course of the new town wall along the curve of the inner boulevards,
to Porte Saint-Denis; whence it took a straight southwesterly course,
parallel with present Rue Aboukir, through Place des Victoires and the
Bank of France, and diagonally across the gardens of the Palais-Royal,
to the gate of Saint-Honoré, nearly in the centre of our Place du
Théatre-Français. It was this gate and its protecting works that were
pounded by the "_canons et coulevrines_" of Joan of Arc, and it was
this portion of the wall which was assaulted by her at the head of her
men; an assault that would have succeeded, and so have given Paris to
the French, had she not been struck down by a crossbow bolt, so
striking panic to her followers. When you post your letters in the
outside southern box of the Post-office on the corner of Avenue de
l'Opéra and Place du Théâtre-Français, or when you look in at the
incubating chickens in the shop window alongside, you are standing, as
near as may be, on the spot where she fell wounded on September 8,
1429. Her tent was pitched, and her head-quarters fixed, on the outer
slope of the Butte des Moulins, a few feet north of where now stands
the apse of the Church of Saint-Roch. From Porte Saint-Honoré, the
wall went direct, across present Place du Carrousel, to the round Tour
de Bois on the river-shore, and from that tower a chain was swung
slantwise up-stream to the Tour de Nesle on the southern bank.
This great wall, when quite finished, was an admirable example of
mediæval mural masonry. Besides its round gate-towers, it was
strengthened by many square towers, and was crenellated, and had
frequent strong sentry-boxes and watch-towers between the battlements.
On the outside was a wide, deep ditch bank-full of water. All stood
intact until partly levelled by Louis XIII. in 1634, and entirely so
by Louis XIV. in 1666, during which thirty years the popular pun had
run: "_Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant._" It was about 1670
that the boulevards were laid out over the foundations of the wall,
its ditch filled in, and trees planted. Two of the gates were kept,
enlarged, and made into triumphal arches; and these Portes Saint-Denis
and Saint-Martin stand there to-day, dingy memorials of Ludovican
pride and pomposity. A century later, in 1770, every trace of wall and
moat was wiped away, the driveway was partly paved, and building
began; but it was not until 1830 that sidewalks were made, and that
grand mansions replaced the former shabby structures. We cannot put
hand on any stone of the wall itself, to-day.
Within the _enceinte_ thus made, our Marais was at length entirely
enclosed; away from its river-front, bordered by abbeys and
monasteries; through its streets, walled off by palaces and mansions;
and its other streets, packed with modest dwellings and shops; far
back to the gardens and the vineyards, and the waste fields not yet
tilled, that spread all around the inner zone of the wall. Within it,
too, was brought the vast domain of the Templars, covering the space
from this outer wall away south to Rue de la Verrerie, and between
Rues du Temple and Vieille-du-Temple. It was partly under cultivation,
partly left wild to forest and bog, this portion being known as the
Marais du Temple. Farther north were the buildings--palaces, priories,
chapels--all secure within their own crenellated wall, all commanded
and defended by the moated and towered citadel known as the Temple.
The order had been founded early in crusading days, in the beginning
of the twelfth century, by nine French gentlemen and knights, who,
clad in white robes marked with a red cross, devoted themselves to the
service and the safety of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Louis VII. gave
them this waste land late in the same century. The small godly body,
vowed to poverty and humility, grew large in numbers and appetite,
great in wealth and pride. Its knights were equal with princes, its
monks were bankers for kings, and all had become simply a gang of
sanctimonious brigands. A Capet saw the birth of the order, a Capet
thought it time to strangle it as it neared its two-hundredth
birthday. Philippe IV., "_le Bel_," less solicitous for the genuine
faith than for the good coin of the Templars, laid hands on them and
on it. He got rid of them by axe and stake and in other ways approved
of in that day, and parcelled out their lands; through which streets
were cut later, and building begun, when this new wall put them on its
safe side.
With the later history of the Temple we cannot concern ourselves, save
to say that it long served as a sanctuary, later as a prison, and that
its last stone was plucked away, six and a half centuries after it was
laid, early in the nineteenth century. The palace of the Grand Prior
stood exactly on the Rue du Temple front of the present Square du
Temple. That little garden was his garden, and on its other edge, just
at the junction of Rues des Archives and Perrée of to-day, rose the
Tower, so famous and so infamous in prison annals.
Safely settled in his Hôtel Saint-Paul, within his own wall--Marcel
quiet in his grave at last, the nobles curbed, the Jacquerie
crushed--the young Dauphin, who had been weak and dissembling, and who
was now grown, by long apprenticeship to his trade of royalty, into
the strong, prudent, politic Charles V., known in history as Charles
the Wise, made proclamation, on his accession in 1364, that
this--"_l'hôtel solennel des grands ébastements_"--should be
henceforth the royal residence. In the old Palace on the Island was
held the official court; the Louvre, partly rebuilt and brightened by
him, was kept for the occasional "_séjour, souper, et gîte_" of roving
royalty. Here in "Saint-Pol" was his home, from whose windows he
looked out, with keen, patient, far-sighted vision, over the Paris and
the France he had quelled and tranquillized.
The Hôtel Saint-Paul was a town in itself, of many mansions, big and
little, of _châteaux_ with their parks, of farms with gardens, of
orchards, fish-ponds, fowl-houses, a menagerie. Sauval goes with gusto
into details of the buildings and their apartments, the decorations,
furniture, and pavements; and the chronicle is appetizing of the
dinners and banquets given to embassies and to honored visitors.
Withal, pigeons perched on the carved balustrades, and guards lay on
straw in the halls. It was a simple patriarchal life led here by
Charles the Wise, and here begun by his son, Charles the Silly. A
pretty, light-minded child of eleven, on his father's death, he
remained a child through his dissolute and diseased early manhood, and
through his later years of spasmodic madness and of intermittent
reason, to his old age of permanent childishness.
While in Paris, this was his abode, and here he was left, almost a
prisoner to unconcerned servants, by his shameless wife, Isabeau de
Bavière. When she saw him, once in a way, he looked on her with
unknowing eyes, or with knowing eyes of horror. His only companion was
the low-born Odette de Champdivers, and with her he played the cards
that untrue tradition claims to have been invented for him. He prowled
about these halls, in filthy rags, eaten by ulcers and vermin, gnawing
his food with canine greed; he ranged through these grounds, finding
fellowship with the animals that were not let loose, but kept in
cages. You may hunt up the stone walls of those cages--originally on
pointed arches with short Romanesque pillars--and the stone
foundations of the royal stables, in the yards on the southern side of
Rue des Lions; a street whose name tells of these menageries, and that
seems to echo with their roarings. The alleyway of cherry-trees now
makes Rue de la Cerisaie, and Rue Beautreillis replaces the green
tunnels of vines on trellises, where were gathered the grapes--good as
are those of Thomery to-day--which produced the esteemed _vin de
l'hôtel Saint-Paul_. Along the farther edge of its grounds, just under
the old wall, ran the lane that is now Rue des Jardins; and Rue
Charles V. keeps alive the memory of the founder of Saint-Paul. In all
these streets, we are treading on the ground he loved.
After the wretched mad king died here in 1422, royalty came no more to
the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and the place ran to waste. It was no home for
the new Dauphin, come to his kingdom as Charles VII., by the grace of
Joan of Arc and of God. His boyish memories were of a dreary
childhood, between a mad father, a devilish mother who had hated him
from his birth, and princely relatives raging and wrestling over those
two for the power to misgovern France. Outside the royal madhouse,
Paris was a butcher-shop. Burgundians and Armagnacs were howling crazy
war-cries in every street, ambuscading and assassinating at every
corner, equally thirsty for blood, but both surpassed in that thirst
by the butchers and horse-knackers, led by Jean Caboche and called
Cabochians. All these factions, while intent solely on bloodshed, were
loud-mouthed with loyalty and patriotism. They were all alike, and we
may transfer to them and to their times the apt phrase of Joseph de
Maistre, concerning the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew: "_Quelques
scélérats firent périr quelques scélérats._" Almost every leader of
men in those days came to his end by arms and in arms, and death by
violence seemed the natural death. The town was a shambles; corpses,
mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the
streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black-death
and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came
marching on; the while _la danse Macabre_ whirled about the tombs in
all the cemeteries.
On the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Hôtel
Saint-Paul, stretched the grounds of the old _hôtel_ of Pierre
d'Orgemont, Bishop of Paris. This property had come to the crown by
purchase or by gift, and had been partly torn down, rebuilt, and its
grounds greatly enlarged, to make a _maison-de-plaisance_ for Charles
VI. The principal building had so many and such various shaped towers
and turrets that it was named the Palais des Tournelles. Viewed from a
distant height, as from the tower of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo, it had
the look of a set of giant chessmen. This was the place selected by
the Duke of Bedford for his residence during the English occupation of
Paris; and from here, after the death of his brother Henry V. of
England--and heir of France, as was then claimed--he reigned as Regent
for the little Henry VI. He enlarged the buildings and beautified the
grounds, in which he kept many rare birds. He kept, too, the rare
manuscripts brought together by Charles V. in the Louvre; and after
his death in Rouen--where he had helped burn The Maid--this library
was carried to England, when the English departed from France. It was
ransomed with coin, and brought back to Paris, by the two grandsons of
its original owner--Charles of Orleans, and his brother of Angoulême,
and became the nucleus of the Royal, now the National Library.
So, when the sentries in English uniforms had gone from the gates, and
the archers in Lincoln green were seen no more in the streets, Charles
VII. came back, made King of France by The Maid who had found him King
of Bourges, and whom he let the English burn for her pains. He entered
Paris in November, 1437, nearly twenty years after he had been carried
out from the town in the arms of Tanneguy Duchâtel. That quick-witted
provost, discovering that the Burgundians had got into the town by the
betrayed Porte de Buci, on the night of Saturday, May 28, 1418, had
hastened to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, had wrapped the sleeping boy in his
bedclothes, and had carried him up Rue Saint-Antoine to the Bastille,
and out into the country on the following day, and so to Melun, where
the King's son was safe.
During this first short stay of three weeks, the listless and sluggish
young King grew as fond as had been the Duke of Bedford of the
walled-in grounds of the Tournelles. They were very extensive,
covering the space bounded by present Rues Saint-Antoine,
Saint-Gilles, Turenne, and Boulevard Beaumarchais. Within this vast
enclosure were many buildings and outbuildings, and in the words of
Sauval: "_Ce n'étoit que galeries et jardins de tous côtés, sans
parler des chapelles._"
And henceforth, for more than a hundred years, the Tournelles, "_pour
la beauté et commodité du dit lieu_," was the favored abode of
royalty, when royalty favored Paris with infrequent visits. The sombre
shapes of Louis XI. and his ignoble comrades darkened its precincts,
at times. When he made his entry, already narrated, into the town
after his coronation at Rheims, he passed the night of August 31,
1461, in the old Island-Palace, and on the following day he installed
himself in "_son hôtel des Tournelles, près la Bastille de
Saint-Antoine_." Here he received, in September, 1467, a visit from
his second wife, Charlotte de Savoie, who came up the river from
Rouen. She was met, below the Island, by a boatful of choristers, who
"sang psalms and anthems after a most heavenly and melodious manner."
She landed on the Island, performed her devotions at Notre-Dame, and
took boat to the water-gate of Quai des Célestins opposite, and thence
made her way on a white palfrey to the Tournelles. The King's
physician, Dr. Coictier--most skilled in bleeding, in all possible
ways, his royal patient--had an astrological tower in the grounds, and
in the centre was a maze named "_Le Jardin Dædalus_." About these
grounds Louis prowled, seldom going beyond them, and then only by
night, and with one trusted gossip. Indeed, he was less like the King
of France here in his palace than anywhere else; camping rather than
residing, with a small retinue of old Brabant servitors, and a larder
filled mostly with cold victuals, says Michelet. It was Loches
occasionally, and Plessis-les-Tours habitually, that had the pleasure
of harboring the "universal spider"; in them both he spun his webs,
and waited gloating, and found "many cockroaches under the King's
hearthstone," as the saying went. And at last he died, triumphant and
wretched, at Plessis-les-Tours.
"_Le Petit Roi_," Charles VIII., hardly knew Paris; and when he
entered the town on February 8, 1492, with his young wife, Anne of
Brittany, who had been crowned at Saint-Denis the day before, the
populace was not agreeably impressed by his short stature, his bad
figure, his heavy head, his big nose, his thick lips always open, and
his great, blank, staring eyes. He was in curious contrast with the
bride--pretty, sprightly, vivacious, and "very knowing," wrote home
the Venetian Ambassador, Zaccaria Contarini. The gentle, weakly
King--so strange a scion of Louis XI.--made his home in Touraine. On
the terrace of Amboise, where he was born, we all know the little
door, leading to the old Haquelebac Gallery, against which he struck
his head as he started down to look on a game of tennis. There, on
April 7, 1498, in a sordid and filthy chamber, a remnant of the old
_château_ he was just then rebuilding, he lay for hours until his
death, so carrying out the curse of Savonarola, who had threatened
him with the anger of God, if he failed to return to Italy with his
army to cleanse the unclean Church with the sword.
[Illustration: Anne de Bretagne.
(From a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection.)]
"_Le bon Roi Louis, Père du Peuple, est mort_," is the doleful
pronouncement of the _crieurs du corps_, starting out from the
Tournelles before dawn of New Year's day, 1515. The kindly old fellow
has died in the night, a martyr to a young wife and to her fashionable
hours. All his life long, Louis had been subject to the fancies of
women, to his undoing. We meet him first, the young and ardent Duc
d'Orléans, the best horseman and swordsman in the court, riding out
from Plessis with the brave Dunois--both grandsons, with different
bars, of the murdered Louis d'Orléans--to snatch the girl Isabelle
from the escort of Quentin Durward. The duke has already taken the eye
of the capable Anne, eldest daughter of Louis XI., as Brantôme is
quick to note. Getting no return for her passion, the fury of a woman
scorned, backed by her father's malign humor, marries the handsome
prince to her younger sister, Jeanne--ugly and deformed and
uncharming. Freed by divorce from this childless union, on taking the
throne, Louis hastens to marry his former flame, Anne of Brittany, now
the widow of Charles VIII. This lady, fair in person and fairer in her
duchy, lively and not unlearned, a blameless yet imperious spouse,
gave him many happy years. The personal court he allowed "_sa
Bretonne_" outshone his own court, and glorified the gloomy
Tournelles. For all his clinging to her, she was taken from him when
only thirty-seven years of age; refusing to live, when she found, for
the first time, that her self-will was not allowed its own way. She
would have her daughter, Claude, marry Charles of Austria,
Emperor-to-be, and the powers in France would not have it, because
they were unwilling that Brittany should go, with its heiress, into
foreign hands. A marriage was arranged between Claude and the young
Duc d'Angoulême, who was to become François I., so keeping the rich
duchy for France. After Anne's death, her widower made a third
venture, and yet, the chronicler plaintively assures us, he had no
need of a new wife. This was Mary, sister of Henry VIII. of England,
who was glad to get her out of his country; and she was as glad to
return as soon as, on finding herself a widow, she could become the
wife of her first love, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. And so these
two were the grandparents of Lady Jane Grey.
Now the customary hour for dining in those days was from five to ten
in the morning, changing a little with the seasons. A French "Poor
Richard" of the period says:
"_Lever à cinq, diner à neuf,
Souper à cinq, coucher à neuf;
Fait vivre d'ans nonnante et neuf._"
Montaigne owns that his dinner-hour of eleven in the morning was
unduly late, but then his supper came correspondingly late, never
before, and often after, six of the evening. Henri IV. dined at the
same belated hour, while François I. could not wait later than nine
o'clock. Once installed in the Tournelles, this young English bride of
Louis's must needs, among other innovations, introduce her own
country's customs into her husband's mode of life, as we are told in
"_la très joyeuse et plaisante histoire_" of the "Loyal Serviteur," of
Bayard: "His wife changed all his manner of living; he had been wont
to dine at eight, and he now dined at mid-day; he had been wont to go
to bed at six in the evening, and he now went to bed at midnight."
Moreover, she beguiled him into supping late and heavily. So these
changes, and other changes in his habits, brought him to his grave,
six weeks after his marriage. His Parisians gathered in Rue
Saint-Antoine, about the entrance of the Tournelles, in honest sorrow
for the loss of the big and benevolent old boy, whom they looked on
and loved as the Father of his People; indeed "one of the people,"
says Michelet, "without the soul of a king."
The Tournelles blazed out bravely for François I., the while the Hôtel
Saint-Paul found itself cut up and sold off in lots by him; the two
cases showing his way, all through life, of raising money by any
means, squeezing his subjects, starting France's national debt as he
did, all because of his puerile ambitions, his shallow levity, his
selfish waste. He did his best to justify Louis XII.'s shrewd prophecy
for him: "_Ce grand gars-là gâtera tout._" Recalling, one needy day,
that he owned Saint-Paul, "_un grand hôtel, fort vague et ruineux_,"
he soon got rid of the buildings and the land for coin, reserving one
large tract, along the eastern side under the wall, for the erection
of an arsenal. And so, with streets cut through the old domain, no
trace was left of Charles V.'s "_hôtel solennel des grands
ébastements_." As for the Tournelles, its new master's fondness for
all showy gimcrackery adorned it with furniture and fittings, and
notably with the tapestries turned out so sumptuously from the factory
at Tours, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, that they came
into vogue for decoration, in place of wall-paintings. No need to say
that the table at the Tournelles was profuse and its court
resplendent. There had been few women in the court before now, and it
was a garden without pretty flowers, as Brantôme puts it. Anne of
Brittany had brightened it a bit for Brantôme with some few _dames et
demoiselles_, but François crowded it with fair women, who brought
music and dancing and flirting. This big and brutal dilettante--study
his face in the countless portraits in the Louvre and at
Azay-le-Rideau--gave little of his time to the Tournelles, however.
Setting Pierre Lescot at work on the lovely western wing of his new
Louvre, he rushed over the land, building and beautifying at
Saint-Germain, Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Blois, Chambord, posing
always as the patron and prodrome of the Renaissance in France. At
least, he could say truly of himself, "_On verra qu'il y a un roi en
France_;" but besides the throne and his pet foolishnesses, he handed
down nothing worth owning to his son--that Henri II. of heavy fist and
light brain, slow of thought and of speech, cold, uncongenial,
commonplace. Yet the Tournelles was a cheerful home for him and for
his official family, when he could get away from the exclusive holding
of Diana of Poictiers and her family. His youngest daughter,
Marguerite de France, has sketched, in her "Mémoires," a most winning
picture of the place and of herself, a lovely maid of seven, playing
about the garden or sitting on her father's knee, helping him select a
suitor for her, from among the young swells at the court. That scene
took place only a few days before his death.
[Illustration: Louis XII.
(Water color, from a portrait by an unknown artist in a private
collection.)]
To the Tournelles comes François Rabelais, in the "Contes Drôlatiques"
of Balzac, and gives to King and court that delicious sermon, worthy
of Rabelais himself. He has come along Rue Saint-Antoine from his home
in Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, a rural lane then, just outside
Philippe-Auguste's wall, on the extreme edge of the gardens of
Saint-Paul. In that paved and built-up street of to-day none of us can
fix on the site of his house, and the tablet on its corner, of Quai
des Célestins, tells us only that Rabelais died in a house in this
street on April 9, 1553. Charles Nodier, starting out from his
Librarian's rooms in the Arsenal Library, on his endless prowls about
old Paris, always stopped and took off his hat in front of No. 8 of
Rue des Jardins, in honor of the great French humorist. Ignorant of
his reason for the selection of this site, we may be content, in
imitation of this charming _flâneur_, to stand uncovered there, before
or near the last dwelling of "_le savant et ingénieux rieur_," whose
birthplace and whose statue at Chinon are worth a journey to see;
where, too, the local wine will be found as delicate and as individual
as when, sold by the elder Rabelais in the fourteenth century, it made
the money that sent his famous son to the great schools of the
capital. That son closed his life of congenial vagabondage, and of
many _métiers_, in this sedate country road, where he had passed three
blameless years, two of them as _curé_ of Meudon, resigning that
position in 1552. He was buried in the cemetery of old Saint-Paul, to
which we shall find our way later. Modern Paris has doubtless built
itself over the grave, as it certainly has over the last
dwelling-place, of the narrator of the adventures of Gargantua and
Pantagruel and the creator of Panurge.