the scenery familiar to Margot and to Chicot must be content with what
is left of the Old Louvre, and of the then new Renaissance Louvre as
it was known to the grandchildren of its builder, François I. Of the
old, the outer walls and the great central tower are outlined by light
stones in the darker pavement of the southwest corner of the present
court. Of the new structure, as we see it, the cold and cheerless
Salle des Caryatides lights up unwillingly to us with the brilliancy
of the marriage festival of Marguerite de France and Henri de Navarre,
as it is pictured by Dumas. This festivity followed the religious
ceremony, that had taken place under the grand portal of Notre-Dame,
for Henry's heresy forbade his marriage within. He and his _suite_
strolled about the cloisters while she went in to mass. In this hall
of the Caryatides his body, in customary effigy, lay in state after
the assassination. There is no change in these walls since that day,
except that a vaulted ceiling took the place, in 1806, of the original
oaken beams, which had served for rare hangings, not of tapestries,
but of men. The long corridors and square rooms above, peopled
peaceably by pictures now, echoed to the rushing of frightened feet on
the night of Saint Bartholomew, when Margot saved the life of her
husband that was and of her lover that was to be. Hidden within the
massive walls of Philippe-Auguste's building is a spiral stairway of
his time, connecting the Salle des Sept Cheminées with the floor
below, and beneath that with the cumbrous underground portions of his
Old Louvre. As one gropes down the worn steps, around the sharp turns
deep below the surface, visions appear of Valois conspiracy and of the
intrigues of the Florentine Queen-Mother.
Here the wily creature had triumphed at last after waiting through
weary years of humiliated wifehood; passed, such of them as Henri II.
was willing to waste in Paris far from his beloved Touraine, in the
old Palais des Tournelles. We shall visit, in another chapter, that
residence of the early kings of France, when they had become kings of
France in more than name.
After the accidental killing of Henry at the hand of Montmorency in
the lists of this palace, his widow urged its immediate destruction,
and this was accomplished within a few years. One portion of the site
became a favorite duelling-ground, and it was here--exactly in the
southeastern corner of Place des Vosges, where now nursemaids play
with their charges and romping schoolboys raise the dust--that was
fought, on Sunday, April 27, 1578, the duel, as famous in history as
in the pages of Dumas, between the three followers of the Duc de Guise
and the three _mignons_ of Henri III. Those of the six who were not
left dead on the ground were borne away desperately wounded. The
instigator of the duel, Quélus--"_un des grands mignons du roy_"--lay
for over a month, slowly dying of his nineteen wounds, in the Hôtel de
Boissy, hard by in Rue Saint-Antoine, which the King had had closed to
traffic with chains. By his bedside Henri spent many hours every day,
offering, with sobs, 100,000 francs to the surgeon who should save
him.
Not far from this house of death, in Rue Saint-Antoine too, was a
little house, very much alive, for it belonged to Marguerite--Navarre
only in name--to which none may follow her save the favored one to
whom her latest caprice has given a nocturnal meeting. She is carried
there, under cover of her closed litter, whenever her mother, never
her husband, shows undue solicitude concerning her erratic career.
In the same street, on the corner of Rue Sainte-Catherine, now
Sévigné--where stand new stone and brick structures--was the town
house of the Comte de Monsoreau. To this house, says Brantôme, Bussy
d'Amboise, done with Margot, was lured by a note written by the
countess, under her husband's orders and eyes, giving her lover,
Bussy, his usual _rendezvous_ during the count's absence. _This_ time
the count was at home, with a gang of his armed men; and on this
corner, on the night of August 19, 1579, the gallant was duly and
thoroughly done to death, not quite so dramatically as Dumas narrates
it in one of his magnificent fights.
This Rue Saint-Antoine was, in those days, hardly less of a bustling
thoroughfare than in our days, albeit it was then a country road,
unpaved, unlighted, bordered by great gardens with great mansions
within them, or small dwellings between them. Outside Porte
Saint-Antoine--that gate in the town wall alongside the Bastille where
now is the end of Rue de la Bastille--on the road to Vincennes, was La
Roquette, a _maison-de-plaisance_ of the Valois kings. Hence the title
of the modern prisons, on the same site. It was a favorite resort of
the wretched third Henry, that shameless compound of sensuality and
superstition; and it was on his way there, at the end of Rue de la
Roquette, that the vicious little lame Duchesse de Montpensier had
plotted to waylay him, and to cut his hair down to a tonsure with the
gold scissors she carried so long at her girdle for that very use. He
had had two crowns, she said--of Poland and of France--and she meant
to give him a third, and make a monk of him, for the sake of her
scheming brother, the Duc de Guise. The plot was betrayed, just as
Dumas details, by one Nicolas Poulain, a lieutenant of the Prévôt of
the Île de France, in the service of the League.
Gorenflot's priory--a vast Jacobin priory--was on the same road, just
beyond the Bastille. To visit him out here came Chicot, almost as
vivid a creation in our affections as d'Artagnan. Once, when the fat
and esurient monk was fasting, Chicot tormented him with a description
of their dinner awhile ago, near Porte Montmartre, when they had teal
from the marshes of the Grange Batelière--where runs now the street
of that name--washed down with the best of Burgundy, _la Romanée_.
These two dined most frequently and most amply, at "_La Corne
d'Abondance_"--a _cabaret_ on the east side of Rue Saint-Jacques,
opposite the cloisters and the gardens of Saint-Benoît, where the boy
François Villon had lived more than a century before. Either of the
two shabby, aged hotels, still left at one corner of the old street
may serve for Chicot's pet eating-place. His dwelling was in Rue des
Augustins, now Rue des Grands-Augustins. Where that street meets the
quay of the same name, is a restaurant dear to legal and medical and
lay _gourmets_, where those two noble diners would be enchanted to
dine to-day. Near Chicot's later dwelling in Rue de Bussy--now spelt
"Buci"--was the inn, "The Sword of the Brave Chevalier," which served
as the meeting-place of the Forty-five Guardsmen, on their arrival in
Paris. You may find, in that same street, the lineal descendant of
that inn, dirty and disreputable and modernized as to name, but still
haunted for us by those forty-five gallant Gascon gentlemen.
The striking change of atmosphere, from the Valois court to the
regency of Marie de' Medici and the reign of the two great cardinals,
is shown clearly in the pages of Dumas, with his perhaps unconscious
subtlety of intuition. We greet with delight the entrance into Paris
of a certain raw Gascon youth mounted on his ludicrously colored
steed, and we are eager to follow him to the _hôtel_ of the Duc de
Tréville in Rue du Vieux-Colombier. This street stretches now, as
then, between Place de Saint-Sulpice and Place de la Croix-Rouge, but
it has been widened and wholly rebuilt, and the courtyard that bustled
with armed men, and every stone of de Tréville's head-quarters, have
vanished.
The _hôtel_ of his temporary enemy, Duc de La Trémouille, always full
of Huguenots, the King complained, was in Rue Saint-Dominique, at No.
63, in that eastern end cut away by Boulevard Saint-Germain. This had
been the Trémouille mansion for only about a century, since the
original family home had been given over to Chancellor Dubourg. Built
by the founder of the family, Gui de La Trémoille--as it was then
spelt--the great fighter who died in 1398, that superb specimen of
fourteenth-century architecture, with additions late in the fifteenth
and early in the sixteenth centuries, stood at the corner of Rues des
Bourdonnais and de Béthisy--two of the oldest streets on the north
bank--until the piercing of Rue de Rivoli in 1844 compelled its
destruction. Fragments of its fine Gothic carvings are set in the wall
of the court of No. 31 Rue des Bourdonnais, a building which occupies
a portion of the original site. On the front of this house is an
admirable iron balcony of later date. And just above, at No. 39 of
this street, over the entrance gate of the remaining wing of another
mediæval mansion, is a superbly carved stone mask of an old man with a
once gilded beard.
It was the new Hôtel La Trémouille, on the south side of the river,
not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, that was nearly wrecked by de
Tréville's guardsmen, running to the rescue of d'Artagnan on that
morning of his duel with Bernajoux, and of his danger from the
onslaught of de La Trémouille's retainers.
That duel ought to be good enough for us, but we have a hankering for
the most dramatic and delightful of all duels in fiction. To get to
its ground, we may follow either of the four friends, each coming his
own way, each through streets changed but slightly even yet, all four
coming out together at the corner of Rues de Vaugirard and Cassette;
where stands an ancient wall, its moss-covered coping overshadowed by
straggling trees, through whose branches shows the roof of a chapel.
It is the chapel, and about it are the grounds, of the Carmes
Déchaussés. A pair of these gentry, sent by Pope Paul V., had appeared
in Paris in the year of the assassination of Henri IV., and drew the
devout to the little chapel they built here in the fields. The order
grew rapidly in numbers and in wealth, acquiring a vast extent of
ground; roughly outlined now by Rues de Vaugirard, du Regard, du
Cherche-Midi and Cassette. The corner-stone of the new chapel, that
which we see, was laid by the Regent Marie de' Medici on July 26,
1613. Beyond its entrance, along the street, rise modern buildings;
but behind the entrance in the western end of the wall, near Rue
d'Assas, stands one of the original structures of the Barefooted
Carmelites. This was used for a prison during the Revolution, and no
spot in all Paris shows so graphic a scene of the September Massacres.
Nothing of the prison has been taken away or altered. Here are the
iron bars put then in the windows of the ground floor on the garden
side. At the top of that stone staircase the butchers crowded about
that door; out through it came their victims, to be hurled down these
same steps, clinging to this same railing; along these garden walks
some of them ran, and were beaten down at the foot of yonder dark
wall. This garden has not been changed since then, except that a large
portion was shorn away by the cutting of Rues d'Assas and de Rennes
and the Boulevard Raspail.
The narrow and untravelled lane, now become Rue Cassette, and the
unfrequented thoroughfare, now Rue de Vaugirard, between the monastery
and the Luxembourg Gardens--which then reached thus far--met at just
such a secluded spot as was sought by duellists; and this wall, intact
in its antique ruggedness, saw--so far as anybody or anything saw--the
brilliant fight between five of Richelieu's henchmen, led by the keen
swordsman Jussac, and Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, aided by the
volunteered sword of d'Artagnan; the sword he had meant to match
against each one of the three, at whose side he found himself fighting
in the end. And so, cemented by much young blood, was framed that
goodly fellowship, of such constancy and vitality as to control kings
and outwit cardinals and confound all France, as the lover of Dumas
must needs believe!
Not only the duelling ground, but many of the scenes of "The Three
Musketeers" are to be looked for in this quarter, near to de
Tréville's dwelling; where, too, the four friends, inseparable by
day, were not far apart at night, for they lived "just around the
corner," one from the other.
[Illustration: The Wall of the Carmelites.]
Athos had his rooms, "within two steps of the Luxembourg," in Rue
Ferou, still having that name, still much as he saw it. Those few,
whom the taciturn Grimaud allowed to enter, found tasteful furnishing,
with a few relics of past splendor; notably, a daintily damascened
sword of the time of François I., its jewelled hilt alone worth a
fortune. The vainglorious Porthos would have given ten years of his
life for that sword, but it was never sold nor pledged by Athos.
Porthos, himself, lived in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, _he used to say_;
and he gave grandiloquent descriptions of the superb furniture and
rich decorations of his apartment. Whenever he passed with a friend
through this street, he would raise his head and point out the
house--before which his valet, Mousqueton, was always seen strutting
in full fig--and proudly announce, "_That_ is my abode." But he never
invited that friend to enter, and he was never to be found at home. So
that one is led to suspect that his grand apartment is akin to his
gorgeous corselet, having only a showy front and nothing behind! We
know that his "fine lady," his "duchess," his "princess"--she was
promoted with his swelling mood--was simply a Madame Coquenard, wife
of a mean lawyer, living in Rue aux Ours. That dingy street, named
from a corruption of the ancient "_Rue où l'on cuit des oies_,"
between Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, has been partly cut away by
Rue Étienne-Marcel; but its tall, hide-bound, tight-fisted houses,
that are left, make vivid to us those scrimped Sunday dinners, at
which Porthos was famished even more than the already starved
apprentices; and bring home to us his artful working on the lady's
credulous infatuation, that he might get his outfit from her
husband's strongbox.
The wily Aramis let his real duchess pass, with his friends, for the
niece of his doctor, or for a waiting-maid. She was, indeed, a _grande
dame_, beautiful and bold, devoted to political and personal intrigue,
the finest flower of the court of that day. Marie de Rohan, Duchesse
de Chevreuse, known as "_la Frondeuse Duchesse_," was the trusted
friend of Anne of Austria, and the active adversary of Richelieu and
of Mazarin, and exiled from Paris by each in turn. She plays as busy a
rôle in history as in Dumas. The daughter of Hercule de Rohan, Duc de
Montbazon, and the wife of Charles d'Albert, Duc de Luynes, and, after
his death, of Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse, this zealous
recruit of the Fronde naturally had her "fling" in private as well as
in public life. Her Hôtel de Chevreuse et de Luynes was one of the
grandest mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, as it originally
stood at No. 31 Rue Saint-Dominique. The cutting of Boulevard
Saint-Germain, leaving it No. 201 of that boulevard, has shorn off its
two wings and its great front court. The main body, which remains, is
impressive in the simple, stately dignity stamped on it by Mansart,
who gave to it his own roof. Its first-floor _salons_ and chambers,
lofty and spacious, glow with the ornate mouldings and decorations of
that period, mellowed by the sombre splendors of its tapestries. Much
of the garden--once a rural park within city limits--has been cut away
by Boulevard Raspail, but from that street one sees, over the new
boundary wall, wide-spreading trees that strike a welcome note of
green amid surrounding stone. The latest _Bottin_, with no room for
romance within its covers, gives the Comtesse de Chevreuse as tenant
of the house, along with other tenants, to whom she lets her upper
floors.
Aramis was not a guest at that mansion, his rôle being that of her
host at his own apartment; daintily furnished and adorned, in harmony
with his taste and that of his frequent visitor. His comrades in the
troop had infrequent privilege of admission. His apartment, on the
ground floor, easy of entrance, was in Rue de Vaugirard, just east of
Rue Cassette, and his windows looked out on the Luxembourg Gardens
opposite. There were three small rooms, communicating, and the bedroom
behind gave on a tiny garden, all his own, green and shady and well
shut in from prying eyes. The whole place forms a most fitting
_entourage_ for the youthful priest who, after this episode of arms
and of intrigue, was to rise so high in the Church, and who has always
been, to all readers, the least congenial of the four musketeers.
To the most sympathetic of them, d'Artagnan, dearer to us than all the
others, we are eager to turn. The real d'Artagnan of history, who
succeeded de Tréville in command of the Guards, has left his memoirs,
possibly written by another hand under his guidance. They are
commonplace and coarse, broad as well as long, and leave us with no
distinct portrait of the man. Our d'Artagnan, bodied forth from that
ineffective sketch by the large brush that never niggled, might serve
as an under-study for Henri IV.; equally brave and resourceful,
equally buoyant in peril and ready in disaster; with the same
guileless and ingenuous candor that covered and carried off the
craftiness beneath. The Gascon, no less than the Béarnais, was master
of the jaunty artlessness of an astute and artful dodgery, a
_fausse-bonhomie_ that is yet delicious and endears them both to us.
Stroll down Rue Servandoni, in its short length from Rue de Vaugirard
to Rue Palatine against Saint-Sulpice Church--the architect of whose
western towers, Servandoni, gave his name to this street--and you will
not fail to find, among the old houses still left, one which might
have sheltered d'Artagnan during his early days in de Tréville's
troop. This street was then known as Rue des Fossoyeurs, and, still as
narrow though not quite so dirty as in d'Artagnan's day, has been
mostly rebuilt. His apartment--"a sort of garret," made up of one
bedroom and a tiny room in which Planchet slept--was at the top of a
house, given as No. 12 and No. 14 in different chapters, owned by the
objectionable and intrusive husband of the beloved Constance. For her
sake, d'Artagnan remains in these poor rooms, and there his three
friends say good-by to Paris and to him, now lieutenant of the famous
troop.
"Twenty Years After" we find our friend, but slightly sobered by those
years, in search of a good lodging and of a good table. He fell on
both at the inn, "_La Chevrette_," kept by the pretty Flemish
Madeleine, in Rue Tiquetonne. Once a path on the outer side of the
ditch, north of the town-wall, named for Rogier Tiquetonne, or
Quinquetonne, a rich baker of the fourteenth century, that narrow
curved street is, still, as to most of its length, a village highway
in the centre of Paris. Its tall-fronted houses rise on either hand
almost as he saw them. Among them is the Hôtel de Picardie, and it is
out of reason to doubt that d'Artagnan, in memory of Planchet--for
Planchet came from Picardy--was attracted by the name and made search
therein for suitable rooms. Or, it may please our fancy to believe
that this inn bore then the sign of The Kid, and that the kindly
hostess changed its name, later, in memory of Planchet, grown
prosperous and rich.
D'Artagnan, mounting still higher in rank and income while here, went
down lower in the inn; and one fine morning said to his landlady:
"Madeleine, give me your apartment on the first floor. Now that I am
captain of the Royal Musketeers, I must make an appearance;
nevertheless, still keep my room on the fifth story for me, one never
knows what may happen!"
Good Master Planchet, sometime valet, and lifelong friend of the great
d'Artagnan, turned grocer, and lived over his shop at the sign of "_Le
Pilon d'Or_," in Rue des Lombards. This had been a street of bankers
and money-dealers in the outset, and it was named, to alter De
Quincey's ornate reference to another Lombard Street, after the
Lombards or Milanese, who affiliated an infant commerce to the matron
splendors of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. When the financial
centre went westward, this street was invaded by the grocers and
spice-dealers, who hold it to this day. Its narrow length is still
fragrant with the descendants of the spices in which Planchet traded,
and of the raisins into which d'Artagnan plunged his hands so
greedily.
[Illustration: Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hôtel de Picardie.]
To those of us who go through the short and stupid Rue de la Harpe of
our Paris, it is puzzling to read of its re-echoing with the ceaseless
clatter of troopers riding through. But in those old days, and up to a
comparatively recent date, it was one of the important arteries of
circulation between the southern side of the town and the Island; the
most frequented road between the Louvre and the Luxembourg, when they
were both royal residences. It started from the little open _place_,
now enlarged and boasting its fountain, where Rue Monsieur-le-Prince
comes out opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, and curved down to the
river-bank, and to the first Pont Saint-Michel. It was the only long,
unbroken thoroughfare to the west of Rue Saint-Jacques, that street
leading to Petit-Pont, and so across the Island to Notre-Dame Bridge.
So Rue de la Harpe was a crowded highway, bordered by busy shops. Its
western side was done wholly away with by the cutting of Boulevard
Saint-Michel, and that broad boulevard has usurped the site of most of
the old street; its eastern side saved only in that section along the
Cluny garden.
D'Artagnan, while living on the left bank in his early days, made his
way by this street to visit his flame Lady de Winter. That dangerous
adventuress is domiciled by Dumas at No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des
Vosges, the number of the house still the same. It is a historic
house, and its story is told in our Hugo pages. Dumas was one of the
frequenters of Hugo's apartment there, and made use of it and its
approaches in "The Three Musketeers."
When Athos came to town, in later years, it was his custom to put up
at the _auberge_, "_Au Grand Roi Charlemagne_," in Rue Guénégaud; a
street bearing still its old name, but the inn has gone. So, too, has
gone the sign of The Fox, in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, where he found
quarters for himself and his son Bragelonne, twenty years after. He
brought the youth here, to the scenes of his own youth, hoping to
launch him in a like career of arms.
From there, the two went, one night, across the river to a house in
the Marais, known to all the footmen and sedan-chairmen of Paris, says
Dumas; a house not of a great lord or of a great lady, and where was
neither dancing, dining, nor card-playing; yet it was the favorite
resort of the men best worth knowing in Paris. It was the abode of
"_le petit Scarron_." About his chair, wherein he was held helpless by
his paralysis, met especially the enemies of Mazarin, the witty and
lewd rhymesters of the Fronde--not one of them as witty or as lewd as
was the crippled host. Yet some _soupçon_ of decency had been brought
into his house by his young wife; the poor country girl of sixteen,
Françoise d'Aubigné, who accepted the puny paralytic of forty and
more, rather than go into a convent. After his death she became Madame
de Maintenon, and later Queen of France, by her secret marriage with
Louis XIV., as old and almost as decrepit as was her first husband.
Dumas has brought Scarron to this house a few years later than history
warrants, and he places the house in Rue des Tournelles, while it was
really a short step from there, being at the corner of Rues des
Douze-Portes and de Saint-Louis, now Rue Turenne. We shall visit it in
our final stroll.