who was Maréchal of France and Governor of Paris under Louis XIII. A
descendant of the early fighters of old France, he seems to have been
one of those favorites of fortune who, in the phrase of Beaumarchais,
give themselves only the trouble to be born. At the age of ten he
began his career as a colonel of cavalry, and continued it through a
long line of lucky promotions in place and pay. Dying in 1704, he left
this _hôtel_ packed with furniture, paintings, _bibelots_, and curios,
and its stables filled with the carriages he had invented; an amazing
collection, requiring months for its sale by his heirs.
The _hôtel_ is now occupied by the Pharmacie Centrale of France, to
whose officials is due our gratitude for their rare and scrupulous
respect for this delightful relic. Over its spacious gardens behind
they have erected their immense laboratories and offices, which we may
enter under the great vaulted porch at No. 21 Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyères.
That once narrowest of the streets of old Paris, as quaint as its
name, given it by the branch of the Hyères nunnery having its seat
here, has become a broad and bustling thoroughfare. The plain rear
elevation of the _hôtel_ can be seen here from the little corner of
the garden that is still kept, and kept green by the choice plants of
the company. In it is a capital bust of Dorvault, physician, author,
founder of the Pharmacie Centrale. This may be the very bit of garden
noticed by Dr. Martin Lister, an English traveller in France at the
close of the seventeenth century. He dined with the Duc d'Aumont, and
records that, opening from the dining-room, was a greenhouse through
which his noble host led him into the garden.
Along through the rocky ravine that bears the name of Charlemagne, and
does him no honor, we pass, by way of Rue Saint-Paul, into the short
street that started in life as Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul, and has now taken
the name of Charles V. Here, among the ancient fronts, we are
attracted by that which is numbered 12, low and wide, with two floors
and dormers above. Through its entrance-door, capped by a well-carved
mask that smiles stonily down on us, we may enter the court by the
courtesy of the sister, who smiles sweetly. This building is occupied
by the girls' school of a sisterhood, whose youthful _communiantes_
happen to be forming in procession for a function to-day. They flutter
about in innocent white, in unconscious contrast with the great lady
and great criminal whom we have come to see. For this was the Hôtel
d'Aubray, and its most distinguished tenant was the Marquise de
Brinvilliers.
Let us look about the court and the little garden behind, both
embraced by the two wings of the structure. That wing on our right,
with round arches and a round tower at its end, is evidently of the
original fabric and intended for stabling. This wing on our left, now
extended by a new chapel, was, when built, meant to contain only this
staircase, whose wide and broad stone steps and well-wrought iron
balustrade mount gradually about a spacious central well. Here,
resting on the bench at its foot, we may recall what is known about
the strange and monstrous woman who once lived here.
She was Marie-Madeleine Dreux d'Aubray, and her father was an officer
of Louis XIV., appointed Civil Lieutenant of the Châtelet Prison. He
married her in 1651, when she was twenty-one, to the wealthy and
dissolute Marquis de Brinvilliers, who was not a model husband. She
was nothing loath, with her inborn instincts, to follow the example
set by him. Among her lovers, a certain Gaudin de Sainte-Croix was
much talked of; so much so that the lady's father, more powerful than
her husband, and doubtless more outraged by the shameless publicity of
the _liaison_, had Sainte-Croix taken from his daughter's carriage, as
they rode together, and put into the Bastille. There his cell-mate was
an Italian known only as Exili, a past-master in poisons, who boasted
that he had brought to death at least one hundred and fifty men and
women in Rome alone. He taught his trade to Sainte-Croix, who proved
to be an apt pupil, and who continued his studies after his release.
He took rooms with an apothecary in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and
fitted up a laboratory. There his Marquise visited him, and was
taught in her turn the use of his potions, among which the "manna of
Saint-Nicholas" became her favorite.
For she took pains and showed conscience in her experiments, mainly on
the patients in the hospitals, wherein she was a constant charitable
worker. Thus she soon learned to dispense her poisoned wafers with
scientific slowness and precision. But she was anxious that her
charity should begin at home. Her father failed gradually with some
obscure and unaccountable malady, and died in torment; and she nursed
him tenderly to the end. There were too many in her family for her
comfort, and her relatives outside had been too solicitous about her;
so some sickened and some died off, she caring for all and lamenting
each death. She had a sister, a Carmelite nun, who was never blinded
by the round, girlish face, appealing blue eyes, and beguiling ways
that bewitched so many. This woman guarded her own life and watched
over others of the family. The attempts made by the marchioness on her
husband's life were caused to fail, it is believed, by the attenuation
of the poisons mixed for her by Sainte-Croix, who doubtless feared
that he must marry the widow if he allowed her to become a widow. He
himself was found dead, in 1672, in his laboratory, poisoned by the
fumes of his devilish brews, through the breaking of the glass mask
worn at his work. The official search among his effects discovered a
casket, addressed to the marchioness at this dwelling; being opened,
its contents were found to be her own ardent love-letters to him, a
document detailing the doses and periods for the proper administration
of the poisons, and a choice assortment of preparations of opium,
antimony, sulphur. There was also a water-like liquid, unknown to
chemists, which was found to kill animals instantaneously, leaving no
lesions of any organ that could be traced by science. Sainte-Croix's
servant made a disclosure, and the marchioness, hearing of his arrest
and the finding of her package, made "confession by avoidance" by a
flight to England. She slipped down these stairs, out through that
doorway, and took coach around the corner for a northern port.
Colbert's brother was then Ambassador at the court of Saint James, and
between them her capture was planned; she got wind of it, and fled to
Liège, where she felt sure of safety in a convent. To her appears,
after a while, a handsome and susceptible young _abbé_, who allows
himself to be corrupted, and arranges for an elopement to a more
congenial refuge for lovers. She climbs gayly into his carriage, his
men surround it, and she is driven across the frontier into France and
to the Bastille. The _abbé_ was Desgrais, an eager police officer
detailed for this duty. He returned to her room in the convent, and
found scattered sheets of paper containing notes that began a
confession. This confession she was forced to complete and confirm by
the torture by water--repugnant to her coquetry, because it would
spoil her figure; "_toute mignonne et toute gracieuse_," had said an
adorer of her early days. She showed courage at the last, Madame de
Sévigné states, in the letters that were full of the trial and
execution. She was burned, having first been beheaded. "Her poor
little body was thrown, after her execution, into a good large fire,
and her ashes blown about by the wind; so that we may be breathing
her," Sévigné writes. This took place late in the afternoon of July
16, 1676--she was just over forty-five years of age--on Place de
Grève, to which she was carted in a tumbril, having stopped on the way
in front of Notre-Dame, and there, on her knees on the stones--her
feet bare, a rope around her neck, a consecrated lighted taper in her
uplifted hand--made to confess afresh.
[Illustration: The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de
Brinvilliers.]
The painter Lebrun was one of the great crowd that gathered to see her
go by, and he made a drawing, which you may see in the gallery of Old
French Designs in the Louvre. She half sits, half reclines, in her
tumbril, clad in a gown, its cowl drawn forward; her head is thrown
back; her thick chestnut hair brushed away from her face; her eyes are
wide and her mouth drawn with terror; her face is round, her lips are
thick; in her folded hands she holds a cross, and she stares straight
before her without seeing. At one side is the profile of a woman, very
lean and ugly, her expression full of horror as she bends forward to
gaze.
Turning from this street down through Rue Beautreillis, we pass the
end of Rue des Lions, on whose southern side we have already found
remains of the Hôtel des Lions du Roi. On its northern side is a row
of plaster-fronted houses, commonplace and shabby. In one of those
garrets there was living, shortly after 1830, a poor family of Jews
named Félix, lately arrived from the Canton Aarau in Switzerland.
Their two little girls went about the streets, singing and picking up
coppers. One day in the Place Royale, among those who stopped to
listen was a kindly eyed gentleman, who handed to the younger and
thinner of the two pinched children a piece of silver. "That is Victor
Hugo," said a woman in the crowd, as he went his way to his home in
the corner. That small singer was Élisa Rachel Félix, known to us as
the great Rachel.
Years after, when the world had given all that it could give to
Rachel, she returned, from a voyage to Egypt in search of health, to
the Place Royale to die. "It is on the way to Père-Lachaise," she
said, when, in 1857, she moved into the immense and superbly furnished
apartment on the first floor of No. 9, where her friends, she thought,
would have ample room for her burial service. It is only a step in
space from this garret to that palace. There, within a few
months--although her death came at the country-seat of Victorien
Sardou's father, whom she was visiting--that service was held, and
from there her body was borne to Père-Lachaise.
Going down Rue du Petit-Musc, we reach the Quai des Célestins, and
here on our left is the beginning of broad Boulevard Henri IV.,
cutting away, in its diagonal course through the grounds of the Hôtel
Saint-Paul, much history and romance. Nothing is left of the gardens
of the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, whose site is marked by a tablet on the
corner of the street of that name, at No. 10 Rue de la Cerisaie. This
tablet tells us that the _hôtel_ was the residence of the Czar Peter
the Great in 1717; the guest, during his short sojourn in Paris, of
the Maréchal de Villeroy, its owner then. We prefer to go back from
that visit over a hundred years to a more attractive presence in this
house. This was Gabrielle d'Estrées, beloved of Henry, who--for his
fondness for her and their two fine boys--would have made her his
wife, and have made them his legitimate successors, if he could have
had his way.
It was Sébastien Zamet who was their host in this "_palais d'amour du
roi_." The son of a shoe-maker of Lucca, he had found his fortune in
Paris, like so many of his countrymen in those days, and he built here
"a true fairy palace, such as romances describe," says Saint-Simon.
And here, walking in the garden after supper on the evening of April
9, 1599, the lovely Gabrielle was taken ill very suddenly. They
carried her to the Hôtel de Sourdis and put her in the care of her
aunt, with whom she had passed a portion of her girlhood in that
mansion. It stood within the precincts of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois,
its entrance on Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, where now is the end of Rue
Perrault. Here Gabrielle died, in agony, at six o'clock of the next
morning; poisoned, say Sismondi, Michelet, and the rest, but by whose
hand we shall never know. The Hôtel des Mousquetaires, that you will
find at No. 4 of Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, was then in existence, and so,
too, were many of these tall façades, with ancient, iron balconies
that look down on the narrow winding street, then a crowded
thoroughfare of old Paris. After Zamet's death his house was bought by
the Duc de Lesdiguières, Marshal and later Constable of France, from
whom it took its permanent name. We have already come here with
Boileau to see the veteran _Frondeur_, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de
Retz, whose last years were passed in this mansion, under the care of
one niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and comforted by another niece,
Madame de Sévigné.
On the quay, off on our left, the Célestins _caserne_ occupies a small
portion of the immense grounds of the Célestins Monastery. It was a
rich community, made so by the many gifts of kings, from Charles V.
down, to "_leurs bien aimés chapelains et serviteurs en Dieu_." These
pious beggars were not too proud to accept anything, and time fails to
tell of the splendors of their church, which became a museum of
monuments, tombs, statues, and was demolished in 1849, many of its
treasures having been destroyed during the Revolution. The godly
brethren are remembered in the name of the barracks and of the quay,
and to some of us, it must be owned, by the delectable dish of their
invention, _omelette à la Célestins_.
That long façade beyond, on Rue de Sully, belongs to the Arsenal, the
building alone left, its spacious gardens now under streets and
houses. We have come to its library with young Balzac, when he escaped
from his grinding drudgery and his dreary garret in Rue Lesdiguières.
We have driven here with Madame Récamier on the day before her death.
The most winning memory of the place is that of Charles Nodier, an
adorable man of genius, whose very defects were lovable, we are told
by the elder Dumas, who loved him. Nodier and Charles Lamb were
hissing, almost in the same year, each his own damned play. Many
others besides Dumas loved Nodier--Royalists and Republicans,
Classicists and Romanticists; and they crowded his _salon_ here of an
evening. For this was his official residence as Librarian, occupied by
him from his appointment in 1823 until his death in 1844. His historic
green drawing-room, where men were friendly who fought outside, and
the smaller rooms of his apartment on the first floor overlooking
Boulevard Morland, have been thrown into the library, and are now its
reading-rooms. They have kept their old-time panelling, carvings,
mouldings, but their walls, once decorated _en grisaille_, have been
toned to a uniform delicate gray-white.
This library was begun in 1785 by the Comte d'Artois, who purchased
the valuable books and manuscripts of Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis
d'Argenson, and of the Duc de la Vallière. Rooms in the Arsenal were
arranged for this collection, and it was named the "_Librairie de
Monsieur_;" the Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI. and of Louis
XVIII., having been the last "_Monsieur_" in France. His library has
grown to be the grandest in Paris after the Bibliothèque Nationale. It
contains the original archives of the Bastille--such as were saved,
when so many were scattered and destroyed at its taking--and it is
especially rich in dramatic literature and in manuscripts.
Here, above our heads as we stand in Rue du Petit-Musc, is the
tasteful, unspoiled side wall of the Hôtel de Lavallette, formerly the
Hôtel Fieubet. It was built by the younger Mansart, on the corner of
Saint-Paul's grounds, for the Chancellor of Maria Theresa, Gaspard de
Fieubet, and it became a gathering-place of the writers of those days.
They were courted by its owner, whose name is frequent in the letters
of Madame de Sévigné, and he himself turned his hand to rhyming, at
odd hours. Nearly two hundred years after he had gone, his mansion was
rescued from the sugar-refiners, who had degraded it to their uses, by
the Lavallette who has given it his name, and who "restored" it beyond
the recognition of its great architect, could he see it now. Its
façade behind the little court is overloaded with carvings, buttressed
by caryatides, surmounted by campaniles; it is a debauch of sculpture,
an orgy of ornamentation, under which the stately lines of the
original fabric are almost lost. They are quite hidden, on one side,
by a modern wing that has been thrust in on the court. All this
dishonor to architecture does not trouble the boys, whose big school
fills the building now, and who troop about the court in their black
jackets and trousers, their wide, white collars, their big, white
ties, pulling on reluctant gloves, as they line up on their unwilling
way to some church function.
We pass along the quay, glancing at the homelike and homely house
numbered 4, whose quiet dignity behind its court is in pleasing
contrast with the place just left. Here were the home and the studio
of Antoine-Louis Barye, and here he died on June 25, 1875.
On the quay at the corner of Rue Saint-Paul there stood until very
lately the entire and unspoiled _hôtel_ built for young Charles, Duc
de La Vieuville, in the last days of the Valois men. It was an
admirable specimen of the architecture of their time, as we may still
assure ourselves by a glance at the wing that is left within the court
entered from Rue Saint-Paul; a stone side wall toned to the glorified
grayness of age, pierced by tall, slender windows of graceful
proportions, and, above, the picturesque brick dormers of that period.
The last of the Valois women, Marguerite, had her home hard by here,
and its story begins just on this spot. When Charles V., to round out
and make entire his Saint-Paul estate, was taking in neighboring
_hôtels_ and outlying bits of land, he found, here where we find the
Hôtel de La Vieuville, the Paris seat of the archbishops of Sens.
Their palace on this corner, and its grounds extending along the
river-front and back along the east side of Rue Saint-Paul, up beyond
present Rue des Lions, cut out a goodly slice from this angle of the
royal domain. The King took this property, giving in exchange, to the
archbishop, the feudal fortress, the Hôtel d'Éstoménil, a little
farther west on the river-bank, at the meeting-place of several
country roads. Those roads are now the streets named Hôtel-de-Ville,
Figuier, Fauconnier, de l'Ave-Maria; and where they meet stands the
Hôtel de Sens, in almost the same state, as to its walls, as when they
were finished by the archbishop Tristan de Salazar. This
soldier-priest had rebuilt the old structure in the last years of the
fifteenth and the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and it
remains an authentic and authoritative document of the domestic
architecture of that period. The delicate ornamentation of its façade
has suffered, some few mutilations have despoiled the fabric, its
gardens are built upon, their great trees are gone, yet it stands,
time-stained and weather-worn, a most impressive example of that
Gothic strength and beauty whose frozen lines were just beginning to
melt under the fire of the upspringing Renaissance.
The noble arch of the ogival portal is, by a touch of genius, pinched
forward at its topmost point, and is there sliced away, so as to make
a snub-nosed protuberance that seems to lift up the whole front. Its
two high-peaked bartizan turrets are a trifle heavy, as we see them
hemmed in by other buildings, but their panelling and moulding plead
for pardon for any slight disproportion; and the one on the corner is
perfect in situation and in effect. The few windows of the front have
lost their stone-crossed mullions, some broken, some bricked up. The
great dormer window above, possibly of later construction, is a
prediction of the loveliness that was to come to dormers, such as we
see in the roofs of Rouen's Hôtel de Ville and of the _château_ of
Blois. The fine effect of the chimneys, once entirely of stone, has
been marred by cheap patching. As to the rest, the oddities and
irregularities of this façade are yet all in good taste and all
captivating. Within the groined porch we see, across the small court,
the main building meant for the archbishop's dwelling, and the solid
square tower meant for defence and for watching. Its entrance-door
tells, in its size and shape, the entire tale of feudal days. Away up
on one angle of this tower is an imitation sentry-box, battlemented
and supported by corbelled brackets. The interior of the buildings has
been defaced and degraded by the base usages to which it has been
subjected, yet traces are left of its past grandeur in some of the
rooms and halls.
[Illustration: The Hôtel de Sens.]
These awaited in orderly and decorous silence, in their early days,
the coming of their owner from the mother-church at Sens. He came
along the banks of the Yonne and the Seine on his richly caparisoned
mule, his foot-servants in advance, his clerkly servitors and
ecclesiastics riding behind, and so he entered into this tranquil
court. Years later the place was noisy enough, when the religious wars
made it one of the meeting-places of the leaders of the Holy League.
On the very day when Henri IV. entered Paris, the Archbishop of Sens,
Cardinal de Pellevé, lay dying in this his palace, almost within
hearing of the triumphant Te Deum in Notre-Dame.
The King had been allowed his divorce by his childless wife,
Marguerite, and he in turn allowed her to return to Paris from her
long exile in Auvergne; ordering that this _hôtel_ should be
fittingly arranged for her residence, in 1605. We saw her last, a
charming child, in the gardens of the Tournelles. And now she comes
here, a worn wanton of nearly fifty-five, her wonted fires still
smouldering under the ashes. It is between these two appearances that
we like to look on her in the pages of Brantôme and on the canvas of
Clouet. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, has been aptly
dubbed the _valet-de-place_ of history; and yet a valet has the merit
of looking out of his own eyes from his own point of view. It was for
him that Marguerite wrote her "Mémoires," and to him she left them. In
after days, when exiled from the court he loved, able only to lick the
chops of memory, he wrote her _éloge_ in these glowing words: "If
there has ever been anyone in the world perfect in beauty, it is the
Queen of Navarre. All who have been, or shall be, near her, are ugly
beside her. If there is a miscreant who believes not in the miracles
of God, let him look upon her. Many believe that she is rather a
goddess of heaven than a princess of earth, and yet perhaps no goddess
was ever so lovely."
It is indeed a lovely creature, yet all of earth, whom we see in
Clouet's half life-size portrait in the _château_ of Azay-le-Rideau.
Her plentiful blond hair curves back above her fine brow, and her
bluish-gray eyes smile out with inviting mischievousness. Yet Brantôme
has to own that his goddess was easily first in the _escadron volant_
that sailed under her mother's flag, and we may guess what that meant
in the court "whose vices it would be repulsive to suggest, and whose
virtues were homicide and adultery."