannot even glance
at the altered residences, in this quarter, of the gifted Amédée
Thierry and of his more gifted brother, Augustin, the historian "with
the patience of a monk and the pen of a poet." He died, in 1856, in
Rue du Mont-Parnasse, in the house that had been Quinet's, it is said.
We look up, as we go, at the sunny windows, facing full south over the
Luxembourg Gardens, of the home of Jules Janin, in his day "the prince
of critics." They are on the first floor at the corner of Rues Rotrou
and de Vaugirard, alongside the Odéon, the theatre in which he had his
habitual seat. He died at Passy in 1874.
This _faubourg_ has had no more striking figure than that of Prosper
Mérimée, tight-buttoned in frock-coat, and of irreproachable
starchedness; with a curiously round, cold eye behind glasses, a large
nose with a square end, a forehead seamed with fine wrinkles. It was
his pride to pass as an Englishman in his walk. In his work, in
romance equally with archæology, the gentleman prevails over the
author, so that he seems to stand aloof, reserved, sceptical, correct;
never showing emotion, never giving way to his really infinite wit and
frisky mockery. He began his working-life in 1825, as a painter with
his father, alongside the École des Beaux-Arts, at No. 16 Rue des
Petits-Augustins, now 12 Rue Bonaparte. In 1840 he moved around the
corner to No. 10 Rue des Beaux-Arts, half way between the school and
his other place of work in the Institute, as Inspector of the
Historical and Artistic Monuments of France. From 1848 to 1851 he was
to be found at 18 Rue Jacob, and close at hand he found
"_l'Inconnue_," at 35 of the same street. In 1852 he removed to his
last residence at 52 Rue de Lille, on the corner of Rue du Bac. The
Commune burned that house along with others adjacent, and until
rebuilding began, long after, there stood in the ruins a marble bust
on its pedestal, unharmed except for the stain of the flames. It was
all that was left of Mérimée's great art-collection, with which, and
with his books and cats, he had lived alone since his mother's death.
He had gone away to Cannes to die in 1870. So that he did not see the
ruins of the Empire, to which he had rallied, altogether from devotion
to the Empress, whom he had known in Spain when she was a child. He
accepted nothing from the Emperor except the position of Librarian at
Fontainebleau, and was as natural and sincere with the Empress, as he
had been with Eugenie Montijo playing about his knee. In his other
office he was a loyal servant of the State, and to his alert, artistic
conscience France owes the preservation of many historic structures.
There are those who claim that the influence of Taine on modern
thought has been deeper and will be more durable than that of Renan.
They base their belief on the groundless notion that men are most
profoundly impressed by pure reason, forgetful of that well-grounded
experience, which proves that all men are touched and moved and
persuaded rather by sentiment than by conviction. And the writer is
irresistible, who, like Renan, appeals to our emotional as well as to
our thinking capacities. We are captivated by those feminine qualities
in his strain that are disapproved of by his detractors; his refined
fancy and his undulating grace seduce us. We are convinced by his zest
in the search for truth, by his courage in speaking it as he found it;
we recognize his sincerity and sobriety that do not demand applause;
we respect the magnanimity that looked on curses as oratorical
ornaments of his enemies, and that took no return in kind. And so we
stand in the peaceful court of homelike No. 23 Rue Cassette, on whose
first floor Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine died in 1893, in respectful memory
of the man who has helped us all by his dissections, his cataloguing,
and his array of facts. The structure of the philosophy of history,
that he raised, stands imposing and enduring on the bank of the stream
of modern thought, and yet it may be that Edmond de Goncourt was not
wholly wrong, in his characterization of Taine as "the incarnation of
modern criticism; most learned, most ingenious, and most frequently
unsound." We turn away and follow eagerly the steps of sympathetic
Joseph-Ernest Renan.
We have already seen the country boy coming to school, at
Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, in 1838. After four years' tuition there,
he passed on to higher courses in the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice. That
renowned school faces the _place_ of the same name, which it entirely
covered, when built in the early years of the seventeenth century.
When the Revolution demolished the old structure, it destroyed the
_parloir_ where the young student, the Chevalier des Grieux, gave way
before the beguilements of his visitor, Manon Lescaut. The fountain in
this open space flashes with that adorable creation of the Abbé
Prévost; the original of two creations as immortal, says Jules Janin:
"For who is the Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre but Manon made
pure; and who is Châteaubriand's Atala but Manon made Christian?"
Once a week, while at the seminary, young Renan took an outing with
the other pupils to its _succursale_ at Issy. It is a dreary walk,
along the wearisome length of Rue de Vaugirard, to the village to
which Isis gave her name, when that goddess, once worshipped in
Lutetia, was banished to this far-away hamlet. There "Queen Margot"
had a hunting-lodge and vast grounds, and when these were taken by the
brothers of Saint-Sulpice, they saved the grounds and transformed the
cupids on the walls of the lodge into cherubs, and the Venus into a
Madonna. Now their new structures in Caen stone face the street named
for Ernest Renan. In the gardens is a chapel built around the grotto,
roofed with shells, wherein Bossuet and Fénelon used to meet, toward
the end of the eighteenth century. There they doubtless began that
controversy over the mystical writings of Madame Guyon, which ended in
Fénelon's dismissal from the court through the influence of the
imperious Bossuet. Under these trees that shaded them, walked Renan in
his long and cruel conflict between his conscience and his traditions,
most dreading the pain he would give his mother by the step he felt
impelled to take. He took that step in October, 1845, when he laid
aside the _soutane_--to be adorned and glorified by him, his teachers
had hoped--and walked out from the seminary to a small _hôtel-garni_
on the opposite side of Place Saint-Sulpice. Supported at first only
by the savings of his devoted sister, Henriette, he started as a
tutor, and began his life's pen-work, in a cheap _pension_, in one of
the shabby houses just west of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, in Rue des
Deux-Églises, now renamed Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Épée.
His future dwellings, befitting his modest gains, were all in quiet
streets of this scholarly quarter. The site of that one occupied from
1862 to 1865, at 55 Rue Madame, is covered by Collége Bossuet, where
priests teach their dogmas. Old Passage Sainte-Marie, where he lodged
for a while in 1865, is now Rue Paul-Louis-Courier, and his lodging is
gone. During the ten years from 1866 to 1876, he lived in the plain
house numbered 29 of retired Rue Vaneau. Then for three years, he had
an apartment at No. 16 Rue Guillaume; "a short street of provincial
aspect," says Alphonse Daudet, "grass-grown, with never a wheel; of
silent mansions and unopened gates, and of closed windows on the
court; faded and wan after centuries of sleep." This mansion was built
for Denis Talon, an advocate-general at the end of the seventeenth
century, and described by Germain Brice, writing in 1684, as having
"most agreeable apartments, with outlook on neighboring gardens, and a
large court, and great expense in building." He did not mention the
entrance-door, which is monumental, nor the knocker, worth a
pilgrimage to see. In 1880 Renan removed to No. 4 Rue de Tournon, so
finding himself between No. 6, once occupied by Laplace, and No. 2,
once occupied by Balzac. In 1883 he was made Administrator of the
Collége de France, and there took up his official residence. His
appointment to the chair of Hebrew in that institution, on his return
from the Orient in 1861, had so perturbed the Church behind the State
that he was dismissed after he had given but one lecture.
The Second Empire gone, he came back, mainly through the action of
Jules Simon, a wise and learned statesman and a most lovable man.
Renan the administrator remained the lecturer as well, and has left
ineffaceable memories with those who saw and heard him in his
declining years; when, his body disabled by maladies, he still went
singing on his way, as he manfully put it. It was a gross and clumsy
body; to use Edmond de Goncourt's words, an ungraceful, almost
disgraceful body, full of the moral grace of this apostle of doubt,
this priest of science. His lectures were rather readings of the
scriptures, interspersed with his own exegesis. On chairs about a
large table, and against the wall, in a small room of the college,
were seated the few intent listeners. Renan sat at one end of the
table, his head--"an unchurched cathedral"--bent over a bulky copy of
the scriptures as he read; then, as he talked, he would raise his head
and throw back the long hair that had tumbled over his brow, the
subtle humor of his mobile mouth and his dreamy eyes effacing the
effect of his big nose and fat cheeks, his beardless face luminous
with an exalted intellectual urbanity. His interpretations and
illustrations were spoken with his perfect art of simple and limpid
phrase, and in those tones that told of his dwelling with the saints
and prophets of all the ages, and with the elusive spirits of mockery
of our own day.
He died, on October 2, 1892, in his official residence in the Collége
de France, an apartment on the second floor of the main structure
facing the front court. The austere simplicity of this Breton interior
was leavened by the books and the equipment of the scholar. The
window of his death-chamber is just under the clock.
The "touch of earth" demanded by Tennyson's Guinevere was a need of
the nature of George Sand. The three stages of her growth, shown in
her work, reveal the three inspirations of her life, each most actual:
the love of man, the love of humanity, the love of nature. The woman's
heart in her made her, said Renan, "the Æolian harp of our time"; and
Béranger's verse well fits her:
"_Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne._"
It vibrated to the touch of outrages on woman and of injustice to man,
and it pulsated with equal passion for her children and for the rural
sights and scents of her birth-place. And we feel her heart in her
phrases, that stir us, as Thackeray puts it, like distant
country-bells. This half-poet, half-mystic, came fairly by her
fantastic inheritance; for she was, in the admirable phrase of Mr.
Henry James, "more sensibly the result of a series of love affairs
than most of us." On the other side, we may accurately apply to her
Voltaire's words concerning Queen Elizabeth: "And Europe counts you
among her greatest men." There were masculine breadth and elevation in
her complex, ample nature, with divine instincts and ideal purities,
that left no room for vulgar ambitions and mean avidities. Balzac, of
kindred qualities, wrote, after having learned to know her a little:
"George Sand would speedily be my friend. She has no pettiness
whatever in her soul; none of the low jealousies that obscure so many
contemporary talents. Dumas resembles her in this."
When Madame Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant, a young woman of
twenty-six, came, in 1830, to Paris to stay--she had already, while a
girl, been a _pensionnaire_ in the convent of the "_Augustines
Anglaises_," where, under its ancient name, we have met with Mlle.
Phlipon--she found her only acquaintance in the capital, Jules
Sandeau, living on Quai Saint-Michel. He had known M. Dudevant and his
wife during his visit to Nohant, a year or so earlier. She rented a
garret in the same house, one of the old row on the quay, just east of
Place Saint-Michel. Here she discovered that she could use a pen; at
first with scant success and for small pay in the columns of the
"Figaro," and then, with not much greater power, in a romance, written
conjointly with Sandeau. They named it "Rose et Blanche," and its
authors' pseudonyme was Jules Sand. Here she assumed the male costume
which enabled her to pass for a young student, unmolested in her walks
in all weathers and with all sorts and conditions of men, whom she
delighted to scrutinize. In a letter written in July, 1832, she says
that she is tired of climbing five long flights so many times a day,
and is seeking new quarters. She found them, with the same superb
outlook over the Seine as that she had left, on a third floor of Quai
Malaquais.
It may have been, for she always dwelt on her royal ancestry, in the
house now No. 5, which had been the home of Maurice de Saxe. That son
of Augustus the Strong of Poland and of the Countess of Königsmark
was the father of a natural daughter, who became the grandmother and
guardian of Mlle. Lucile-Aurore. Madame Dudevant gave his name to her
son, and this young Maurice, and his sister Solange, were now brought
to their mother's new home. She devoted hours to their amusement and
instruction, and hours to her pen-work; writing far into the night
when daylight did not suffice. She improvised a study in the ground
floor on the court, cool when the westering sun flooded her windows
above, and quiet when too many visitors disturbed her. For she had
sprung into fame with her "Indiana"--its author styled George
Sand--and after only two months' interval with her "Valentine."
Naturally inert, she had to push herself on to work, and then her
"serene volubility" knew no pause. She had now to be reckoned with in
the guild of letters, and its members met in the "poets' garret," as
she termed her little _salon_.
Balzac came--he who discouraged her in the beginning, on Quai
Saint-Michel--and Hugo and Dumas and Sainte-Beuve and young de Musset.
With this last-named she went from here to Italy, having persuaded his
mother that his infatuation would reform the wayward youth. All the
world knows, from the books on both sides, the story of the
short-lived _liaison_. She returned to this home in August, 1834,
hungry for her children. Then we lose sight of her for many years, in
her visits to her beloved provincial scenes, and her journeys to other
lands, and her temporary residences on the right bank of the Seine.
In the winter of 1846 and 1847 she had a _pied-à-terre_ in her son's
studio, in the secluded square of Cours d'Orléans, its entrance now at
80 Rue Taitbout. There she was visited by Charles Dickens, who
describes her as "looking like what you'd suppose the queen's monthly
nurse would be; chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed; a singularly
ordinary woman in appearance and manner." Others describe her, at this
period, when she had just passed her fortieth year, as having a
wearied, listless bearing, her only notable feature being her dull,
mild, tranquil eyes. In February, 1852, she was found by Mr. and Mrs.
Browning in the small apartment attached to her son's studio, at No. 3
Rue Racine. It is at the top of the house, and can be rented to-day. A
curious picture of her and her surroundings is given by the Brownings.
She was a constant attendant at this time at the Odéon--on whose stage
her plays were produced--and at the restaurant in the _place_ in front
of the theatre. There she used to sit among her male friends, smoking
"those horrid big cigars" which so revolted Rachel that she would
never meet the smoker.
George Sand's last Paris home was in Rue Gay-Lussac, and she was one
of the earliest tenants in that street, opened in 1868. She had three
or four small rooms in the _entresol_ of No. 5, the lease of which,
after her death in 1876, was sold by her son to a Roumanian lady,
along with some of his mother's furniture. This lady is delighted to
chatter about her illustrious predecessor in this apartment, and
allows the favored visitor to sit on the broad couch, covered in dingy
and worn leather, whereon George Sand was fond of reclining in her
last tranquil days, at rest after stormy and laborious years.
There is a hospitable little inn in the Faubourg Saint-Germain
endeared to many of us by memories, joyous or mournful. The Hotel de
France et de Lorraine, in narrow Rue de Beaune, just south of the
quay, was one of the earliest hotels in Paris, and was an approved
resort of the Royalists, before emigration and after Restoration. They
seem still to haunt its court and halls, where there lingers that
atmosphere of decayed Bourbonism, which James Russell Lowell
humorously hits off in a letter written when he was a guest here. The
pervading presence is that of Châteaubriand, and our amiable hosts
have a pride in keeping his apartment--on the first floor, in plain
wood panelling of time-worn gray--much as it was when he wrote, in its
_salon_, his letter of resignation of his post in the Diplomatic
Service, to the First Consul, to be Emperor within two months.
Châteaubriand was in Paris on leave of absence at the time of the
shooting of the Duc d'Enghien, in the ditch of Vincennes on the night
of March 20, 1804, and he refused to serve any longer the man whom he
regarded as an assassin. Just seventeen years earlier these two men
had arrived in Paris, both sub-lieutenants, of nearly the same age,
equally obscure and ambitious, equally without heart. Napoleon
Bonaparte, coming from Corsica, took a room in the Hôtel de
Cherbourg, as we have seen; François-Auguste, Vicomte de
Châteaubriand, coming from his natal town of Saint-Malo, found lodging
in the Hôtel de l'Europe in Rue du Mail. This street, between Porte
Saint-Denis, by which the coaches entered, and Place des Victoires,
where they put up, was full of _hôtels-garnis_ for travellers.
Installed there, Châteaubriand hunted up the great Malesherbes, a
friendly counsellor who put him in the way of meeting men of note;
among others Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, at the top of them all, just
then, with his "Paul et Virginie." These two, the one just fifty, the
other not yet twenty, then in 1787, strolled together in the Jardin du
Roi, forgetting their old world and its worries, in their talks of the
new world and its glories.
During the next two or three years, Châteaubriand came frequently to
Paris, an intent and disgusted onlooker at its doings. He stood, with
his sisters, at their windows in Rue de Richelieu, open on that
September day, when the mob surged by holding aloft on pikes the heads
of Foulon and Berthier. His Royalist stomach revolted, and he joined
his regiment at Rouen, to retire soon from the service, and to sail in
1791 for the new United States, with dreams of distinction as the
discoverer of the Northwest Passage. He dined with George Washington,
to whom he carried a letter from a French officer, who had served in
the colonial army. The President waved aside Châteaubriand's florid
compliments, and advised him to give up his futile quest. The young
Breton wandered far into the new country, and while resting in a
clearing on the Scioto, where now is Chillicothe, Ohio, he read in an
old newspaper of the royal flight to Varennes, and of the enforced
return.