found time to settle himself and his family in the apartment on the
second floor of No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des Vosges. We shall
prowl about this historic spot when we come to explore the Marais;
just now, only this apartment and this house come under our scrutiny.
It was one of the earliest and grandest mansions of this grand square,
and took its title of Hôtel de Guéménée when that family held
possession in 1630. Ten years later one of its floors was tenanted by
Marion Delorme, whose gorgeous coach with four horses drew a crowd to
that south-eastern corner whenever she alighted, and whose dainty
rooms drew a crowd of another sort on her evenings, so much the vogue.
They were the gathering-place of the swells of her day, of dignitaries
of the court and the Church, of men famous in letters and science, all
attracted by the charm and wit and polish of this young woman. In his
"Cinq-Mars," de Vigny brings together in her _salon_, among many
nameless fine people, Descartes, Grotius, Corneille--fresh from his
latest success, "Cinna"--and a youth of eighteen, Poquelin, afterward
Molière. This is well enough, but he goes too far in his fancy for a
telling picture, and drags in Milton, shy and silent. John Milton had
long before passed through Paris, on his way home from Italy, and was
then busy over controversial pamphlets in London. Nor can the English
reader take seriously the recitation, urged on "_le jeune Anglais_,"
of passages from his "Paradise Lost"--written twenty years later--a
recitation quite comprehended by this exclusively French audience. For
the Delorme is moved to tears, and Georges Scudéry to censure, so
shocked are his religious scruples and his poetic taste! De Vigny is
surer of his stepping when on French ground, and plausibly makes
Marion a spy on the conspirators, in the pay of Richelieu. At that
time, during the construction of his Palais-Cardinal--now the
Palais-Royal--his residence was diagonally opposite No. 6, in the
northwestern corner of Place Royale. That corner has been cut through,
and his house cut away, by the prolongation of Rue des Vosges along
that side of the square. It has been said that the cardinal's hunting
to death of Cinq-Mars was less a punishment for the conspiracy against
King and State than a personal vengeance on the dandy, with a hundred
pairs of boots, who had supplanted him with Mlle. Delorme. The Marais
streets knew them both well. Cinq-Mars lived with his father in the
family Hôtel d'Effiat, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, demolished in 1882.
Marion did not pine long after his execution, but went her way gayly,
until she was driven by her debts to a pretended death and a sham
funeral, at which she peeped from these windows. She sank out of sight
of men, and died in earnest, before she had come to forty years, in
her mother's apartment in Rue de Thorigny, leaving a fortune in fine
lace and not a _sou_ in cash for her burial.
De Vigny proves his intimate acquaintance with this house, during
Hugo's residence, by his use of its back entrance for the confederates
of Cinq-Mars, making their way to Delorme's house, on the night of
their betrayal. And Dumas makes this entrance serve for d'Artagnan in
his visits to Lady de Winter and to her attractive maid.
That entrance is still in existence from Rue Saint-Antoine, by way of
the Impasse--then Cul-de-sac--Guéménée, and at its end through a small
gate into the court, and so by a back door into the house. Through
that rear entrance crowded a squad of the National Guard, from Rue
Saint-Antoine, during the street fighting of February, 1848,
intending by this route to enter the square unseen, and secure it
against the regular troops of Louis-Philippe. Some few among them
amused themselves by mounting the stairs and invading Hugo's deserted
apartment. He had gone, that day, at the head of a detachment of the
royal force, not leading it against the rioters, but lending his
influence as Peer of France to save, from its bayonets, the
fellow-rioters of the men just then intruding on his home. They did no
harm, happily, as they filed through the various rooms, and past a
child's empty cradle by the side of the empty bed. It had been the
cradle of the daughter, Adèle, and perhaps of the other babies, and
was always cherished by Madame Hugo. In a small room in the rear, that
served as Hugo's study, the leader of the band picked up some written
sheets from the table, the ink hardly dry, and read them aloud. It was
the manuscript of "Les Misérables," just then begun, but not finished
and published until 1862, when the exile was in Guernsey.
While plodding along with that great work, Hugo put forth from this
study much verse and his last plays. Here, in 1838, he wrote his final
dramatic success, "Ruy Blas," and his final dramatic failure, "Les
Burgraves," which ended his stage career. From here he went to his
_fauteuil_ in the Academy in 1841, the step to the seat of Peer of
France, accorded him by the King within a few years. Meanwhile, his
larger rooms hardly held the swelling host of his friends, and, it
must be said, his flatterers. Not Marion Delorme had more, nor
listened to them with a more open ear. Their poison became his food.
Indeed, the men who formed "_le Cénacle_," in these and other
_salons_, seemed to find their breath only in an atmosphere of mutual
admiration. Each called the other "_Cher Maître_," and all would
listen, in wistful reverence, to every utterance of the others and to
the deliverance of his latest bringing-forth, vouchsafed by each in
turn. While Lamartine, standing before the fireplace, turned on the
pensive tune of his latest little thing in verse, Hugo gazed intent on
him as on an oracle. Then Hugo would pour forth his sonorous rhymes,
his voice most impressive in its grave monotone. The smaller singers
next took up the song. No vulgar applause followed any recitation, but
the elect, moved beyond speech, would clutch the reciter's hand, their
eyes upturned to the cornice. Those not entirely voiceless with
ecstasy might be heard to murmur the freshest phrases of sacramental
adoration: "_Cathédrale_," or "_Pyramide d'Égypte_!"
There were certain minor chartered _poseurs_ in the circle. There was
Alfred de Vigny, "before his transfiguration," to whom might be
applied Camille Desmoulins's gibe at Saint-Just: "He carries his head
as if it were a sacrament." To which Saint-Just replied by the
promise, that he kept, to make Camille carry _his_ head after the
fashion of Saint-Denis. There was Alfred de Musset, who had been
brought first to the cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs by Paul
Foucher, his schoolmate and Hugo's brother-in-law. Like his
Fantasio, de Musset then "had the May upon his cheeks," and was young
and gay and given to laughter; now, old at thirty, he posed as the
bored and _blasé_ prey and poet of passion.
[Illustration: Alfred de Musset.
(From the sketch by Louis-Eugène Lami.)]
Yet there were others, by way of contrast: Dumas, fresh from his
romance-factory, full-blooded, stalwart, sane; Gautier, dropping in
from his rooms near by, at No. 8 in the square, ship-shape inside his
skull for all its mane of curling locks, and for all his eccentric
costume; Barye, coming from his simple old house at No. 4 Quai des
Célestins, sitting isolated and silent, dreaming of the superb curves
of his bronze creatures; Nodier, escaping from his Librarian's desk in
the Arsenal, the _flâneur_ of genius, with no convictions about
anything, and with generous friendships for everybody; Delacroix,
impetuous chief of the insurgents in painting, most mild-mannered of
men, his personal suavity disarming those who were going gunning for
him, because of his insurrectionary brush; Mérimée, frock-coated,
high-collared, buttoned-up, self-contained, cold and correct, of
formal English cut.
Among the guests were occasional irreverent onlookers, not deemed
worthy of admission to the inner circle, who sat outside, getting much
fun out of its antics. Such a one was Madame Ancelot, whose graphic
pen is pointed with her jealousy as a rival lion-hunter, who had
outlived her vogue of the early Restoration. Daudet's sketch of her
blue-stockinged _salon_, a faded survival of its splendors under Louis
XVIII., is as daintily malicious as is her sketch of Hugo's evenings.
Through those evenings, Madame Ancelot says, Madame Hugo reclined on a
couch, as if over-wearied by the load of glory she was helping to
carry. That lady had one relief in this new home, its doors being shut
against the ugly face of Sainte-Beuve, at the urging of the indignant
young wife. This happened in 1834, and within a few years Sainte-Beuve
gave to the world his "Book of Love," a book of hatred toward Hugo,
with its base suggestion of the wife's complaisance for the writer.
Him it hurt more than it hurt Hugo. _He_ had taken, and he still
keeps, his unassailable place in the affection, as in the admiration,
of his countrymen. There can be no need to summon them as witnesses,
yet it may be well to quote the words of two foreign fellow-craftsmen.
The Englishman, Swinburne, in his wild and untamed enthusiasm,
acclaims Hugo as a healer and a comforter, a redeemer and a prophet;
burning with wrath and scorn unquenchable; deriving his light and his
heat from love, while terror and pity and eternal fate are his
keynotes. No great poet, adds Swinburne, was ever so good, no good man
was ever so great. Heine, German by birth, scoffs at Hugo, claiming
that his greatest gift was a lack of good taste, a condition so rare
in Frenchmen that his compatriots mistook it for genius. He sees
merely a studied passion and an artificial flame in Hugo's specious
divine fire; and the product is nothing but "fried ice." And Heine
sums him up: "Hugo was more than an egoist, he was a Hugoist."
Charles Dickens describes Madame Hugo as "a little, sallow lady, with
dark, flashing eyes." Making the round of Paris with John Forster, in
the winter of 1846-47, they came to this "noble corner house in the
Place Royale." They were struck by its painted ceilings and wonderful
carvings, the old-gold furniture and superb tapestries; and, more than
all, by a canopy of state out of some palace of the Middle Ages. It is
worthy of note here that Hugo was almost the first man of his
period--a deplorable period for taste in all lands--to value and
collect antiques of all sorts. They were a fit setting for these
rooms, and for the youth and loveliness that crowded them, up to the
open windows on the old square. The young smokers among the men were
driven forth to stroll under its arcades, recalling the strollers of
Corneille's and Molière's time, albeit these were painfully ignorant
of tobacco bliss, so loud were the papal thunders against its
temptations then.
Dickens and Forster found Hugo the best thing in that house, and the
latter records the sober grace and self-possessed, quiet gravity of
the man, recently ennobled by Louis-Philippe, but whose nature was
already written noble. "Rather under the middle size, of compact,
close buttoned-up figure, with ample dark hair falling loosely over
his close-shaven face. I never saw upon any features, so keenly
intellectual, such a soft and sweet gentility, and certainly never
heard the French language spoken with the picturesque distinctness
given it by Victor Hugo."
Within the portal of the Church of Saint-Paul and Saint-Louis, in Rue
Saint-Antoine, on either side, is a lovely shell holding holy-water,
given by Hugo in commemoration of the first communion of his eldest
child, Léopoldine. In this church she and young Charles Vacquerie were
married in February, 1842. Both were drowned in August of that year.
And this is the church selected by Monsieur Gillenormand for the
marriage of Marius and Cosette, because the old gentleman considered
it "more coquettish" than the church of his parish. For he lived much
farther north in the Marais, at No. 6 Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,
where a new block of buildings has taken the place of his
eighteenth-century dwelling. For this marriage, after playing the
obdurate and irascible godfather so long, he was suddenly transformed
into a fairy godmother.
Toward the end of 1848, after the escape of Louis-Philippe, Hugo moved
to Rue d'Isly, No. 5, for a short period, and then to No. 37, now No.
41 Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne, where he remained until 1851. In the
Paris _Bottin_ during these years he is entitled--considering it,
strangely to us, his especial distinction--"_Représentant du Peuple_."
The youthful Royalist poet, the friend of Charles X., the friend later
of Louis-Philippe, had become an oracle of Democracy. He added nothing
to his honestly earned fame by his long-winded bombast in the
_Tribune_; and however genuine his attitude may have been, it appealed
almost entirely to the groundlings.
They came in crowds about this house, with flaming torches and
blaring bands, howling their windy homage. They are remembered, with
mute disapproval, by the old _concierge_ of the house, Lagoutte
Armand. With real pleasure does he recall "Monsieur Hugo," and prattle
memories of his friends like Béranger, and of his family. There were
two sons, Charles and François-Victor, the former known as "Toto," a
"_très gentil garçon_." In his _loge_, pointed out with pride by the
_concierge_, to whom it was given by Hugo, is a rare engraving of the
poet, which makes him serious, almost stern, of aspect, his mouth
showing its strength in the beardless face, his hair plastered down
about the superb brow. His head was carried always well bent forward,
and he went gravely, the old man tells us. The house is unaltered, but
the street has grown commonplace since the days when its
half-countryfied cut attracted Hugo and Béranger and Alphonse Karr.
This witty editor of "Les Guêpes," something of a _poseur_ with his
pen, had a genuine love of flowers and of women, on whom he lavished
his pet camelias and tulips. He cultivated them in the garden of the
house, now numbered 15, which he occupied in this street from 1839 to
1842. The sculptor Carrier-Belleuse is now in possession of Karr's old
rooms, and his studio covers the one-time garden. Béranger came, in
1832, to No. 31, then a small cottage behind a garden, where he lived
for three years. The bare walls of the communal school, numbered 35,
now cover the site of his home, and there are no more cottages nor
gardens in the street.
From 1851, when the _coup-d'état_ of December drove him first into
hiding and then into exile, through all the years of the empire, we
find in each year's _Bottin_: "_Hugo, Victor, Vicomte de, de
l'Institut_, . . . . ." These dots represent a home unknown to the
Paris directory; no home indeed, for there can be none for a Frenchman
beyond his country's borders. Of Hugo's dwellings during these years
nothing need be said here, save that his long residence in Guernsey
gave him his characters and colors for "Les Travailleurs de la Mer,"
and such slight acquaintance with seafaring and ships as is shown in
"Quatre-Vingt-Treize." Where he got the fantastic English details of
"L'Homme-qui-rit," no man shall ever know.
Here, too, he finished "Les Misérables," writing it, he said, with all
Paris lying before him in his mind's eye; or, as he puts it, with the
exile's longing, "_on regarde la mer, et on voit Paris_." His
topographical memory was none too accurate, and errors of slight or of
real importance may be detected in "Les Misérables." It is really in
his poetry that he has done for his "maternal city" what Balzac did
for her in prose; singing in all tones the splendor and the squalor of
"_la ville lumière_," to use his swelling phrase. Despite some errors,
and despite the pulling-about of Paris since Valjean's day, we may
still trace his flight through nearly all that thrilling night, when
Javert and his men hunted him about the southern side of the town, and
across the river from the Gorbeau tenement. This tenement, so striking
a set in many scenes of the drama, was an historic mansion run to
seed, standing just where Hugo places it--on the site of Nos. 50 and
52 Boulevard de l'Hôpital, almost directly opposite Rue de la
Barrière-des-Gobelins. Facing that street--renamed Rue Fagon in
1867--on the northern side of Boulevard de l'Hôpital, the little
market of the Gobelins replaces the squalid old shanty which gave
perilous shelter to Valjean and Cosette, and later to Marius.
From here, driven by a nameless terror after his recognition of Javert
in the beggar's disguise, the old convict started, leading Cosette by
the hand. He took a winding way to the Seine, through the deserted
region between the Jardin des Plantes and Val-de-Grâce, turning
strategically on his track in streets through which we can follow him
as easily as did Javert. He was not certain that he was followed,
until, turning in a dark corner, he caught full sight of the three men
under the light before the police-station. Hugo places this station in
Rue de Pontoise, and this is a mistake; it was then and is still in
the next parallel street, Rue de Poissy, at No. 31.
Now, Valjean turns away from the river, carrying the tired child in
his arms, and makes a long circuit around by the Collége Rollin--long
since removed to the northern boulevards--and by the lower streets
skirting the Jardin des Plantes--no longer the Jardin du Roi--and so
along the quay. He is bent, as Javert guessed, on putting the river
between himself and his pursuers. He crosses Pont d'Austerlitz, and
plunges into the maze of roads and lanes, lined with woodyards and
walls, on the northern side of the river. There Javert loses the
trail; while for us, that trail is hidden under new streets laid out
along those lanes, and under railway tracks laid down on those roads.
We come in sight of the fugitive again, as he climbs the convent wall,
drawing up Cosette by the rope taken from the street lantern. Here is
that high gray wall, stretching along the eastern side of old Rue de
Picpus, and the southern side of the new wide Avenue Saint-Mandé. This
wall--of stone, covered with crumbling plaster--is as old as the
garden of "_Les Religieuses de Picpus_," which it surrounds, and as
the buildings within, which it hides from the street. We may enter the
enclosure by the old gate at No. 35 Rue de Picpus, the very gate
through which Cosette was carried out in a basket, and Valjean borne
alive in the nun's coffin to his mock burial. About the court within,
the red-tiled low roofs of the ancient foundation peep out among more
modern buildings. Behind all these and beyond the court stretches the
garden, a portion still set aside for vegetables, and we look about
for Fauchelevent's protecting glasses for his cherished melons. What
we do find is the very outhouse, in an angle of the wall, on which
Valjean dropped; it is a shanty nearly gone to ruin, but serving still
to store the garden tools of Fauchelevent's successor.
[Illustration: The Cemetery of Picpus.]
"Near the old village of Picpus, now a part of the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, under the walls of the garden which belonged to the
Canoness of Saint-Augustin, in a bit of ground not more than thirty
feet in length, repose thirteen hundred and six victims beheaded at
Barrière du Trône, between _26 Prairial_ and _9 Thermidor_, in the
second year of the republic." This extract, from the "Mémorial
Européen" of April 24, 1809, is a fitting introduction to the small
cemetery, hid away at the very end of this convent garden. In this
snug resting-spot sleep many illustrious dead. On the wall, alongside
the iron-railed gate, under a laurel-wreath, is a tablet inscribed
with the name of "André de Chénier, son of Greece and of France," who
"_servit les Muses, aima la sagesse, mourut pour la verité_." He and
his headless comrades were carted here and thrown into trenches, when
the guillotine was busy at the Barrière du Trône, now Place de la
Nation, only a step away, in the early summer of 1794, up to the day
of Robespierre's arrest. Their mothers, widows, children, dared not
visit this great grave nor, indeed, ask where it was. In that time of
terror, grief was a crime and tears were no longer innocent. It was
only in after years that this bit of ground was bought, and walled in,
and cared for, by unforgetting survivors. Some few among them, of high
descent or of ancient family, planned for their own graves and those
of their line to come and to go, within touch of this great common
grave that held the clay of those dear to them. They bought, in
perpetuity, this bit of the convent garden on the hither side of the
gate, through which we have been looking, and it is dotted with many a
cross and many a slab. And this tiny burial-ground draws the American
pilgrim as to a shrine, for in it lies the body of Lafayette.
The sisters of the Séminaire de Picpus, who inherited the duties,
along with the domain of "_Les Religieuses_" of the eighteenth
century, devote themselves to the instruction and the training of
their young _pensionnaires_. The story of the establishment is told in
"Les Misérables," in detail that allows no retelling.
Fauchelevent had planned to carry off his tippling crony of the
Vaugirard Cemetery to the tap-room, "_Au bon Coing_," and so get
Valjean out of his coffin. To his horror, he found the drunkard
replaced by a new grave-digger, who refused to drink, and Valjean was
nearly buried alive. We will, if it please you, visit the "Good
Quince," no longer in its old quarters, for it quitted them when the
historic Cemetery of Vaugirard was closed forever. On its ground, at
the corner of Rue de Vaugirard and Boulevard Pasteur, has been built
the Lycée Buffon. To be near the then newly opened burial-ground of
Mont-Parnasse, "_Au bon Coing_" put up its sign on the front of a
two-storied shanty, at the corner of Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and Rue de
la Gaieté, a street strangely misguided in title in this joyless
neighborhood. About the bar on this corner crowd the grave-diggers and
workmen from the near-at-hand graves, and at the tables sit mourners
from poor funerals, all intent on washing the smell of fresh mould
from out their nostrils. This den is the _assommoir_ of this quarter,
swarming, noisy, noisome.
On those summer days, when Hugo used to stroll from his cottage in Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs out to the southern slopes, he discovered the
Champ de l'Alouette--a fair field bordering the limpid Bièvre, just
beyond the factory of the Gobelins. It had borne that name from
immemorial time, and was the field, as the man told Marius, where
Ulbach had killed the shepherdess of Ivry. Marius came to this green
spot that he might dream about "The Lark," after he had heard, from
his peep-hole in the wall of the Gorbeau tenement, the Thénardiers so
name his unknown lady. We, too, may walk in the Field of the Lark, its
ancient spaciousness somewhat shrunken, as with all those erstwhile fields
hereabout, of which we get glimpses along Boulevard Saint-Jacques and
other distant southern boulevards. There is a wide gateway in the high
wall that runs along stony Rue du Champ-de-l'Alouette, and we pass
through it and the court within to the bright little garden beyond,
where children are playing, guileless as Cosette. This is her field,
now shut in by great tanneries, its air redolent of leather, its
Bièvre sullied by the stains and the scum of the dye-works above. Yet,
hid away in this dreary quarter--where the broad and cheerless streets
are sultry in summer, bleak in winter, and gritty to the feet all the
year round--it is still, as Hugo aptly says, the only spot about here
where Ruysdael would have been tempted to stop, and sit, and sketch.
Among the countless American feet that tread Rue du Bac and Rue de
Babylone, on their way to the shop that is a shrine at the junction of
those two streets, there may be some few that turn into Rue Oudinot.
It is well worth the turning, if only because it has contrived to keep
that village aspect given by gardens behind walls, and cottages
within those gardens. It still bore its old name, Plumet, when General
Hugo came to live in it, that he might be near his son in Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and here he died suddenly in January, 1828. In
this house, well known to Hugo, he installed Valjean and the girl
Cosette. From this house, by its back door and by the lane between
high parallel walls, Valjean slips out unseen into Rue de Babylone. In
its front garden, under a stone on her bench, Cosette finds her
wonderful love-letter; and here is the scene of that exquisite
love-making, when Marius appears in the moonlight.