monarchy and in impotent adventure for the republic--give occasion for
grandiose barricade-building and for melodramatic combats. Hugo takes
us, with Marius and his fellow-students, to that labyrinth of
narrowest lanes, twisting about high bluffs of houses, that was then
to be found between the churches of Saint-Leu and Saint-Eustache. It
was a most characteristic corner of mediæval Paris, and it has, only
recently and not yet entirely, been cut away by Rue Rambuteau, and
built over by the business structures around the Halles. The street of
la Grande-Truanderie is for the most part respectabilized, that of la
Chanverie is reformed quite out of life, and la Petite-Truanderie
alone remains narrow and malodorous. But "_Corinthe_" has been carted
clean away. This was the notorious tavern, of two-storied stone, in
front of which Enjolras defended his barricade, within which
Grantaire emptied his last bottle, and in whose upper room these two
stood up against the wall to be shot. Grantaire was doubtless sketched
from his illustrious precursor and prototype, the poet, Mathurin
Régnier, who tippled and slept at a table of this squalid drinking-den
during many years, until the year 1615, when debauchery killed him too
young. His colossal and abused body carried the soul, original,
virile, and fiery, which he has put into his verse, although he has
over-polished it a bit. When this tavern--in the fields near the open
markets--was his favorite resort, it bore the sign and name,
"_Pot-aux-Roses_"; it was dedicated later "_Au Raisin de Corinthe_";
and this was soon popularly shortened to "_Corinthe_." Forty years
after his death, another true poet was born in the tall house that
rose alongside this tavern, its windows looking out over the waste
lands of the Marais, as Jean-François Regnard says in his verse. Like
young Poquelin, thirty years before, this boy played about the Halles;
then he went away to strange adventures in foreign lands with pirates
and with ladies; and came home here to write comedies, that have the
gayety and sparkle, yet not the depth, of those of Molière. Indeed,
Voltaire asserts that he who is not pleased with Regnard is not fit to
admire Molière. The seventeenth-century mansion, in which he was born,
befitted the position of his father, a rich city merchant, and it has
luckily escaped demolition, albeit brought down to base uses, as you
shall see on looking at No. 108 Rue Rambuteau. And if you hurry to
this neighborhood, you may yet find some few reminders of the scenes
of 1832. In Rue de la Petite-Truanderie is just such a tavern as was
"_Corinthe_," in its worst days. Its huge square pillars will hardly
hold up, much longer, the aged stone walls. Just here is the dark
corner where Valjean set Javert free; and in Rue Mondétour, at that
end not yet shortened and straightened into a semblance of
respectability, you may see a small sewer-mouth, direct descendant of
the grated hole, down which Valjean crawled, with Marius on his back,
to begin that almost incredible march through the tortuous sewers to
their outlet on the Seine, under Cours-la-Reine. He came out on a spit
of sand, "not very far distant from the house brought to Paris in
1824," says Hugo, who should have said 1826. His reference is to the
house popularly named "_la maison de François Ier_." It was built
by that monarch, at Moret on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau,
for his beloved sister, Marguerite de Navarre, it is believed. It was
removed, stone by stone, and re-erected on its present site in
Cours-la-Reine, where it is a delight to the lover of French
Renaissance.
Hugo was one of the earliest, among the exiles of the Empire that
ended worthily in the shame of Sedan, to be welcomed by the new
Republic on his hastening to Paris. There he remained through _l'Année
Terrible_ of the Prussian siege, with his friend Paul Meurice, a hale
veteran of letters, still in the youth of age in 1899. Paris being
once more opened, Hugo went to and fro between Brussels and Guernsey
and his own country for awhile. In 1873 he had quarters in the Villa
Montmorenci at Auteuil, we learn by a letter from him dated there. In
1874 he settled in an apartment at No. 66 Rue de La Rochefoucauld, an
airy spot at the summit of the slope upward toward Montmartre. Here he
remained a year, and in 1875 removed a little farther along this same
slope, to No. 21 Rue de Clichy, on the corner of Rue d'Athènes. His
apartment on the third floor was bright and sunny, having windows
quite around the corner on both streets, and here he lived for four
years. Much of the last two years was taken up by his new duties as
Senator, so that scant leisure was left him for literary labor; and it
was in this house that he sadly told a favorite comrade that the works
he had dreamed of writing were infinitely more numerous than those he
had found time to write. Driven from here by the unremitting invasion
of friends, admirers, strangers, men and women from all quarters of
the globe, bent on a sight of or an autograph from the only Hugo, he
took refuge in Avenue d'Eylau, away off at the other end of the town,
where only real friendship would take the trouble to follow him. He
made this last removal in 1880. This final home was as modest as any
of his childhood homes, and had just such a garden as theirs. Here he
passed five happy years, with cherished companionship within, and all
about him "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends."
[Illustration: Victor Hugo.
(From the portrait by Bonnat.)]
As a tribute to him, Avenue d'Eylau has become Avenue Victor-Hugo, and
his two-story-and-attic house--not one bit grander than the cottage
in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, in which began his literary
fame--remains unchanged under its new number 124, only its side garden
having been built over, the garden in the rear being left unspoiled.
At No. 140 of the avenue, the residence of M. Lockroy, is preserved
the original death-mask of the poet, taken by the sculptor, M. Dalou.
It is a most striking portrait, and one wishes that copies might be
permitted.
Here he died in 1885, and from here his body was carried by France to
the Panthéon, there to be placed among all her other glories by a
grateful country. Despite the ostentation of the pauper's hearse
decreed by this rich man, no more solemn and imposing spectacle has
been seen by eyes that have looked on many pageants, civil and
military, in many lands; even more impressive in the attitude of the
closely packed concourse--hushed, motionless, with bared heads--that
gazed all through that hot May day at the slow-moving _cortège_, than
in that magnificent retinue, escorting to his grave "The Sublime
Child," grown gray in the service of his country's letters.
THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS
THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS
The prehistoric savages, who settled, for safety from onslaught, on
the largest of the islands in the Seine, known to us as Île de la
Cité; the rabble of Gaulish fisherfolk, who came to camp here in
after-years; the little tribe of Parisii who later builded a fortified
hamlet on this sure ground, and bridged it with the mainland: all
these, looking, through the centuries, northwardly across the
transparent and unsullied stream, saw the flat river-bank opposite,
over beyond it a ring of low wooded hills, and between these, on
either hand, broad expanses of marsh, morass, and forest. That which
stretched to their right is our Marais. In it the veteran Camulogenus,
captaining the Parisii, hoped to mire down the Roman soldiers, once
already stuck in the mud along the Bièvre on the southern bank of the
Seine. But it is Labienus, that ablest of Cæsar's lieutenants, who
"marches with four legions to Lutetia. (This is the fortress of the
Parisii, situated on an island in the river Seine.)" And Labienus
knows the country as well as his trade, and skirts around the Marais,
and crosses the Seine at Auteuil to the solid ground he has chosen on
the plains of Grenelle. There he wins battle in the year 52 B.C., and
drives the Gauls in disorder to the high ground on which the Panthéon
now stands, and the Luxembourg Gardens lie. The Romans, in possession
of the island, rebuild the bridges, cut away by the Parisii, and
restore the town partly burned by them; a palace for the resident
Governors arises on the extreme western end of the island; and new
defences are constructed for the Gallo-Roman Lutetia. Four centuries
later, it was called his "dear and well-beloved Lutetia" by Julian,
and from that conviction he was never apostate. He loved it for its
soft air, its fair river, its honest wines coming from its own
vineyards. On the slope of its southern suburb stood out the massive
walls of the baths that bear his name; and his gardens, planted with
vines, reached to the river. Where he swam, we go dry-shod, when we
saunter through the Cluny; and we may sit, a little farther south, in
Rue de Navarre just off Rue Monge, in the stone seats of the Roman
arena, a perfect bit of loyal preservation of Lutetia.
The Romans meant to make their new town an important centre, and those
impassioned road-builders began to bring to it the highways, in the
making of which, and by means of which, they were easily masters of
their world. The Gauls had trodden footpaths through the forests and
over the marshes, and of these, the two most trodden on the northern
bank started from near the end of their only bridge, now replaced by
Pont Notre-Dame. That which went northerly to the southeastern corner
of the Halles of our Paris, there split into two branches; the one,
named the Voie des Provinces Maritimes, followed nearly the line of
present Rue Montmartre, and went, by way of Pontoise, to the
northwestern coast of Gaul; the other, named the Voie des Provinces du
Nord, ran from the Halles on a line between Rues Saint-Martin and
Saint-Denis, about where now Boulevard Sebastopol stretches. It was
the high road to Saint-Denis, Senlis, Soissons, and so away to the
north. The other main pathway turned toward the east, just above the
bridge-end, and went nearly parallel with the river-bank, along the
line of present Rue Saint-Antoine. This road, to Sens and Meaux and
thence eastwardly, was known as the Voie des Provinces de l'Est, and
later in life as the Voie Royale.
This pathway was diked by the Romans, and when sufficiently raised, it
was paved with stones. Even then it was often submerged, and the marsh
over which it went made more marshy, by frequent floods of the swollen
Seine, overwashing its slight banks; and by the ceaseless streams that
carried down through this bowl the waters of the encircling slopes of
Montmartre, Belleville, Chaumont, Ménilmontant. In our stroll through
the Marais, you will walk above one of these streams, serving as a
sewer to-day, and along the bank of still another, turned into the
Gare de l'Arsenal.
On the two sides of this raised road, bit by bit the bog was planted;
foot by foot the swamp was reclaimed; gardens were cultivated, farms
were tilled, flocks were fed; herdsmen's huts dotted the plain; on the
higher spots farmers' houses peeped from among the trees; and on the
slopes above, all around from Chaillot to Charonne, shone the white
walls of the villas--walls of marble from Italy--of great officials
and of wealthy traders. The Church came along this road from its
central seat at Sens, and, keen of eye, picked out choice sites for
chapels, convents, monasteries. Little by little the entire Marais was
levelled up as the surrounding hills were levelled down; yet keeping
so well its forests, that it gave good hiding for eight years to
Saint-Denis dodging Valerian's pursuit, until that day of the saint's
long and winding walk down the street of his name, his head carried in
his hands. This northern suburb grew more gradually, at first, than
its southern sister, whose sunny breast had enticements for gardeners
and for vine-growers. It was a strong man who woke the Marais to
unwonted life, and by his wall, encircling and securing it,
Philippe-Auguste quickened its sluggish suburban pulse into urban
animation. The northern settlements became _la Ville_, the island
being _la Cité_, and the southern suburb _l'Université_.
There was a beach or strand--_la grève_--near the middle of this
northern bank, at which were moored and unloaded the boats bringing to
the town light merchandise, such as grain, meats, stuffs, and fabrics.
All heavy goods--timber, stone, metals--came to the Port Saint-Paul,
in front of Quai des Célestins; still there under its old name, but
its old business long since gone to the bustling Port de Grenelle. On
the Grève gathered men out of place, wandering about while waiting for
work; whence comes the modern meaning of _grève_--a strike, when men
get out of place and are not anxious for a job. Here on the Grève, as
their common ground, met the men who carried goods by water from up
and down stream, and the men who carried goods by land, to and from
the provinces. They were strong and turbulent men, and they made two
mighty guilds, and these two, combined with other guilds, formed an
all-powerful confraternity. In the course of years, there came to its
head, as _Prévôt des Marchands_, that demigod of democracy, the
notable Étienne Marcel. He had his home, while living, on Place de
Grève, and in the river, when dead; to-day, in bronze he bestrides his
bronze horse between those two dwelling-places, facing the strand he
ruled and the city he tried to rule. It is he--none more worthy--who
shall marshal us on our way to the Marais.
For, when Jean II., "_le Bon_," was sent to his long captivity in
England from the field of Poictiers, won by the Black Prince in 1356,
it was the first Dauphin France had had, known later as Charles V.,
who acted as Regent in his father's absence. He was a sickly and a
studious youth, easily alarmed by the violence of these guilds, now
making one more savage assault on royal prerogatives, in a desperate
stroke to secure the right of the townsmen to rule their town. The
Dauphin was afraid of being trapped in the Louvre, and he took refuge
in the old Palace of the City. To him forces his way, one day, the
boisterous Marcel at the head of three thousand armed and howling men,
kills two of the royal marshals in the Presence, and places his own
cap of the town colors, red and blue--these were combined with the
Bourbon white to make the Tricolor, centuries later--on the head of
the terrified Dauphin, either to protect him, or in insolent token of
this new recruit to the faction. As soon as might be, the Dauphin got
away from his revolted citizens, and came back to his town only when
strong enough to hold it against them. Nor would he then trust himself
to a permanent residence in the Island-Palace, and it was allowed to
fall into disrepair through several successive reigns. Louis XII. made
partial restorations, and occasionally sojourned in his palace "in
mid-stream," that made him think of his Loire. Parliament already
owned the building then, by gift from Charles VII., and since then it
has always been known as the Palais de Justice. The returned Dauphin
took up his abode in the Hôtel d'Étampes, in the quarter of
Saint-Paul, outside Philippe-Auguste's wall; and, by successive
purchases, secured other neighboring _hôtels_ and their grounds. This
spacious _enceinte_, within its own walls, stretched from behind the
gardens of the Archbishop of Sens, on the river front, and from the
grounds of the Célestins, just east of them, on Port Saint-Paul--where
the Dauphin's new estate had a grand portal and entrance-way from the
quay and the river--away back to Rue Saint-Antoine on the north; and
from just outside the old wall, eastwardly to the open country. This
domain, and the suburbs that had grown beyond that old wall, toward
the north, now came to be embraced within a new enclosure. On the
southern side of the river there seemed no need for any enlargement
of the old enclosure.
This wall, known in history as the wall of Charles V., was partly
quite new, partly an extension or a strengthening of a wall begun by
Marcel in 1356; under the pretext of "works of defence of the kingdom
against the English," and carried on in offence of his royal master.
But before he had finished it, he came to his own end, opportunely for
everyone but himself. It is midnight of July 31, 1358, and he is
hastening, in darkness and stealth, to open his own gate of
Saint-Antoine for the entrance of the combined forces of the English
and of Charles the Bad, of Navarre. In Froissart's words: "The same
night that this should have been done, God inspired certain burgesses
of the city ... who, by divine inspiration, as it ought to be
supposed, were informed that Paris should be that night destroyed." So
they armed and made their way to Porte Saint-Antoine, "and there they
found the provost of merchants with the keys of the gates in his
hands;" and their leader, John Maillart, asked, "Stephen, what do you
here at this hour?" When Stephen told John not to meddle, John told
Stephen: "By God, you're not here for any good, at this hour, and I'll
prove it to you." And so, as his notion of proof, "he gave with an axe
on Stephen's head, that he fell down to the earth--and yet he was his
gossip." Thus died Stephen Marcel, the martyr of devotion to the
liberties of his fellow-citizens, in the eyes of many. To others of
us, he is the original of the modern patriot of another land, who
thanked God that he had a country--to sell; and his ignoble death
seems to be the just execution of a traitor. It is due to him to own
that he was a strong man, genuine and pitiless in his convictions, and
might have merited well of his town and his country, but that the good
in him was poisoned by his rapacity for power, and polluted by
personal hatred of the Dauphin. His naked body, before being thrown
into the Seine, lay exposed for days in front of the Convent of
Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, whose grounds stretched from
without the old wall, eastwardly along the northern side of Rue
Saint-Antoine. Through them was cut our present Rue Sévigné, and it
was on the spot made now by the corner of that street and Rue
Saint-Antoine, half way between the old gate and the new gate just
built by Marcel, that the crowd gathered to gaze on his corpse.
Froissart rightly claims, referring to Marcel's projected wall with
his customary delightful enthusiasm, that it was "a great deed to
furnish an arm, and to close with defence, such a city as Paris.
Surely it was the best deed that ever any provost did there, for else
it had been, after divers times, overrun and robbed by divers
occasions." It was a greater deed that was now done by Charles V., and
his Provost of Paris, Hugues Aubriot; and their new wall is well worth
a little journey along its line, easily traced on our Paris map.
We have already made a visit to Quai des Célestins, and have read the
tablet that marks the place where played Molière and his troupe, in
1645; and the other tablet that shows the site of Philippe-Auguste's
Barbeau tower, constructed toward 1200, and taking its name from the
great Abbey of Barbeau, whose extensive grounds bordered the
river-bank here. From this huge tower and its gateway, kept intact as
the starting-point at this end, the new wall turned at a right angle
to the fast crumbling old wall, and went eastwardly along the shore;
which they now banked up and planted with elms. That shore-line is now
Boulevard Morland--named from that brave colonel of chasseurs who was
killed at Austerlitz--and the land in front, as far as Quai Henri IV.,
was anciently the little Île des Javiaux, renamed Île Louvier in the
seventeenth century, when it served as a vast woodyard for the town.
The slight arm of the river that cut it off has been filled in, and
the island is now one with the mainland. At the corner of Boulevard
Bourdon--which records the name of a colonel of dragoons, who fell at
Austerlitz--the new wall turned, and followed what is now the middle
line of that boulevard to the present Place de la Bastille. Here was
the two-round-towered gateway built by Marcel, and called, as were
called all those gateways, _Bastilia_--a word of mediæval Latin,
meaning a small fortress, such as was formed by each of these gates
with its flanking towers. There were many of them opening into and
guarding the town, that of Saint-Denis being the only other one of the
size of this of Saint-Antoine; which was enlarged into the massive
fortress known to us as the Bastille.
Of all the wretched memories of the accursed old prison, we shall
awaken only one; that of Hugues Aubriot, its builder and its first
tenant. Made Provost of Paris by Charles V.--who, after his hapless
experience with Marcel, when Dauphin, would have no more Provost of
Merchants--Aubriot had many enemies among the guilds and among the
clerics. He was frank and outspoken of speech, humane to the
priest-despoiled and mob-harried Jews, for whom he had, like his royal
master, toleration if not sympathy, and to whom he returned their
children, caught and christened by force. So, on the very day of the
burial of his royal master, in September, 1380, Aubriot was arrested
for heresy, and soon sent to his own Bastille of Saint-Antoine, "_pour
faire pénitence perpétuelle, au pain de tristesse, et à l'eau de
douleur_." The Church sentence gives a poetic touch to prosaic bread
and water. Aubriot fed only a short time on these delicacies, for he
was rescued by the mob that, for the moment, idolized him, and led in
triumph to his home. That home, from which he speedily fled out of
Paris in terror of his rescuers, was given by Charles V. to this good
servant, and we may stop, just here, to look on what is left of it.
[Illustration: The Hôtel du Prévôt.]
Under an arch at No. 102 Rue Saint-Antoine, we enter Passage
Charlemagne, and go through an outer into an inner court. In its
northwestern corner is a tower containing an old-time spiral
staircase. This is the only visible vestige of the palace of the
Provost of Paris, its unseen portions being buried under, or
incorporated with, the structures of the Lycée Charlemagne, just
behind us toward the east. The boundary railing, between this college
and the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, is exactly on the line
of Philippe-Auguste's wall. From the inner or city side of that wall,
the provost's palace, with its grounds, stretched to Rue Prévôt, then
Rue Percée; that name still legible in the carved lettering on its
corner with Rue Charlemagne. In that street, behind us as we stand
here, is the southern entrance of his grounds, whose northern line was
on Rue Saint-Antoine. This tower before us has been sadly modernized
and newly painted, but its fabric is intact, with its original,
square, wide-silled openings at each of the three landing-places of
the old staircase. These openings are within a tall, slender arch, a
timid attempt at the ogival, whose bolder growth we shall see
presently in the Hôtel de Sens.
Above this arch a superimposed story, its window cut in line with the
others below, has taken the place of the battlements. On either side
the tower joins a building obviously later than it in date, although
it has been claimed that all three structures are fifteenth-century
work. The high arch and the other decorations of the tower are
undoubtedly of that time, but they are, as undoubtedly, applied over
the small stones of a much more ancient fabric. This conviction is
reinforced by the sentiment that makes us see Charles the Wise come
into this court, with his good Aubriot, enter that low door, and climb
that staircase, looking out through those windows as he mounts. In the
year of that King's death there was born a future owner of this tower
and its palace. This was Pierre de Giac, a charming specimen of the
gang that helped John of Burgundy and Louis of Orleans in their ruin
of France--the only job in which they were ever at one. Pierre de
Giac, after betraying both sides, fell into the strong clutch of the
Duke of Richmond, by whom, after torture, he was tied in a bag and
flung into the Seine. His crony, Louis d'Orléans, had possession of
this property in the closing years of the fourteenth century, when he
instituted the order of the _Porc-Épic_ in honor of the baptism of his
eldest son, Charles the Poet. The family emblem which gave its name to
this order, gave it also to this _hôtel_, to which it still clings.