meaning of that word; far different from the meaningless Culture with
a capital, of our time. She was fond of philosophy, withal, and took
turns with Plato and with Montaigne; and would speculate on the
problems of life either with Church dignitaries or with the epicurean
Saint-Évremond. And she captivated them all, men of all sorts,
beginning with her girlish years--when she dutifully obeyed her
father, who preached pleasure to her, rather than her mother, who
pushed her toward a convent--through all her long life of incredibly
youthful heart and body, to her amazing conquests when over sixty. A
portrait of her at about this age hangs in Knole House, Sevenoaks; her
hair, parted down the middle and plainly drawn back in modest fashion,
her alluring eyes and her ingenuous direct smile, give her the look of
a girl. Richelieu was her first admirer, Voltaire was the latest.
When brought to this house, where he celebrated Ninon's ninetieth
birthday in verse, young Arouet was only about twelve years old, as
was told in a preceding chapter. She was charmed with the youthful
genius, and, dying within a few weeks, in 1706, she left him two
thousand crowns for buying his beloved books.
From five until nine in the evening, Ninon was "at home" here, up to
her eighty-fourth year, in 1700. Before her visitors went away, they
sat down to a simple supper, served with no parade and at small
expense. Many of the guests, following the fashion of Scarron's
friends and of the persistent diners-out of that day, brought their
own _plats_. We get a glimpse of the simplicity of these suppers "_à
tous les Despréaux et tous les Racines_," and of the homely, social
ways of the _bourgeoisie_, in Voltaire's tiresome comedy "Le
Dépositaire."
We look about these rooms, in which we are standing, and wish we might
have seen Boileau and Racine here; we seem to see Molière, reading his
unacted and still unnamed play, and consulting his hostess as to
whether "Tartufe" will do for a title; and old Corneille, forgetting
to be shy and clumsy at her side; and Scarron, wheeled in his chair,
quicker in his scoffing for her quick catching of the point; and La
Rochefoucauld, less of a surly and egotistic _poseur_ in her presence,
content to sparkle as a boudoir Machiavelli; and Huyghens, fresh from
his discovery of the moons of Saturn, finding here a heavenly body of
unwonted radiance, and setting to work to write erotic verse mixed
with mathematics. The great Condé himself, proud, vain,
hardest-hearted of men, melts when he meets her; broken and decrepit,
he climbs out from his sedan-chair--"that wonderful fortification
against bad weather and the insults of the mud," says delicious
Mascarille--and approaches, hat in hand, the _calèche_ of that other
aged warrior, Ninon de Lenclos.
Through No. 23 of Boulevard Beaumarchais, which occupies the site of
her garden, we come out on that broad thoroughfare, passing on our
right the buildings covering the gardens that once countrified this
east side of Rue des Tournelles. We cannot now search among the houses
there for that one inhabited by the Abbé Prévost, some time between
1730 and 1740, while he was writing his enthralling story of "Manon
Lescaut." Almost at the end of the boulevard, men are sitting about
tin tables on the pavement, drinking good beer, on the very site of
the gate of Saint-Antoine. Just there, outside the gate, stood Lady de
Winter, pointing out to her two hired assassins her pet enemy,
d'Artagnan, as he rode out on the Vincennes road, on his way to the
siege of Rochelle. The gate abutted on the western side of the
Bastille, and its figures, carved by Jean Goujon for decorations of a
later day, may be seen in the Cluny Gardens.
Traced in the pavement of Place de la Bastille and across Rue
Saint-Antoine, you may follow the outlines of such portions of the
walls and towers of the great prison as are not hidden under the
houses at the two corners. When you ask for your number in the
omnibus office of the _place_, you are standing in the Bastille's
inner court. Across its outer eastern ditch and connected with the
wall of Charles V., was thrown a projecting bastion, the tower of
which stood exactly where now rises the Column of July. At the corner
of Rues Saint-Antoine and Jacques-Coeur, a tablet shows the site of
the gateway that gave entrance to the outer court, which led
southwardly along the line of the latter small street. By this gateway
the armed mob entered on July 14, 1789. Lazy Louis XVI., hard at work
on locks and other trifles at Versailles--having as yet no news from
Paris--writes in his diary for that day: "_Rien_"! That mob had found
the fortress as little capable of resistance as the throne that it
overturned a while later; both proved to be but baseless fabrics of an
unduly dreaded terror. Indeed, it was the power behind this prison
that was stormed on that day. There were plenty of prisons in Paris,
as fast and as secret as was the Bastille. This was more than a prison
to these people; it gloomed over their lives as its towers gloomed
over their street--a mysterious and menacing defiance, a dumb and
docile doer of shady deeds, a symbol of an authority feared and hated.
And so these people first tore away the tool, and then disabled the
hand that had held it. It was a stirring act in the drama, though a
trifle melodramatic.
"_Palloy le Patriote_," as he styled himself, takes the centre of the
stage just here, and, like all professional patriots, in all lands and
all times, he makes a good thing of his patriotism. He was the
contractor for demolishing the walls and for clearing the ground of
the wreckage, at a handsome price; and he doubled his wage by the sale
of the materials. Some of the stones went, queerly enough, to the
building of Pont de la Concorde; others of them may be seen in the
walls of the house on the western corner of Boulevard Poissonière and
Rue Saint-Fiacre, and of other houses in the town. With the stones not
fit for these uses, and with the mortar, he made numerous models of
the Bastille, which were purchased by the committees and sent as
souvenirs to the chief towns of the then newly created departments.
One of these models is in the Musée Carnavalet. So, too, the thrifty
Palloy turned the ironwork dug out into hat and shoe buckles, and the
woodwork into canes and fans and tobacco-boxes; all, at last, into
coin for his patriotic pocket. The gate of one of the cells was
removed, and rebuilt in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie; where it may be
seen by the inmates, who care nothing for a door more or less, but
never by the outsider, who would like to get in for a glimpse!
To "Palloy the Patriotic" and his gang of a thousand workingmen, rides
up on his white horse, one day, the first commander of the just
invented and organized National Guard--Lafayette, aptly named by
Mirabeau the "Cromwell-Grandison" of his nation. He looks over the
busy ground, and gives orders that the men shall receive a pint of
wine and a half-franc daily; but they got neither money nor wine, both
doubtless "conveyed, the wise it called," on the way, by Palloy or by
other "patriots." Lafayette carried away the great key of the
Bastille's great entrance-door, and sent it to George Washington by
Thomas Paine, when, a few years later, Paine got out of the Luxembourg
prison and out of France. It is one of the cherished relics at Mount
Vernon, and not one is more impressive and more appropriate in that
place, since it was the success of the American revolutionists that
inspirited those who opened the Bastille.
We pass along Rue Saint-Antoine, so commonplace and sordid to-day, so
crowded with history and tradition. It has seen, in its short length,
pageants of royalty and nobility, the hide-and-seek of romance, the
blood-letting of sharp blades, the carnage of the common people, such
as no other street of any other town has known. Its memories would
fill a fat volume.
The little temple of Sainte-Marie on our left, as we go--a reduced
imitation of Rome's Pantheon--is a design by François Mansart, and
while it has his grace of line and his other qualities, it is not a
notable work. Built on the site of the Hôtel de Boissy, wherein Quélus
died and his lover Henry wept, it was intended for the chapel of the
"_Filles de la Visitation_," and their name clings to it, although it
has been made over to the Protestant Church. To this convent fled
Mlle. Louise de la Fayette from Louis XIII.; who, ardent in the only
love and the only chase known in his platonic career, visited her here
until his confessor, Vincent de Paul, showed him the scandal of a King
going to a nunnery. So he had to leave her, secure under the veil and
the vows of the cloister. She became Soeur, and later Mère,
Angélique, of the Convent of Sainte-Madeleine, founded in 1651 by
Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I., which stood on the far-away
heights of Chaillot, where now is the museum of the Trocadéro. There
the sister and the sweetheart of Louis XIII. lived together for many
years.
A few steps farther, and we come to Rue Beautreillis; its pavement and
its houses on both sides, nearly as far as Rue Charles V., covering
the Cemetery of old Saint-Paul; which extended westerly toward Passage
Saint-Pierre, wherein we may find the stone walls, now roofed in with
wood, of the _charniers_. There had been a suburban cemetery outside
the old wall, which was brought within city limits by the new wall,
and served as the burial-ground of the prisoners who died in the
Bastille. It did not so serve, as is commonly asserted, for the
skeletons found in chains in the cells, when the prison was opened by
righteous violence, because no such skeletons were found. "The Man in
the Iron Mask" was buried in this ground, close alongside the grave of
Rabelais, dug exactly one hundred and fifty years earlier. Pass
through the two courts that lie in the rear of No. 17 Rue
Beautreillis, and you will find yourself in a large waste garden, in
one corner of which the persuasive _concierge_ points out the grave of
the "_Masque-de-Fer_." It may well be that she is not misled by
topographical pride, for this ground was certainly a portion of the
old burial-ground, and not impossibly that portion where Rabelais and
"Marchioly" were laid near together. This is the prisoner's name on
the Bastille's burial-register, and not far from his real name. For we
know, as surely as we shall ever know, that this prisoner of State was
the Count Ercolo Antonio Mattioli, Secretary of State of Charles IV.,
Duke of Mantua. The count had agreed to betray his trust and to sell
his master's fortress of Casali to the French representative; with
this in their possession, Pignerol belonging already to France, Louis
XIV. and Louvois would dominate all upper Italy. Mattioli took his
pay, and betrayed his paymaster; the scheme miscarried, and the
schemer deserved another sort of reward. His open arrest, or
execution, or any public punishment, meant exposure and scandal to the
Crown and the Minister and the Ambassador of France. So he was
secretly kidnapped, and became "The Man in the Iron Mask." At his
death, in 1703, his face was mutilated, lest there might be
recognition, even then; the walls of his cell were scraped and
painted, to obliterate any marks he might have put on them; his linen
and clothing and furniture were burned. Had Voltaire suspected the
results of modern research, he would not have put forth his theory, in
the second edition of his "Questions sur l'Encyclopédie," that this
prisoner was an elder brother of Louis XIV. Yet, but for Voltaire's
error, we should have lost those delightful pages of Dumas, wherein
Aramis carries off from the Bastille this elder brother and rightful
heir to the crown, leaving Louis XIV. in the cell, and at last
replaces his puppets in their original positions.
This Cemetery of Saint-Paul, dating back to Dagobert, when the
burial-grounds on the Island had become overpeopled, had its own small
chapel of the same name, which had fallen out of use and into ruin.
Charles V., bringing it within his enclosure of the Hôtel Saint-Paul,
rebuilt and enlarged it and made it the church of the royal parish.
All the daughters and the sons of France were thenceforth baptized
here, and it became the favorite church of the nobility. After Louis
XI.'s time, and the desertion of this quarter by royalty, the little
church lost its vogue. In 1794 it was appropriated and sold as
National Domain, and torn down soon after. Its site is covered by the
buildings on and behind the eastern side of Rue Saint-Paul, opposite
the space between Passage Saint-Paul and Rue Eginhard. This is the
small street selected by Alphonse Daudet for the shop of his
_brocanteur_ Leemans, to which comes the fascinating Sephora, of "Les
Rois en Exil." Daudet has overdone it in going so far for his local
color; the street is a noisome alley, entered by an archway from Rue
Saint-Paul, holding only two or three obscene junk-shops.
And now, passing the flamboyant Italian façade--a meretricious
imitation of the front of Saint-Gervais--of the Church of
Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, which has absorbed the name of old
Saint-Paul, we reach at last the ample space where the two streets of
Rivoli and of Saint-Antoine meet and so make one broad, unbroken
thoroughfare through the length of the town, from the place where the
Bastille was to the place now named Concorde. This grand highway has
existed only since the middle of the nineteenth century. The Consulate
and the First Empire had cut Rue de Rivoli along the upper edge of the
Tuileries Gardens as far easterly as Rue de Rohan; from there it was
prolonged, taking the line of some of the old, narrow streets and
piercing through solid masses of ancient buildings, in the last years
of Louis-Philippe; and was carried from the Hôtel de Ville to this
point by the Second Empire. All through earlier days, the route,
common and royal, from the Louvre and the Tuileries to the Hôtel
Saint-Paul, the Tournelles, the Bastille, and the Arsenal, was by way
of narrow Rue Saint-Honoré and its narrower continuation, Rue de la
Ferronerie, thence around by Rue Saint-Denis into Rue des Lombards,
and so along Rues de la Verrerie and Roi-de-Sicile to the old gate of
Saint-Antoine, that stood just behind us here at the end of Rue
Malher. Outside that gate was the country road leading to Vincennes,
which was transformed into the city street, known to us as Rue
Saint-Antoine, through the protection given by Charles V.'s new wall
and by his Bastille. There had been, long before, a Rue Saint-Antoine,
and it curves away here on our left, and is called Rue François-Miron,
so named in honor of that _Prévôt des Marchands_ in Henri IV.'s time,
who merits remembrance as an honest, high-minded, capable
administrator of his weighty office.
Thus this street of old Saint-Antoine was the thoroughfare--at first
from the entrance into the town by the old gate of Saint-Antoine, and
afterward from the new street of Saint-Antoine and its entrance gate
farther east--to the open space behind the Hôtel de Ville, alongside
Saint-Gervais, and so to the bridges and the Palace on the Island. It
was a street "marvellously rich" in shops, having no rival except in
Rue Saint-Denis. Its shopkeepers shouted, from their doors or from the
pavement in front, the merits of their wares to the throng swarming
always along. Their wares were worthy of the city that, with its
fast-growing population, equalled Venice herself in wealth, display,
and splendor, if we may trust the word of an exultant scribbling
citizen of the Paris of Charles V.
So, too, it was the grand highway for royal entries, for troops, for
ambassadors with their trains, for any parade that demanded display
and attracted spectators. Such an array came along here on August 26,
1660, when young Louis XIV. brought into his town his young bride,
Maria Theresa of Spain, each of them being just twenty-two years old.
It was the showiest pageant and the longest procession yet seen in
Paris, taking ten or twelve hours to pass. The bride--a slight,
pretty, girlish figure, in white satin and pearls, and a violet mantle
of velvet--leaned back on the crimson velvet of her huge gilded
chariot; at her right on horseback was the King, in cloth-of-gold and
black lace, his collars and ruffles of white point. In the resplendent
retinue nothing so blazed as the superb empty coach of the
Cardinal-Minister Mazarin, its panels painted by Lebrun, drawn by the
famous mules and escorted by the Mousquetaires. Less than a year later
Mazarin was carried through Paris in his hearse, caring no more for
mules or any tomfoolery.
The procession had entered the town under Claude Perrault's triumphal
arch at the end of the Vincennes Avenue, and through Porte
Saint-Antoine, cleaned up and sculptured afresh for this day, and so
by new Rue Saint-Antoine, along this present Rue François-Miron. It
was packed with spectators, among whom was La Fontaine, who sent a
long rhymed description of the show to his patron, Fouquet, not
omitting mention of the cardinal's mules. These, too, were spoken of
with fitting praise in a letter written to a friend by young Madame
Scarron--to be a widow, within a few weeks--who was also in the
throng. Years after, she confessed to the credulous King that on that
day she had first seen him and first loved him, and that she had never
ceased to love him since! We may not consider the Duchess of Orleans
unduly prejudiced when she refers to Madame de Maintenon as "that
hussy."
At No. 88 Rue François-Miron you may see an excellent balcony of that
period, solidly and richly wrought in iron, supported by captivating
stone dragons of fantastic design. There were similar balconies on the
front of the great mansion at No. 68--which was then No. 62--but of
these only a small one is still left over the portal. They were all
crowded with a most select mob of the elect on the day of this
procession. There was Anne of Austria, in her black mantle, looking
down on her son, her thoughts turning back to her own bridal
procession over the same route, and her own youthful blond beauty of
forty-five years before. By her side sat Henrietta of France, widow of
Charles I., and her daughter, Henrietta Anne of England. The girl may
have gazed with curiosity on the over-dressed fop riding at the
bride's left wheel. This was Philippe d'Orléans, who was to be her
husband, and was, through his complacent creatures, to poison her
within ten years from this day. In another balcony sat Mazarin, too
ill to take part in the procession.
The hostess of these great ladies was one Catherine Bellier, wife of
Pierre de Beauvais; and this house is the Hôtel de Beauvais. The
husband had been a pedlar or a shopkeeper, and had amassed sufficient
wealth from ribbons to enable him to buy his title. The wife had
served as first _femme-de-chambre_ to Anne of Austria, and had so
learned many secrets of that queer court, of its Queen-Mother, and of
her Cardinal. In that court there was no more unscrupulous creature
than this Catherine Bellier. The deliciously outspoken Duchess of
Orleans--the second wife of that Philippe we have just seen--describes
this woman as one-eyed and hideous, of profligate life, and apt in all
intrigue. To the day of her death she loved to appear in flamboyant
costumes at the court, where she was treated with distinction because
of what she knew. Anne of Austria gave her the stone for the
construction of this _hôtel_, and she used to visit her
waiting-woman and _confidente_ here. A popular verse of the day ran:
"_Mercredi notre auguste Reine,
Cette charmante Souveraine,
Fut chez Madame de Beauvais;
Pour de son admirable palais
Voir les merveilles étonnantes,
Et les raretés surprenantes._"
[Illustration: The Hôtel de Beauvais.]
The design of the Hôtel de Beauvais, by Antoine Lepautre, is most
daring and original in its great interior oval court, embellished with
pilasters that are topped with finely carved stone masks. Despite the
unhallowed devotion to cleanliness which, with its whitewash, has
robbed it of its former lovely bloom of age, this court remains one of
the most impressive specimens of seventeenth-century domestic
architecture in all Paris. From the street we pass through an ample
gateway, its curved top surmounted by a great shell. The vestibule is
ornamented with escutcheons, alternating with the garlanded ox-skulls
of Roman-Doric decoration--mistaken by many for rams' heads, so as to
make a sculptor's pun on Bellier--all admirably carved in stone. The
noble staircase has Corinthian columns, and a massive stone balustrade
so perfectly pierced into fine lines of intertwisted tracery as to
give delicacy to it, thick and broad as it is. Cut in stone
escutcheons in the ceiling of this stairway are the intertwined
initials of the brand-new nobility that built it. The grand _salons_
of the first floor have been partitioned off into small rooms for
trade purposes. No character of any sort has been left to the
interior.
The ground on which we tread here, while a portion of the Marais of
old Paris, is not the Marais of modern Paris, as it is commonly
designated. Yet this region toward the river, built on during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after the opening up of the
grounds of the Hôtel Saint-Paul and the cutting of streets through
them, holds enticements in architecture and in story that tempt us to
turn our backs for a while on our own Marais.
Many of the streets here remain unmodernized and unspoiled, and here
are _hôtels_ as perfectly preserved as this Hôtel de Beauvais. At No.
26 Rue Geoffroy-Lasnier we stop in delight before an entrance-door
superbly carved and heavy with a glorious knocker--a lion's head
holding a great ring in its mouth. Above this door we read: "_Hôtel de
Châlons, 1625, et de Luxembourg, 1659._" The small court within,
diminished by modern stables on one side, retains on its other side an
ancient iron fountain. The façade of the miniature _hôtel_ giving on
this court is in well-balanced stone and brick; its shapely windows
are surrounded by male and female masks, and by delicate foliage
twining about the monograms of the aforetime exalted owners--all
elaborately carved in stone. The roof rises gracefully to its ridge,
and each gable end is surmounted by a well-wrought iron finial. There
is a modest garden behind, shut in and hid by the buildings about,
which hide, too, the simple and attractive stateliness of that rear
face of the Hôtel de Châlons. The enchanting isolation and the
singular charm of this concealed corner give us the feeling that here
is a bit of Bourges, gently dropped, tranquil and untroubled, into the
midst of these turbulent streets.
A little farther along, at No. 32 in this street of Geoffroy-Lasnier,
behind a commonplace house-front and a commonplace court, you shall
find a staircase, with an iron rail below and a wooden rail above,
that make a most uncommon and interesting picture.
Turning into Rue de Jouy, an altogether delightful old-time street, we
pass through a monumental gateway at No. 7 into a symmetrical court.
Facing us is the Hôtel d'Aumont, and it tells us more than is told by
any structure hereabout of the merits of François Mansart. This front
of two stories and of his own roof is faultless in proportion and
dainty in adornment. He has given it the stamp of the stately days of
the Grand Monarch by the four _oeils-de-boeuf_ above the perfect
cornice of the second floor, two on either side of the central window.
In the two corners of the court, at each angle of the building, are
round-fronted stone _perrons_, broad and low and inviting. That on our
left gives entrance to a small hall, the staircase in which carries an
exquisite wrought-iron rail that lifts and lightens the stone steps.
By them we mount to the chambers of the first floor, small as was the
custom then, with one grand central reception-room, excellent in its
proportions, its vaulted ceiling curiously carved in relief. All these
rooms are, by the good taste and generous spirit of the owners of the
property, kept in perfect condition, the furniture is of the period,
and the painting--done by Lebrun a century later than the ceiling on
which it is placed--is fresh and untarnished.