its grounds, just beyond the present northern side of Rue
Saint-Antoine, Rue de Birague being cut through almost their middle
line. For more than a hundred years they had been the scene of many a
tournament, and not one of them had been so crowded or so brilliant as
that which began on June 28, 1559. The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, made
in the previous April with England and Spain, was to be celebrated,
and there were to be rejoicings over the recent marriage of Henry's
sister, Marguerite, with the Duc de Savoie, and of his eldest
daughter, Isabelle, with Philip II. of Spain. This girlish third wife
of the Spanish King was the heroine of the Don Carlos affair, which
has made so many dramas. To rejoice in royal fashion in those days,
men must needs fight and ladies must look on. So it came that the
King, proud of having shown himself "a sturdy and skilful cavalier"
during the two days' tilting, insisted on running a course with
Montgomery of the Scottish Guard, whose broken lance pierced Henri's
visor through the eye into the brain. He lay unconscious in the
Tournelles for eleven days, and there he died on July 10, 1559.
Those lists were never again used, the palace was never again
inhabited. All the bravery of the two last courts could not hide the
dry-rot of the wooden structures, and all its perfumes could not
sweeten the stenches from the open drains all about. Even the
hard-headed and strong-stomached Louise de Savoie, mother of François
I., had sickened in the place. So "_le misérable coup_," that freed
Catherine de' Medici from years of slighted wifehood, gave her an
excuse for leaving the malodorous and unhealthful Tournelles, with her
four sons and her unmarried daughter. A portion of the structures was
kept by her second son, Charles IX., for his birds and dogs, until his
mother got him to order its destruction by an edict dated January,
1565.
On his Pont-Neuf sits Henri IV. on his horse, and every Frenchman
looks up as he passes, with almost the same emotion felt by the
Frenchmen of Voltaire's day, at the effigy of the most essentially
French of all French kings. The statue faces "the symmetrical
structures of stone and brick," planned by him for his Place Dauphine,
in honor of the birth of his son. They are hardly altered since their
construction by his good friend Achille de Harlay, President of
Parliament, whose name is retained in the street behind the _place_
and in front of the Palace of Justice. The King looks out, a genial
grin between his big, ugly, Gascon-Bourbon nose and his pushing chin,
over his beloved Paris, well worth the mass he gave for it; for, from
the day he got control, it grew in form and comeliness for him. His
kindly, quizzical eyes seem to see, over the Island and the river, his
own old Marais, the quarter which held the _hôtel_ of his _menus
plaisirs_, and which it was his greater pleasure to rebuild and make
beautiful. And "_la perle du Marais_"--his Place Royale--deserves his
unchanging regard, almost unchanged as it is, since he planned it and
since its completion, which he never saw. It is the grand tangible
monument he has left to Paris, and speaks of him as does nothing else
in the town.
When he came into his capital on March 22, 1594, he found the
enclosure of the Tournelles _en friche_. Within a few days he gave a
piece of it, holding an old house, that fronted on Rue Saint-Antoine,
to his good Rosny, whom he made Duc de Sully a little later. This
Maximilien de Béthune had been the most faithful helper of Henri de
Navarre and he continued to be the most faithful servant of Henri IV.
He had many homely virtues, rare in those days, rare in any days. He
was courageous, honest, laborious; he did long and loyal service to
the State; he worked almost a miracle for the finances of the kingdom,
carrying his economies into every detail, even to the ordering of
costumes in black, to spare the expense of the richly colored robes in
vogue. A vigilant watch-dog, he was surly and snappish withal, and he
had a greedy grip on all stray bones that fell fairly in his way. His
wealth and power grew with his chances. He seems to have put something
of himself into his _hôtel_, which faces us at No. 143 Rue
Saint-Antoine. It bears on its lordly front an honesty of intention
that is almost haughty, with a certain self-sufficiency that shows a
lack of humor; all most characteristic of the man. Neither he nor his
abode appeals to our affections, howsoever they may compel our
respect.
[Illustration: Sully.
(From a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musée Condé at
Chantilly.)]
Having got this well-earned gift of land from the King, he cleared
away the old buildings upon it, and erected this superb structure. His
architect was doubtless Jean du Cerceau, for the heaviness of his
early work is apparent in these walls, but their owner evidently
enforced his personal tastes on them. The façade, on the shapely
court, has its own touch of distinction, dashed by the touch of
pomposity that dictated, to the four secretaries employed on his
memoirs, his stock phrase, "Such was Sully!" This front is
over-elaborate. The main body and the two wings--which are a trifle
too long and too large, and so crowd and choke that main body--are all
heavily sculptured. On every side, stone _genii_ bear arms, stone
women pose as the seasons and the elements, stone masks and foliage,
whose carving is finer than the sculpture, crowd about the richly
chiselled windows. Yet those windows look down on the court in a most
commanding way; and the fabric, behind all its floridness, shows a
power in the rectitude of its lines that must needs be acknowledged.
[Illustration: The Court of the Hôtel de Béthune. Sully's Residence.]
The garish windows of the restaurant on the ground floor glare
intrusively out on the old-time court, and a discordant note is struck
by the signs, all about its doorways, of the new-fangled industries
within--a water-cure, a boxing-school, a gymnasium. School-boys play
noisily in this court, and, in the garden behind, schoolgirls take
the air demurely. To reach their garden, we pass through a spacious
hall, along one side of which mounts a wide, substantial staircase,
its ceiling overloaded with panels and mouldings. Set in a niche in
the garden-wall is a bust of the Duke of Sully. This garden façade is
in severer taste than that of the front court, its wings are less
obtrusive, and its whole effect is admirable. The little garden once
made one with the garden of the Hôtel de Chaulnes behind, that faced
the Place Royale, to which Sully thus had entrance. That entrance may
be found through the two small doors of No. 7, Place des Vosges, and
behind that building is Sully's _orangerie_, in perfect preservation.
Having handsomely requited his servant and comrade, the King began, in
the very centre of the Tournelles, a great square with surrounding
structures. As soon as one of his pavilions was sufficiently finished,
he installed in it a colony of two hundred Italians, brought to France
for that purpose, skilled weavers and workers of silks shot with
silver and with gold, such as made Milan famous. And to this man
alone--who was, said a memorial of his Chamber of Commerce, pleading
for the planting of the mulberry, "nearly divine, never promising
without performing, never starting without finishing;" and who issued
edicts for that planting, in spite of Sully's opposition--does France
owe her mulberry plantations and her silkworms, as Voltaire truly
points out. It is commonly asserted that his "mason," for these
constructions of the Place Royale, was Androuët du Cerceau, whose
name is claimed for many buildings that would make his working-life
last for a century and more. This Jacques Androuët was so renowned in
his day, that much of the architecture of his sons and his grandson
was then, and is still, set down to him. That stern old Huguenot, born
in 1515, went from Paris along with the dwellers in "Little Geneva,"
and is last heard of, still in exile, as late as 1584. Perhaps his son
Baptiste joined him in 1585, when his convictions drove him, too, from
the court and the capital, as has been told in the chapter, "The
Scholars' Quarter." Baptiste came back to serve Henri IV. and Louis
XIII., and trained his son Jean in his trade. For much of the work of
this busy Jean his grandfather has the credit, as well as for other
work done by Jean's uncle Jacques, second of that name. The Pont-Neuf
is always ascribed to the great Androuët, who never saw one of its
stones in place. That bridge was begun by his son Baptiste in 1578,
and finished by his grandson Jean in 1607. He it was, if it were any
du Cerceau, who planned and began the Place Royale.
[Illustration: The Hôtel de Mayenne.
In the distance, the Temple Sainte-Marie, called the Church of the
Visitation.]
We are fortunate in that we may see one example of the style of the
founder of this notable family, in the massive structure at No. 212
Rue Saint-Antoine, its side walls extending along Rue du Petit-Musc.
This street took its title from one of the numerous small _hôtels_
that made up the grand Hôtel Saint-Paul; and on its foundations--still
buried beneath these stones--was erected the present structure by
Androuët du Cerceau. It is the only entire specimen of his work in
Paris, and we may believe that he had done better work than this,
albeit it carries the authority of the old Huguenot. He began it for
Diane de Poictiers, and it was finished for an owner as heavy and as
stolid as its walls. This was Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Mayenne, the
eldest, the least brilliant, the most honest, of the famous brothers
of Guise. As Lieutenant-General of the League, he led its troops to
the defeats of Arques and Ivry. When Henri de Navarre became Henri IV.
of France, the only punishment he inflicted on his fat opponent was to
walk him, at a killing pace, about the grounds of Monceaux, while
listening to his protests of future submission: "I will be to you, all
my life long, a loyal subject and faithful servant. I will never fail
you nor desert you." So promised Mayenne, and he kept his word. He
lived here in this mansion, through sixteen years of honorable
employment in the Council of State, surviving Henry only a few months,
and dying in his bed, in pain and with patience. His house, once one
of the noisy hatching-places of the Holy League, is now a noisy school
for boys. Its well-set cornice has been mangled by the cutting through
it of the dormer windows, its grand staircase has been degraded, its
court, stern from du Cerceau's hand, has grown sullen, and its great
gardens are built over, all along Rue du Petit-Musc.
In accordance with the King's scheme for his Place Royale, its eastern
side was first built up at the crown's expense. The other sides were
divided into lots of similar size, and leased to men of the court, of
family, and of finance, on condition that they should begin to build
at once, each after the original plans. With this stipulation, and an
agreement to occupy their dwellings when finished, and to pay a yearly
rental of one crown of gold, they and their heirs forever were given
possession of these lots, as stated in the royal patent registered on
August 5, 1605. Thirty-six structures were planned for these private
dwellings, the two central pavilions on the northern and southern
sides being reserved for royalty; so that thirty-six crowns were to
come in as the entire annual revenue from the Place Royale; not an
exorbitant rental, since the _écu de la couronne_ of that day was
worth from seven to ten francs. Thus began that historic square, and
thus vanished, from off the face of the earth, the last trace of the
historic Tournelles.
Henry was more eager to hurry on the constructions than were his
tenants; only a few of whom, indeed, completed and occupied their
houses. There were other delays in building, not to be overcome by his
almost daily visits to the spot when in town, and by his appealing
letters from Fontainebleau to Sully, urging him to "_go and see_" if
the work were being pushed on. But it was still unfinished, when
Ravaillac's knife cut off all his plans. This plan, however, was
carried out by Marie de' Medici, who had made herself Queen-Regent by
lavish payments and promises. Her memories of the style of Northern
Italy influenced details of the new constructions, which were so far
finished in 1615 as to serve for the scene of the festivities, planned
by her as an expression of the joy that the Parisians did not know
they felt. The occasion was the marriage of her son, the
fourteen-year-old Louis XIII., with Anne of Austria, daughter of
Philip III. of Spain; and of her daughter, Isabelle, with the Spanish
Infante, afterward Philip IV. That was a great day for the Place
Royale. For this function its still uncompleted portions were hid by
scaffoldings, and all its fronts were draped with hangings and
festooned with flowers. One hundred thousand guests swarmed to see the
childish mummery of bearded men pranking as nymphs, the circus antics
of _ballets de chevaux_ by day, and the fireworks by night.
This first public appearance of the _place_ was, also, the last public
appearance of the Queen-Regent. There can be woven no romance about
this woman; fat and foolish, copious of emotion, impulsive of speech.
The pencil of Rubens cannot give grace to her affluent curves, and her
husband's strength could not stand against her "terribly robust" arms,
working briskly when she raged. Whatever may be our summing-up of this
man's morality, we must set down, to the credit of his account, his
hard case with the two women to whom fate had married him, each so
trying after her own fashion. Of sterner stuff than he, so far as that
sex goes, was Richelieu, the new ruler of the young King Louis XIII.
He would bear no more of Marie's meddling and muddling, and sent her
into exile in 1617. These two died in the same year, 1642, she in
poverty and neglect at Cologne, after having so long been "tossed to
and fro by the various fortunes of her life," says English Evelyn;
who, travelling on the Continent, notes the "universal discontent
which accompanied that unlucky woman, wherever she went."
We see her in our Place Royale only during this one day, but her son
and his minister are with us there to-day, as we stand in front of
that King's statue, in the centre of the square. This statue is a
reproduction of the original--melted down in 1792--erected by
Richelieu in 1639, not less for his own glorification, than to
immortalize the virtues of "Louis the Just, Thirteenth of that name."
He had a score of the virtues of a valet, indeed, and with them the
soul of a lackey. This present statue, placed here in the closing year
of the Bourbon Restoration, 1829, prettifies and makes complacent that
sombre and suspicious creature, the dismallest figure in his
low-spirited court. On his hair, flowing to his shoulders, rests a
laurel crown, and the weak lips, curved in an unwonted smile, not
twisted by his habitual stutter, are half hid by a darling mustache.
He sits his horse jauntily, clad in a long cloak and a skirt reaching
to his naked knees, and tries to be ostentatiously Roman with bare
arms and legs, his right hand pointing out across the square, from
which he tried in vain to drive the duellists.
We have already come here, under the guidance of Dumas, to witness one
famous duel in the time of Henri III. This spot had retained its vogue
for the aristocratic pastime, in spite of the repeated edicts and the
relentless punishments of Richelieu, under royal sanction and
signature. Fair women hung over the infrequent balconies, or peeped
from the windows, to view these duels and to applaud the duellists. A
keener interest was given to the probability of the death on the
ground of one combatant, by the certainty of the axe or the rope of
the public executioner for the survivor.
Windows and balconies are deserted now; there is no clash of steel in
the square, whose silence is in striking contrast with the sordid
strife of neighboring Rue Saint-Antoine; and these stately mansions,
dignified in their unimpaired old age, seem to await in patience the
return of their noble occupants. There has been no change in them
since, on their completion in 1630, they were regarded as the grandest
in all Paris, and there is hardly any change in their surroundings.
The commonplace iron railings of the square, put there at the same
time with the fountains, by Louis-Philippe, were the cause of hot
protest by Hugo and other residents of the quarter, who mourned the
loss of the artistic rails and gateway of seventeenth-century
fabrication. And Rue des Vosges has been cut through into the northern
side of the square, making a thoroughfare to Boulevard Beaumarchais,
such as was not planned originally. That plan provided for approach to
the _place_ only by the two streets under the two central pavilions,
north and south, now named Béarn and Birague. Those two pavilions,
higher than the others, were set apart for the King and Queen; and
over the central window of the southern one, the King, in medallion,
looks down. The stately fronts of red brick--new to Paris then--edged
with light freestone, and the steep roofs of leaded blue slate, broken
by great dormers reminiscent of Renaissance windows, are time-stained
to a delicate tricolor; and it pleases us to fancy the first Bourbon
King unconsciously anticipating the flag of the French Republic in the
colors of his Place Royale.
These tall windows, opening from floor to ceiling, were a novelty to
the Parisians of that day, the fashion having only just then been set
in the new Hôtel Rambouillet. Behind them, the spacious blue and
yellow _salons_ were hung with Italian velvets, or with Flemish and
French tapestries, interspaced with Venetian mirrors. Lebrun and his
like decorated the ceilings later, and the cornices were heavily
carved, and the furniture was in keeping with its surroundings. The
arcades of brick, picked out with stone ribs--a trifle too low and
heavy, it may be, for their symmetry with the otherwise perfect
proportions of these façades--were imitated from those of Italy, to
serve for shelter from sun, and for refuge from rain, to the strollers
who thronged them for over a century. To tell over their names, one
has merely to look down the list of the men who made themselves talked
about, through the whole of Louis XIII.'s and almost to the close of
Louis XIV.'s reign. Then there were the women, lovely or witty or
wicked, and those others, "_entre deux âges_," for whom the Marais
was noted. The creations of comedy are here, too, and Molière's
Mascarille and _le Menteur_ of Corneille are as alive as their
creators, under these arcades.
For this spot was not only the centre of the supreme social movement
of the capital during this long period, but it was the cradle of that
_bourgeois_ existence which grew absurd in its swelling resolve to
grow as big as that above it. The Hôtel Rambouillet, for all its
affectations, did some slight service to good literature and good
morals; it rated brains and manners above rank and money; it gave at
least an outside deference to decency. Molière himself, rebelling, had
to yield, and his early license became restraint, at least. In the
wild days of the Fronde, men and women were in earnest, and then came
the days when they were in earnest only about trifles; when the
"infinitely little" was of supremest importance, when shallow
refinements concealed coarseness, stilted politeness covered mutual
contempt, and the finest sentiments of a Joseph Surface in the _salon_
went along with unrestricted looseness outside. To seem clean was the
epidemic of the time, and its chronic malady was cant, pretence, and
pollution. And the _bourgeois_ imitated the noble; and, in the Place
Royale and about, Molière found his _Précieuses Ridicules_. Just a
little way from here, was a room full of them--that of Mlle. de
Scudéry.
Go up Rue de Beauce, narrowest of Marais streets between its old
house- and garden-walls, and you come to the passage that leads to the
Marché des Enfants-Rouges, the market and its surrounding space
taking the greater part of the site, and keeping alive the name, of
the admirable charity for children originated by the good Marguerite
de Navarre, sister of François I., and by him endowed at her urging.
The little orphans cared for in this institution were clad all in red,
and their pet popular name of "_Enfants Rouges_" soon took the place
of the official title of "_Enfants de Dieu_." On the corner of this
passage, you must stop to choose the abode of Mlle. de Scudéry from
one of the two ancient houses there, for it is certain that she lived
in one of these two, with a side door in the passage; and local legend
and topographic research have failed to fix on the true one. She has
told us that it stood alongside the Templars' grounds, in the midst of
gardens and orchards tuneful with birds, so that the lower end of the
street was called Rue des Oiseaux; and we find this narrow passage,
since then close shut in with houses, still tuneful to-day, but the
birds are kept in cages.
In this house Madeleine de Scudéry wrote her long and weary romance,
"Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus," the most widely read and the most
successful book of the day, from the money point of view. With this
money she paid the debts of her brother, Georges, a dashing
spendthrift with showy tastes; one of those chivalric souls, too fine
to work, but not too fine to sponge on his sister and to take pay for,
and put his name to, work done by her pen. Here she carried on the old
business of the Hôtel Rambouillet, where she had served her
apprenticeship before starting out for herself, and where she had
produced the poem by which she won her _nom de Parnasse_, "Sapho."
Here she was promoted to be the Tenth Muse, and sat enthroned amid her
admirers, who trooped in from all about the Marais, on every Saturday
for more than thirty years. As to the _causerie littéraire et galante_
of these reunions, we learn all about it, and laugh at it, in
Pellisson's "Chronique du Samedi." It is impossible to burlesque it;
Molière himself could not do it. He has taken entire sentences
concerning the education of woman from the "Grand Cyrus," and put them
into his "Femmes Savantes"; and it is simply a portrait that he drew
of Madelon, as she sat in this _salon_ a year or so before he put her
on the stage, awaiting the gifted authors of "La Carte du Royaume des
Précieuses." And Mascarille's fatuous swagger and strident voice--as
he walks the boards in Coquelin's skin--seem to come straight and
uncaricatured from Pellisson's pages. When the valet's voice,
quavering with complacency, shakes our midriff with his pronouncement:
"We attach ourselves only to madrigals," he is making a direct
quotation from the "Chronique."
Mlle. de Scudéry, while a _précieuse_ herself, was too genuine and
talented and good-hearted a woman to be ridiculous. She is really an
admirable example of the writing-woman of the seventeenth century, a
female Mignard in her pen-portraits. Dr. Martin Lister came to pay his
respects to the Tenth Muse, in this little house in 1698, and found
her over ninety years old, toothless, and still talking! One might
wish to have been present at this meeting, but may be content with
looking on the walls that harbored a worthy woman and her queer crowd
of adorers.