her death, in the first year of the eighteenth century, this quarter
had become the chosen abode of the real swells of Paris, and so the
only possible residence for all those who wished to be so considered.
Long before, a new member of the body politic had been born--the
_bourgeois_--and a place had to be found for him. The leisure he had
gained from bread-getting need no longer be given to head-breaking,
and for his vision there was a horizon broader than that of his
father, of dignity in man and comeliness in life. His first solicitude
was for his habitation, which must be set free from the rude strength
of the feudal fortresses in which the _noblesse_ had camped. He
levelled battlements into cornices, and widened loop-holes into
windows, open for sunlight and _à la belle étoile_. In this seemly
home, his thoughts threw off the obstruction imposed by centuries of
repression, and by the joyless dogmas of the Church. And so began that
multiform process that, at last, flamed up through the frozen earth,
and has been named the Renaissance.
Many of the new mansions of the _bourgeoisie_ were in Marais streets
that were still walled off by the shut-in grounds of the religious
bodies, whose unproductive dwellers avoided all taxation. "You see,
formerly, there were monasteries all about here," says light-hearted
Laigle in "Les Misérables"; "Du Breul and Sauval give the list of them
and the Abbé Lebeuf. They were all around here; they swarmed; the
shod, the unshod, the shaven, the bearded, the blacks, the grays, the
whites, the Franciscans, the Minimi, the Capuchins, the Carmelites,
the Lesser Augustins, the Greater Augustins, the Old Augustins. They
littered." These belated owls, blinking in the new sunlight and
fresher air, had now to find other dark walls for their flapping. The
zone of abbeys, stretching from the Bastille to the Louvre, began to
be cut into, and the grounds of the great _hôtels_ of the noblemen
came into the market as well. There had been hardly any opening-up of
this quarter, from the day when Charles V. ended his wall, to the day
when Henri IV. began his Place Royale. He had planned, also, a
monumental square at the top of the Templars' domain, to be called
Place de France, with a grandiose entrance, from which eight wide
streets, bearing the names of the great provinces of France, were to
radiate, to be crossed by smaller streets named from the lesser
provinces. For this scheme Sully had bought up, under cover of a
broker, an immense tract in this region, just as the King's death put
a sudden end to this project, along with all his other projects.
One man did much to make real the plan that had been put on paper
only. This was Claude Charlot, a Languedoc peasant, who had come to
the capital in wooden _sabots_, with no money, but with plenty of
shrewdness and audacity. By 1618 he had managed to acquire almost the
entire tract set aside by Sully, and through it he cut streets, the
principal one of which is called after him, while, of those called
after the provinces, some still keep their names and some have been
renamed.
Even during his mapmaking of the Marais--summarily stopped by
Richelieu's spoliation--this was yet a solitary and unsafe quarter,
through which its honest citizens went armed against footpads by day,
and by night stretched chains across the _coupe-gorges_ of its narrow
streets. It continued to grow slowly through the last years of the
seventeenth century, and these streets, with the Place Royale as their
centre, were in time lined by the _portes-cochères_ of rich
financiers, farmers-generals, and receivers of taxes, all swollen with
their pickings and stealings. They adorned their dwellings with carved
panels and painted ceilings, with sculptured halls and spacious stone
stairways; and many of them were rich in manuscripts and rare books,
and in collections of various sorts.
Of these mansions, a surprising proportion is still standing, given up
to business-houses, factories, and schools; for all of which uses
their capacious rooms readily lend themselves. Within these old walls,
face to face with the bustling streets, shouldered by structures of
yesterday, or in dignified withdrawal behind their courts, can be
found actual treasures of decoration and of carving, along with
invisible and intangible treasures of association. For the aspect of a
street, or the atmosphere of a house, tells to the intelligent
looker-on as much of its bygone inmates as of its bare masonry. And
kindly fate has left such relics plentifully scattered about the
Marais. In oldest Paris of the Island, and in that almost as old
suburb on the southern bank, one must prowl patiently to find
suggestive brick and stone. In those regions a concealed tower, or an
isolated _tourelle_ on the angle of a building, makes the whole joy of
a day's journey. Here, in the Marais, at every step you stumble on
history and tradition and romance.
For "the little province of the Marais" was far away from the capital,
and was let alone; or, rather, it was an unmolested island, washed
about and not washed over by the swift tide of traffic. The stormy
waves of insurrection have broken against its shores, and its
pavements have never been made into barricades in any of the recurring
revolutions, which have all been but interludes and later acts of the
Great Revolution, in the people's endeavor to carry on and complete
the main motive of that drama.
The vogue of the Marais began to fade away with the middle years of
the eighteenth century, when the old _noblesse de famille_ adopted the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the new _noblesse de finance_ migrated to
the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the gadding multitude sought the
arcades of the Palais-Cardinal, renamed Palais-Royal. A few ancient
families, poor and proud, remained to burrow in their ancestral homes,
and retired pensioned officials and _petits rentiers_ found a boon in
the small rentals of the big apartments. All these _locataires_,
preserving the old forms and keeping untarnished the old etiquette,
gave an air of dignified dulness to the Marais. Their dinner-hour was
at five o'clock, and after that solemn function, held in the hall hung
with family portraits or with dingy tapestry, their sedate prattle,
before going to bed at nine o'clock, would touch on the unhallowed
Edict of Nantes and on its righteous revocation; even as in a certain
London club of to-day, musty old gentlemen still lament, with subdued
dismay, "the murder of the Martyr, Charles Stuart." The sole diversion
of these ancient dames of the Marais was a stroll in the Place Royale,
arrayed in old-time costumes, their white hair dressed high above
their patrician brows.
Nowadays, under the horse-chestnuts and baby elms of its ground,
school-boys from the neighboring institutions romp on the grit, and
babies are wheeled about by their nurses, and on the benches sit faded
old men, blinking and inarticulate. They cling to the historic name of
the place, while to us of the real world it is known as Place des
Vosges; this title having been given it, in honor of the province of
that name, by Lucien Bonaparte, while he was Minister of the Interior.
The appellation was officially adopted by the Republic of 1848, and
once more, perhaps finally and for all time, by the Third Republic.
THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS
[Illustration: The Place des Vosges.]
THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS
"_Dans cet hôtel est née, le 6 Fevrier, 1626, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal,
Marquise de Sévigné_:" so reads the tablet set in that wall, which
fronts on the square, of the house numbered 1 Place des Vosges, having
its entrance at No. 11 Rue de Birague. There is no name more closely
linked with the Marais than that of this illustrious woman. Born in
this house, baptized in its parish church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis,
she here grew up to girlhood; she was married in Saint-Gervais, her
daughter was married in Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs; and the greater
portion of her life was passed within this quarter. Her father was
killed in a duel a few months after her birth, at the age of seven she
lost her mother, and when only twenty-five years old, she found
herself a widow. After a short sojourn in the provinces with her son
and daughter, she came back, in 1655, to Paris and to the Marais. She
had casual and unsettled domiciles, for many years, in Rues de
Thorigny, Barbette, des Francs-Bourgeois, des Lions-Saint-Paul, des
Tournelles--all within our chosen district--before she settled in her
home of twenty years, the Carnavalet.
It is but a step away from this tablet above us, to the corner of
Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and Sévigné; the latter street, at that
time, bearing its original name of Culture-Sainte-Catherine, having
been opened through that portion under cultivation of the grounds of
the great monastery of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers. On the
corner of this new street and that of Francs-Bourgeois--then Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Catherine--a piece of the convent garden was bought by
Jacques de Ligneris, and thereon a house for his residence was
erected. Its plans were drawn by Pierre Lescot, it was built by Jean
Bullant, was decorated by Androuët du Cerceau, and its sculptures were
carved by Jean Goujon. And thus these walls, on which we are looking,
speak in mute laudation of four famous men. One more notable name may
be added to this list--that of François Mansart. He was called in, a
century or so after the completion of this mansion, for its renovation
and enlargement; and, to his lasting honor, he contented himself with
doing only what seemed to him to be imperatively demanded, and with
attempting no "improvements" nor "restoration" of the work of his
great predecessors. He knew what we have learned, that those words too
often mean desecration and ruin to all historic monuments in all
lands. During this interval, the building had come into the hands of
Françoise de la Baume, Dame de Kernévalec, whose Breton name,
corrupted to Carnavalet, has clung to it ever since. That name
suggested the pun of the _carnaval_ masks, carved in stone over the
arches of the wings in the court. They were done by a later hand than
that of Goujon, whose last work is to be seen about that window of
the Louvre, on which he was busy, when a bullet picked him off, a day
or two after the night of Saint Bartholomew. The tranquil elegance of
his chisel has adorned this almost perfect gateway with the graceful
winged figure in its keystone. It lifts and lightens the severe
dignity of the façade. And, in the court--its centre not unworthily
held by the bronze statue of Louis XIV., remarkable in its exquisite
details, found in the old Hôtel de Ville--we linger in joy before the
graceful flowing curves and the daylight directness of the Seasons of
this French Phidias. The figures on the wings are from a feebler
chisel than his. Of all the crowding memories of this spot, those of
the Marquise de Sévigné and of Jean Goujon are the most vivid and the
most captivating. The busts of these two, one on either side, greet us
at the head of the staircase leading to her apartments; she is alert
and winsome, he is sedate and thoughtful and a trifle too stern for
the most amiable of sculptors, as he shows himself here, rather than
the staunch Huguenot, killed for his convictions.
She was fifty-one years of age by the records when she came to live
here, in 1677, and half that age at heart, which she kept always
young. She had been so long camping about in the Marais, that she was
impatient to settle down in the ideal dwelling she had found, at last.
She writes to her daughter: "_Dieu merci, nous avons l'hôtel
Carnavalet. C'est une affaire admirable; nous y tiendrons tous, et
nous aurons le bel air. Comme on ne peut pas tout avoir, il faut se
passer des parquets, et des petites cheminées a la mode.... Pour moi,
je vais vous ranger la Carnavalette, car, enfin, nous l'avons, et j'en
suis fort aise._"
So she moved in, with her son and daughter, both dear to her. It was
to the daughter, however, that the mother's affluence of affection
flowed out, all through her life; and it may well be that this
veritable passion saved her from all other passions, during the years
of her long widowhood, when many a _grand parti_ fell at her feet. She
looked on them all alike, with pity for their seizure, and each of
them got up and walked away, unappeased. Yet hers was a rich nature,
wholesome and womanly withal, and there are potentialities of emotion
in the pouting lips and inviting eyes of the pretty pagan of this
bust. Nor was she a prude, and her way of quoting Rabelais and
listening to La Fontaine's verses would horrify us moderns of queasy
stomachs. She had ready pardon for the infidelities of her husband,
and later for the misdeeds of her scampish cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, "the
most dangerous tongue in France."
Above all, this real woman showed a masculine strength and loyalty of
friendship for men; showed it most markedly in her sympathy for those
who had fallen in the world. There is no finer example in the annals
of constancy than her devotion to the broken Fouquet, howbeit he may
have merited breaking. The spirit of her letters, at the time of his
disgrace and imprisonment, cannot be twisted into anything ignoble, as
Napoleon tried to do, on reading them in the State archives. He
sneeringly suggested that her sympathy with Fouquet was "_bien chaud,
bien vif, bien tendre, pour de la simple amitié_." So it was, indeed;
for her friendships were attachments, and warmth and tenderness
pulsate in all her letters; and these qualities will, along with their
unpremeditated spontaneity, keep them alive as long as letters live.
What else was in her letters has been told by Nodier, when he says
that they regulated and purified the language for ordinary use; and by
Jules Janin, who rightly claims that, from this Carnavalet, came the
purest and most perfect French hitherto heard in France.
In forming and housing the great collection of the History of Paris,
to which the Musée Carnavalet is devoted, new buildings about a trim
garden in the rear have been added to the original mansion, whose own
rooms have been subjected to as little change as possible. Madame de
Sévigné's apartment, on the first floor, is hardly altered, and her
bedroom and _salon_ have been especially kept inviolate. The admirable
mouldings, the curious mirrors, the old-fashioned lustre, remain as
she left them, when she went to her daughter at Grignan to die. In
this _salon_, and in the wide corridor leading to it, both now so
silent and pensive, she received all the men of her day worth
receiving; and it is here alone that we breathe the very atmosphere of
this incomparable creature.
We may join the early-goers among these men, who make their way to
another house, not far distant. There are temptations to stop before,
and explore within, the seventeenth-century mansions all along Rues
Sévigné and du Parc-Royal, but we pass on into Rue Turenne--once Rue
Saint-Louis, the longest and widest and foremost in fashion of Marais
streets, now merely big and bustling, with little left of its ancient
glory--until we come to its No. 58, on the corner of old Rue des
Douze-Portes, now named Ville-Hardouin, after the contemporary
chronicler of the Fifth Crusade. This modest house at the corner has
been luckily overlooked by the modern rebuilder of this quarter, who
has not touched its two stories and low attic above a ground floor,
its unobtrusive portal, its narrow hall, and its staircase; small and
quaint, in keeping with the cripple who was carried up and down for
many years. Paul Scarron lived here, in the apartment _au deuzième à
droite_, dubbed the "_Hôtel de l'Impécuniosité_" by his young wife,
who was the granddaughter of the Calvinist leader, Agrippa d'Aubigné,
and who was to be the second wife of Louis XIV. Sitting at her
scantily supplied supper-table here, the maid would whisper that a
course was lacking, and that an anecdote from the hostess must fill
the bill of fare instead. Goldsmith tells us, at the beginning of his
"Retaliation:"
"Of old when Scarron his companions invited,
Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united."
And, just here, it is curious to recall the fact that Goldsmith was
busied, during the last months of his life, on a translation of
Scarron's "Roman Comique," and his bethumbed copy was found on his
desk, after his death.
Scarron was always poor and always importunate, and yet he was "a
pleasant prodigy never before seen," he says of himself; rightfully
claiming that he was able "to sport with misery and jest in pain."
Paralyzed and still a prey to incurable torments, immovable in his
armchair except for his nimble fingers, he drove his pen merrily to
the making of comedies, tales, pamphlets, and the verse that, like
him, was impishly awry with mockery, as if chattered by "a wilderness
of monkeys." Letters, too, he wrote in this house, that give us
striking glimpses of the man and of his time. In them we discover that
"most terribly" was the sanctified slang then for the modern
abomination "awfully." Appeals for money make up much of his
correspondence, but there is never a hint of a loan in the charming
letters to the "_belle ange en deuil_," Madame de Sévigné; in which he
always assures her that she is a dangerous person, and that those who
look on her without due care, grow sick upon it immediately, and are
not long-lived. Mlle. de Lenclos was a favorite of his, too, and that
"_charmant objet, belle Ninon_," came to sit for hours beside his
invalid-chair. She made friends with the young wife, too, but
complained that she was "_trop gauche_" to learn gallantry, and was
"_vertueuse par faiblesse_." The large-minded lady frankly owns:
"_J'aurais voulu l'en guérir, mais elle craignait trop Dieu._" For all
that, the friendship then formed between the two women was never
broken, and when the widow Scarron came to position and power she
offered a place at court to her elder friend; an offer that was
refused, for the old lady never grew old enough to change her mode of
life. And there is little doubt that the younger woman often looked
back with longing to those wretched days that were so happy. She said
once, seeing the carp dying of surfeit in the Versailles pond: "_Elles
regrettent leur bourbe_," suggesting that, like them, she suffered
from satiety.
Years before his marriage, Scarron had lived with his sister in this
same little street of "Twelve Doors," and had grown very fond of the
"_beau quartier des Marests_." He asks: "Who can stay long from the
Place Royale?" When he returned to Paris in 1654--having married in
1652, and having made a long stay in Touraine--he came back to his
beloved Marais, and took a three-years' lease of this apartment. At
its termination the lease was probably renewed, for it is a
time-honored tradition that makes this old house the place of his
death, on October 14, 1660.
Between fifty and one hundred years later--the exact date is not to be
got at--the garret above was crowded with the pet dogs and cats and
birds of Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, who lived in filth among them,
seldom eating, never washing, always smoking. The big blond dramatist
had fallen a victim to poverty and melancholy, after a short career of
success on those boards which he stained with the blood of many
violent deaths. He had said that, since Corneille had taken heaven for
his own and Racine had seized upon earth, he could place his scenes
only in hell. He was rescued, and taken from this garret, by the
pension obtained through La Pompadour. That great lady was not
prompted by any comprehension of the sombre power of his tragedy, but
by a desire to wreak her spite against Voltaire by the exaltation of a
rival.
Scarron's widow was left in poor case, with only her husband's small
pension for support, and this was stopped by Colbert on the death of
Anne of Austria, in 1666. That Queen-Mother had endowed an institution
for poor girls and sick women, and with these "_Hospitalières de la
Place Royale_," Madame Scarron found shelter, having sold all that she
owned. In 1669 she was put in charge of the first child of the King
and Madame de Montespan, and we know all the rest, to the secret
marriage in 1685. Such of the buildings of the "_Hospitalières_" as
are left now form part of the Hôpital Andral, and their old roofs and
dormers and chimneys take our eye above the low wall as we turn into
Rue des Tournelles. In this street is the hospital's main entrance,
and through its gate we look across the garden, that stretches back to
the former entrance in Impasse de Béarn; now opened only to carry out
for burial the bodies of those dying in the hospital.
The line of walls along Rue des Tournelles was broken by only a few
isolated houses, when François Mansart selected a site here, and put
thereon his own dwelling, unpretending as the man himself, in contrast
with the grand mansions he had planned for his noble and wealthy
clients. This is his modest entrance-court, at No. 28 Rue des
Tournelles, and behind it is the simple façade of his _hôtel_. This
building probably formed his entire frontage, or it may have been the
_corps-de-logis_ of a more extensive structure, whose two wings
reached out toward the street at Nos. 26 and 30. This number 28,
whether the central or the entire body of the building, remains in
perfect preservation. At Mansart's death, in 1666, it came, along with
most of his property, to his sister's son, whom he had adopted, and
trained to be the architect known as Jules Hardouin Mansart. He gained
position and pay in the royal employ, more by this adoptive name than
by his abilities. As Superintendent of Buildings under Louis XIV. he
is responsible for most of the horrors of the palace of Versailles,
yet the dome of the Invalides proves him to have been capable of less
meretricious work.
On taking possession of his uncle's mansion, he had, as sole tenant of
his spacious and inviting first floor, Mlle. Anne Lenclos, popularly
christened Ninon de Lenclos, then fifty years of age. Her dwelling is
the end and object of this short walk, and together with the house
from which we started, and the one at which we stopped, it gives us a
complete picture of the social doings of the Marais at that period. We
are allowed to enter among the men with whom we have come, and we will
go in, let us say, with young de Sévigné, who finds his way here
frequently, from his _pied-à-terre_ in his mother's house, as his
father and his grandfather had found their way to Ninon's abode. Under
the stone balcony on the court-front we step up into a goodly hall,
from which rises a stone staircase, its outer end finely carved, its
steps well worn by many visitors through the years. An admirable
medallion looks down from the wall as we mount, and in the rooms above
we find carved panels and decorated ceilings, many of them done by
Lebrun and Mignard, probably for the fair tenant. They are so
carefully kept that canvas covers such of them as are feared to be
"_trop lestes_" for modern eyes, in the modest words of the ancient
_concierge_. Mansart put an excellent façade on his garden-front, and
its coupled Ionic columns, and balconies of wrought-iron railings, are
all there unmutilated. But the garden, then stretching to Boulevard
Beaumarchais, is now hidden under the shops that front on that
boulevard.
To these rooms and this garden thronged the same men whom we have seen
in the Sévigné and Scudéry _salons_, and these reunions were as
decorous as those, and perhaps somewhat more cheerful and more natural
in tone. For, while Ninon had the honor of being enrolled in the
"Grand Dictionnaire des Précieuses," published in 1661, and while she
had been presented at the Hôtel de Rambouillet at the early age of
seventeen, she had none of the pretensions nor the ridiculosities of
"Les Femmes Savantes." She was absolutely genuine, not ashamed to be
natural, quite ready to laugh or to cry with her friends. These
friends, drawn to her less by her beauty than by her charm, were held
always by her sunny amiability, her quick sympathies, her frank
_camaraderie_. She was the Clarisse of Mlle. de Scudéry's "Clélie;" an
_enjouée aimable_, who never denied herself the indulgence of any
caprice of head or of heart. Yet, as she laughingly confessed, while
she thanked God every night for the good wits given her, she prayed
every morning for better protection against the follies of her heart.
It is a faithful portrait that is given in the verse of her day:
"_L'indulgente et sage Nature
A formé l'âme de Ninon,
De la volupté d'Épicure,
Et de la vertu de Caton._"