THE RUE DE L'ANCIENNE COMÉDIE AND THE CAFÉ PROCOPE.
The Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Près and the Rue de
l'Ancienne Comédie are one and the same. As the Rue des
Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Près, it dates back to somewhere about the
reign of Philippe Auguste; and as the Rue de l'Ancienne Comèdie it takes
its name and fame from the year 1689, when the old Théâtre Français was
opened on the 18th of April by the company known as Moliêre's
troupe--Moliêre being then dead, and Lully having succeeded him at the
Théâtre du Palais Royal.
In the same year, 1689, one François Procope, a Sicilian, conceived the
happy idea of hiring a house just opposite the new theatre, and there
opening a public refreshment-room, which at once became famous, not only
for the excellence of its coffee (then newly introduced into France),
but also for being the favorite resort of all the wits, dramatists, and
beaux of that brilliant time. Here the latest epigrams were circulated,
the newest scandals discussed, the bitterest literary cabals set on
foot. Here Jean Jacques brooded over his chocolate; and Voltaire drank
his mixed with coffee; and Dorat wrote his love-letters to Mademoiselle
Saunier; and Marmontel wrote praises of Mademoiselle Clairon; and the
Marquis de Biévre made puns innumerable; and Duclos and Mercier wrote
satires, now almost forgotten; and Piron recited those verses which are
at once his shame and his fame; and the Chevalier de St. Georges gave
fencing lessons to his literary friends; and Lamothe, Fréron,
D'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, and all that wonderful company of wits,
philosophers, encyclopaedists, and poets, that lit up as with a dying
glory the last decades of the old _régime_, met daily, nightly, to
write, to recite, to squabble, to lampoon, and some times to fight.
The year 1770 beheld, in the closing of the Théâtre
Français, the extinction of a great power in the Rue des
Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Près--for it was not, in fact, till the theatre
was no more a theatre that the street changed its name, and became the
Rue de L'Ancienne Comédie. A new house (to be on first opening invested
with the time-honored title of Théâtre Français, but afterwards to be
known as the Odéon) was now in progress of erection in the close
neighborhood of the Luxembourg. The actors, meanwhile, repaired to the
little theatre of the Tuilleries. At length, in 1782,[2] the Rue de
L'Ancienne Comédie was one evening awakened from its two years' lethargy
by the echo of many footfalls, the glare of many flambeaux, and the
rattle of many wheels; for all Paris, all the wits and critics of the
Café Procope, all the fair shepherdesses and all the beaux seigneurs of
the court of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI., were hastening on foot, in
chairs, and in chariots, to the opening of the new house and the
performance of a new play! And what a play! Surely, not to consider it
too curiously, a play which struck, however sportively, the key-note of
the coming Revolution;--a play which, for the first time, displayed
society literally in a state of _bouleversement_;--a play in which the
greed of the courtier, the venality of the judge, the empty glitter of
the crown, were openly held up to scorn;--a play in which all the wit,
audacity, and success are on the side of the _canaille_;--a play in
which a lady's-maid is the heroine, and a valet canes his master, and a
great nobleman is tricked, outwitted, and covered with ridicule!
[2] 1782 is the date given by M. Hippolyte Lucas. Sainte-Beuve places it
two years later.
This play, produced for the first time under the title of _La Folle
Journée_, was written by one Caron de Beaumarchais--a man of wit, a man
of letters, a man of the people, a man of nothing--and was destined to
achieve immortality under its later title of _Le Mariage de Figaro_.
A few years later, and the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie echoed daily and
nightly to the dull rumble of Revolutionary tumbrils, and the heavy
tramp of Revolutionary mobs. Danton and Camille Desmoulins must have
passed through it habitually on their way to the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Charlotte Corday (and this is a matter of history) did pass through it
that bright July evening, 1793, on her way to a certain gloomy house
still to be seen in the adjoining Rue de l'École de Médecine, where she
stabbed Marat in his bath.
But throughout every vicissitude of time and politics, though fashion
deserted the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, and actors migrated, and fresh
generations of wits and philosophers succeeded each other, the Café
Procope still held its ground and maintained its ancient reputation. The
theatre (closed in less than a century) became the studio first of Gros
and then of Gérard, and was finally occupied by a succession of
restaurateurs but the Café Procope remained the Café Procope, and is the
Café Procope to this day.
The old street and all belonging to it--especially and peculiarly the
Café Procope---was of the choicest Quartier Latin flavor in the time of
which I write; in the pleasant, careless, impecunious days of my youth.
A cheap and highly popular restaurateur named Pinson rented the old
theatre. A _costumier_ hung out wigs, and masks, and débardeur garments
next door to the restaurateur. Where the fatal tumbril used to labor
past, the frequent omnibus now rattled gayly by; and the pavements
trodden of old by Voltaire, and Beaumarchais, and Charlotte Corday, were
thronged by a merry tide of students and grisettes. Meanwhile the Café
Procope, though no longer the resort of great wits and famous
philosophers, received within its hospitable doors, and nourished with
its indifferent refreshments, many a now celebrated author, painter,
barrister, and statesman. It was the general rendezvous for students of
all kinds--poets of the École de Droit, philosophers of the École de
Médecine, critics of the École des Beaux Arts. It must however be
admitted that the poetry and criticism of these future great men was
somewhat too liberally perfumed with tobacco, and that into their
systems of philosophy there entered a considerable element of grisette.
Such, at the time of my first introduction to it, was the famous Café
Procope.