week, of men of letters and of the arts, with whom her learning
allowed her to converse on equal terms; and her kindliness allowed
them to feel at ease. For "from her behavior it could never be
discovered that she had once been the wife of the King." But the
wayward Margot made trouble for herself that ended her stay here after
a year or less. She came home from mass at the Célestins on the
morning of Wednesday, April 5, 1606, and as she was helped from her
coach by her newest favorite page of eighteen, he was killed by her
latest discarded favorite, already twenty. She sat in one of these
front windows the next day, having neither eaten nor drunk nor slept
meanwhile; she looked out on the beheading of the jaunty assassin;
that evening she left the Hôtel de Sens forever. For a while she
stayed at her hunting-lodge at Issy, already visited by us in former
pages, and then went to her last dwelling, on the southern bank in the
Pré-aux-Clercs, which looked out across the river at the Louvre, where
Henry was unhappy with her successor. The two women remained always
friendly, and were seen together in festivities and processions, and
the reigning Queen paid many a debt of the deposed Queen. To the last
she rouged to the eyes, and wore a flowing wig and low frocks, albeit
she had turned _dévote_, and had found a new idol in her confessor.
This was young Vincent de Paul, not yet canonized, whose chaste
ministrations made him adored by sinners elderly enough to repent.
There she died in the spring of 1615, at the age of sixty-three, the
last of the Valois name, leaving everything, mostly debts, to young
Louis XIII.
Later along in the seventeenth century, when the court end of the town
went to the west, and the Church dignitaries found this region too far
afield, this Hôtel de Sens was sold. Its new owners and tenants were
the merchants and financiers who crowded then to this quarter. They,
too, soon moved farther west, and the place had many strange
employments forced upon it. As early as 1692, the _messageries_ for
Dijon and Lyons rented it for their town head-quarters. By the middle
of the eighteenth century, the palace of the archbishops was degraded
to a livery stable and a horsedealer's lair, and the ancient arms of
Sens on its front and the escutcheons of Lorraine and Bourbon,
prelates of the Church, were covered by a great sign, "_Maison de
Roulage et de Commission_." From this court, in the words of the
advertisement of that date, "_Le Courrier de la Malle de Paris à Lyons
partit à cinq heures et demi du soir, 8 Floréal, an IV._"--which was
April 27, 1796.
[Illustration: Marguerite de Valois.
(From a portrait by an unknown artist, in the Musée de Montpellier.)]
That mail-coach was stopped near Lieussart, its driver killed, and a
large sum in assignats and gold carried off. For this crime one Joseph
Lesurques was arrested, and was recognized by several witnesses as the
robber. He had been an official in Douai, had saved money, and had
gone to Paris for the education of his children. Neither his record
nor his alibi sufficed to acquit him, the strongest of circumstantial
evidence convicted him, and he was executed on October 30, 1796. Two
years later the murderer and robber was captured in one Dubosc, who,
after a daring escape and recapture, went to the guillotine. By
Dubosc's conviction Lesurques was posthumously morally acquitted, but
his judicial rehabilitation has never been made, albeit his broken and
crazed children petitioned, courts debated, and Deputies chattered
through many long years. This true story, our last reminiscence of the
Hôtel de Sens, has been put on the French stage as "Le Courrier de
Lyons," and on the English stage as "The Lyons Mail."
We go on to the upper end of Rue Fauconnier, and across Rue
Saint-Antoine, to where begins Rue Pavée-au-Marais, a most ancient and
aristocratic street, filled with grand mansions in its best days and
in days not so long gone. It had taken its name as early as the middle
of the fifteenth century, when, first of all the Marais streets, it
was paved. It was known, unofficially and popularly, as _le petit
Marais_, so closely did it crowd, within its short and select limits,
the essential characteristics in architecture and atmosphere of the
great Marais. Now, wofully modernized, it holds one relic only, a
magnificent relic, that suggests to us, in its solitary dignity,
something of the lost glories of this street.
We cross Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, a main thoroughfare of old Paris, whose
odd name came from Charles, brother of Saint Louis, Count of Anjou and
Provence, and King of Naples and Sicily in 1265. His fortified abode
stood on the northern side of this street, at its eastern end just
within the old walls. It became, in after times, the _hôtel_ and then
the prison of La Force. Its entrance was over yonder, at the corner of
modern Rue Malher; and opposite, on the southern corner, was the stone
that served as the axeman's block for the Princess of Lamballe. Along
this pavement the small Gavroche led the two smaller Thénardier boys,
on his way to _his hôtel_--the plaster elephant in Place de la
Bastille. A wide avenue, bordered by modern constructions, is fast
taking the place of the old street and robbing it of all its
character.
Where Rue Pavée meets Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, stands the Hôtel
Lamoignon, formerly the Hôtel d'Angoulême. At that corner a square
turret juts out from above the ground floor, overhanging the pavement,
its supporting bracket cut under in shell-like curves. About the
stately court, entered from Rue Pavée, rise the imposing walls, those
of the wings of a little later date and a little more ornate than that
of the façade. This front is pre-eminently impressive in its height,
in the unusual loftiness of its floors and their windows, in the
single Corinthian pilasters, tall and slender and graceful, rising
from ground to cornice. They may serve us as a souvenir of Jean
Bullant's work in the _château_ of Ecouen and in his portion of
Chantilly. Above that cornice the dormer windows spring high under
their gabled ends. Beneath them, and over the entrance porch, and on
the side wall of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois--profusely decorating, but
not overloading, the spacious surfaces that carry them easily--we
trace without effort the unworn hunting-horns, the stags' heads, the
dogs in chase, the crescent and the initial H so interlaced as to form
an H and a D--all the carved emblems of Diane de France, for whom this
remarkable structure was planned and built, a little after 1580, by a
now unknown architect.
She was born of an Italian mother, during a stay in her country of the
son of François I., who was later Henri II. On coming to the throne,
in 1547, he legitimatized this daughter, then ten years of age, and
gave her education and position in France. She grew up to be a good
woman and a good wife to Horace Farnese, Duc de Castro, and to her
second husband, François, the eldest son of the Constable Montmorenci.
She spent her long life--which saw seven monarchs sitting on the French
throne--doing kindly acts, not one of which meant so much for the
France she loved as the reconciliation between Henri III. and Henri de
Navarre; possible through her, because the sceptic Béarnais took her
word for or against any written word of anyone. Dying in 1619, she
left this mansion to Charles, Duc d'Angoulême, son of Charles IX. and
Marie Touchet, the last of her many benefactions to him. He added
these wings, and placed in that on the northern side this stately
stone staircase, filling the width between the stone walls, with no
hand-rail to break its sweep. Nothing is left of the former grandeur
of the interior, which is given up to large industries and petty
handicrafts; even the vast and lofty chambers are cut up for trade
purposes by partitions and by interposed floorings.
In 1658 the Hôtel d'Angoulême became the Hôtel Lamoignon by purchase
of Guillaume de Lamoignon, a wealthy President of Parliament, and in
1684 it went to his son, Chrétien-François de Lamoignon. It was a
dwelling worthy of him and of his illustrious name, which it still
bears. In it he received the best society of that day--represented to
us by Racine, Boileau, Bourdaloue, Regnard, and others of their
kidney, all honored in finding a friend in this magistrate of ability,
probity, kindliness. It was to him that Boileau addressed his "Sixth
Epistle," and to him, when, as Master of Requests, it was his official
duty to forbid further performances of "Tartufe" after the first
night, Molière submitted without rancor. Perhaps his highest honor,
during a life of honors, was his refusal of an election to a
_fauteuil_ in the Académie Française.
On April 13, 1763, in this building was opened the first public
library of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris. One Antoine Moriau had been
for many years collecting, in his apartment on this second floor, some
14,000 volumes and 200 manuscripts, all left to the town at his death
in 1759. The municipality kept his rooms, and rented additional rooms
on this first floor, opening them to the public on Wednesdays and
Saturdays.
[Illustration: The Hôtel Lamoignon.]
The _concierge_ or his wife, honored by the interest shown in their
splendid show-place, will conduct such curious strangers as may wish
around the corner into Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and through a
little gate on that street into a small back court. This is the shabby
remnant of Diane's and of Lamoignon's extensive gardens, which once
stretched to those of the Hôtel de La Force on the south, and
eastwardly to Rue Sévigné. From this spot you may see four or five
windows away up in the rear wall of the mansion, and you will be told
that these are the windows of Alphonse Daudet's former apartment,
wherein he wrote "Fromont jeune et Risler aîné." His large study on
the top floor had two high, wide windows, from which he saw the roofs
of all Paris on that side. Against the wall at one end of the room was
his shelf for standing at his work, and his wife's desk was at the
other end; while, between them, carrying the freshly written sheets,
trotted the little boy Léon, who is now a man, wielding his own good
pen. To him, in those days, the tall Flaubert and Tourgueneff were
"giants" by the side of his father, and of the other friends who used
to climb these many stairs to this _salon_ in the sky. Daudet has left
affectionate records of the old house. His "Rois-en-exil" was written
in a pavilion in the garden of Richelieu's old mansion, which stood in
the northwestern corner of the then Place Royale, now Place des
Vosges, where has been cut, through house and garden, the prolongation
of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Rue des Vosges.
The gentle artist, "handsome as a Hindoo god" in those days, says M.
Claretie, brought from his beloved _Midi_ a longing for space and air
and quiet, and all his abodes in the city were high above the street,
with ample breathing-space and unbroken horizon. His earliest Paris
home was at the very top of the furnished Hôtel du Senat, still at No.
7 Rue de Tournon. This was the wretched room to which he came back,
early one morning, from his first swell reception, his only dress-suit
drenched with the wet snow through which he had waded, owning no
overcoat. Then, for a while, he occupied an _entresol_ in No. 4 Place
de l'Odéon, in "_la maison A. Laissus_," one of the unaltered houses
of that historic place. His last home was on the third floor of No. 31
Rue Bellechasse, in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and one
of its delightful old gardens lay beneath his windows, giving him the
greenness and the tranquillity so dear to him.
The name of Madame Daudet may not be omitted from this record of the
illustrious women of the Marais, although now, in the maturity of her
distinction and elegance, she adorns another quarter of Paris. She has
made for herself an honored place among French women of letters, and
she helped her husband to his own place by her critical powers and her
sympathetic appreciation. She both tranquillized and stimulated him
through his earlier years of robust strength, and the later invalidism
that was yet filled with labor. Her son, who carried the father's
sheets across the room to her for approval or correction, has
dedicated his "Alphonse Daudet" to his mother, "who aided and
encouraged her husband alike in the hours of discouragement and of
hopefulness."
There are bits and fragments of vanished antiquity--portals, windows,
balconies, brackets, pitifully sundered from the grandeur they stand
for and suggest--scattered all about this portion of the Marais. Much
of this bygone grandeur was to be found in Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, a
street that had been a country road just outside the wall of
Philippe-Auguste, and, with the crumbling of the wall, had been
speedily built up with stately mansions. One of these, with a fund for
its support, was willed, in 1415, to the Grand Prior of France, in
trust for such burghers as were freed from all taxation by reason of
their extreme poverty. So it came that these _francs bourgeois_ gave
their name to the street. Here at No. 30 is a quaint low front, mostly
taken up by a spacious entrance-porch, decorated with finely cut
dragons; here at No. 31 is the superb portal of the Hôtel Jeanne
d'Albret; all that is left of the noble residence of that niece of
François I. who married the Duc de Clèves in 1541. It is more than a
century from that date before this _hôtel_ holds any history for us,
when it became tenanted by César Phébus d'Albret, Marshal of France; a
rich and frolicsome Gascon, a friend of Scarron, an especial friend of
young Madame Scarron. It was he who killed the Marquis de Sévigné in a
duel. The Duchesse d'Albret was an eminently proper person, a bit of a
_précieuse_, and her _salon_ here was a flimsy copy of that of the
Hôtel Rambouillet. Scarron's widow, poor and by no means unfriended,
found a temporary home in this house, after a short stay with her
life-long friend, Mlle. de Lenclos, before taking rooms in the
convent, where we have seen her.
When _la veuve_ Scarron, reincarnated in Madame de Maintenon, was
living in the grand establishment at Vaugirard, provided by the King
for his two children, she is said, by local tradition, to have had her
private apartment in the Marais, near where we stand. It was on the
first floor of the small and shabby house at No. 7 bis Rue du Perche,
and you are shown a ceiling in an upper room, that is claimed to have
been painted for the great lady. It is in four sunken squares, wherein
pose the four Seasons, in conventional attitudes and unconventional
raiment.
Let us stop here on the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois,
where it meets the end of a little street with the big name of des
Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, given to it by the great hospital and
monastery that occupied these grounds, through which this street was
afterward cut, when Philippe-Auguste gathered them just within the
safe-keeping of his wall. Just without that wall lay the Hôtel
Barbette, in the midst of its own wide lands. On this corner, we stand
just on the line of the wall, and look across Rue des Francs-Bourgeois
into a court, once the Alleé aux Arbalétriers, over whose entrance is
a tablet, recording the murder of Louis d'Orléans, near that spot--a
scene sketched in our first chapter. That maze of courts, crowded
close with ancient wooden structures, tempts us to search within it
for vestiges of the outbuildings of the Hôtel Barbette. And it is
worth while exploring the interior of the corner house, if only for
its mediæval staircase. Coming out by the courts opening into Rue
Vieille-du-Temple, we take a few steps to where it meets the southern
side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and we stand on the exact site of
the Porte Barbette of the old wall.
There, on the northeastern corner of the two streets, stands a most
ancient building well worth our regard. On the angle, reaching from
just above its ground floor to the cornice, is hung a five-sided
_tourelle_ of singular beauty. Its heavy supporting bracket is deeply
and handsomely corbelled out, and at each angle is a slim colonette,
delicately carved. The division line between its two stories is
defined by a fine moulding. In the first story is cut a small ogival
window, under a prettily crocketed head and a flat finial. This window
is iron grated, and its grim visage is softened by a flowering plant
set within. The panels of the lower story are plain, and those above
are decorated with a lace-like pattern, graceful and elegant, whose
lines and curves carry one's eye to the cornice. The plain façade of
the house in Rue Vieille-du-Temple has been degraded by modern
windows, while that in the other street remains most impressive, with
its gabled end. All in all, no such delightful specimen of
fifteenth-century Gothic as this Barbette turret can be found in our
Marais.
[Illustration: The Tourelle of the Hôtel Barbette.]
Yet turret and structure are not, as is often stated, any portion of
the original Hôtel Barbette. That was built, at the end of the
thirteenth century, by Étienne Barbette, a man of wealth and
importance, the Provost of Paris under Philippe "_le Bel_," and his
Master of the Mint. The vast enclosure of his grandiose _hôtel_
covered all the ground, from the old wall northward to the line of the
present Rues de la Perle and du Parc-Royal; and eastwardly from this
Rue Vieille-du-Temple to the gardens of Saint-Catherine du
Val-des-Écoliers, near where now runs Rue Sévigné. This ample domain
sufficed for the _menus plaisirs_ of this lucky man, and was merely
his _petit séjour_. Under that blameless guise it served as the abode,
a little more than a century later, when rebuilt after the mob had
wrecked it, of Isabeau de Bavière, official wife of mad Charles VI.
Leaving him to the neglect of servants and to the companionship of
Odette, the Queen escaped boredom here, by her dinners and suppers,
balls and fêtes; here she invented, or first introduced, the
masquerades that were soon the rage of Polite Society. She amused
herself with other games, too; such as statecraft, in partnership with
her husband's younger brother, Louis d'Orléans. It was from the
Barbette that she mismanaged the kingdom, ground down the people with
intolerable taxes, pushed the marriage of her daughter Catherine with
Henry V. of England, plotted the shameful Treaty of Troyes, which made
France an appanage of the English crown, and gave Paris to English
troops.
After her husband's death, cast aside by Burgundy and England, she
found a drearier refuge in the Hôtel Saint-Paul than that to which she
had condemned him there. In its corners she hid while Joan the Maid
was undoing the evil work done by this shameless woman, and was
bringing back to Paris the son hated by this shameless mother. All
through those years she wept and moaned, witnesses have reported; left
alone, as she was, with the memories of her lusts and her treasons,
with the wreckage of the animal beauty, for which, and for no other
quality, she had been selected as the royal consort. Seven days after
she learned of the signing of the Treaty of Arras she died, "_et son
corps fut tant méprisé_," says Brantôme, that it was thrown into a
boat at the water-gate of Saint-Paul, and, after an unseemly service
in Notre-Dame, was sent by night down the Seine to Saint-Denis,
"_ainsi ni plus ni moins qu'une simple demoiselle!_"
Partly destroyed by fire and partly rebuilt, we find the Hôtel
Barbette, after another hundred years and more, in the hands of the
Comte de Brézé, Seneschal of Normandy. Aged, ugly, crippled, as we see
him in Hugo's verse, he is pleasantly remembered for the lovely widow
he left for Henri II., and for his lovely tomb left, for our joy, in
the cathedral of Rouen. When his widow, Diane de Saint-Vallier, became
Diane de Poictiers, Duchesse de Valentinois--an elderly siren of
thirty-seven, who was yet "_fort aymée et servie d'un des grands rois
et valeureux du monde_"--she wore always her widow's white and black,
and kept to the last that whiteness of skin and purity of complexion
that came, she claimed, from her only cosmetic, soap and water. Her
coldness of heart had much to do with it, to our thinking. Brantôme
saw her when she had come to sixty-two, and was struck by her
freshness, "_sans se farder_," as of thirty. He adds, with his
ever-green susceptibility: "_C'est dommage que la terre couvre ce beau
corps._" This property had gone, on her husband's death, in 1561, to
his and her two daughters; who profited by its vast extent and by the
example set by François I. in similar jobs, to open streets through
it, and divide it into parcels for selling. Those streets were named
Barbette and Trois-Pavilions, the latter now renamed Elzévir. And if
any remnant exists of the second Hôtel Barbette of Diane de Poictiers,
it is this corner house and its lovely turret.
By way of this corner, the body of Louis d'Orléans was carried to the
Church of the Blancs-Manteaux, in the street of that name just behind
us. It lay till morning in the nave, and about the bier gathered
royalty and nobility, all through the long November night. The church
is gone, and so, too, is his chapel in the Church of the Célestins;
and the monument, erected there by Louis XII. to his murdered
grandfather and his martyred grandmother, has been placed in the
Cathedral of Saint-Denis. The site of the Church of the
Blancs-Manteaux is covered by the great central establishment of the
Mont de Piété; its grounds are entirely built over; the street that
took the name of the monastery, once a perilous _coupe-gorge_, has
grown to be, not respectable, but characterless. We must be content
with the phantoms of Saint Louis's white-mantled monks, strolling in
their cloisters; later, grown fat and scampish, haunting the low
_cabarets_ of this mal-famed street, and rehearsing, within their own
precincts, those frenzied mysteries of the mediæval stage, that led to
the disbandment and the driving-out of the debauched order.
A step to the south from this street, along Rue Vieille-du-Temple,
brings us to the massive entrance-doors of No. 47. Their outer
surfaces are richly carved with masks and with figures; on their inner
side is an excellent bas-relief representing Romulus and Remus found
by the shepherd, when the wolf is giving them suck. About the court,
diminutive and dainty, the walls of the small _hôtel_ are adorned with
tasteful sculptures, and laden with dials, two of the sun and two of
the moon. These anomalous adornments came here through the caprice of
a Director of the Royal Observatory, who once occupied the house and
who wreaked his scientific humor in this odd fashion. This is the
Hôtel de Hollande, a rebuilt remnant of the large mediæval mansion of
Maréchal de Rieux. The street just in front of his _hôtel_, some
authorities insist, was the scene of the assassination of the Duc
d'Orléans. Reconstructed early in the seventeenth century, the
carvings, sculptures, and decorations of this elegant little _hôtel_
are excellent examples of late Renaissance. Unluckily, the bas-reliefs
and paintings of the interior may no longer be seen. Beyond this outer
court is a smaller court, containing an attractive structure of a
later date.
This Hôtel de Hollande has borne that name since, in the reign of
Louis XIV., it was the seat of the embassy representing Holland at his
court. This being officially Dutch soil, at that time, we may see
Racine coming through this entrance-doorway, in full wig and court
costume; coming to present his son for introductions at The Hague,
where the young man is to be a member of the French Embassy. We have
seen the letters sent to him there by his thrifty father. There is
another bit of history for us here. It was in this house that the firm
"Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie" started in business in 1776, with a
capital of 3,000,000 francs. The firm was composed of Caron de
Beaumarchais, with the governments of France and Spain for his silent
partners; the former putting in 2,000,000 francs, and the latter the
other million. The business of this house--and it did a lively
business while it lasted--was to supply, secretly and unknown to the
English officials in Paris, arms and equipments to the American
colonies.
Anne de Montmorenci, the great constable of France, in alliance,
against the Huguenots, with the Guises, his near neighbors in the
Marais, outfought Condé and Coligny at Saint-Denis in 1567, and died,
of the wounds he got in that battle, "in his own _hôtel_ in Rue
Saint-Avoie." So says the chronicle, and it tells us further that his
was the grandest mansion in the town, with most extensive grounds; far
surpassing in size and magnificence the Hôtels Lamoignon and
Carnavalet. It was sufficiently spacious for the large-minded John
Law, who established his bank in the building two centuries later.
When the crash came, and he sought more modest quarters, the State
took the building for its _bureaux_. Now, no stone of the structure
can be found, the street from which it had entrance--Saint-Avoie--is
merged in that portion of Rue du Temple which crosses Rue Rambuteau,
and this broad thoroughfare sweeps over the site of Montmorenci's
palace and his gardens.