great quartette together; yet, each passing on his own way, all were
ready to reunite, at any moment, for a new deed of emprise and for the
joy of countless readers. We spare ourselves the pain of seeing them
at that cruel moment when they found themselves on opposing sides,
blade crossing blade. We take leave of Aramis, the Bishop, deep in the
intrigues dear to his plotting spirit; of Porthos, complacent in his
wealth, growing more corpulent at his well-spread table; of Athos,
sedate and dignified, content in the tranquil life of his beloved
_château_, at Blois.
And d'Artagnan? Most fitting in _his_ eyes, mayhap, would it be to
take our last look at him in the height of his glory, host of the
Hôtel de Tréville, receiving the King at his own table. We prefer,
rather, to hold him in memory just when Athos introduces his old
comrade to the assemblage at Blois, as "Monsieur le Chevalier
d'Artagnan, Lieutenant of his Majesty's Musketeers, a devoted friend
and one of the most excellent and brave gentlemen I have ever known."
The reading world echoes his words. In the whole range of fiction
there exists no gentleman more excellent and more brave!
THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO
THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO
When Madame Hugo brought her two younger boys, Eugène and Victor, to
Paris in 1808, she took a temporary lodging in Rue de Clichy, until
she found an apartment with a garden, on the southern side of the
Seine. In this part of the town, where gardens, such as she needed,
are plentiful even yet, she sought all her future abodes. Her first home
in this quarter was near the old Church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.
Victor, then six years old, could never recall its exact site, after
he grew up, and could not say if the house were still standing. This
ground-floor apartment proved to be too small for the small family;
which was soon installed, a few steps farther south, in a roomy old
house within its own garden. It was a portion of the ancient Convent
of the Feuillantines, left untouched by the Revolution, at Impasse des
Feuillantines, No. 12--an isolated mansion in a deserted corner of
southern Paris. The great garden running wild, its fine old trees, and
its ruined chapel, claimed the first place in the recollections of
Victor's boyhood; "a religious and beloved souvenir," he fondly
regarded it.
This homely paradise has disappeared; partly invaded by the aggressive
builder, and partly cut away to make room for Rue d'Ulm, called by
Hugo a "big and useless street." The greater portion of the site of
his house and garden is now covered by the huge buildings of one of
the city schools. By a curious coincidence, at No. 12 Rue des
Feuillantines--which must not be confused, as it is often confused,
with the Impasse of the same name--there stands just such an old
house, in the midst of just such gardens, shaded by just such old
trees, as Hugo describes in the pathetic reminiscences of his youth,
and as those of us remember, who saw his old home, only a few years
ago.
His childish memories went back, also, to his days at school in Rue
Saint-Jacques, not far from home; and to a night lit up by the
illumination of all Paris, in celebration of the birth of the little
King of Rome, in 1811. This was just before the sudden journey of the
three to Madrid to join General Hugo. The delineation of the boy
Marius, swaying between his clashing relatives, is a vivid drawing of
the attitude, during these and later years, of the young Victor,
leaning at times toward his Bourbonist mother, at times toward his
Bonapartist father. Of that gallant soldier, whose hunt for "Fra
Diavolo"--the nickname of a real outlaw--seems to belong rather to the
realm of fiction than of fact, one hears but little in his son's early
history. Except to send for them from Madrid, and except for his brief
appearance in Paris, during the Hundred Days, General Hugo seldom saw
and scarcely influenced these two younger sons during their boyhood.
Once more in Paris, and for awhile at the Feuillantines, we find the
devoted mother settling herself and her sons, on the last day of the
year 1813, in a roomy old building of the time of Louis XV., in Rue du
Cherche-Midi. Her rooms were on the ground floor, as usual, with easy
access to the health-giving garden, and the boys slept above. There
was a court in front, in which, during the occupation of Paris by the
Allies, were quartered a Prussian officer and forty of his men; to the
disgust of the mother, and to the joy of her boys, captivated by
soldierly gewgaws. The site of court and house and garden is covered
by a grim military prison, in which history has been made in the
closing years of the nineteenth century.
On the other side of the street, at the corner of Rue du Regard, was
and is the Hôtel de Toulouse, a seventeenth-century structure, named
for its former occupant, the Comte de Toulouse, son of Madame de
Montespan. It was used as a prison early in the nineteenth century,
and since then it has been the seat of the Conseil-de-Guerre; famous,
or infamous, in our day, as the head-quarters of the Court-Martial.
The wide façade on the court has no distinction, nor has the "Tribunal
of Military Justice" on the first floor; to which we mount by the
broad staircase at the left of the entrance-door. Above are the
living-rooms of the commandant, who was a Monsieur Foucher at that
time, with whose family, the Hugo family, already acquainted, formed
now a lasting friendship. It was this intimacy that made their home
here the brightest spot in Hugo's boyish horizon.
[Illustration: The Hôtel de Toulouse.]
When Napoleon's return from Elba brought his old officers back to
their allegiance, General Hugo hurried to Paris, and, before hurrying
away again, placed his boys in a boarding-school--the Abbaye Cordier,
in Rue Sainte-Marguerite. This was a gloomy little street, dingy with
the smoke of the smiths' forges that filled it, elbowed in among
equally narrow ways between the prison of the Abbaye--then standing
where now runs the roadway of modern Boulevard Saint-Germain--and the
Cour du Dragon. This superb relic of ancient Paris has been left
untouched, and the carved dragon above its great arched entrance looks
down, out of the past, on modern Rue de Rennes. Rue Sainte-Marguerite
has been less lucky, for such small section of it, as remained after
the cutting of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue de Rennes, is mainly
rebuilt, and renamed Rue Gozlin.
A little later, Victor was advanced to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the
college of many another Frenchman who became famous in after life,
notably of Molière. These two youths saw the same buildings of the
Lycée and studied in the same rooms; for it was demolished and rebuilt
only under the Second Empire. It stood--and the new structure
stands--in Rue Saint-Jacques, behind the Collége de France. It was
something of a stretch for youthful legs by the roundabout way between
college and home, but he plodded sturdily along, that solemn lad,
taking himself and all he did as seriously then as when he became a
Peer of France, and the self-elected Leader of a Cause.
In 1818 Madame Hugo and her boys came to a new home on the third floor
of No. 18 Rue des Petits-Augustins, in a wing of that old _abbaye_ of
the Augustin fathers, which had given its name to the street, now Rue
Bonaparte. The entrance court, on that street, of the École des
Beaux-Arts, covers the site of this wing, and the school has replaced
the rest of the monastery, saving, within its modern walls, only the
chapel built by Queen Marguerite. In the old court and the old
buildings behind, at that time, were stored tombs of French kings and
historic monuments and historic bones, removed from their original
grounds, as has been told in our Molière chapter, to save them from
mutilation at the hands of the Revolutionary Patriots. On this queer
assemblage the boys' room looked down; their mother, from her front
windows, looked down on the remains of the vast gardens of the Hôtel
de La Rochefoucauld, once a portion of the grounds of Marguerite, that
stretched to the north of Rue Visconti, between Rues de Seine and
Bonaparte. The view, so far below, could not compensate Madame Hugo
for the loss of her own garden, which meant sun and air and health.
She drooped and fell ill, and her only solace was the devotion of her
son Victor. Whenever she was able to go out, they spent their evenings
with the Foucher family, at the Hôtel de Toulouse. While the boys sat
silent, listening to the talk of their elders, Victor's eyes were
busy, and they taught him that Adèle Foucher was good to look upon.
These two children walked, open-eyed, into love, as simply and as
naturally as did Cosette and Marius; and after a brief period of storm
and stress, their marriage came in due time, and they began their long
and happy life together.
This Hugo home in Rue des Petits-Augustins, rising right in front of
all who came along Rue des Beaux-Arts, was a familiar sight to a young
Englishman, about ten years after this time. His name was William
Makepeace Thackeray, and he was lodging in this latter street among
other students of the Latin Quarter, and trying to make a passable
artist with the material given him by nature for the making of an
unsurpassable author. His way lay in front of the old _abbaye_, each
time he went to or from the schools, or his modest restaurant.
Thirion was the host of this cheap feeding-place, esteemed by art
students, on the northern side of old Rue des Boucheries; of which
this side and some of its buildings have been saved, while the street
itself has been carried away in the wider stream of Boulevard
Saint-Germain. There, at No. 160, to-day, you will find the same
restaurant, under the same name on the sign, and the same rooms,
swarming with students as during Thackeray's days in Paris.
In 1821, at the end of her term of three years in the _abbaye_, Madame
Hugo took her sons and her furniture directly up Rue Bonaparte and
turned into Rue des Mézières, and in its No. 10 they were soon settled
in a ground floor with its garden. The great new building at No. 8
stands on the site of house and court and garden. There is left, of
their day there, only the two-storied cottage on the western end of
No. 6 Rue des Mézières--then No. 8--which preserves the image of the
Hugo cottage, and brings back the aspect of the street as they saw it,
countrified with just such cottages.
Early in their residence here, Victor was honored by a summons to
visit Châteaubriand, long the literary idol of the schoolboy, who had
written in his diary, when only fourteen: "I will be Châteaubriand or
nothing!" For he had begun to rhyme already at the Cordier school, and
in his seventeenth year he had established, in collaboration with his
eldest brother, Abel, "Le Conservateur Littéraire," a bi-monthly of
poetry, criticism, politics, most of it written by Victor. It lived
from December, 1819, to March, 1821, and its scarce copies are prized
by collectors. Now the precocious boy's ode "On the death of the Duke
of Berry"--assassinated by Louvel in February, 1820, in Rue Rameau, on
the southern side of Square Louvois, then the site of the
opera-house--had fallen under the eye of Châteaubriand, who was
reported to have dubbed him "The Sublime Child." Châteaubriand denied
this utterance, in later years, but agreed to let it stand, since the
phrase had become "consecrated." It was at the door of No. 27 Rue
Saint-Dominique, then the residence of the elder author, that the
young poet knocked in those early days of his fame; and here, a little
later, he was invited by the diplomat to join his Embassy to Berlin.
Madame Hugo's health prevented the acceptance of this flattering
offer.
While still at this home in Rue des Mézières, Victor received another
honor in a call from Lamartine, the lately and loudly acclaimed author
of "Les Méditations," who was then about thirty-one years of age. In a
letter, written many years after, Lamartine described this first
meeting: "Youth is the time for forming friendships. I love Hugo
because I knew and loved him at a period of life when the heart is
still expanding within the breast.... I found myself on the ground
floor of an obscure house at the end of a court. There a grave,
melancholy mother was industriously instructing some boys of various
ages--her sons. She showed me into a low room a little apart, at the
farther end of which, either reading or writing, sat a studious youth
with a fine massive head, intelligent and thoughtful. This was Victor
Hugo, the man whose pen can now charm or terrify the world."
The grave, melancholy mother died in the early summer of 1821, and her
bereaved sons carried her body across the Place, to the Church, of
Saint-Sulpice and then to the Cemetery of Mont-Parnasse. On the
evening of that day of the burial, Victor returned to the cemetery,
and there, overcome with grief and choked by sobs, the boy of only
nineteen wandered alone for hours, recalling his mother's image and
repeating her name. Seeking blindly for some comforting presence, he
found his way, that same night, to the Hôtel de Toulouse, for a
glimpse of Adèle Foucher. Unseen himself, he saw her dancing, all
unconscious of his mother's death and his heart-breaking loss.
After weeks of wretched loneliness, young Hugo went to live, with a
country cousin just come to town, on the top floor of No. 30 Rue du
Dragon. This street is connected with the court of the same name by a
narrow passage under the houses at the western end of the court. No.
30 is still standing, a high, shabby old building, that yet suggests
its better days. In the belvedere high above the attic windows, Hugo
lived the life of his Marius, keeping body and soul together on a
slender income of 700 francs a year. Luckier than Marius, who could
only follow Cosette and the old convict in the Luxembourg Gardens,
Hugo was allowed little walks there with his adored lady, her mother
always accompanying them. This chaperonage did not prevent the secret
slipping of letters between the lovers' hands, and many of these have
been preserved for future publication.
It was at this time that the Post-office officials held up, in their
_cabinet-noir_, a letter from Hugo, offering the shelter of his one
room, "_au cinquième_," to a young fellow implicated in the conspiracy
of Saumur, and hiding from the royal police. Hugo makes this offer,
his letter explains, in pure sympathy for a misguided young man in
peril of arrest and death; his own allegiance to the throne being so
established as to permit him to give this aid with no danger to
himself and no discredit to his loyalty. The letter was copied,
resealed, sent on its way; the copy was carried to Louis XVIII., and
so moved him--_not_ in the direction meant by his officials--that he
made inquiry about its writer, and presently gave him a pension. This
incident was not known to Hugo until many years after.
Among the men who visited him in this garret was Alfred de Vigny, then
a captain in the Royal Guard, and dreaming only, as yet, of his
"Cinq-Mars." Hugo was dreaming many dreams, too, over his work, and
his brightest dream became a reality in October, 1822, when, in
Saint-Sulpice's Chapel of the Virgin--the chapel from which his mother
had been buried eighteen months earlier--was performed the Church part
of his marriage with Adèle Foucher. The wedding banquet was given at
the Hôtel de Toulouse by her father, who had been won over to this
immediate marriage, despite the delay he had urged because of the
youth of the bride and the poverty of the bridegroom.
The young couple, whose combined ages barely reached thirty-five,
found modest quarters for awhile in Rue du Cherche-Midi, near her and
his former homes, and then removed to No. 90 Rue de Vaugirard. Their
abode, cut away by the piercing of that end of Rue Saint-Placide, is
replaced by the new building still numbered 90 Rue de Vaugirard, near
the corner of Rue de l'Abbé-Grégoire.
In this first real home of his married life, Hugo produced his "Hans
d'Islande" and his "Bug Jargal"--the latter rewritten from a crude
early work--by which, poor things though they were, he earned money,
as well as by his poems, poured forth in ungrudging flood. In the
ranks of the Classicists at first, he soon fell into line with the
Romanticists, and by 1827 he was the acknowledged leader of "_La Jeune
France_." On his marriage, he had been allotted the pension, already
alluded to, of 1,500 francs yearly, by Louis XVIII., in recognition of
his Royalist rhymings, and this sum was doubled in 1823.
With their growing fortune, the young couple allowed themselves more
commodious quarters. These they found, early in 1828, in a house
behind No. 11 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a street somewhat curtailed
in its length by the cutting of Rue de Rennes, and the old No. 11 is
now No. 27. A long alley, once a rural lane between bordering trees,
leads to the modest house hidden away from the street. Quiet enough
to-day, it was quieter then, when it was really in the Fields of Our
Lady, in that quarter of the town endeared to Hugo by his several
boyhood-homes.
The long, low cottage, since divided and numbered 27 and 29, still
faces the street, just as when he first passed under its northern end
into the lane, with his young wife. She writes, in her entrancing
"Life of Victor Hugo, by a Witness": "The avenue was continued by a
garden, whose laburnums touched the windows of his rooms. A lawn
extended to a rustic bridge, the branches of which grew green in
summer." The rustic bridge, the lawn, and the laburnums are no longer
to be found, but the house is untouched, save by time and the
elements. Behind those windows of the second floor, where was their
apartment, was written "Marion Delorme," his strongest dramatic work,
in the short time between the 1st and the 24th of June, 1829; and
there he read it to invited friends, among whom sat Balzac, just then
finishing, in his own painstaking way, "Les Chouans." In October of
this year "Hernani" was written and put on the boards of the Comédie
Française, long before reluctant censors allowed "Marion Delorme" to
be played.
To these rooms came, of evenings, those brilliant young fellows and
those who were bent on being brilliant, who made the vanguard of the
Romanticists. Here was formed "_le Cénacle_," of which curious circle
we shall soon see more. Here Sainte-Beuve dropped in, from his rooms a
few doors off, at No. 19, now No. 37, Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs;
dropped in too frequently, for the "smiling critic" came rather to
smile on young Madame Hugo than for other companionship. Sometimes of
an afternoon, such of the group as were walkers would start for a long
stroll out to and over the low hills surrounding the southern suburbs,
to see the sun set beyond the plains of Vanves and Montrouge. As they
returned they would rest and quench their modest thirst in a suburban
_guinguette_ and listen to the shrill fiddling of "_la mère Saguet_."
All this and much more is told in Hugo's verse. The town has grown
around and beyond the tavern, where it stands on the southwestern
corner of Rue de Vanves and Avenue du Maine, its two stories and steep
roof and dormer windows all like an old village inn going to decay.
One day, late in 1828, Hugo started from his house for the prison of
the Grande-Force, to visit Béranger. The simple-seeming old singer,
during his nine months' imprisonment, had an "at home" every day,
receiving crowds of men eminent in politics and in letters. His
conviction made one of the most potent counts in the indictment of the
Bourbons by the populace, two years later.
It was in this way that Hugo had opportunity to study the prison, in
such quick and accurate detail, as enabled him to make that dramatic
description of the escape of Thénardier; an escape made possible, at
the last, by little Gavroche, fetched from his palatial lodging in the
belly of the huge plaster elephant on Place de la Bastille, on the
very night of his giving shelter to the two lost Thénardier boys,
whom he--the heroic, pathetic, grotesque creature--didn't know to be
his brothers any more than he knew he was going to rescue his father!
This prison had been the Hôtel du Roi-de-Sicile, away back in the
"middling ages," and had been enlarged and renamed many times, until
it came, about 1700, to Caumont, Duc de La Force, whose name clung to
it until its demolition early in the Second Empire. Taken in 1754 by
the Government, Necker made of it what was then considered a "model
prison," to please the King, and to placate himself and the
philosophers about him, righteously irate with the horrors of the
Grand-Châtelet. The Terror packed its many buildings, surrounding
inner courts, with political prisoners, and killed most of them in the
September Massacres. Its main entrance was on the northern side of Rue
du Roi-de-Sicile, near Rue Malher, recently cut. Just at the
southwestern junction of those two streets, stood--men yet living have
seen it--the _borne_ (a large stone planted beside the roadway to keep
wheels from contact with the bordering buildings), on which was hacked
off the head of the Princesse de Lamballe, as she was led from that
entrance to be "_élargie_," on the morning of September 3, 1792.
The landlady of the Hugo household had retired from trade with enough
money to buy this quiet place, set far back from this quiet street,
intending to end her days in an ideal resting-place. From the first,
her smug comfort had been violated by many queer visitors, and when
"Hernani" made its hit, there was a ceaseless procession of the
author's noisy admirers, by night and by day, on her staircase and
over her head--she had kept the ground floor for her tranquil
retreat--until the maddened woman gave Monsieur Hugo "notice to quit."
She liked her tenants, she hastened to say, she felt for the poor
young wife in _her_ loss of sleep, and, above all, she pitied her for
having a husband "who had taken to such a dreadful trade!"
So they had to move, and late in 1830, or early in 1831, they went
across the river to No. 9 Rue Jean-Goujon, where, in an isolated house
surrounded by gardens, in the midst of the then deserted and desolate
Champs-Élysées, they could be as noisy as they and their friends
chose. Soon after coming here they took their new daughter and their
last child, Adèle, to Saint-Philippe-du-Roule for her baptism, as Hugo
recalled, twenty years later, at Balzac's burial service in the same
church. But here, despite the fields that tempted to walks in all
directions, Hugo shut himself in and shut out his friends. For he was
bound, by contract with his publisher, to produce "Notre-Dame de
Paris" within a few months. With his eye for effect, he put on a
coarse, gray, woollen garment, reaching from neck to ankles, locked up
his coats and hats, and went to work, stopping only to eat and sleep.
He began his melodramatic book to the booming of the cannon of a
Parisian insurrection, and he ended it in exactly five and one-half
months, just as he had got to the last drop of ink in the bottle he
had bought at the beginning. He thought of calling this romance "What
there is in a Bottle of Ink," but gave that title to Alphonse Karr,
who used it later for a collection of stories. Goethe's verdict on
"Notre-Dame de Paris" must stand; it is a dull and tiresome show of
marionettes.
This house has gone, that street has been rebuilt, the whole quarter
has a new face and an altered aspect. After his book was finished,
Hugo hurried out to see the barricades of 1832, which he has glorified
in "Les Misérables." At this time, too--by way of contrast--he permits
a glimpse of his undisturbed home life. It is seen by a friend, who,
"ushered into a large room, furnished with simple but elegant taste,
was struck with the womanly beauty of Madame Hugo, who had one of her
children on her knee." When he saw the poet, sitting reading by the
fireside close by, "he was vividly impressed with the resemblance of
the entire scene to one of Van Dyck's finest pictures."