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The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume 2 (of 2)

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Title: The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume 2 (of 2)

Author: Benjamin Ellis Martin
        Charlotte M. Martin


        
Release date: March 19, 2013 [eBook #42367]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STONES OF PARIS IN HISTORY AND LETTERS, VOLUME 2 (OF 2) ***

Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

  On page 149, camelias is a possible typo for camellias.

  The index entry for the Latin Quarter refers to a non-existent
  index entry to the Scholars' Quarter.




THE STONES OF PARIS

IN HISTORY AND LETTERS

  [Illustration: Madame de Sévigné.
   (From the portrait by Mignard.)]




     THE STONES OF PARIS
     IN HISTORY AND LETTERS

     BY
     BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN
     AND
     CHARLOTTE M. MARTIN


     IN TWO VOLUMES

     VOL. II


     _ILLUSTRATED_


     NEW YORK
     CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
     MDCCCXCIX




     COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY
     CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS


     TROW DIRECTORY
     PRINTING AND BOOK BINDING COMPANY

     NEW YORK




CONTENTS


                                                     Page

     The Southern Bank in the Nineteenth Century        1

     The Paris of Honoré de Balzac                     51

     The Paris of Alexandre Dumas                      89

     The Paris of Victor Hugo                         123

     The Making of the Marais                         163

     The Women of the Marais                          213




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

_From drawings by John Fulleylove, Esq. The portraits from photographs
by Messrs. Braun, Clément et Cie._


     Madame de Sévigné (from the portrait by Mignard).
                                                          Frontispiece

                                                                  PAGE

     Alphonse de Lamartine (from a sketch by David d'Angers,
     "_un soir chez Hugo_")                                  facing 10

     Madame Récamier (from the portrait by Gros)             facing 40

     The Abbaye-aux-Bois                                            43

     Portal of Châteaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac               46

     The Court of the Pension Vauquer                        facing 52

     Honoré de Balzac (from the portrait by Louis Boulanger) facing 64

     Les Jardies                                                    70

     The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the house where
     Voltaire died                                           facing 78

     The Pension Vauquer                                            80

     The Commemorative Tablet to Balzac                             84

     The Figure of d'Artagnan (from the Dumas Monument by
     Gustave Doré)                                           facing 90

     Alexandre Dumas                                        facing 104

     The Wall of the Carmelites                                    113

     Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hôtel de Picardie             facing 118

     The Hôtel de Toulouse                                         128

     Alfred de Musset (from the sketch by Louis-Eugène Lami)
                                                            facing 144

     The Cemetery of Picpus                                        153

     Victor Hugo (from the portrait by Bonnat)              facing 160

     The Hôtel du Prévôt                                           175

     Anne de Bretagne (from a portrait by an unknown artist in a
     private collection)                                    facing 186

     Louis XII (from a water-color portrait by an unknown artist,
     in a private collection)                               facing 190

     Sully (from a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musée
     Condé at Chantilly)                                    facing 194

     The Court of the Hôtel de Béthune. Sully's Residence          196

     The Hôtel de Mayenne. In the distance, the Temple Sainte-Marie,
     called the Church of the Visitation                    facing 198

     The Place des Vosges                                   facing 214

     The Hôtel de Beauvais                                  facing 238

     The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de Brinvilliers
                                                            facing 246

     The Hôtel de Sens                                      facing 254

     Marguerite de Valois (from a portrait by an unknown artist, in
     the Musée de Montpellier)                              facing 258

     The Hôtel Lamoignon                                    facing 262

     The Tourelle of the Hôtel Barbette                            268

     The Gateway of the Hôtel de Clisson                           276




THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY




THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY


In preceding chapters we have come upon the small beginnings of the
Scholars' Quarter; we have had glimpses of the growth of the great
mother University and of her progeny of out-lying colleges; and we
have trodden, with their scholars and students, the slope of "the
whole Latin Mountain," as it was named by Pantaléon, that nephew of
Pope Urban IV., who extolled the learning he had acquired here.
Looking down from its crest, over the hill-side to the Seine, we have
had under our eyes the mediæval _Pays Latin_, filling up the space
within its bounding wall, built by Philippe-Auguste and left untouched
by Charles V.; we have seen that wall gradually obliterated through
the ages, its gate-ways with their flanking towers first cut away, its
fabric picked to pieces, stone by stone; while, beyond its line, we
have watched the building up, early in the seventeenth century, of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, over the Pré-aux-Clercs, and in the fields
beyond, and along the river-bank toward the west. In the centre of
this new quarter the nobility of birth was soon intrenched behind its
garden-walls, and in the centre of the old quarter the aristocracy of
brains was secluded within its courts. The boundary-line of the two
quarters, almost exactly defined by the straight course from the
Institute to the Panthéon, speedily became blurred, and the debatable
neutral ground between was settled by colonists from either region,
servants of the State, of art, of letters. In our former strollings
through long-gone centuries, we have visited many of these and many of
the dwellers on the University hill; we are now to turn our attention
to those brilliant lights on the left bank who have helped to make
Paris "_la ville lumière_" during the forenoon of the nineteenth
century.

Through the heart of the _faubourg_ curved the narrow Rue
Saint-Dominique, from Esplanade des Invalides to Rue des Saints-Pères.
This eastern end, nearly as far west as Rue de Bellechasse, has been
carried away by new Boulevard Saint-Germain, and with it the _hôtel_
of the de Tocqueville family, which stood at No. 77 of the ancient
aristocratic street. Here in 1820 lived the Comtesse de Tocqueville,
with her son, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, a lad of fifteen. Here he
remained until the events of 1830 sent him to the United States, with
a mission to study their prison systems; a study extended by him to
all the institutions of the Republic, which had a profound interest
for the French Republicans of that time. His report on those prisons
appeared in 1832, and in 1835 he put forth the first volume of "De la
Démocratie en Amérique," its four volumes being completed in 1840.
That admirable survey of the progress of democracy--whose ascendancy
he predicted, despite his own predilections--still carries authority,
and at the time created a wide-spread sensation. It made its author
famous, and promoted him to the place of first-assistant lion in the
_salon_ of Madame Récamier, whose head lion was always Châteaubriand.
De Tocqueville had settled, on his return to Paris, in this same
_faubourg_; residing until 1837 at 49 Rue de Verneuil, and from that
date to 1840 at 12 Rue de Bourgogne. Elected Deputy in 1839, he soon
crossed the Seine, and we cannot follow him to his various residences
in the quarter of the Madeleine. For a few months in 1849 he served as
Minister for Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of the Prince-President,
and was among the Deputies put into cells in December, 1851. His
remaining years, until his death at Cannes in 1859, were spent in
retirement from all public affairs.

A notable inhabitant of the University quarter, in the early years of
the nineteenth century, was François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot, a young
professor at the Sorbonne. His classes were crowded by students and by
men from outside, all intent on his strong and convincing presentation
of his favorite historical themes. He lived, near his lecture-room, at
No. 10 Rue de la Planche, a street that now forms the eastern end of
Rue de Varennes, between Rues du Bac and de la Chaise. From 1823 to
1830 his home was at 37 Rue Saint-Dominique, where now is No. 203
Boulevard Saint-Germain, next to the Hôtel de Luynes, already visited
with Racine. This latter period saw Guizot, after a temporary
dismissal from his chair by the Bourbon King, at the height of his
powers and his prestige as a lecturer. He carried his oratory to the
Chamber of Deputies in 1830, and there compelled equal attention. In
1832 we find him, Minister of Public Instruction, installed in the
official residence at 116 Rue de Grenelle, on the corner of Rue de
Bellechasse. His work while there still lasts as the basis of the
elementary education of France, and it is to him that she owes her
primary schools. Pushed out from this office in 1836 by the pushing
Thiers, he went to England as Ambassador for a few months in 1840, and
in the autumn of that year he took up his abode in the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, where he remained until he was driven out in 1848.
That ancient mansion, no longer in existence, stood on the triangle
made by Boulevard and Rue des Capucines. With his desertion of this
Southern Bank, we lose sight of his dwellings, always thereafter in
the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Guizot and Louis-Philippe failed in their
fight against a nation, and the men of February, 1848, revolted
against the Prime Minister as well as against the King of the French.
That _opéra-bouffe_ monarch with the pear-shaped face, under the guise
of Mr. Smith, with a fat umbrella, slipped out of the back door of the
Tuileries and away to England; Guizot got away to the same safe shores
in less ludicrous disguise. He returned to his own land in 1849, and
lived until 1874, always poor, always courageous, and always at work.
Among his many volumes of these years, all marked by elevation of
thought and serenity of style, as well as by absence of warmth and
color, were his "Mémoires," wherein he proves, to the satisfaction of
his austere dogmatism, that he had always been in the right throughout
his public career.

The Revolution of 1830, that sent de Tocqueville on his voyage, and
that started Guizot in political life, brought Alphonse-Marie-Louis de
Lamartine to the public ear as an orator. He had filled the public eye
as a poet since 1820, when his "Méditations Poétiques" appeared. In
1830, his "Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses" had made it sure that
here was a soul filled with true harmony. And while he sang the
consolations of religion, as Châteaubriand had sung its splendors, he
gave proof of his devotion to the Church and throne. But he bore the
Revolution of 1830, and the flight of the Bourbons, with the same
equanimity he always summoned for the reverses of others, as well as
for his own. When a literary genius is out of work, says Sainte-Beuve,
he takes to politics and becomes an Illustrious Citizen, for want of
something better to do. Lamartine was elected a Deputy soon after the
upset of 1830, and sprang at once into the front rank of parliamentary
orators. His speeches in the Chamber, and his "History of the
Girondists"--enthralling and untrustworthy--helped to bring on the
Revolution of 1848, quite without his knowing or wishing it. It was
his superb outburst of rhetoric, as he stood alone on the steps of the
Hôtel de Ville, on February 25th, backed by no colleague and clad in
no authority, that saved to France her Tricolor--"that has swept all
around the world, carrying liberty and glory in its folds"--in place
of the white flag of the Bourbons that had gone, and the red rag of
the mob that was near coming. Between that month of February and June
of that same year, Lamartine had been on the crest of his highest
wave, and had sunk to his lowest level in the regard of his Parisians.
Their faith was justified in his genius and his rectitude, but a
volcano is not to be squirted cold by rose-water, and the new republic
could not be built on phrases. After his amazing minority in the
election for president, Lamartine sank out of sight, accepting without
complaint his sudden obscurity, as he had accepted without intrigue
his former lustre. The conspiracy of December, 1851, sent him into
retirement, and he lived alone with his pen, his only weapon against
want--a pathetically heroic figure during these last years. George
Sand had seen a good deal of Lamartine in the days of 1848, and he
struck her as "a sort of Lafayette without his shrewdness. He shows
respect for all men and all ideas, while believing in no ideas and
loving no man." A more just and complete judgment is that of Louis
Blanc: "He is incessantly laboring under a self-exalting
hallucination. He dreams about himself marvellous dreams, and believes
in them. He sees what is not visible, he opens his inward ear to
impossible sounds, and takes delight in narrating to others any tale
his imagination narrates to him. Honest and sincere as he is, he
would never deceive you, were he not himself deceived by the familiar
demon who sweetly torments him."

For twenty years he had been a resident of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Indeed, when he came to Paris for a while, in 1820, to see to the
publication of his first poems, he found rooms on Quai d'Orsay. From
there he went to make that call on young Hugo, to be narrated later.
From 1835 to 1855 his apartment was in the grand mansion, "between
court and garden," No. 82 Rue de l'Université. His reception-room was
decorated with portraits and busts of Alphonse de Lamartine, we are
told by Frederick Locker-Lampson, who visited him there. His host was
a handsome and picturesque figure, he says, albeit with an
over-refinement of manner. No keener criticism of the poet and his
poetry, at this period, has been made than that by Locker-Lampson, in
one curt sentence. His sane humor is revolted by that "prurient
chastity, then running, nay, galloping, to seed in an atmosphere of
twaddle and toadyism."

The desolate fallen idol was rescued from oblivion and poverty by the
Second Empire, whose few honorable acts may not be passed over. In
1867, in its and his dying years, that government gave him money, and
the municipality gave him a house. These gifts came to him in Rue
Cambacérès, in a small hotel now rebuilt into No. 7 of that street.
Where it meets with Rue de Penthièvre, just above, you will find the
attractive old mansion, with its ancient number 43 cut in the stone
over the doorway, in which, during the years after leaving the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, he carried on his courageous struggle with his
pen against debt and poverty. He had but few months' enjoyment of his
last home, the gift of the people of Paris, for he died there in 1869.
It was at Passy, not far from the square in Avenue Henri-Martin, named
for him and holding his statue. The chair in which he is seated might
be a theatrical property, perhaps humorously and fittingly so
suggested by the sculptor; who has, however, done injustice to his
subject, in robbing him of his natural grace and suavity, and in
giving him a pedantic angularity that was never his.

When Lamartine writes to Sainte-Beuve, "I have wept, I who never
weep," we are amused by the poet's naïve ignorance of his persistent
lachrymose notes. The "smiling critic" accepted them simply as a
pardonable overflow of the winning melancholy of that nature, in which
he recognized all that was genuine and laudable. This wide-minded
tolerance is perhaps the secret of Sainte-Beuve's strength as a
critic. With his acute discernment of the soul of a book and of its
author, his subtle appreciation of all diverse qualities, he was
splendidly impartial. He could read anything and everything, with a
keenness of appraisement that did not prejudice his enjoyment of that
which was alive, amid much that might be dead. "A pilgrim of ideas,
but lacking the first essential of a pilgrim--faith"--he gave all that
he was to literature through all his life, and when near its end, he
had the right to say: "Devoted with all my heart to my profession
of critic, I have tried to be, more and more, a good and--if
possible--a skilful workman."

  [Illustration: Alphonse de Lamartine.
   (From a sketch by David d'Angers. "_un soir chez Hugo._")]

He devoted himself so entirely to his profession, that his life was
like a mill, as he said, perpetually feeding and grinding. On the
Monday morning, he would shut himself in with the new volumes, which
he was to feed into himself and assimilate, during the twelve hours of
each of the five following days; on Saturday he was ready to grind out
the result. His Sunday holiday was given to the proof-reading of his
next day's "Causerie du Lundi." On that evening he took his only
relaxation, in the theatre. His work-room was bare of all
superfluities, and his daily life went in a round, with simple diet,
no wine, nor coffee, nor tobacco.

At the age of twenty-five, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was living,
with his mother, in a small apartment on the fourth floor of No.
19--now 37--Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He had given himself to letters
instead of medicine, for which he had studied, and had become a
regular contributor of critical papers to the press. His name was
already spoken along with the names of Victor Cousin, Villemain,
Guizot, Mérimée. He had produced his "Historical and Critical
Pictures," his "French Poetry and French Theatre of the Sixteenth
Century," and the "Poems of Joseph Delorme"--his selected pen-name.
The poet in him had abdicated to the critic, handing down many choice
gifts. In this apartment he received for review a volume of poems,
"by a young barbarian," his editor wrote. This was the "Odes et
Ballades" of Victor Hugo, with whom the critic soon made acquaintance,
and at whose house, a few doors away in the same street, he became a
constant visitor. From here Madame Sainte-Beuve removed, with her son,
in 1834, to Rue du Mont-Parnasse, and in that street he had his home
during his remaining years. His official residence, from 1840 to 1848,
as a Keeper of the Mazarin Library, was in that building now occupied
by the Institute. He found installed there, among the other Keepers,
Octave Feuillet. The upheaval of February, 1848, drove Sainte-Beuve
into Belgium. On his return in the following year, he settled in the
house left him by his mother, and there he died in 1869. This
two-storied, plaster-fronted, plain little No. 11 Rue du
Mont-Parnasse, saw his thirty years of colossal work. From here, he
went to take his chair of Latin poetry in the Collège de France, where
he was hissed by the students, who meant to hiss, not the critic and
lecturer, but the man who had accepted the Second Empire in accepting
that chair. He was no zealous recruit, however, and preserved his
entire independence; and when he consented to go to the Senate in
1865, it was for the sake of its dignity and its salary. He was always
poor in money.

To his workroom in this house, came every French writer of those
thirty years, anxious to plead with or to thank that Supreme Court of
Criticism. Among those who bowed to its verdicts and who have owned
to its influence, Edmond de Goncourt has given us the most vivid
sketch of the critic in conversation: "When I hear him touch on a dead
man, with his little phrases, I seem to see a swarm of ants invading a
body; cleaning out all the glory, and in a few minutes leaving a very
clean skull of the once illustrious one." And, in his written reviews,
Sainte-Beuve had the supreme art of distilling a drop of venom in a
phial of honey, so making the poison fragrant and the incense deadly.
There is no more constant presence than his on this southern
hill-side, where all his days and nights were spent. We seem to see
there the short, stout figure, erect and active, the bald head covered
with a skull-cap, the bushy red eyebrows, the smooth-shaven face,
redeemed from ugliness by its alert intelligence. His walks were down
this slope of Mont-Parnasse, which he thought of as the
pleasure-ground of the mediæval students of the University, to the
quays, where he hunted among the old-book stalls. And he loved to
stroll in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens. In the Poets' Corner,
now made there, you will find his bust along with those of Henri
Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, and Paul Verlaine.

Crossing the street from Sainte-Beuve's last home to No. 32, we find a
modest house set behind its garden-wall, in which is a tablet
containing the name of Edgar Quinet. More than passing mention of his
name is due to this fine intellect and this great soul. His mother
thought that "an old gentleman named M. Voltaire"--whom she might have
seen in her childhood, as her village crowded about his carriage on
its way to Paris--was the cleverest man who ever lived. She brought up
her boy to think for himself, after that philosopher's fashion, and
the boy bettered her teachings. He spent his life in looking into the
depths of beliefs and institutions, in getting at the essence of the
real and the abiding, in letting slip that which was shallow and
transitory; so that, towards the end, he could say: "I have passed my
days in hearing men speak of their illusions, and I have never
experienced a single one." He became, in Professor Dowden's apt
phrase, "a part of the conscience of France," and as such, his
influence was of higher value than that exerted by his busy pen in
politics, history, poetry. Indeed, his enthusiasms for the freedom and
progress of his fellow-beings carried his pen beyond due restraint. Of
course he was honored by exile during the Second Empire, and when it
tumbled to pieces, he returned to Paris, and soon went to Versailles
as a Deputy. At his grave, in 1875, Hugo spoke of him as living and
dying with the serene light of truth on his brow, and he can have no
happier epitaph.

Quinet had outlived, by only a few months, his life-long friend Jules
Michelet, who died in 1874. He, too, had his homes and did his work,
private and public, on this same hill-side. His birth-place, far away
on the northern bank, on the corner of Rues de Tracy and Saint-Denis,
is now given over to business. It was a church, built about 1630 in
the gardens of "_Les Dames de Saint-Chaumont_," and had been closed
in 1789, along with so many other churches. Going fast to ruin, it
was fit only for the poverty-stricken tenant, who came along in the
person of the elder Michelet, a printer from Laon. He set up his
presses in the nave and his household gods in the choir, where the boy
Jules was born on August 22, 1798. The building is unchanged as to its
outer aspect, with its squat columns supporting the heavy pediment of
the façade, except that two stories have been placed above its main
body. In these strange surroundings for a child, and in the shelters
equally squalid, to and from which his father removed during many
years, the boy grew up, haunted and nervous, cold, hungry and
ill-clad, and always over his books when set free from type-setting.

He got lessons and took prizes at the Lycée Charlemagne, but the
pleasantest lesson and the dearest prize of his youth did not come in
school. They were his first sight, from his father's windows in Rue
Buffon, of the sun setting over beyond the trees, tuneful with birds,
of the Jardin du Roi. Grass and foliage, and a sky above an open
space, had been unknown to his walled-in boyhood. When he became able
to choose a home for himself, it had always its garden, or a sight of
one. At an early age he went to tutoring; in 1821 he was appointed
lecturer on history in the Collège Rollin, then in its old place on
the University hill; soon after 1830 he succeeded to Guizot's chair in
the Sorbonne, and in 1838 the Collège de France made him its professor
of History and Moral Science. In that institution, he and his
colleague Quinet caused immense commotion by their assaults on the
Church intrenched in the State, and from their halls the hootings of
the clericals, and the plaudits of the liberals, re-echoed throughout
France. The priesthood complained that "the lecturer on history and
morals gave no history and no morals," and it began to be
believed--rightly or wrongly--that he was using his professor's
platform as a band-stand, and was beating a big drum for the
gratification of the groundlings. He was speedily dismissed, he was
reinstated soon after 1848, and was finally thrown aside by the Second
Empire.

At this period only, he disappears from the Scholars' Quarter for a
while. His earliest residence there was, soon after his marriage in
1827, at 23 Rue de l'Arbalète, a street named from the "_Chevaliers de
l'Arbalète_," who had made it their archery grounds in mediæval days.
The site of Michelet's residence is fittingly covered by a large school,
on the corner of that street and of the street named for Claude
Bernard. After a short stay in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor--that
street nearly all gone now--he returned to this neighborhood, and
settled in Rue des Postes, which, in 1867, received the name of the
grammarian Lhomond. Otherwise, no change has come to this quiet
street, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century buildings, among
which is the Hôtel Flavacourt, set in the midst of gardens. On its
first floor Michelet lived from 1838 to 1850. At No. 10 is the arched
gateway through which he went, in its keystone the carved head of a
strong man with thick beard and curling locks. Above the long
yellow-drab wall shows the new chapel of the priests, who, with
unknowing irony, have taken his favorite dwelling for their schools.

Absent from this quarter during the early years of the Second Empire,
and absent from Paris during part of that time, it was in 1856 that
Michelet settled in his last abode. It was at 44 Rue de l'Ouest, and
his garden here was the great Luxembourg Garden. In 1867, the street
was renamed Rue d'Assas, and his house renumbered 76. After his death
in the south of France in 1874, his widow lived there until her own
death in 1899, and kept that modest home just as he had left it. She
was his second wife, and had been of great help to him in his work,
and had done her own work, aided by his hand, which sprinkled
gold-dust over her manuscript, as she prettily said. That hand had not
been idle for over fifty years. He gave forty years of labor, broken
only by his other books, to his "History of France," which at his
death was not yet done, as he had meant that it should be done. It is
a series of pictures, glowing and colored by his sympathetic
imagination, which let him see and touch the men of every period, and
made him, for the moment, the contemporary of every epoch. And Taine
assures us, contrary to the general belief, that we may trust its
accuracy. His style has a magic all its own. He had said: "Augustin
Thierry calls history a narration, Guizot calls it an analysis; I
consider that history should be a resurrection." This idea is
translated into durable marble on his striking tombstone in
Père-Lachaise, done in high relief by the chisel of Mercié.

The life of Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littré, a few years longer than that
of Michelet and equally full of strenuous labor, was passed on this
same slope and ended in this same Street of Assas. Born on February 1,
1801, in the plain house of three stories and attic at No. 21 Rue des
Grands-Augustins, he got his schooling at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where
we have seen other famous scholars. He appears for a day and a night
on the barricades of 1830, and then settles quietly at No. 11 Rue du
Colombier, now Rue Jacob. On his marriage, in 1835, he removed to No.
21 Rue des Maçons, now Rue Champollion, once Racine's street, in the
heart of the University. In 1838 he made his home in Rue de l'Ouest,
and in that home he remained until his death on June 2, 1881. His
apartment took up the entire second floor of present 44 Rue
d'Assas--the new name of Rue de l'Ouest--at the corner of Rue de
Fleurus, and its windows on the curve opened on ample light and air.

Like Sainte-Beuve, Littré gave up medicine, to which he had been
trained, for journalistic work; some of which, in his early days, was
done for the Gazette Médicale, and much of it all through life for the
political press. He was an ardent Liberal, and after the fall of the
Empire, was elected a Deputy, and later a Senator, of the Third
Republic. Nothing in the domain of literature seemed alien to this
catholic mind, equally at ease in science and philosophy, philology
and history. The enduring achievement of his life is his Dictionary of
the French Language. It was begun in 1844 and completed in 1872, and a
supplement was added in 1877. In his fortieth year, he was attracted
by the teachings of Comte, and became a leader of the Positivists and
a copious contributor to their review. His career is that of an
earnest and a self-denying student; a teacher of unfettered thinking
in science, religion, politics; a modest and disinterested
fellow-worker in letters.

His master in the cult that won him solely by its scientific
fascinations, Auguste Comte, had lived for the last fifteen years of
his life at No. 10 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and there he died in 1857.
We can but glance at the tablet in passing, and we cannot even glance
at the altered residences, in this quarter, of the gifted Amédée
Thierry and of his more gifted brother, Augustin, the historian "with
the patience of a monk and the pen of a poet." He died, in 1856, in
Rue du Mont-Parnasse, in the house that had been Quinet's, it is said.
We look up, as we go, at the sunny windows, facing full south over the
Luxembourg Gardens, of the home of Jules Janin, in his day "the prince
of critics." They are on the first floor at the corner of Rues Rotrou
and de Vaugirard, alongside the Odéon, the theatre in which he had his
habitual seat. He died at Passy in 1874.

This _faubourg_ has had no more striking figure than that of Prosper
Mérimée, tight-buttoned in frock-coat, and of irreproachable
starchedness; with a curiously round, cold eye behind glasses, a large
nose with a square end, a forehead seamed with fine wrinkles. It was
his pride to pass as an Englishman in his walk. In his work, in
romance equally with archæology, the gentleman prevails over the
author, so that he seems to stand aloof, reserved, sceptical, correct;
never showing emotion, never giving way to his really infinite wit and
frisky mockery. He began his working-life in 1825, as a painter with
his father, alongside the École des Beaux-Arts, at No. 16 Rue des
Petits-Augustins, now 12 Rue Bonaparte. In 1840 he moved around the
corner to No. 10 Rue des Beaux-Arts, half way between the school and
his other place of work in the Institute, as Inspector of the
Historical and Artistic Monuments of France. From 1848 to 1851 he was
to be found at 18 Rue Jacob, and close at hand he found
"_l'Inconnue_," at 35 of the same street. In 1852 he removed to his
last residence at 52 Rue de Lille, on the corner of Rue du Bac. The
Commune burned that house along with others adjacent, and until
rebuilding began, long after, there stood in the ruins a marble bust
on its pedestal, unharmed except for the stain of the flames. It was
all that was left of Mérimée's great art-collection, with which, and
with his books and cats, he had lived alone since his mother's death.
He had gone away to Cannes to die in 1870. So that he did not see the
ruins of the Empire, to which he had rallied, altogether from devotion
to the Empress, whom he had known in Spain when she was a child. He
accepted nothing from the Emperor except the position of Librarian at
Fontainebleau, and was as natural and sincere with the Empress, as he
had been with Eugenie Montijo playing about his knee. In his other
office he was a loyal servant of the State, and to his alert, artistic
conscience France owes the preservation of many historic structures.

There are those who claim that the influence of Taine on modern
thought has been deeper and will be more durable than that of Renan.
They base their belief on the groundless notion that men are most
profoundly impressed by pure reason, forgetful of that well-grounded
experience, which proves that all men are touched and moved and
persuaded rather by sentiment than by conviction. And the writer is
irresistible, who, like Renan, appeals to our emotional as well as to
our thinking capacities. We are captivated by those feminine qualities
in his strain that are disapproved of by his detractors; his refined
fancy and his undulating grace seduce us. We are convinced by his zest
in the search for truth, by his courage in speaking it as he found it;
we recognize his sincerity and sobriety that do not demand applause;
we respect the magnanimity that looked on curses as oratorical
ornaments of his enemies, and that took no return in kind. And so we
stand in the peaceful court of homelike No. 23 Rue Cassette, on whose
first floor Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine died in 1893, in respectful memory
of the man who has helped us all by his dissections, his cataloguing,
and his array of facts. The structure of the philosophy of history,
that he raised, stands imposing and enduring on the bank of the stream
of modern thought, and yet it may be that Edmond de Goncourt was not
wholly wrong, in his characterization of Taine as "the incarnation of
modern criticism; most learned, most ingenious, and most frequently
unsound." We turn away and follow eagerly the steps of sympathetic
Joseph-Ernest Renan.

We have already seen the country boy coming to school, at
Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, in 1838. After four years' tuition there,
he passed on to higher courses in the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice. That
renowned school faces the _place_ of the same name, which it entirely
covered, when built in the early years of the seventeenth century.
When the Revolution demolished the old structure, it destroyed the
_parloir_ where the young student, the Chevalier des Grieux, gave way
before the beguilements of his visitor, Manon Lescaut. The fountain in
this open space flashes with that adorable creation of the Abbé
Prévost; the original of two creations as immortal, says Jules Janin:
"For who is the Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre but Manon made
pure; and who is Châteaubriand's Atala but Manon made Christian?"

Once a week, while at the seminary, young Renan took an outing with
the other pupils to its _succursale_ at Issy. It is a dreary walk,
along the wearisome length of Rue de Vaugirard, to the village to
which Isis gave her name, when that goddess, once worshipped in
Lutetia, was banished to this far-away hamlet. There "Queen Margot"
had a hunting-lodge and vast grounds, and when these were taken by the
brothers of Saint-Sulpice, they saved the grounds and transformed the
cupids on the walls of the lodge into cherubs, and the Venus into a
Madonna. Now their new structures in Caen stone face the street named
for Ernest Renan. In the gardens is a chapel built around the grotto,
roofed with shells, wherein Bossuet and Fénelon used to meet, toward
the end of the eighteenth century. There they doubtless began that
controversy over the mystical writings of Madame Guyon, which ended in
Fénelon's dismissal from the court through the influence of the
imperious Bossuet. Under these trees that shaded them, walked Renan in
his long and cruel conflict between his conscience and his traditions,
most dreading the pain he would give his mother by the step he felt
impelled to take. He took that step in October, 1845, when he laid
aside the _soutane_--to be adorned and glorified by him, his teachers
had hoped--and walked out from the seminary to a small _hôtel-garni_
on the opposite side of Place Saint-Sulpice. Supported at first only
by the savings of his devoted sister, Henriette, he started as a
tutor, and began his life's pen-work, in a cheap _pension_, in one of
the shabby houses just west of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, in Rue des
Deux-Églises, now renamed Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Épée.

His future dwellings, befitting his modest gains, were all in quiet
streets of this scholarly quarter. The site of that one occupied from
1862 to 1865, at 55 Rue Madame, is covered by Collége Bossuet, where
priests teach their dogmas. Old Passage Sainte-Marie, where he lodged
for a while in 1865, is now Rue Paul-Louis-Courier, and his lodging is
gone. During the ten years from 1866 to 1876, he lived in the plain
house numbered 29 of retired Rue Vaneau. Then for three years, he had
an apartment at No. 16 Rue Guillaume; "a short street of provincial
aspect," says Alphonse Daudet, "grass-grown, with never a wheel; of
silent mansions and unopened gates, and of closed windows on the
court; faded and wan after centuries of sleep." This mansion was built
for Denis Talon, an advocate-general at the end of the seventeenth
century, and described by Germain Brice, writing in 1684, as having
"most agreeable apartments, with outlook on neighboring gardens, and a
large court, and great expense in building." He did not mention the
entrance-door, which is monumental, nor the knocker, worth a
pilgrimage to see. In 1880 Renan removed to No. 4 Rue de Tournon, so
finding himself between No. 6, once occupied by Laplace, and No. 2,
once occupied by Balzac. In 1883 he was made Administrator of the
Collége de France, and there took up his official residence. His
appointment to the chair of Hebrew in that institution, on his return
from the Orient in 1861, had so perturbed the Church behind the State
that he was dismissed after he had given but one lecture.

The Second Empire gone, he came back, mainly through the action of
Jules Simon, a wise and learned statesman and a most lovable man.
Renan the administrator remained the lecturer as well, and has left
ineffaceable memories with those who saw and heard him in his
declining years; when, his body disabled by maladies, he still went
singing on his way, as he manfully put it. It was a gross and clumsy
body; to use Edmond de Goncourt's words, an ungraceful, almost
disgraceful body, full of the moral grace of this apostle of doubt,
this priest of science. His lectures were rather readings of the
scriptures, interspersed with his own exegesis. On chairs about a
large table, and against the wall, in a small room of the college,
were seated the few intent listeners. Renan sat at one end of the
table, his head--"an unchurched cathedral"--bent over a bulky copy of
the scriptures as he read; then, as he talked, he would raise his head
and throw back the long hair that had tumbled over his brow, the
subtle humor of his mobile mouth and his dreamy eyes effacing the
effect of his big nose and fat cheeks, his beardless face luminous
with an exalted intellectual urbanity. His interpretations and
illustrations were spoken with his perfect art of simple and limpid
phrase, and in those tones that told of his dwelling with the saints
and prophets of all the ages, and with the elusive spirits of mockery
of our own day.

He died, on October 2, 1892, in his official residence in the Collége
de France, an apartment on the second floor of the main structure
facing the front court. The austere simplicity of this Breton interior
was leavened by the books and the equipment of the scholar. The
window of his death-chamber is just under the clock.

The "touch of earth" demanded by Tennyson's Guinevere was a need of
the nature of George Sand. The three stages of her growth, shown in
her work, reveal the three inspirations of her life, each most actual:
the love of man, the love of humanity, the love of nature. The woman's
heart in her made her, said Renan, "the Æolian harp of our time"; and
Béranger's verse well fits her:

     "_Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
     Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne._"

It vibrated to the touch of outrages on woman and of injustice to man,
and it pulsated with equal passion for her children and for the rural
sights and scents of her birth-place. And we feel her heart in her
phrases, that stir us, as Thackeray puts it, like distant
country-bells. This half-poet, half-mystic, came fairly by her
fantastic inheritance; for she was, in the admirable phrase of Mr.
Henry James, "more sensibly the result of a series of love affairs
than most of us." On the other side, we may accurately apply to her
Voltaire's words concerning Queen Elizabeth: "And Europe counts you
among her greatest men." There were masculine breadth and elevation in
her complex, ample nature, with divine instincts and ideal purities,
that left no room for vulgar ambitions and mean avidities. Balzac, of
kindred qualities, wrote, after having learned to know her a little:
"George Sand would speedily be my friend. She has no pettiness
whatever in her soul; none of the low jealousies that obscure so many
contemporary talents. Dumas resembles her in this."

When Madame Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant, a young woman of
twenty-six, came, in 1830, to Paris to stay--she had already, while a
girl, been a _pensionnaire_ in the convent of the "_Augustines
Anglaises_," where, under its ancient name, we have met with Mlle.
Phlipon--she found her only acquaintance in the capital, Jules
Sandeau, living on Quai Saint-Michel. He had known M. Dudevant and his
wife during his visit to Nohant, a year or so earlier. She rented a
garret in the same house, one of the old row on the quay, just east of
Place Saint-Michel. Here she discovered that she could use a pen; at
first with scant success and for small pay in the columns of the
"Figaro," and then, with not much greater power, in a romance, written
conjointly with Sandeau. They named it "Rose et Blanche," and its
authors' pseudonyme was Jules Sand. Here she assumed the male costume
which enabled her to pass for a young student, unmolested in her walks
in all weathers and with all sorts and conditions of men, whom she
delighted to scrutinize. In a letter written in July, 1832, she says
that she is tired of climbing five long flights so many times a day,
and is seeking new quarters. She found them, with the same superb
outlook over the Seine as that she had left, on a third floor of Quai
Malaquais.

It may have been, for she always dwelt on her royal ancestry, in the
house now No. 5, which had been the home of Maurice de Saxe. That son
of Augustus the Strong of Poland and of the Countess of Königsmark
was the father of a natural daughter, who became the grandmother and
guardian of Mlle. Lucile-Aurore. Madame Dudevant gave his name to her
son, and this young Maurice, and his sister Solange, were now brought
to their mother's new home. She devoted hours to their amusement and
instruction, and hours to her pen-work; writing far into the night
when daylight did not suffice. She improvised a study in the ground
floor on the court, cool when the westering sun flooded her windows
above, and quiet when too many visitors disturbed her. For she had
sprung into fame with her "Indiana"--its author styled George
Sand--and after only two months' interval with her "Valentine."
Naturally inert, she had to push herself on to work, and then her
"serene volubility" knew no pause. She had now to be reckoned with in
the guild of letters, and its members met in the "poets' garret," as
she termed her little _salon_.

Balzac came--he who discouraged her in the beginning, on Quai
Saint-Michel--and Hugo and Dumas and Sainte-Beuve and young de Musset.
With this last-named she went from here to Italy, having persuaded his
mother that his infatuation would reform the wayward youth. All the
world knows, from the books on both sides, the story of the
short-lived _liaison_. She returned to this home in August, 1834,
hungry for her children. Then we lose sight of her for many years, in
her visits to her beloved provincial scenes, and her journeys to other
lands, and her temporary residences on the right bank of the Seine.
In the winter of 1846 and 1847 she had a _pied-à-terre_ in her son's
studio, in the secluded square of Cours d'Orléans, its entrance now at
80 Rue Taitbout. There she was visited by Charles Dickens, who
describes her as "looking like what you'd suppose the queen's monthly
nurse would be; chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed; a singularly
ordinary woman in appearance and manner." Others describe her, at this
period, when she had just passed her fortieth year, as having a
wearied, listless bearing, her only notable feature being her dull,
mild, tranquil eyes. In February, 1852, she was found by Mr. and Mrs.
Browning in the small apartment attached to her son's studio, at No. 3
Rue Racine. It is at the top of the house, and can be rented to-day. A
curious picture of her and her surroundings is given by the Brownings.
She was a constant attendant at this time at the Odéon--on whose stage
her plays were produced--and at the restaurant in the _place_ in front
of the theatre. There she used to sit among her male friends, smoking
"those horrid big cigars" which so revolted Rachel that she would
never meet the smoker.

George Sand's last Paris home was in Rue Gay-Lussac, and she was one
of the earliest tenants in that street, opened in 1868. She had three
or four small rooms in the _entresol_ of No. 5, the lease of which,
after her death in 1876, was sold by her son to a Roumanian lady,
along with some of his mother's furniture. This lady is delighted to
chatter about her illustrious predecessor in this apartment, and
allows the favored visitor to sit on the broad couch, covered in dingy
and worn leather, whereon George Sand was fond of reclining in her
last tranquil days, at rest after stormy and laborious years.

There is a hospitable little inn in the Faubourg Saint-Germain
endeared to many of us by memories, joyous or mournful. The Hotel de
France et de Lorraine, in narrow Rue de Beaune, just south of the
quay, was one of the earliest hotels in Paris, and was an approved
resort of the Royalists, before emigration and after Restoration. They
seem still to haunt its court and halls, where there lingers that
atmosphere of decayed Bourbonism, which James Russell Lowell
humorously hits off in a letter written when he was a guest here. The
pervading presence is that of Châteaubriand, and our amiable hosts
have a pride in keeping his apartment--on the first floor, in plain
wood panelling of time-worn gray--much as it was when he wrote, in its
_salon_, his letter of resignation of his post in the Diplomatic
Service, to the First Consul, to be Emperor within two months.
Châteaubriand was in Paris on leave of absence at the time of the
shooting of the Duc d'Enghien, in the ditch of Vincennes on the night
of March 20, 1804, and he refused to serve any longer the man whom he
regarded as an assassin. Just seventeen years earlier these two men
had arrived in Paris, both sub-lieutenants, of nearly the same age,
equally obscure and ambitious, equally without heart. Napoleon
Bonaparte, coming from Corsica, took a room in the Hôtel de
Cherbourg, as we have seen; François-Auguste, Vicomte de
Châteaubriand, coming from his natal town of Saint-Malo, found lodging
in the Hôtel de l'Europe in Rue du Mail. This street, between Porte
Saint-Denis, by which the coaches entered, and Place des Victoires,
where they put up, was full of _hôtels-garnis_ for travellers.
Installed there, Châteaubriand hunted up the great Malesherbes, a
friendly counsellor who put him in the way of meeting men of note;
among others Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, at the top of them all, just
then, with his "Paul et Virginie." These two, the one just fifty, the
other not yet twenty, then in 1787, strolled together in the Jardin du
Roi, forgetting their old world and its worries, in their talks of the
new world and its glories.

During the next two or three years, Châteaubriand came frequently to
Paris, an intent and disgusted onlooker at its doings. He stood, with
his sisters, at their windows in Rue de Richelieu, open on that
September day, when the mob surged by holding aloft on pikes the heads
of Foulon and Berthier. His Royalist stomach revolted, and he joined
his regiment at Rouen, to retire soon from the service, and to sail in
1791 for the new United States, with dreams of distinction as the
discoverer of the Northwest Passage. He dined with George Washington,
to whom he carried a letter from a French officer, who had served in
the colonial army. The President waved aside Châteaubriand's florid
compliments, and advised him to give up his futile quest. The young
Breton wandered far into the new country, and while resting in a
clearing on the Scioto, where now is Chillicothe, Ohio, he read in an
old newspaper of the royal flight to Varennes, and of the enforced
return.

At once he started for France, to offer his sword to his King,
arriving in January, 1792, and in the summer of that year he joined
the growing train of _émigrés_ to England. For eight years he toiled
and starved in London, and returned to Paris in 1800. His passport
bore the name of "Lassague," and he posted, in company, as far as
Porte de l'Étoile. Thence he went on foot down the Champs Élysées,
finding none of the silence and desolation his fancy had pictured,
but, on either hand, lights and music. On the spot where the
guillotine had stood he stopped, provided with the proper emotions. He
crossed Pont Royal, then the westernmost bridge, and betook himself to
lodgings in Rue de Lille, in an _entresol_ of one of the dignified
mansions, that seem still to stand aloof from their _bourgeois_
neighbors. From here, he stole out to his meals, hiding his face
behind his journal, in which he had been reading impassioned praise of
the new book, "Atala," and listened to the other guests speculating as
to the unknown genius who had written it. The picture is to be
cherished, for it is the only known portrait of Châteaubriand, modest
and shrinking. He had brought the manuscript of "Atala" to Paris in
his pocket, and had sought long before securing a publisher. The book
found a public eager for novelty. It came in a period of sterility in
letters, when all the virility of France had been spent in her
colossal wars, and the new century was alert to greet the serene
light of science and literature. That came from all points of the
horizon, but the resplendent figures of these years were Madame de
Staël and Châteaubriand.

These two had nothing in common, but they were not inimical, and
Châteaubriand was one of the minor lions at Madame de Staël's
receptions. For this was a little earlier than 1803, when a more
beneficial air than that of Paris was ordered for her by the First
Consul, whom she bored. This "cyclone of sentiment" must have bored
Mr. Pitt, also, when she visited England during the Terror; for he
seemed to think that the lady did protest too much about the absence
of an equivalent in English for the French word "_sentiment_," and he
replied: "_Mais, Madame, nous l'avons; c'est 'My eye and Betty
Martin.'_" And when she got to Germany she bored Goethe, not only with
her sloppy sentimentality, but with her shapely arms, too lavishly
displayed. There could be no sympathy between the woman, who, in
Sainte-Beuve's words, "could not help being even more French than her
compatriots," and the stuff of whose dreams was a union of the
theories of the dead and of the newly born centuries; and
Châteaubriand, the hard-headed opponent of every revolutionary idea,
who pompously labelled himself "a Bourbon by honor, a Royalist by
reason, and still by taste and nature a Republican"!

A year after his "Atala," in 1802, his "Génie du Christianisme" had
placed him, in the estimation of his country and of himself, on a
literary throne level with the military throne of Bonaparte. The
rhetorical fireworks of this book, corruscating around the Catholic
Church, lighted up the night of scepticism, when worship had been
abolished and God had been outlawed. Yet, as he poetized beyond
recognition the North American savages in his "Atala," so now he
prettified the sanctuary and "gilded the Host." The First Consul,
welcoming any aid in his scheme to use the Church for his own ends,
sent the author to the legation at Rome. We have seen his return.
After this, he moves about Paris, lodging, for a while, he says, "in a
garret" offered him by Madame la Marquise de Coislin, a stanch friend
and stanch Royalist. "Hotel de Coislin" may still be read above the
doorway of the stately mansion that faces Place de la Concorde, at the
western corner of Rue Royale, and aggressive Bourbonism speaks from
its stone pillars and pediment. His garret there was no squalid
lodging. On his return from the Holy Land in 1807, Châteaubriand
planted the Jerusalem pines and cedars of Lebanon he had brought back,
in the garden of "_Vallée-aux-Loups_," a little place he then
purchased near Aulnay, on the south of the city. Here, while the
Empire lasted, he passed years of quiet content, with his wife, his
plants, and his books, but writing no more romance after 1809. In
1817, having a town residence, and finding himself too poor to keep
this country place, he sold it, and new buildings cover the site of
his cottage and garden.

Recalled to active life by the Restoration, Châteaubriand posed as one
who was more Royalist than the King, with a mental reservation of his
platonic fancy for a republic. He was a pretentious statesman, none
too sincere. His pamphlet, "De Buonaparte et des Bourbons," had been
worth an army to the cause, said Louis XVIII., who placed him in the
Chamber of Peers, and in 1822, after a short stay at the Berlin
Embassy, in the Ambassador's residence in London. Lording it there, in
all "the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power," he recalled his former
years of obscurity and privation in London streets, and began his
"Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." In writing about himself he was at his ease,
feeling that he had a subject worthy of his best powers, and these
memoirs have little of the inflated and fantastic mannerisms of his
romances about other people. As to the rest, they are a colossal
monument to his conceit and selfishness. Dismissed suddenly and
indecently by Louis XVIII., from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Châteaubriand was made Ambassador to Rome on the accession of Charles
X., in 1828. He refused to recognize the younger branch of the
Bourbons in 1830, and when the crown was given to Orleans, he strode
out of the Chamber of Peers, and stripped himself of his peer's robe,
with great theatric effect. Appearing no more in public life, he was
active in pamphlets and in the press as an opponent of the new
royalty, which would lead to a republic, he predicted.

"_Châteaubrillant, Vicomte de, Rue de l'Université 25_," is his
address in the _Bottin_ of 1817; a record of interest in its
antiquated spelling of his name, and because this is the house, on the
corner of Rue du Bac, which we shall visit later with Alexandre
Dumas. This three years' lease expiring in 1820, he removed to the
fine old mansion, where he gave reception to young Victor Hugo, to be
described later, at No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique. Its site is covered by
the modern building numbered 197 in Boulevard Saint-Germain, whose
southern side, just here, replaces the same side of Rue
Saint-Dominique, as has been already told. He kept other town
addresses, to which we need not follow him, during his absences on
diplomatic duty. From 1827 to 1838 we find him and Madame de
Châteaubriand in their retired home, in the southern outskirts of the
city. Their 84 Rue d'Enfer is now 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, the old
street name thus punningly extended, in homage to the heroic defender
of Belfort.

The dingy yellow front of the long wall and the low building is broken
by a gate-way, and within is a small lodge on the left, wherein sits a
woman in the costume of a sisterhood. She permits entrance into the
cottage on the right, and you are in Châteaubriand's small _salon_,
the remaining portion of the cottage being now in possession of the
Institution des Jeunes Filles Aveugles, alongside. His portrait in
pencil, and a water-color sketch of his wife, hang on the wall. Her
face shows the boredom and patience that were put into it by her life
with this man of irascible genius and of frequent infidelities. She is
buried behind the altar of the chapel of the Marie-Thérèse Infirmary,
which she founded and carried on, in the devoutness that dwelt in her
soul for the Church, whose appeal to him was in its artistic
endowments. A portion of the revenue that supports this institution
comes from the sale of chocolate, made first to her liking by her
_chef_, and made after his rule ever since. As Soeur Marie shows you
out from the salesroom, alongside this little reception-room, you see
the group of trees in the circular lawn, that was planted by husband
and wife; on the farther side are the dilapidated buildings of their
day, now used for the chocolate _fabrique_; behind the great court
rise the walls of the Infirmary for aged and invalid priests.
Châteaubriand had known, while in Kensington during his exile, many of
the impoverished _curés_ who were, like himself, refugees from the
Revolution; and some of them had followed him here, and had become
domesticated pets of the household, together with the big gray cat
given him by the Pope. To them and their successors in poverty and
illness, he bequeathed this comfortable retreat.

There is an episode of these years that shows a kindly side of
Châteaubriand, that he seldom allows us to see. He was suggested for
the presidency of the republic, adventured by the political clubs for
a year or two after the unwelcome accession of Louis-Philippe.
Châteaubriand did not join the plotters, but he was arrested, along
with many of them, and locked up for two weeks or so. Now, when the
Bourbons had put Béranger in prison, in 1828, Châteaubriand had been
one of the many sympathizers who had flocked to the cell of the
courageous singer. In 1832 the rôles were reversed, and Béranger came
in, from his cottage in Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne, to visit the
imprisoned statesman. And after Châteaubriand's release, he wrote a
charming letter to Béranger, thanking him for that token of
fellow-feeling, and begging him not to "break his lyre," as the
veteran _chansonnier_ had threatened to do, and urging him to go on
"making France smile and weep; for, by a secret known only to you, the
words of your _chansons_ are gay and the airs are plaintive."
Béranger's songs touch no chord now, their plaintiveness is
commonplaceness, his philosophy has no loftiness, his sentimentality
is of the earth earthy, and his lyre is, to us, a tinkling
hurdy-gurdy.

When the young Breton officer walked through Rue du Mail first in
1787, his gaze might have turned, as our gaze turns to-day, to two
striking façades in that street: that of No. 7, built by Colbert,
whose emblematic serpents are carved high up in the capitals of the
heavy columns; and that of No. 12, as stolid as the other is
fantastic, its heaviness not lightened by the two balconies, and their
massive supports, on the wide stone front. It was erected in 1792 by
Berthault, the architect whose work we see at Malmaison and in the
Palais-Royal. Châteaubriand might well have been attracted by this
house, for it was soon to shelter the woman who became later the
lasting influence of his life.

In 1793, at the very top of the Terror, Jacques Récamier brought to
this house his bride not yet sixteen, who had been Mlle.
Jeanne-Françoise-Julie-Adélaïde Bernard. Here they lived for five
years. Their house is unaltered as to fabric, and the original heavy,
circular, stone staircase still mounts to the upper floors. These are
now divided by partitions into small rooms, and the lofty first story
is cut across by an interposed floor; all for the needs of trade. The
ceiling of the grand _salon_ retains its admirable cornice. Like other
mansions on the south side of Rue du Mail, this Récamier house
extended, behind a large court, now roofed over with glass, through to
Rue d'Aboukir, where its rear entrance is at No. 11. On the first
floor of this wing, in the oblong ceiling of a small room, is a deeply
sunk oval panel, that holds a painting of that time, in good
preservation.

From here Jacques Récamier, just then wealthy, removed to the newest
fashionable quarter of which the centre was Rue du Mont-Blanc, now Rue
de la Chaussée-d'Antin, whose No. 7 covers the site of his magnificent
mansion. It was then a street of small and elegant _hôtels_, each in
its own grounds, and M. Récamier bought the one that had belonged to
Necker, and had been confiscated by the State. He bought also the
adjoining house, and rebuilt the two into one. Its furniture,
fittings, bronzes, and marbles were all especially designed for this
new palace of a prosperous financier. Here was the scene of those
balls that were the wonder of Paris during the Consulate and the early
years of the Empire. The costumes of the period, both for men and
women, were picturesque in cut and coloring. Among the guests shone
Caroline Bonaparte, later to marry Murat, the youngest of the sisters
and most resembling her great brother in face and character. M. and
Mme. Récamier spent their summers in a _château_ owned by him in the
suburbs of Clichy; and to it every man of note in the State and the
army found his way. Napoleon said he, too, would be glad to go to
Clichy, if the fair _châtelaine_ would not come to court, and sent
Fouché to arrange it, but with no success. She fought shy of Napoleon,
the man and the Emperor, as Madame de Staël itched for his attention,
personal and political. Nor did Madame Récamier like his brother
Lucien, who languished about her, to the ridicule of his equally
love-lorn rivals.

His justification, and that of all her other adorers, speaks from
David's unfinished canvas in the Louvre. Yet this shows only the outer
shell of her loveliness; within was a lovely nature, simple and
kindly, sympathetic and loyal, that made her generous in her
friendships with men and women, and devoted to the welfare of her
friends. The single passion of her life was her passion for goodness.
Her modesty kept her unconscious of her attractions of mind and body,
and thus she held, almost unaware, the widest dominion of any woman of
her day. The Duchess of Devonshire put it daintily: "First she's good,
next she's _spirituelle_, and after that, she's beautiful." And so, as
we come to know her, we learn infinite respect for the woman, who
"with an unequalled influence over the hearts and wills of men,
scorned to ask a favor, and endured poverty and ... exile, which fell
with tenfold severity on one so beloved and admired, without
sacrifice of dignity and independence."

  [Illustration: Madame Récamier.
   (From the portrait by Gros.)]

Comparative poverty, hurried by the Emperor, came in 1806, and the
town house and the _château_ were sold, along with her plate and
jewels. In 1811 she was exiled from Paris on the pretext that her
_salon_ was a centre of Royalist conspiracy, and she passed the years
until the Restoration in the south of France, in Italy, and in
Switzerland with her beloved Madame de Staël.

Just beyond the Boulevards de la Madeleine and des Capucines, which
show the line of the rampart levelled by Louis XIV., and along the
course of its outer moat, a new street had started up at the end of
the eighteenth century, and was completed in the early years of the
nineteenth century. It began at present Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin,
and ended at the Church of the Madeleine, then in course of
construction; it was built up in the best style of that period, and it
was named Rue Basse-du-Rempart. That untouched section, to the west of
Rue Caumartin, shows us the admirable architecture of the early Empire
in the stately fronts, that shrink back behind the boulevard in
stony-faced protest against its turmoil. Eastwardly from Rue
Caumartin, the northern side of Boulevard des Capucines has trampled
out nearly the whole of the old street. The stones of Place de l'Opéra
lie on the site of the modest house, at 18 Rue Basse-du-Rempart, taken
by M. Récamier after his first business reverses, and occupied by him
during his wife's exile; and the florist's shop, under the Grand
Hôtel, is on the spot of their stately residence at No. 32 of the
same street, after her return and until 1820. In that year, his
fortune regained, he moved farther west in the same street to a more
sumptuous home at No. 48. This house has been happily saved for us,
and is now numbered 18 of Boulevard des Capucines; one of the three
structures of the old street, which stand back from the line of modern
frontage, and lower than the level of modern paving. The present No.
16 is the Récamier coach-entrance, and the huge stabling in the rear
is built on the Récamier gardens. Their house preserves its
wrought-iron balconies, and within is the circular staircase mentioned
in her "Mémoires." Down these stairs, for the last time, she came in
1827, leaving M. Récamier to his disastrous speculations, which had at
last swallowed up her own fortune, and drove to the Abbaye-aux-Bois.
There was her home until her death in 1849.

The venerable mass of the convent is in sight behind the railed-in
court at No. 16 Rue de Sèvres. One portion that we see was built in
1640 for the "_Annonciades_," and from them bought by Anne of Austria,
in 1654, for the sisterhood of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, who had been
driven from their convent near Compiègne by the civil wars of the
Fronde. That wing which was burned in 1661 was speedily rebuilt, and
forms part of the structure before us. Convents had then, and have
still, rooms and apartments which are let or sold to lone spinsters
and widows, and to "decayed gentlewomen who have seen better days."
This Abbaye-aux-Bois, during the Bourbon Restoration, "when the sky
had no horizon," was a favorite retreat for fashionable _dévotes_,
mending their reputations by a temporary retirement. The life there is
pleasantly described in the early letters of Mary Clarke--later Madame
Julius Mohl--who lived there with her mother. M. Bernard, the father
of Madame Récamier, had bought one of its grandest apartments for his
daughter, after the first bankruptcy of her husband. When she came
here it was occupied, and she rented a shabby upper floor for two or
three years, and then went down to her own apartment on the first
floor, to which she added another in the rear of the same floor. It
is in the western wing, of modern construction, with windows on Rue de
Sèvres, and on the terrace that overlooks the garden, now shorn of a
goodly slice by Boulevard Raspail. We know all about this _salon_,
famous for twenty years, the roll of whose frequenters holds every
illustrious name in France during that period, as well as those of
many charlatans and bores.

  [Illustration: The Abbaye-aux-Bois.]

It is reported that Madame Récamier and Châteaubriand met first, in
the earliest years of the century, at the receptions of Madame de
Staël. Whenever they met to become mutually attracted, this attraction
grew in him until it became the dominant sentiment of his life. With
all his elevation of soul and his breadth of mind, he had no depth of
feeling. "I have a head, good, clear, cold," he wrote; "and a heart
that goes jog-trot for three-and-one-half quarters of humanity." The
other one-eighth was Madame Récamier, and she outcounted all the rest
of the world in stirring such heart as he had. "You have transformed
my nature," he tried to make her believe, and he may have believed it
himself. Sick with conceit as he was, spoiled by flattery, morbid from
introspection, her companionship lifted him out of his melancholy and
raised him into serenity. As for her, so long as Madame de Staël
lived, she had no other affection to spare for anyone, and perhaps
this incomparable creature never gave to Châteaubriand more than
homage to her hero, tenderness to the isolated man, and medicine to a
mind diseased. He may well have written, toward the last: "I know
nothing more beautiful nor more good than you."

The "_chemin des vaches_" of the sixteenth century became a country
road by the passage of the drays that carted stone, from the Vaugirard
quarries to the ferry on the southern shore, for the building of the
Tuileries. The Pont Royal of Mansart has taken the place of the wooden
bridge built above that ferry, and the ferry has given the name to
that road, now Rue du Bac. Along its line, on both sides, _seigneurs_
and priests took land and built thereon. There are yet, behind the
huge stone blocks of houses, immense tracts of grounds and of
woodland, unsuspected by the wayfarer through the narrow, noisy
street. One of the most extensive of these open spaces is owned by the
Seminary of the Missions Étrangères, whose church is near the corner
of Rue de Babylone. For two bishops, who had charge here in the time
of Louis XIV., were erected two houses, exactly alike without and
within, and these are now numbered 118 and 120 Rue du Bac. In the
latter in the apartment on the ground floor, M. and Mme. de
Châteaubriand installed themselves in 1838; having left their cottage
and its domain in Rue d'Enfer, to the needy priests there. Here, in an
angle of the front court, are the low stone steps that mount to their
apartment.

  [Illustration: Portal of Châteaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac.]

Its dining-room and a chapel, arranged by them, gave on this court.
The chapel has been thrown into, and made one with, the dining-room,
but this is the only alteration since their time. His bedroom, and
that of his wife--with her huge bird-cages behind--and the _salon_
between the two rooms, looked out on their garden, and beyond it on
the vast grounds of the Missions Étrangères. The enchanting seclusion
was dear to him in these last years, during which his only work was
the completion and touching-up of his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." Select
extracts from the manuscript were sometimes read by him to the group
that assembled in the drawing-room at the _abbaye_, between four and
six o'clock of every afternoon. The hostess sat on one side of the
fireplace, her form grown so fragile that it seemed transparent for
the gentle spirit shining out, like a radiant light within a rich
vase. Châteaubriand "pontificated" in his arm-chair opposite, toying
with the household cat, the while he tried to listen to the lesser
men; "a giant bored by, and smiling pitifully down on, a dwarf world,"
is Amiel's phrase. When Châteaubriand spoke or read, it was with
sonorous tones, and with attitude and gesture of a certain
stateliness. He was always an artist in all details. His costume was
simple and elegant. Short of stature, he made himself shorter by his
way of sinking his head--"an Olympian head," says Lamartine--between
his shoulders. Under his thick-clustering locks rose a noble forehead,
power shone from his eyes, pride curled his lips--too often--and his
expression gave assurance of a glacial reserve.

The day came when he found himself too feeble for the short walk
between his house and the _abbaye_. Then his friend came to him. She
and Madame de Châteaubriand had been sufficiently friendly, but that
good lady gave her days to her prayer-books, and to reading her
husband's books; which she never understood, albeit she had the finest
mind of any woman he had known, he always asserted. She died in the
winter of 1846-47, and her body was carried to the Infirmary, the care
of which had been the occupation and the happiness of her later years.
Jacques Récamier, when in mortal illness in 1830, had been brought to
his wife's rooms in the _abbaye_, at her request and by special favor
of the Mother Superior, and there he had died.

And now, Châteaubriand offered marriage to Madame Récamier, and she
refused what she might have accepted, could it have come a few years
earlier. "But, at our age," she asked, "who can question our intimacy,
or prevent me taking care of you?" She was prevented only by the
cataract that slowly blinded her, and she sat by his bedside,
helpless, while Madame Mohl--who had remained Mary Clarke until the
summer of 1847--wrote his necessary letters. That sympathizing woman,
one of the few congenial to him, had only to come down from the
apartment she had taken on the third floor of this house, overlooking
the gardens; the apartment which she and her learned husband, Julius
Mohl, made the social successor of the Récamier _salon_, through many
years. Châteaubriand's death took place on July 4, 1848. He had lived
to see the Orleans throne, which he hated, overthrown as he had
foretold by the republic, which he did not love. His faithful lady
stood by his deathbed, with Béranger, equally faithful to old friends,
old customs, and old clothes, clad as we see him in his statue of
Square du Temple.

Châteaubriand's funeral service, attended by all that was best in
France, was solemnized in the Church of the Missions Étrangères, next
door, and his body was laid in a rock of the harbor of Saint-Malo.
Madame Récamier went back to her now desolate rooms. On May 10, 1849,
she drove over to the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, on a visit to her
niece, whose husband, M. Lenormant, was its librarian and had his
apartment there. That night she died in that building, in a sudden
seizure of cholera.




THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  [Illustration: The Court of the Pension Vauquer.]




THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC[1]


Set in the front wall of a commonplace house, in the broad main street
of sunny Tours, a tablet records the birth of Balzac in that house, on
the _27 Floréal, An VII._ of the Republic--May 16, 1799--the day of
Saint-Honoré, a saint whose name happened to hit the fancy of the
parents, and they gave it to their son. Many a secluded corner of the
town, many a nook within and about its Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, many
a portrait of its priests, has been brought into his books. And he has
portrayed, with his artist hand, the country round about of the broad
Loire and of bright Touraine, always vivid in his boyish
reminiscences. In his life and his work, however, he was, first and
always, a Parisian. To the great town, with all its mysteries and its
possibilities, his favorite creations surely found their way, however
far from it they started, drawn thither, as was drawn and held their
creator, by its unconquerable authority.

His father had been a lawyer, forced for safety during the Revolution
into army service, and when he was ordered from Tours, in 1814, to
take charge of the commissariat of the First Division of the Army in
Paris, he brought his family with him. Their abode was in Rue de
Thorigny, one of the old Marais streets, and the boy, nearly fifteen,
was put to school in the same street, and later in Rue Saint-Louis,
hard by. Transformed as is this quarter, there yet remain many of the
magnificent mansions with which it was built up in the days of its
grandeur, and their ample halls and rooms and gardens serve admirably
now as schools for boys and for girls. The young Honoré and his Louis
Lambert are one in their pitiful memories of these schools and of
their earlier schooling at the Seminary of Vendôme.

To please his father, the boy, when almost eighteen, went through the
law course of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France. To please
himself he listened, for the sake of their literary charm, to the
lectures of Villemain and Cousin and Guizot, and would rehearse them
with passion when he got home. But he had no love for the arid
literature of the law, and was wont to linger, in his daily walks
along the quays and across the bridges to and from his lecture-rooms,
over the bookstalls, spending his modest allowance for old books,
which he had learned already to select for their worth.

These studies ended, he entered the law office of M. de Merville, a
friend of his father, with whom Eugène Scribe had just before finished
his time, and to whom Jules Janin came for his training a little
later. And these three, unknown to one another, were, as it happened,
of the same mind in their revolt against the drudgery of the desk, and
against the servitude of the attorney, coupled with certain competence
as it might be; and in their preference for that career of letters,
which might mean greater toil, but which brought immediate freedom and
promised not far-off fame, and perhaps fortune, too.

The elder Balzac, severely practical, dreamed no dreams, and was
horrified by his son's refusal to pursue the profession appointed for
him. He foretold speedy starvation, and--perhaps to prepare Honoré for
it--allowed him to try his experiment, for two years, on a hundred
francs or less a month. So, the family having to leave Paris early in
1820, a garret--literally--was rented for the young author, and poorly
furnished by his mother; a painstaking, hard-working, fussy old lady,
who looked on him as a little boy all her life long, who drudged for
him to his last days, and who felt it to be her duty to discipline him
to hardship in these early days! This attic-room was at the top of the
old house No. 9 Rue Lesdiguières, which was swept away by the cutting
of broad Boulevard Henri IV. in 1866-67, its site being in the very
middle of this new street. To wax sentimental--as has a recent
writer--over the present No. 9 as Balzac's abode is touching, but
hardly worth while, that house having no interest for us beyond that
of being of the style and the period of Balzac's house, and serving to
show the shabbiness of his surroundings. These did not touch the young
author, whose garret's rental was within his reach, as was the
_Librairie de Monsieur_; for he gives it the old Bourbon name, and how
it got that name shall be told in our last chapter. It was the Library
of the Arsenal, still open to students as in his days there, in the
building begun by François I. for the casting of cannon, which he made
lighter and easier of carriage, and the casting of which exploded the
Arsenal within twenty years, and with it part of the adjacent Marais.
The Valois kings rebuilt it, Henri IV. enlarged it, and gave it for a
residence to his Grand Master of artillery, Sully, for whom he
decorated the _salons_ as we see them to-day. You may climb the grand
staircase, and stand in the rooms--their gildings fresh, their
paintings bright--occupied by the great minister. In the cabinet that
contains his furniture and fittings is an admirable bust of the King.
And you seem to see the man himself, as he enters, his debonair
swagger covering his secret shamefacedness for fear of a refusal of
his stern treasurer to make the little loan for which he has again
come to beg, to pay his last night's gambling or other debt of honor!

In this library by day, and in his garret by night, Balzac began that
life of terrific toil from which he never ceased until death stopped
his unresting hand. The novels he produced during these years were
hardly noticed then, are quite unknown now; showing no art, giving no
promise. He never owned them, and put them forth under grotesque
pen-names, such as "Horace de Saint-Aubin," "Lord R'hoone"--an anagram
of Honoré--and others equally absurd, all telling of his fondness for
titles.

This garret, in which he lived for fifteen months, is vividly pictured
in "La Peau de Chagrin," written in 1830, as Raphael's room in his
early days, before he became rich and wretched. Balzac's letters to
his sister Laure (Madame Laure de Surville) detail, with delightful
gayety, his exposure to wind and wet within these weather-worn walls;
and his ingenious shifts in daily small expenditure of _sous_ to make
his income serve. He relates how he shopped, how he brought home in
his pockets his scant provender, how he fetched up from the court-pump
his large allowance of water. For he used it lavishly in making his
coffee, that stimulation supplying the place of insufficient food, and
carrying him through his nights of pen-work. Excessive excitation and
excessive toil, begun thus early, went on through all his life, and he
dug his too early grave with his implacable pen. His only outings, by
day or by night, were the long walks that gave him his amazing
acquaintance with every corner of Paris, and his solitary strolls
through the great graveyard of Paris, near at hand. "_Je vais m'égayer
au Père-Lachaise_," he writes to his sister; and there he would climb
to the upper slopes, from which he saw the vast city stretched out.
For he was fond of height and space, and we shall see how he sought
for them in his later dwelling-places.

And in this storm-swept attic he had his first dreams of dwelling in
marble halls. Extreme in everything, he could imagine no half-way
house between a garret and a palace; he began in the one, he ended in
the other, unable to find pause or repose in either!

Dreaming the dreams of Midas, he loved to plunge his favorite young
heroes into floods of sudden soft opulence, and his longings for
luxury found expression in those unceasing schemes for instant wealth
which made him a kindly mock to his companions. His first practical
project was started in 1826, during a temporary sojourn for needed
rest and proper food at his father's new home in Villeparisis,
eighteen miles from Paris, on the edge of the forest of Bondy. He
speedily hurried back to Paris and turned printer and publisher;
bringing out, among other reprints, the complete works of Molière and
of La Fontaine, each with his own introduction, each in one
volume--compact and inconvenient--and, at the end of the year which
saw twenty copies of either sold, the entire editions were got rid of,
to save storage, at the price by weight of their paper. This and other
failures left him in debt, and to pay this debt and to gain quick
fortune, he set up a type-foundry in partnership with a foreman of his
printing-office. The young firm took the establishment at No. 17 Rue
des Marais-Saint-Germain, now Rue Visconti; named for the famous
archæologist who had lived, and in 1818 had died, in that venerable
mansion hard by on the corner of Rue de Seine and Quai Malaquais. We
have already found our way to this short and narrow Rue Visconti, to
visit Jean Cousin and Baptiste du Cerceau, and, last of all, the rival
houses of Racine.

Balzac's establishment, now entirely rebuilt, was as typical a setting
of the scene as any ever invented by that master of scene-setting in
fiction. It may be seen, as it stood until very lately, in its
neighbor No. 15, an exact copy of this vanished No. 17. Its frowning
front, receding as it rises, is pierced with infrequent windows, and
hollowed out by a huge, wide doorway, within which you may see men
casting plates for the press, albeit the successors of "_Balzac et
Barbier_" no longer set type nor print.

"_Balzac H. et Barbier A., Imprimeurs, Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, 17_;"
so appears the firm in the Paris directory for 1827. The senior partner
had not yet assumed the particle "_de_," so proudly worn in later years
when, too, he is labelled in the directory "_homme-de-lettres_," the
title of "_imprimeur_," on which he prided himself because it meant
wealth, having lasted only until the end of 1827 or the beginning of
1828. Printing-office and type-foundry were sold at a ruinous
sacrifice, and Balzac was left with debts of about 120,000 francs; a
burden that nearly broke his back and his heart for many years. He
never went through that narrow street without groaning for its
memories; and for a long time, he told his sister, he had been tempted
to kill himself, as was tempted his hero of "La Peau de Chagrin." In
his "Illusions Perdues" he has painted, in relentless detail, the
cruel capacity of unpaid, or partially paid, debts for piling up
interest. But the helpless despair of David Séchard was, in Balzac
himself, redeemed by a buoyant confidence that never deserted him for
long. To pay his debts, he toiled as did Walter Scott, whom Balzac
admired for this bondage to rectitude, as he admired his genius. All
through the "Comédie Humaine" he dwells on the burden of debt, the
ceaseless struggle to throw it off, by desperate, by dishonorable,
expedients.

On an upper floor of his establishment, Balzac had fitted up a small
but elegant apartment for his living-place, his first attempt to
realize that ideal of a bachelor residence such as those in which he
installed his heroes. This was furnished, of course, on credit, and
when failure came, he removed his belongings to a room at No. 2 Rue de
Tournon, a house quite unchanged to-day. Here his neighbor was the
editor of the "Figaro," Henri de la Touche--his intimate friend then,
later his intimate enemy; a poor creature eaten by envy, whose
specialty it was to turn against former friends and to sneer at old
allies.

Here Balzac finished the book begun in his former room over his works,
"Les Chouans." It was published in 1829, and was the first to bear his
real name as author, the first to show to the reading world of what
sterling stuff he was made. That stuff was not content with the book,
good as it was, and he retouched and bettered it in after years. It
brought him not only readers but editors and publishers; and before
the end of 1830, he had poured forth a flood of novels, tales, and
studies; among them such works as "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote,"
"Physiologie du Mariage," "Gobseck," "Étude de Femme," "Une Passion
dans le Désert," "Un Épisode sous la Terreur," "Catherine de Médicis,"
"Lettres sur Paris"--with "Les Chouans," seventy in all!

Werdet, one of Balzac's publishers--his sole publisher from 1834 to
1837--lived and had his shop near by, at No. 49 Rue de Seine. To his
house, just as it stands to-day, the always impecunious young author
used to come, morning, noon, and night for funds, in payment of work
unfinished, of work not yet begun, often of work never to be done.

From Rue de Tournon he removed, early in 1831, to Rue Cassini, No. 1,
as we find it given in the Paris _Bottin_ of that year. It is a short
street of one block, running from Avenue de l'Observatoire to Rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, and takes its name appropriately from the
Italian astronomer, who was installed in the Observatory, having been
made a citizen of France by Colbert, Louis XIV.'s great Finance Minister.
It is a secluded quarter still, with its own air of isolation and its
own village atmosphere. In 1831 it was really a village, far from
town, and these streets were only country lanes, bordered by infrequent
cottages, dear to the weary Parisian seeking distance and quiet. Three
of them, near together here, harbored famous men at about this period,
and all three have remained intact until lately for the delight of the
pilgrim--that of Châteaubriand, No. 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, that of
Victor Hugo, No. 27 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and this one of Balzac.
His house, destroyed only in 1899, was on the southwest corner of Rue
du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques and Rue Cassini. It was a little cottage of
two stories, with two wings and a small central body, giving on a tiny
court. A misguided Paris journal has claimed, with copious letterpress
and illustrations, the large building at No. 6 Rue Cassini for
Balzac's abode. This is a lamentable error, one of the many met with
in topographical research, by which the traditions of a demolished
house are transplanted to an existing neighbor. This characterless No.
6 carries its own proof that Balzac could never have chosen it, even
were we without the decisive proof given by the _cadastre_ of the
city, lately unearthed by M. G. Lenôtre among the buried archives of
the _Bureau des Contributions Directes_.

In the sunny apartment of the left wing dwelt Balzac and his friend,
Auguste Borget; in the other wing, Jules Sandeau lived alone and
lonely in his recent separation from George Sand. Their separation was
not so absolute as to prevent an occasional visit from her, and an
occasional dinner to her by the three men. She has described one of
these wonderful dinners with much humor; telling how Balzac, when she
started for her home--then on Quai Malaquais--arrayed himself in a
fantastically gorgeous dressing-gown to accompany her; boasting, as
they went, of the four Arabian horses he was about to buy; which he
never bought, but which he quite convinced himself, if not her, that
he already owned! Says Madame Dudevant: "He would, if we had permitted
him, have thus escorted us from one end of Paris to the other." He so
far realized his vision as to set up a tilbury and horse at this
period--about 1832--and exulted in the sensation created by his
magnificence as he drove, clad in his famous blue coat with shining
buttons, and attended by his tiny groom, "_Grain-de-mil_."

This equipage and that gorgeous dressing-gown were but a portion of
the bizarre splendor with which Balzac loved to relieve the squalor of
his debt-ridden days. Here, his creditors forgetting, by them
forgotten, as he fondly hoped, hiding from his friends the furniture
he had salvaged from his wreck, he wantoned in silver toilet-appliances,
in dainty porcelain and _bric-à-brac_; willing to go without soup and
meat--never without his coffee--that he might fill, with egregious
_bibelots_, his "nest of boudoirs _à la marquise_, hung with silk and
edged with lace," to use George Sand's words; boudoirs which he has
described in minute detail, placing them in the preposterous apartment
of "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or."

In his work-room, apart and markedly simple and severe, he began that
series of volumes, amazing in number and vigor, with which he was
resolute to pay his enormous debts. Here, in this little wing, in the
years between 1831 and 1838, he produced, among over sixty others of
less note, such masterpieces as "La Peau de Chagrin," "Le Chef
d'Oeuvre Inconnu," "Le Curé de Tours," "Louis Lambert," "Eugénie
Grandet," "Le Médecin de Campagne," "Le Père Goriot," "La Duchesse de
Langeais," "Illusion Perdues" (first part only), "Le Lys dans la
Vallée," "L'Enfant Maudit," "César Birotteau," "Cent Contes
Drôlatiques" (in three sections), "Séraphita," "La Femme de Trente
Ans," and "Jésus-Christ en Flandres."

In addition to his books, he did journalistic writing, chiefly for
weekly papers; and in 1835 he bought up and took charge of the
"Chronique de Paris," aided by a gallant staff of the cleverest men of
the day. It lived only a few months. In 1840 he started "La Revue
Parisienne," written entirely by himself. It lived three months.

When once at work, Balzac shut himself in his room, often seeing no
one but his faithful servant for many weeks. His work-room was
darkened from all daylight, his table lit only by steady-flamed
candles, shaded with green. A cloistered monk of fiction, he was clad
in his favorite robe of white cashmere, lined with white silk, open at
the throat, with a silken cord about the waist, as we see him on the
canvas of Louis Boulanger. He would get to his table at two in the
morning and leave it at six in the evening; the entire time spent in
writing new manuscript, and in his endless correction of proofs,
except for an hour at six in the morning, for his bath and coffee, an
hour at noon for his frugal breakfast, with frequent coffee
between-times. At six in the evening he dined most simply, and was in
bed and asleep by eight o'clock.

  [Illustration: Honoré de Balzac.
   (From the portrait by Louis Boulanger.)]

With no inborn literary facility, with an inborn artistic conscience
that drove him on in untiring pursuit of perfection, he filled the
vast chasm between his thought and its expression with countless
pen-strokes, and by methods of composition all his own: the exact
reverse of those of Dumas, writing at white heat, never rewriting; or
of Hugo, who said: "I know not the art of soldering an excellence in
the place of a defect, and I correct myself in another work." Balzac
began with a short and sketchy and slip-shod skeleton, making no
attempt toward sequence or style, and sent it, with all its errors, to
the printer. Proofs were returned to him in small sections pasted in
the centre of huge sheets; around whose wide borders soon shot from
the central text rockets and squibs of the author's additions and
corrections, fired by his infuriated fist. The new proofs came back on
similar sheets, to be returned to the printer, again like the web and
tracks of a tipsy spider. This was repeated a dozen or, it is said, a
score of times, always with amplifications, until his type-setters
became palsied lunatics. He overheard one of them, as he entered the
office one day, say: "I've done my hour of Balzac; who takes him
next?" Type-setter, publisher, author were put out of misery only when
the last proof came in, at its foot the magic "_Bon à tirer_."

This stupendous work had been preceded and was accompanied by as
stupendous preparation of details. He dug deep to set the solid
foundations for each structure he meant to build. "I have had to read
_so many_ books," he says, referring to his preliminary toil on
"Louis Lambert." So real were his creations to him--more alive to his
vision than visible creatures about--that he must needs name them
fittingly, and house them appropriately. Invented nomenclature gave no
vitality to them, in his view, and he hunted, on signs and shop-fronts
wherever he went, for real names that meant life, and a special life.
"A name," as he said, "which explains and pictures and proclaims him;
a name that shall be his, that could not possibly belong to any
other." He revelled in his discovery of "Matifat," and "Cardot," and
like oddities. He dragged Léon Gozlan through miles of streets on such
a search, refusing every name they found, until he quivered and
colored before "Marcas" on a tailor's sign; it was the name he had
dreamed of, and he put "Z" before it, "to add a flame, a plume, a star
to the name of names!"

His scenes, too, were set for his personages with appalling care, so
that, as has been well said, he sometimes chokes one with brick and
mortar. He knew his Paris as Dickens knew his London, and found in
unknown streets or unfrequented quarters the scenes he searched long
for, the surroundings demanded by his characters. If his story were
placed in a provincial town, he would write to a friend living there
for a map of the neighborhood, and for accurate details of certain
houses. Or, he would make hurried journeys to distant places: "I am
off to Grenoble," or, "to Alençon"--he wrote to his sister--"where
So-and-so lives:" one of his new personages, already a living
acquaintance to him. In his artistic frenzy for fitting atmosphere he
has, unconsciously, breathed his spirit of unrest into much of his
narrative, and the reader plunges on, out-of-breath, through
chapterless pages of fatiguing detail.

These excursions were not his only outings in later years. He got away
from his desk during the summer months, for welcome journeys to his
own Touraine, and to other lands, and for visits to old family
friends. Always and everywhere he carried his work with him.

And he began to see the world of Paris, and to be seen in that world,
notably in the famous _salon_ of Emile de Girardin and his young wife,
Delphine Gay de Girardin, where the watchword was "Admiration, more
admiration, and still more admiration." He met well-bred women and
illustrious men, whose familiar intercourse polished him, whose
attentions gratified him. The pressure of his present toil removed for
a while, he was fond of emerging from his solitude, and of flashing in
the light of publicity. He was an interested and an interesting
talker, earnest and vehement and often excited in his utterances; yet
frank and merry, and vivid with a "Herculean joviality." His thick
fine black hair was tossed back like a mane from his noble, towering
brow; his nose was square at the end, his lips full and curved, and
hidden partly by a small mustache. His most notable features were his
eyes, brown, spotted with gold, glowing with life and light--"the eyes
of a sovereign, a seer, a subjugator." A great soul shone out of them,
and they redeemed and triumphed over all that was heavy in face and
vulgar in body; for, with a thickness of torso like Mirabeau, and the
neck of a bull, he had his own corpulence. Lamartine says that the
personal impression made by Balzac was that of an element in nature;
he gripped one's brain when speaking, and one's heart when silent.
Moreover, it was an element good as well as strong, unable to be other
than good; and his expression, we know from all who saw it, told of
courage, patience, gentleness, kindliness.

He was commonly as careless of costume as a vagrant school-boy in
outgrown clothes. He would rush from his desk to the printer's or race
away in search of names, clad in his green hunting-jacket with its
copper buttons of foxes' heads, black and gray checked trousers,
pleated at the waist, and held down by straps passing under the huge
high-quartered shoes, tied or untied as might happen, a red silk
kerchief cord-like about his neck, his hat, shaggy and faded, crushed
over his eyes--altogether a grotesque creature! In contrast, he was
gorgeous in his gala toilet of the famous blue coat and massive gold
buttons, and the historic walking-stick, always carried _en grande
tenue_, its great knob aglow with jewels sent him by his countless
feminine adorers.

When Balzac removed with Sandeau, in 1838, to new quarters, he kept
this apartment in Rue Cassini for an occasional retreat, perhaps for a
friendly refuge against the creditors, who became more and more
clamorous in their attentions. The two comrades furnished the lower
floor of their new home most handsomely; mainly with the view of
dazzling urgent publishers, who, as said Balzac, "would give me
nothing for my books if they found me in a garret." Coming to drive a
bargain, these guileless gentry found themselves too timid to haggle
with the owners of such luxury. They could not know that that luxury
was merely hired under cover of a friend's name, and lit up only by
night to blind and bewilder them, while the haughty authors lived by
day in bare discomfort, on a half-furnished upper floor.

Of this mansion only the site remains. It was at No. 17 Rue des
Battailles, on the heights of Chaillot--the suburb between Paris and
Passy--and that street and the Balzac house have been cut away by the
modern Avenue d'Iéna. Retired and high as it was, with its grand view
over river and town, it was not high enough nor far enough away for
this lover of distance and height. He soon tried again to realize his
ideal of a country home by buying, in 1838, three acres of land at
Ville d'Avray, a quarter near Sèvres, on the road to Versailles. On
the ground was a small cottage called, in Louis XIV.'s time, "_Les
Jardies_," still known by that name, and notable in our time as the
country-home of Léon Gambetta, wherein he died. That home remains
exactly as he left it, at No. 14 Rue Gambetta, Ville d'Avray, and has
been placed among the National Monuments of France. It is a shrine for
the former followers of the great tribune, who visit it on each
anniversary of his death. The statue they have erected to their
leader, alongside the house, may be most kindly passed by in silence.

  [Illustration: Les Jardies.]

The glorious view from this spot--embracing the valley of Ville
d'Avray, the slopes opposite, the great city in the distance--was a
delight to Balzac. _Les Jardies_ was a tiny box, having but three
rooms in its two stories, which communicated by a ladder-like
staircase outside. He had tried to improve the place by a partial
rebuilding, and the stairs were forgotten until it was too late to put
them inside. A later tenant has enclosed that absurd outer staircase
within a small addition. His garden walls gave him even more trouble,
for they crumbled and slid down on the grounds of an irate neighbor.
The greater part of that garden has been walled off. Yet the poor
little patch was a domain in his eyes; its one tree and scattered
shrubs grew to a forest in his imagination, and his fancy pictured,
in that confined area, a grand plantation of pineapples, from which he
was to receive a yearly income of 400,000 francs! He had fixed on the
very shop on the boulevards where they were to be sold, and only
Gautier's cold sense prevented the great planter, as he saw himself,
from renting it before he had grown one pineapple!

His rooms were almost bare of furniture, and this was suggested by his
stage directions charcoaled on the plaster walls: "Rosewood panels,"
"Gobelins tapestries," "Venetian mirror," "An inlaid cabinet stands
here," "Here hangs a Raphael." Thus he was content to camp for four or
five years, hoping his house would yet be furnished, and perhaps
believing it was already furnished.

At this time, and for many years, Balzac rented a room over the shop
of his tailor Buisson, at the present No. 112 Rue de Richelieu. His
letters came here always, and he used the place not only for
convenience when in town, but, in connection with other shelters, for
his unceasing evasion of pursuing creditors. A tailor still occupies
that shop, and seems to be prosperous; probably able to collect his
bills from prompter customers than was Balzac.

In 1843, forced to sell _Les Jardies_, he came back into the suburbs,
to a house then No. 19 Rue Basse, at Passy, now No. 47 Rue Raynouard
of that suburb. On the opposite side of the street, at No. 40, is a
modest house, hiding behind its garden-wall. This was the unpretending
home of "_Béranger, poète à Passy_," to quote the Paris _Bottin_. No.
47 is a plain bourgeois dwelling of two stories and attic, wide and
low, standing on the line of the street; in the rear is a court, and
behind that court is the pavilion occupied by Balzac. He had entrance
from the front, and unseen egress by a small gate on the narrow lane
sunk between walls, now named Rue Berton, and so by the quay into
town. This was a need for his furtive goings and comings, at times.

Balzac's work-room here looked out over a superb panorama--across the
winding Seine, over the Champ-de-Mars, and the Invalides' dome, and
all southern Paris, to the hills of Meudon in the distance. This room
he kept austerely furnished, as was his way; while the living
apartments were crowded with the extraordinary collection of rare
furniture, pictures, and costly trifles, which he had begun again to
bring together. To it he gave all the money he could find or get
credit for, and as much thought and labor and time as to his books,
although with little of the knowledge that might have saved him from
frequent swindlers. It was only his intimates who were allowed to
enter these rooms, and they needed, in order to enter them, or the
court or the house on the street, many contrivances and passwords,
constantly changed. He himself posed as "_la Veuve Durand_," or as
"_Madame de Bruguat_," and each visitor had to ask for one of these
fictitious persons; stating, with cheerful irrelevancy: "The season of
plums has arrived," or, "I bring laces from Belgium." Once in, they
found free-hearted greeting and full-handed hospitality, and
occasional little dinners. The good cheer was more toothsome to the
favored _convives_, than were the cheap acrid wines, labelled with
grand names, made drinkable only by the host's fantastic fables of
their vintages and their voyages; believed by _him_, at least, who
dwelt always in his own domain of dreams.

These dinners were not extravagant, and there was no foolish
expenditure in this household at Passy. Balzac wrote later to his
niece, that his cooking there had been done only twice a week, and in
the days between he was content with cold meat and salad, so that each
inmate had cost him only one franc a day. For this man of lavish
outlay for genuine and bogus antiques, this slave to strange
extravagances and colossal debts--partly imaginary--was painfully
economical in his treatment of himself. He thought of money, he wrote
about money. Before him, love had been the only passion allowed in
novels; he put money in its place and found romance in the Code. All
through his life he worked for money to pay his debts, intent on that
one duty. In October, 1844, he wrote two letters, within one week, to
the woman who was to be his wife; in one of them he says that his
dream, almost realized, is to earn before December the paltry twenty
thousand francs that would free him from all debt; in the other he
gloats over recent purchases of _bric-à-brac_, amounting to hundreds
of francs. He saw nothing comically inconsistent in the two letters.

In all his letters, the saddest reading of all letters, there is this
curious commingling of the comic and the sordid. Those, especially,
written to his devoted sister and to the devoted lady who became his
wife at the last, give us most intimate acquaintance with the man;
showing a _man_, indeed, strong and vehement, steadfast and patient;
above all, magnanimous. Self-assertive in his art, eager and insistent
concerning it, he was quite without personal envy or self-seeking.
Said Madame Dudevant: "I saw him often under the shock of great
injustices, literary and personal, and I never heard him say an evil
word of anyone." Nor was there any evil in his life--a life of
sobriety and of chastity, as well as of toil. At the bottom of his
complex nature lay a deep natural affection. This giant of letters,
when nearly fifty years old, signed his letters to his mother, "_Ton
fils soumis_"; so expressing truly his feeling for her, from the day
she had installed him in his mean garret, to that later day, when she
fitted up his grand last mansion. In his letters to those dear to him,
amid clamorous outcries about debts and discomforts, comes a deeper
cry for sympathy and affection. Early in life, he wrote to his sister:
"My two only and immense desires--to be famous and to be loved--will
they ever be satisfied?" To a friend he wrote: "All happiness depends
on courage and work." So, out of his own mouth, we may judge this man
in all fairness.

From this Passy home one night, Balzac and Théophile Gautier went to
the apartment of Roger de Beauvoir, in the Hôtel de Lauzun-Pimodan, on
the Island of Saint-Louis; and thence the three friends took a short
flight into a hashish heaven. Their strange experiences have been
told by their pens, but to us, Balzac's night of drugged dreams is not
so strange as his days of unforced dreams. That which attracts us in
this incident is its scene--one of the grandest of the mansions that
sprang up from the thickets of Île Saint-Louis, as _le Menteur_ has
put it. Built in the middle years of the seventeenth century, it
stands quite unchanged at No. 17 Quai d'Anjou, bearing, simply and
effectively, every mark of Mansart's hand in his later years. Its
first owner followed his friend Fouquet to the Bastille and to
Pignerol; its next tenant came to it from a prison-cell, and went from
it to the very steps of the throne. He was the superb adventurer,
Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Duc de Lauzun, and his family name clings
still to the place, and is cut in gold letters on the black marble
tablet above the door. On that prettiest balcony in Paris, crowded the
prettiest women of Paris, on summer nights, to look at the river fêtes
got up by their showy and braggart Gascon host. Through this portal
have passed Bossuet and Père Lachaise, going in to convert the plain
old Huguenot mother of de Lauzun, who lived retired in her own
isolated chamber through the years of her son's ups and downs. When
her family had gone, came the Marquis de Richelieu, great-nephew of
the great Richelieu, with the bride he had stolen from her convent at
Chaillot--the daughter of Hortense Mancini, niece of Mazarin, and of
her husband, it is alleged. Then came the Pimodan, who was first of
that name, and who gave it to his _hôtel_. It is an admirable relic;
its rooms, with their frescoed ceilings and their panelled walls, are
as remarkable as those of the _château_ of Fontainebleau, and are not
surpassed by any in Paris. The mansion is well worth a visit for
itself and for its memories.

Balzac's Paris--the Paris for which his pen did what Callot and Meryon
did for it with their needles--has been almost entirely pickaxed out
of sight and remembrance. The Revolution, wild-eyed in its mad
"Carmagnole," gave itself time to raze a few houses only, after
clearing the ground of the Bastille, although it had meant much more
destruction; the Empire cut some new streets, and planned some new
quarters; the Bourbons came back and went away again, leaving things
much as they had found them. It remained for Louis-Philippe to begin
"works of public utility," an academic phrase, which being interpreted
signified the tearing down of the old and the building up of the new,
to gratify the grocers and tallow-chandlers whose chosen King he was,
and to fill his own pocket. Yet much of Balzac's stage-setting
remained until it was swept away by Haussmann and his master of the
Second Empire. Such was the wretched Rue du Doyenné, that "narrow
ravine" between the Louvre and Place du Carrousel, where Baron Hulot
first saw _la Marneffe_, and where _la Cousine Bette_ kept guard over
her Polish artist in his squalid garret; doubtless the very garret
known to Balzac in his visits there, when it was tenanted by Arsène
Houssaye, Gautier, Gavarni, and the rest of "Young France, harmless in
its furies." That house, one of a block of black old eighteenth-century
structures, stood where now is the trim little garden behind the
preposterous statue of Gambetta.

History and fiction meet on the steps of Saint-Roch. There César
Birotteau, the ambitious and unlucky perfumer, was "wounded by
Napoleon," on the _13 Vendémiaire_, the day that put the young
Corsican's foot into the stirrup, and gave to the sham-heroic César
that sounding phrase, always thereafter doing duty on his tongue. He
was carried to his shop in Rue Saint-Honoré, on its northern side near
Rue de Castiglione, and hid and bandaged and nursed in his _entresol_.
This part of Rue Saint-Honoré and its length eastward, with its narrow
pavement and its tall, thin houses, is still a part of the picture
Balzac knew and painted; but the business district hereabout has
greatly changed since his day. The Avenue de l'Opéra, and all that
mercantile quarter dear to the American pocket, the Bourse and the
banking-houses about, date from this side of his Paris. Nucingen would
be lost in his old haunts, and Lucien de Rubempré could not recognize
the newspaper world of our day.

The _hôtels_ of the Faubourg Saint-Germain--the splendid mansions of
the splendid eighteenth century, where his Rastignac and his lesser
pet swells lorded it--are now, in many cases, let out in apartments,
their owners content with the one floor that is in keeping with their
diminished fortunes. Undiminished, however, are their traditions and
their prejudices, albeit "_Le Faubourg_" exists no longer, except as
an attitude of mind. Yet, here on the left bank, are still to be
found some of the scenes of the "Comédie Humaine." On Quai Voltaire,
alongside the house in which Voltaire died, is the very same shop of
the antiquary, from whom Raphael de Valentin bought the _peau de
chagrin_. Balzac knew it well, doubtless was swindled there, and
to-day you will find it as crowded with curiosities, as begrimed with
dust, as suggestive of marvels hid in its dusky corners, as when he
haunted it.

Raphael de Valentin lived in the _hôtel-garni_ Saint-Quentin, Rue des
Cordiers. Long before his day, Rousseau had been a tenant of a dirty
room in the same dirty _hôtellerie_, going there because of the
scholarly neighborhood of the place and of its memories, even at that
time. Leibnitz, in 1646, had found it a village inn in a narrow lane,
hardly yet a street. Gustave Planche lived there, and Hégésippe Moreau
died there in 1838--a true poet, starved to death. The old inn and all
its memories and the very street are vanished; and the new buildings
of the Sorbonne cover their site.

  [Illustration: The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the house
   where Voltaire died.]

"One of the most portentous settings of the scene in all the
literature of fiction. In this case there is nothing superfluous;
there is a profound correspondence between the background and the
action." Such is the judgment of so competent a critic as Mr. Henry
James, concerning the house in which is played the poignant tragedy of
"Père Goriot." You will, if you love Balzac, own to the truth of this
statement, when you look upon this striking bit of salvage. It
stands, absolutely unchanged as to externals, at No. 24 Rue
Tournefort; a street named in honor of the great botanist who cleared
the track for Linnæus. In Balzac's day, this street was known by its
original name of Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève; one of the most ancient and
most isolated streets on the southern bank. Once only, through the
centuries, has its immemorial quiet been broken by unseemly noise,
when, in the days of François I., a rowdy gambling-den there, the
"_Tripôt des 11,000 Diables_," did its utmost to justify its name. The
street seems to creep, in subdued self-effacement, over the brow of
Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, away from the Paris of shops and cabs and
electric light. The house stands narrow on the street, its gable
window giving scanty light to poor old Goriot's wretched garret;
framed in it, one may fancy the patient face of the old man, looking
out in mute bewilderment on his selfish, worldly daughters. The place
no longer holds the "_pension bourgeoise de deux sexes et autres_" of
the naïve description on the cards of Madame Vauquer, _née_ Conflans;
and is now let out to families and single tenants. Its gate-way stands
always open, and you may enter without let or hindrance into the
court, and so through to the tiny garden behind, once the pride of
Madame Vauquer, no longer so carefully kept up. You peep into the
small, shabby _salle-à-manger_, on the entrance floor of the house,
and you seem to see the convict Vautrin, manacled, in the clutch of
the _gens-d'armes_, and, cowering before him, the vicious old maid who
has betrayed him. That colossal conception of the great romancer had
found his ideal hiding-place here, as had the forlorn father his
hiding-place, in his self-inflicted poverty. All told, there is no
more convincing pile of brick and mortar in fiction; sought out and
selected by Balzac with as much care and as many journeys as Dickens
gave to his hunt for exactly the right house for Sampson and Sally
Brass.

  [Illustration: The Pension Vauquer.]

While Balzac was still at Passy, after long searching for a new home,
he made purchase, as early as 1846, in the new quarter near the
present Parc Monceaux. That name came from an estate hereabout, once
owned by Philippe Égalité; and his son, the King of the French, and
the shrewdest speculator among the French, was just at this time
exploiting this estate, in company with lesser speculators. The whole
suburb was known as the Quartier Beaujon, from a great banker of the
eighteenth century, whose grand mansion, within its own grounds, had
been partly demolished by the cutting of new streets, leaving only
out-buildings and a pavilion in a small garden. This was the place
bought by Balzac; the house and grounds, dear as they were, costing
much less, as he found, than his furniture, bronzes, porcelains, and
pottery, paintings and their frames--all minutely described in the
collection of _le cousin Pons_. He made a museum, indeed, of this
house, bringing out all his hidden treasures from their various
concealments here and there about town. There was still a pretence of
poverty regarding his new home; he would say to his friends, amazed by
the display: "Nothing of all this is mine. I have furnished this house
for a friend, whom I expect. I am only the guardian and doorkeeper of
this _hôtel_."

The pretty mystery was resolved within a few months, and its solution
explained Balzac's frequent and long absences from Paris after the
winter of 1842-43. These months had been passed at the home of Madame
Ève de Hanska, the Polish widow who was to be his wife. Her home was
in the grand _château_ of Wierzchownie, in the Ukraine, whose present
owner keeps unchanged the furniture of Balzac's apartment, where is
hung his portrait by Boulanger, a gift to Madame de Hanska from her
lover. And from there he brought his bride to Paris in the summer of
1850, their marriage dating from March of that year, after many years
of waiting in patient affection. She had made over--with Balzac's
cordial consent--nearly the whole of her great fortune to her
daughter, her only child, and to that daughter's husband, retaining
but a small income for herself. It was--and the envious world owned
that it was--truly a love-match. They came home to be welcomed, first
of all, by Balzac's aged mother; who had, during his absence, taken
charge of all the preparations, with the same anxious, loving care she
had given to the fitting-up of his garret thirty years before. She had
carried out, in every detail, even to the arrangement of the flowers
in the various rooms, the countless directions he had sent from every
stage of the tedious journey from Wierzchownie.

"And so, the house being finished, death enters," goes the Turkish
proverb. This undaunted mariner, after his stormy voyage, gets into
port and is ship-wrecked there. His premonition of early years,
written to his confidant Dablin in 1830, was proven true: "I foresee
the darkest of destinies for myself; that will be to die when all that
I now wish for shall be about to come to me." As early as in the
preceding summer of 1849, he had ceased to conceal from himself any
longer the malady that others had seen coming since 1843. The long
years of unbroken toil, of combat without pause, of stinted sleep, of
insufficient food, of inadequate exercise, of the steady stimulation
of coffee, had broken the body of this athlete doubled with the monk.
Years before, he had found that the inspiration for work given by
coffee had lessened in length and strength. "It now excites my brain
for only fifteen days consecutively," he had complained; protesting
that Rossini was able to work for the same period on the same
stimulus! So he spurred himself on, listening to none of the warnings
of worn nature nor of watchful friends. "Well, we won't talk about
that now," was always his answer. "In the olden days," says
Sainte-Beuve, "men wrote with their brains; but Balzac wrote, not only
with his brains, but with his blood." And now, he went to pieces all
at once; his heart and stomach could no longer do their work; his
nerves, once of steel and Manila hemp, were torn and jangled, and
snapped at every strain; his very eyesight failed him. The most
pitiful words ever penned by a man-of-letters were scrawled by him, at
the end of a note written by his wife to Gautier, a few weeks after
their home-coming: "_Je ne puis ni lire ni écrire._"

"On the 18th August, 1850"--writes Hugo in "Choses Vues"--"my wife,
who had been during the day to call on Madame Balzac, told me that
Balzac was dying. My uncle, General Louis Hugo, was dining with us,
but as soon as we rose from table, I left him and took a cab to Rue
Fortunée, Quartier Beaujon, where M. de Balzac lived. He had bought
what remained of the _hôtel_ of M. de Beaujon, a few buildings of
which had escaped the general demolition, and out of them he had made
a charming little house, elegantly furnished, with a _porte-cochère_
on the street, and in place of a garden, a long, narrow, paved
court-yard, with flower-beds about it here and there."

  [Illustration:  Plaque marking place of death of Balzac]

It was to No. 14, Allée Fortunée, that Hugo drove. That suburban lane
is now widened into Rue Balzac, and where it meets Rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Honoré there is a bit of garden-wall, and set in it is
a tablet recording the site of this, Balzac's last home. The house
itself has quite vanished, but one can see, above that wall, the upper
part of a stone pavilion with Greek columns, built by him, it is
believed.

"I rang," continues Hugo; "the moon was veiled by clouds; the street
deserted. No one came. I rang again. The gate opened; a woman came
forward, weeping. I gave my name, and was told to enter the _salon_,
which was on the ground floor. On a pedestal opposite the fireplace
was the colossal bust by David. A wax-candle was burning on a handsome
oval table in the middle of the room.... We passed along a corridor,
and up a staircase carpeted in red, and crowded with works of art of
all kinds--vases, pictures, statues, paintings, brackets bearing
porcelains.... I heard a loud and difficult breathing. I was in M. de
Balzac's bedroom.

"The bed was in the middle of the room. M. de Balzac lay in it, his
head supported by a mound of pillows, to which had been added the red
damask cushions of the sofa. His face was purple, almost black,
inclining to the right. The hair was gray, and cut rather short. His
eyes were open and fixed. I saw his side face only, and thus seen, he
was like Napoleon.... I raised the coverlet and took Balzac's hand. It
was moist with perspiration. I pressed it; he made no answer to the
pressure...."

The bust that Hugo saw was done by David d'Angers; a reduced copy
surmounts Balzac's tomb. His portrait, in water-color, painted, within
an hour after his death, by Eugène Giraud, is a touching portrayal of
the man, truer than any made during life, his widow thought. While
long suffering had wasted, it had refined, his face, and into it had
come youth, strength, majesty. It is the head of the Titan, who
carried a pitiable burden through a life of brave labor.

Balzac's death was known in a moment, it would seem, to his creditors,
and they came clamoring to the door, and invaded the house--a ravening
horde, ransacking rooms and hunting for valuables. They drove the
widow away, and she found a temporary home with Madame de Surville, at
47 Rue des Martyrs. This house and number are yet unchanged. Cabinets
and drawers were torn open, and about the grounds were scattered his
letters and papers, sketches of new stories, drafts of contemplated
work--all, that could be, collected by his friends, also hurrying to
the spot. They found manuscripts in the shops around, ready to enwrap
butter and groceries. One characteristic and most valuable letter was
tracked to three places, in three pieces, by an enthusiast, who
rescued the first piece just as it was twisted up and ready to light a
cobbler's pipe.

"He died in the night," continues Hugo. "He was first taken to the Chapel
Beaujon.... The funeral service took place at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule.
As I stood by the coffin, I remembered that there my second daughter
had been baptized. I had not been in the church since.... The
procession crossed Paris, and went by way of the boulevards to
Père-Lachaise. Rain was falling as we left the church, and when we
reached the cemetery. It was one of those days when the heavens seemed
to weep. We walked the whole distance. I was at the head of the coffin
on the right, holding one of the silver tassels of the pall. Alexandre
Dumas was on the other side.... When we reached the grave, which was
on the brow of the hill, the crowd was immense.... The coffin was
lowered into the grave, which is near to those of Charles Nodier and
Casimir Delavigne. The priest said a last prayer and I a few words.
While I was speaking the sun went down. All Paris lay before me, afar
off, in the splendid mists of the sinking orb, the glow of which
seemed to fall into the grave at my feet, as the dull sounds of the
sods dropping on the coffin broke in upon my last words."

Yes, stretched before his grave, lies all Paris, as his Rastignac saw
it, when he turned from the _fosses-communes_, into which they had
just thrown the body of Père Goriot, and with his clinched fist flung
out his grand defiance toward the great, beautiful, cruel city: "_À
nous deux, maintenant!_"

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Just as Balzac was a victim of calumny during life, so, since
death, has he suffered from carelessness. It is almost impossible to
make sure of incidents and dates in his career. These errors begin
with his birth, which is placed on the 20th May by many writers, and
is so cut on the memorial tablet in Paris. In this text, his
birth-date is fixed on the 16th May, on the strength of his family
records, and the statements of his life-long friends. Of these, some
say that he was born on the _27 Floréal_, and others on the day of
Saint-Honoré. No figuring can make these dates fall on any other day
than the 16th May. As for the many conflicting statements concerning
him that have been handed down, in the absence of indisputable
evidence, those alone are accepted here which are most nearly in
keeping with the proven facts and dates in his life.




THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS

  [Illustration: The Figure of d'Artagnan.
   (From the Dumas Monument, by Gustave Doré.)]




THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS


It was in 1823 that Alexandre Dumas, in his twenty-first year, took
coach for Paris from his boyhood-home with his widowed mother, at
Villers-Cotterets. He was set down at the principal landing-place of
the provincial diligences in Place des Victoires, and found a room
near by in an inn at No. 9 Rue du Bouloi. Its old walls are still
there on the street and in the court, and the Hôtel de Blois still
awaits the traveller. Thence he started on foot, at once, for No. 64
Rue du Mont-Blanc, the home of the popular Liberal spokesman in the
Chamber of Deputies, General Foy, an old comrade-in-arms of General
Dumas, to whom his son brought a letter of introduction.

About that house, two years later, a few days after November 28, 1825,
all Paris assembled, while all France mourned, for the burial of this
honest man, whose earnest voice had been heard only in the cause of
freedom and justice. Marked by a tablet, his house still stands, and
is now No. 62 Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin--the renamed Rue du
Mont-Blanc--on the corner of Rue de la Victoire.

Besides this letter, young Dumas carried only a meagre outfit of
luggage, and such meagre education as may be picked up by a clever
and yet an idle lad, in a notary's office in a provincial town.
Indeed, when he was made welcome by General Foy, he was questioned,
too; and, to his chagrin, he was found to be without equipment for any
sort of service. On the strength, however, of his "_belle écriture_,"
he obtained, through the influence of the general, a petty clerkship
in the household of the Duc d'Orléans, coming naturally enough to the
boy from Villers-Cotterets, the country-seat of the Orleans family.
Its stipend of 1,200 francs a year was doubtless munificent in the
eyes of Orleans thrift, and was certainly sufficient for the needs
then of the future owner of Monte-Cristo's millions. He earned his
wage and no more; for his official pen--at his desk in the
Palais-Royal--while doing its strict duty on official documents, was
more gladly busied on his own studies and his own paper-spoiling. For
the author within him had come to life with his first tramping of the
Paris streets and his first taking-in of all that they meant then.

The babies, begotten by French fathers and mothers during the
Napoleonic wars, and during those tremendous years at the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, breathed,
full-lunged, an air of instant and intense vitality. Now, come to
stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, eager to speed the coming of
red-blooded Romanticism and the going of cold and correct Classicism,
showed itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in literature
and the arts, after the sterility of so many years.

When Dumas came to Paris, Lamartine had already, in 1820, charmed the
public by the freshness and grace of his "Méditations." His admirers
were content with the sonorous surface of his vague, spiritual
exaltations, satisfied not to seek for any depth below. Hugo, barely
twenty, had thrilled men with the sounding phrases of his "Odes et
Ballades." These two, coming behind Chénier the herald and
Châteaubriand the van-courier, were imposing pioneers of the great
movement. Even more popular than these two Royalist poets, as they
were regarded, was Casimir Delavigne--already installed over Dumas as
Librarian at the Palais-Royal--rather a classicist in form, yet hailed
as the poet and playwright of the Liberal Opposition. Soulié, not so
well known now as he merits, won his first fame in 1824 by his poems
and plays. De Vigny had brought out his earliest poems in 1822; and
now, "isolated in his ivory tower," he was turning the periods of his
admirable "Cinq-Mars." De Musset was getting ready to try his wings,
and made his first open-air flight in 1828; a flight alone, for the
poet of personal passion joined no flock, ever. Gautier was serving
his apprenticeship to that poetic art, to whose service he gave a
life-long devotion and the most perfect craftsmanship in all France.

"They all come from Châteaubriand," said Goethe, of these and of other
rhymesters of that time. Châteaubriand himself had closed his career
as poet and as imaginative writer as far back as 1809, and had by now
taken his rank as a classic in literature, and in life as a Peer of
France and a Minister of the Bourbons.

But of all the singers of that day it was to Béranger that the public
ear turned most quickly and most kindly; even though he, then
forty-three years of age, might also seem to be of an earlier
generation. Those others touched, with various fingers, the lyre or
the lute; he turned a most melodious hand-organ, with assured and
showy art, and around it the captivated crowd loved to throng, with
enraptured long ears. His cheaply sentimental airs were hummed and
whistled all over France, and, known to everybody everywhere, there
was really no need of his putting them in type on paper, and no need
of his being sent to prison for that crime by Charles X. Yet he had
his turn, soon again, and his _chansons_, as much as any utterance of
man, upset the Bourbon throne and placed Louis-Philippe on that shaky
seat. That most prosaic of monarchs was sung up to the throne, and the
misguided poet soon found him out for what he was.

In prose, during these years, Nodier, Librarian at the Arsenal, was
plying his refined and facile pen. Mérimée showed his hand in 1825,
not to clasp, with any show of sympathy, the hand of any
fellow-worker, yet willing to take his share of the strain. Guizot,
out of active politics for a time, did his most notable pen-work
between 1825 and 1830. His untiring antagonist, Thiers, not yet turned
into the practical politician, produced, between 1823 and 1827, his
"History of the French Revolution," voluminous and untrustworthy; its
author energetically earning Carlyle's epithet, "a brisk little man in
his way." His life-long crony, Mignet, was digging vigorously in dry,
historic dust. Sainte-Beuve left, in 1827, his medical studies for
those critical studies in which he soon showed the master's hand;
notably with his early paper on Hugo's "Odes et Ballades." Michelet
was finding his _métier_ by writing histories for children. The two
Thierry brothers, Augustin and Amédée, proved the genuine historian's
stuff in them as early as 1825. Balzac was working, alone and unknown,
in his garret; and young Sue was handling the naval surgeon's knife,
before learning how to handle the pen.

And nearly all of these, nearly all the fine young fellows who made
the movement of 1830, had got inspiration from Villemain, who had
spoken, constantly and steadfastly, from his platform in the Sorbonne
during the ten years from 1815 to 1825, those sturdy and graphic words
which gave cheer and courage to so many.

There were a similar vitality and fecundity in painting and music and
their sister arts, and the brilliant host stirring for their sake
might be cited along with the unnumbered and unnamable pen-workers of
this teeming decade.

Less aggressive was the theatre. Scribe had possession, flooding the
stage with his comedies, vaudeville, opera-librettos, peopling its
boards with his pasteboard personages. There was call for revolt and
need of life. Talma, near his end, full of honors, devoted to his
very death to his art, longed to fill the rôle of a _man_ on the
boards, after so many years' impersonation of bloodless heroes. So he
told Dumas, who had come to see him only two weeks before his death,
in 1826, when the veteran thought he was recovering from illness--an
illness acceptable to the great tragedian, for it gave him, he pointed
out with pride, the lean frame and pendent cheeks, "beautiful for old
Tiberius"--the new part he was then studying. Death came with his cue
before that rôle could be played.

This wish for a real human being on the boards came home to Dumas,
when he saw the true Shakespeare rendered by Macready and Miss
Smithson at the Salle Favart in 1826. It was Shakespeare, in the
reading before and now in the acting, that helped Dumas more than any
other influence. No Frenchman has comprehended more completely than
Dumas the Englishman's universality, and he used to say that, after
God, Shakespeare was the great creator. His first attempt to put live
men and women on the stage, in "Christine," was crowded out by a
poorer play of the same name, pushed by the powers behind the Comédie
Française. But on its boards, on the evening of February 16, 1829, was
produced his "Henri III. et sa Cour," an instantaneous and
unassailable success. He might have said, in the words of Henri IV. at
Senlis, "My hour has struck"; for from that hour he went on in his
triumphant dramatic career. The Romantic drama had come at last, with
its superb daring, its sounding but spurious sentiment, its
engorgement of adjectives, and its plentiful lack of all sense of the
ludicrous. Perhaps if it had not taken itself so seriously, and had
been blessed with a few grains of the saving salt of humor, it had not
gone stale so soon.

Dumas had removed, soon after coming to town, from the inn in Rue du
Bouloi to another of the same sort just around the corner, Hôtel des
Vieux-Augustins, in the street of the same name--now widened and
renamed Rue Hérold. In the widening they have cut away his inn, at
present No. 12, and that of "_La Providence_," next door at No. 14,
where Charlotte Corday had found a room on coming to Paris, thirty
years before, to visit Monsieur Marat. The sites of the two hotels are
covered by the rear buildings of the Caisse d'Epargne, which fronts on
Rue du Louvre. One ancient house, which saw the arrival of both these
historic travellers, has been left at No. 10; in it was born, on
January 28, 1791, the musician Hérold, composer of "Zampa" and
"Pré-aux-Clercs." Dumas lived for a while later at No. 1 Place des
Italiens, now Place Boïeldieu. In the summer of 1824 he brought his
good mother to town, and took rooms on the second floor of No. 53 Rue
du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, next door to the old _cabaret_, "_Au Lion
d'Argent_." Mother and son soon after moved across the river, where he
found for her a home in Rue Madame, and found for himself an apartment
at No. 25 Rue de l'Université, on the southeastern corner of Rue du
Bac. There had been an illustrious tenant of this house, in 1816 and
1817, who was named Châteaubriand. Dumas, in his "Mémoires," gives
both the third and the fourth floors for his abode, as he happens to
feel like fixing them. He had windows on both streets, and he fitted
up the rooms "with a certain elegance." Shoppers at the big
establishment, "_Au petit Saint-Thomas_," may explore its annex and
mount to Dumas's rooms in the house that now hides its stately façade
and its entrance _perron_ in the court behind modern structures. Here
he remained from 1824 to 1833, making a longer stay than in any of the
many camping-places of his migratory career. And here he gave his name
to his most memorable endowment to the French drama, in the person of
his only son, born on July 29, 1824, at the home of the mother,
Marie-Catherine Lebay, a dressmaker, living at No. 1 Place des
Italiens, where Dumas had had his rooms. On March 17, 1831, the father
formally owned the son by _l'acte de reconnaissance_, signed and
recorded at the office of the mayor of the Second Arrondissement, May
6, 1831. So came into legal existence "Alexandre Dumas, _fils_."

Portions of the child's early life were passed with his father, but
separations became more frequent and more prolonged, as the boy
developed his own marked character--in striking contrast with that of
the elder. Their mutual attitude came, before many years, to be as
queer and as tragi-comic as any attitudes invented by either of them
for the stage. The son used to say, in later life, that he seemed to
be the elderly guardian and counsellor of the father--a
happy-go-lucky, improvident, chance child. For the son of the
Parisienne had inherited her hard shrewdness along with his father's
dramatic range, and this happy commingling of the stronger qualities
of the parents gave him his special powers.

The doings of the elder Dumas during the famous three days of July,
1830, would make an amusing chapter. Eager to play the part of his own
boisterous heroes, he flung himself, with hot-headed and bombastic
ardor, into throne-upsetting and throne-setting-up. Of course he
allied himself with the opponents of Louis-Philippe--possibly in keen
memory of his monthly hundred francs worth of drudgery--and of course
the success of the Orleanists left him with no further chance for
place or patronage.

So his pen was his only ally, and it soon proved itself to be no
broken reed, but a strong staff for support. Strong as it was and
unresting, no one pen could do even the manual labor required by the
endless volumes he poured forth. In 1844, having finished
"Monte-Cristo," he followed it by "The Three Musketeers," and then he
put out no less than forty volumes in that same year; each volume
bearing his name as sole author. But this sturdy and undaunted toiler
was no laborious recluse, like Balzac, and he was surrounded by clerks
for research, secretaries for writing, young and unknown authors for
collaborating; reserving, for his own hand, those final telling
touches that give warmth and color to the canvas signed by him. His
"victims," as they are described in the "Fabrique de Romans, Maison
Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie," a malicious exposure, are hardly
subjects for sympathy; they earned money not otherwise within their
power to earn, and not one of them produced, before or after, any work
of individual distinction. In his historical romances, their work is
evident in the study and research that give an accuracy not commonly
credited to Dumas and about which he never bothered. The _belle
insouciance_ of his touch is to be seen in the dash of the narrative,
and above all in the dialogues, not only in their dramatic force and
fire, but in their growing long-windedness. For he was paid by the
line at a royal rate, and he learned the trick of making his lines too
short and his dialogues too long, his paymasters complained. And, as
he went on, it must be owned that he used his name in unworthy ways,
not only for books of no value and for journalistic paltriness, but
for shameless signature to shopkeepers' puffs, composed for coin.

As the volumes poured out, money poured in, and poured out again as
freely. For he was a spendthrift of the old _régime_, spending not
only for his own caprices, but for his friends and flatterers and
hangers-on. He made many foolish ventures, too, such as building his
own theatre and running it; and he squandered fabulous sums in his
desire to make real, at Saint-Gratien, his dream of a palace fit for
Monte-Cristo himself. The very dogs abused his big-hearted
hospitality, quartering themselves on him there, until his favorite
servant, under pretence of fear of the unlucky number thirteen, to
which they had come, begged to be allowed to send some of them away.
He gave up his attempt toward reformatory thrift when Dumas ordered
him to find a fourteenth dog! He would have drained dry a king's
treasury, and have bankrupted Monte-Cristo's island of buried
millions. Yet with all his ostentatious swagger and his preposterous
tomfoolery, he had a childlike rapture in spending, and a manly joy in
giving, that disarm stingy censure. The lover of the romancer must
mourn for the man, growing poorer as he grew older, and must regret
the degrading shifts at which he snatched for money, by which he sank
to be a mountebank in his declining years. Toward the last his purse
held fewer _sous_ than it held when he came to Paris to hunt for them.

From his eight years' home in Rue de l'Université, Dumas crossed the
Seine, preferring always thereafter the flashily fashionable quarters
of the northern side; and none of his numerous dwellings henceforward
are worth visiting for their character or color. For nearly two years
he lived in a great mansion, No. 40 Rue Saint-Lazare, in other rooms
of which George Sand lived a little later. His next home, from 1835 to
1837, at 30 Rue Bleue, has been cut away by Rue Lafayette. From 1838
to 1843 he had an apartment, occasionally shared by his son, at No. 22
Rue de Rivoli, between Place des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Roch.

Twenty-five years after the death of the father, when the son, as he
says, was older and grayer than his father had ever grown to be, a
letter to him was written by that son. It is an exquisite piece of
literature. He brings back their life in this apartment, when,
twenty-two years apart in their birth, they were really of the same
age. He tells how he, a young man going early to his studies, left the
elder at his desk, already at work at seven in the morning, clad only
in trousers and shirt, the latter with open neck and rolled-up
sleeves. At seven in the evening his son would find him planted there
still at work, his mid-day breakfast often cold at his side, forgotten
and untouched! Then these two would dine, and dine well, for the
father loved to play the cook, and he was a master of that craft. All
the while he was preparing the _plats_ he would prattle of his heroes,
what they'd done that day, and what he imagined they might do on the
next day. And then the letter calls back to the father that evening, a
little later, when he was found by his son sunk in an armchair,
red-eyed and wretched, and mournfully explained: "Porthos is dead!
I've just killed him, and I couldn't help crying over him!" It must
have been at this period that the romancer tried to secure his son as
his permanent paid critic, offering him 25,000 francs a year, and
"you'll have nothing to do but to make objections." The offer was
declined, and rightly declined.

It was in this and in his succeeding residences--Rue de Richelieu,
109, in 1844, and Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, 45, in 1845--that he
brought out in newspaper _feuilletons_ "The Count of Monte-Cristo,"
and "The Three Musketeers," these amazing successes written from day
to day to keep pace with the press. In 1846, while his address was at
No. 10 Rue Joubert, he was in Spain with the Duc de Montpensier, one
of his many companions among princes. They, along with other cronies,
male and female, more or less worthy, found Dumas at Saint-Germain
from 1847 to 1854. Then, suddenly, he disappeared into Belgium, "for
reasons not wholly unconnected with financial reverses," as he and his
only peer in fiction, Micawber, would have put it. He was in town
again in 1856, at No. 77 Rue d'Amsterdam, and there remained until
1866, when he rushed off to the head-quarters of the "Dictator of
Sicily," Garibaldi, to whom Dumas appointed himself aide and
messenger. Between 1866 and 1870 his residence was at 107 Boulevard
Malesherbes. On the coming of the Prussians, he was carried, ailing
and feeble, to his country-place at Puys, near Dieppe, where he died
December 5, 1870. His public burial was delayed until the close of the
war, and then, in 1872, was solemnized in the presence of all that was
notable in French art and literature, at his birthplace and his
boyhood-home, Villers-Cotterets.

When Dumas was asked how a monument might be erected in memory of a
dead pen-worker, who in life had been misunderstood and maligned, he
replied: "Use the stones thrown at him while he lived, and you'll have
a tremendous monument." The lovers in all lands of the great romancer
could well have brought together more telling stones than those that
make Doré's monument in Place Malesherbes, near his last Paris home.
And yet, curiously weak in its general impression, its details are
effective. The group in front is well imagined: a girl is reading to a
young student, and to an old, barefooted workman; on the other side is
our hero d'Artagnan. The seated statue of Dumas, on too tall a
pedestal, is an admirable portrait, with his own vigorous poise of
head and gallant regard.

In 1864 the American Minister to France, Mr. John Bigelow, breakfasted
with Dumas at Saint-Gratien, near Paris, where the romancer was
temporarily sojourning. It was toward the close of our Civil War, and
he had a notion of going to the United States as war-correspondent for
French papers, and to make another book, of course. Mr. Bigelow gives
an accurate and admirable description of the host, as he greeted him
at the entrance of his villa; over six feet in height, corpulent, but
well proportioned; a brown skin, a head low and narrow in front,
enlarging as it receded, covered with crisp, bushy hair growing gray,
thick lips, a large mouth, and enormous neck. Partly African and
wholly stalwart, from his negress grandmother, he would have been a
handsome creature but for his rapidly retreating forehead. But in his
features and his expression nothing showed that was sordid or selfish,
and his smile was very sweet.

  [Illustration: Alexandre Dumas.]

Dumas lives and will never die as long as men love strength and
daring, loyalty and generosity, good love-making and good fighting. He
has put his own tenderness and frankness and vivacity into the real
personages, whom he has reanimated and refined; and into the ideal
personages, whom he has made as real as the actual historic men and
women who throng his thrilling pages. His own virility and lust of
life are there, too, without one prurient page in all his thousands.
And he tells his delightful stories not only with charm and wit, but
in clean-cut, straightforward words, with no making of phrases.

Very little of the Valois Paris is left to-day, and the searcher for
the scenery familiar to Margot and to Chicot must be content with what
is left of the Old Louvre, and of the then new Renaissance Louvre as
it was known to the grandchildren of its builder, François I. Of the
old, the outer walls and the great central tower are outlined by light
stones in the darker pavement of the southwest corner of the present
court. Of the new structure, as we see it, the cold and cheerless
Salle des Caryatides lights up unwillingly to us with the brilliancy
of the marriage festival of Marguerite de France and Henri de Navarre,
as it is pictured by Dumas. This festivity followed the religious
ceremony, that had taken place under the grand portal of Notre-Dame,
for Henry's heresy forbade his marriage within. He and his _suite_
strolled about the cloisters while she went in to mass. In this hall
of the Caryatides his body, in customary effigy, lay in state after
the assassination. There is no change in these walls since that day,
except that a vaulted ceiling took the place, in 1806, of the original
oaken beams, which had served for rare hangings, not of tapestries,
but of men. The long corridors and square rooms above, peopled
peaceably by pictures now, echoed to the rushing of frightened feet on
the night of Saint Bartholomew, when Margot saved the life of her
husband that was and of her lover that was to be. Hidden within the
massive walls of Philippe-Auguste's building is a spiral stairway of
his time, connecting the Salle des Sept Cheminées with the floor
below, and beneath that with the cumbrous underground portions of his
Old Louvre. As one gropes down the worn steps, around the sharp turns
deep below the surface, visions appear of Valois conspiracy and of the
intrigues of the Florentine Queen-Mother.

Here the wily creature had triumphed at last after waiting through
weary years of humiliated wifehood; passed, such of them as Henri II.
was willing to waste in Paris far from his beloved Touraine, in the
old Palais des Tournelles. We shall visit, in another chapter, that
residence of the early kings of France, when they had become kings of
France in more than name.

After the accidental killing of Henry at the hand of Montmorency in
the lists of this palace, his widow urged its immediate destruction,
and this was accomplished within a few years. One portion of the site
became a favorite duelling-ground, and it was here--exactly in the
southeastern corner of Place des Vosges, where now nursemaids play
with their charges and romping schoolboys raise the dust--that was
fought, on Sunday, April 27, 1578, the duel, as famous in history as
in the pages of Dumas, between the three followers of the Duc de Guise
and the three _mignons_ of Henri III. Those of the six who were not
left dead on the ground were borne away desperately wounded. The
instigator of the duel, Quélus--"_un des grands mignons du roy_"--lay
for over a month, slowly dying of his nineteen wounds, in the Hôtel de
Boissy, hard by in Rue Saint-Antoine, which the King had had closed to
traffic with chains. By his bedside Henri spent many hours every day,
offering, with sobs, 100,000 francs to the surgeon who should save
him.

Not far from this house of death, in Rue Saint-Antoine too, was a
little house, very much alive, for it belonged to Marguerite--Navarre
only in name--to which none may follow her save the favored one to
whom her latest caprice has given a nocturnal meeting. She is carried
there, under cover of her closed litter, whenever her mother, never
her husband, shows undue solicitude concerning her erratic career.

In the same street, on the corner of Rue Sainte-Catherine, now
Sévigné--where stand new stone and brick structures--was the town
house of the Comte de Monsoreau. To this house, says Brantôme, Bussy
d'Amboise, done with Margot, was lured by a note written by the
countess, under her husband's orders and eyes, giving her lover,
Bussy, his usual _rendezvous_ during the count's absence. _This_ time
the count was at home, with a gang of his armed men; and on this
corner, on the night of August 19, 1579, the gallant was duly and
thoroughly done to death, not quite so dramatically as Dumas narrates
it in one of his magnificent fights.

This Rue Saint-Antoine was, in those days, hardly less of a bustling
thoroughfare than in our days, albeit it was then a country road,
unpaved, unlighted, bordered by great gardens with great mansions
within them, or small dwellings between them. Outside Porte
Saint-Antoine--that gate in the town wall alongside the Bastille where
now is the end of Rue de la Bastille--on the road to Vincennes, was La
Roquette, a _maison-de-plaisance_ of the Valois kings. Hence the title
of the modern prisons, on the same site. It was a favorite resort of
the wretched third Henry, that shameless compound of sensuality and
superstition; and it was on his way there, at the end of Rue de la
Roquette, that the vicious little lame Duchesse de Montpensier had
plotted to waylay him, and to cut his hair down to a tonsure with the
gold scissors she carried so long at her girdle for that very use. He
had had two crowns, she said--of Poland and of France--and she meant
to give him a third, and make a monk of him, for the sake of her
scheming brother, the Duc de Guise. The plot was betrayed, just as
Dumas details, by one Nicolas Poulain, a lieutenant of the Prévôt of
the Île de France, in the service of the League.

Gorenflot's priory--a vast Jacobin priory--was on the same road, just
beyond the Bastille. To visit him out here came Chicot, almost as
vivid a creation in our affections as d'Artagnan. Once, when the fat
and esurient monk was fasting, Chicot tormented him with a description
of their dinner awhile ago, near Porte Montmartre, when they had teal
from the marshes of the Grange Batelière--where runs now the street
of that name--washed down with the best of Burgundy, _la Romanée_.
These two dined most frequently and most amply, at "_La Corne
d'Abondance_"--a _cabaret_ on the east side of Rue Saint-Jacques,
opposite the cloisters and the gardens of Saint-Benoît, where the boy
François Villon had lived more than a century before. Either of the
two shabby, aged hotels, still left at one corner of the old street
may serve for Chicot's pet eating-place. His dwelling was in Rue des
Augustins, now Rue des Grands-Augustins. Where that street meets the
quay of the same name, is a restaurant dear to legal and medical and
lay _gourmets_, where those two noble diners would be enchanted to
dine to-day. Near Chicot's later dwelling in Rue de Bussy--now spelt
"Buci"--was the inn, "The Sword of the Brave Chevalier," which served
as the meeting-place of the Forty-five Guardsmen, on their arrival in
Paris. You may find, in that same street, the lineal descendant of
that inn, dirty and disreputable and modernized as to name, but still
haunted for us by those forty-five gallant Gascon gentlemen.

The striking change of atmosphere, from the Valois court to the
regency of Marie de' Medici and the reign of the two great cardinals,
is shown clearly in the pages of Dumas, with his perhaps unconscious
subtlety of intuition. We greet with delight the entrance into Paris
of a certain raw Gascon youth mounted on his ludicrously colored
steed, and we are eager to follow him to the _hôtel_ of the Duc de
Tréville in Rue du Vieux-Colombier. This street stretches now, as
then, between Place de Saint-Sulpice and Place de la Croix-Rouge, but
it has been widened and wholly rebuilt, and the courtyard that bustled
with armed men, and every stone of de Tréville's head-quarters, have
vanished.

The _hôtel_ of his temporary enemy, Duc de La Trémouille, always full
of Huguenots, the King complained, was in Rue Saint-Dominique, at No.
63, in that eastern end cut away by Boulevard Saint-Germain. This had
been the Trémouille mansion for only about a century, since the
original family home had been given over to Chancellor Dubourg. Built
by the founder of the family, Gui de La Trémoille--as it was then
spelt--the great fighter who died in 1398, that superb specimen of
fourteenth-century architecture, with additions late in the fifteenth
and early in the sixteenth centuries, stood at the corner of Rues des
Bourdonnais and de Béthisy--two of the oldest streets on the north
bank--until the piercing of Rue de Rivoli in 1844 compelled its
destruction. Fragments of its fine Gothic carvings are set in the wall
of the court of No. 31 Rue des Bourdonnais, a building which occupies
a portion of the original site. On the front of this house is an
admirable iron balcony of later date. And just above, at No. 39 of
this street, over the entrance gate of the remaining wing of another
mediæval mansion, is a superbly carved stone mask of an old man with a
once gilded beard.

It was the new Hôtel La Trémouille, on the south side of the river,
not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, that was nearly wrecked by de
Tréville's guardsmen, running to the rescue of d'Artagnan on that
morning of his duel with Bernajoux, and of his danger from the
onslaught of de La Trémouille's retainers.

That duel ought to be good enough for us, but we have a hankering for
the most dramatic and delightful of all duels in fiction. To get to
its ground, we may follow either of the four friends, each coming his
own way, each through streets changed but slightly even yet, all four
coming out together at the corner of Rues de Vaugirard and Cassette;
where stands an ancient wall, its moss-covered coping overshadowed by
straggling trees, through whose branches shows the roof of a chapel.
It is the chapel, and about it are the grounds, of the Carmes
Déchaussés. A pair of these gentry, sent by Pope Paul V., had appeared
in Paris in the year of the assassination of Henri IV., and drew the
devout to the little chapel they built here in the fields. The order
grew rapidly in numbers and in wealth, acquiring a vast extent of
ground; roughly outlined now by Rues de Vaugirard, du Regard, du
Cherche-Midi and Cassette. The corner-stone of the new chapel, that
which we see, was laid by the Regent Marie de' Medici on July 26,
1613. Beyond its entrance, along the street, rise modern buildings;
but behind the entrance in the western end of the wall, near Rue
d'Assas, stands one of the original structures of the Barefooted
Carmelites. This was used for a prison during the Revolution, and no
spot in all Paris shows so graphic a scene of the September Massacres.
Nothing of the prison has been taken away or altered. Here are the
iron bars put then in the windows of the ground floor on the garden
side. At the top of that stone staircase the butchers crowded about
that door; out through it came their victims, to be hurled down these
same steps, clinging to this same railing; along these garden walks
some of them ran, and were beaten down at the foot of yonder dark
wall. This garden has not been changed since then, except that a large
portion was shorn away by the cutting of Rues d'Assas and de Rennes
and the Boulevard Raspail.

The narrow and untravelled lane, now become Rue Cassette, and the
unfrequented thoroughfare, now Rue de Vaugirard, between the monastery
and the Luxembourg Gardens--which then reached thus far--met at just
such a secluded spot as was sought by duellists; and this wall, intact
in its antique ruggedness, saw--so far as anybody or anything saw--the
brilliant fight between five of Richelieu's henchmen, led by the keen
swordsman Jussac, and Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, aided by the
volunteered sword of d'Artagnan; the sword he had meant to match
against each one of the three, at whose side he found himself fighting
in the end. And so, cemented by much young blood, was framed that
goodly fellowship, of such constancy and vitality as to control kings
and outwit cardinals and confound all France, as the lover of Dumas
must needs believe!

Not only the duelling ground, but many of the scenes of "The Three
Musketeers" are to be looked for in this quarter, near to de
Tréville's dwelling; where, too, the four friends, inseparable by
day, were not far apart at night, for they lived "just around the
corner," one from the other.

  [Illustration: The Wall of the Carmelites.]

Athos had his rooms, "within two steps of the Luxembourg," in Rue
Ferou, still having that name, still much as he saw it. Those few,
whom the taciturn Grimaud allowed to enter, found tasteful furnishing,
with a few relics of past splendor; notably, a daintily damascened
sword of the time of François I., its jewelled hilt alone worth a
fortune. The vainglorious Porthos would have given ten years of his
life for that sword, but it was never sold nor pledged by Athos.

Porthos, himself, lived in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, _he used to say_;
and he gave grandiloquent descriptions of the superb furniture and
rich decorations of his apartment. Whenever he passed with a friend
through this street, he would raise his head and point out the
house--before which his valet, Mousqueton, was always seen strutting
in full fig--and proudly announce, "_That_ is my abode." But he never
invited that friend to enter, and he was never to be found at home. So
that one is led to suspect that his grand apartment is akin to his
gorgeous corselet, having only a showy front and nothing behind! We
know that his "fine lady," his "duchess," his "princess"--she was
promoted with his swelling mood--was simply a Madame Coquenard, wife
of a mean lawyer, living in Rue aux Ours. That dingy street, named
from a corruption of the ancient "_Rue où l'on cuit des oies_,"
between Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, has been partly cut away by
Rue Étienne-Marcel; but its tall, hide-bound, tight-fisted houses,
that are left, make vivid to us those scrimped Sunday dinners, at
which Porthos was famished even more than the already starved
apprentices; and bring home to us his artful working on the lady's
credulous infatuation, that he might get his outfit from her
husband's strongbox.

The wily Aramis let his real duchess pass, with his friends, for the
niece of his doctor, or for a waiting-maid. She was, indeed, a _grande
dame_, beautiful and bold, devoted to political and personal intrigue,
the finest flower of the court of that day. Marie de Rohan, Duchesse
de Chevreuse, known as "_la Frondeuse Duchesse_," was the trusted
friend of Anne of Austria, and the active adversary of Richelieu and
of Mazarin, and exiled from Paris by each in turn. She plays as busy a
rôle in history as in Dumas. The daughter of Hercule de Rohan, Duc de
Montbazon, and the wife of Charles d'Albert, Duc de Luynes, and, after
his death, of Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse, this zealous
recruit of the Fronde naturally had her "fling" in private as well as
in public life. Her Hôtel de Chevreuse et de Luynes was one of the
grandest mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, as it originally
stood at No. 31 Rue Saint-Dominique. The cutting of Boulevard
Saint-Germain, leaving it No. 201 of that boulevard, has shorn off its
two wings and its great front court. The main body, which remains, is
impressive in the simple, stately dignity stamped on it by Mansart,
who gave to it his own roof. Its first-floor _salons_ and chambers,
lofty and spacious, glow with the ornate mouldings and decorations of
that period, mellowed by the sombre splendors of its tapestries. Much
of the garden--once a rural park within city limits--has been cut away
by Boulevard Raspail, but from that street one sees, over the new
boundary wall, wide-spreading trees that strike a welcome note of
green amid surrounding stone. The latest _Bottin_, with no room for
romance within its covers, gives the Comtesse de Chevreuse as tenant
of the house, along with other tenants, to whom she lets her upper
floors.

Aramis was not a guest at that mansion, his rôle being that of her
host at his own apartment; daintily furnished and adorned, in harmony
with his taste and that of his frequent visitor. His comrades in the
troop had infrequent privilege of admission. His apartment, on the
ground floor, easy of entrance, was in Rue de Vaugirard, just east of
Rue Cassette, and his windows looked out on the Luxembourg Gardens
opposite. There were three small rooms, communicating, and the bedroom
behind gave on a tiny garden, all his own, green and shady and well
shut in from prying eyes. The whole place forms a most fitting
_entourage_ for the youthful priest who, after this episode of arms
and of intrigue, was to rise so high in the Church, and who has always
been, to all readers, the least congenial of the four musketeers.

To the most sympathetic of them, d'Artagnan, dearer to us than all the
others, we are eager to turn. The real d'Artagnan of history, who
succeeded de Tréville in command of the Guards, has left his memoirs,
possibly written by another hand under his guidance. They are
commonplace and coarse, broad as well as long, and leave us with no
distinct portrait of the man. Our d'Artagnan, bodied forth from that
ineffective sketch by the large brush that never niggled, might serve
as an under-study for Henri IV.; equally brave and resourceful,
equally buoyant in peril and ready in disaster; with the same
guileless and ingenuous candor that covered and carried off the
craftiness beneath. The Gascon, no less than the Béarnais, was master
of the jaunty artlessness of an astute and artful dodgery, a
_fausse-bonhomie_ that is yet delicious and endears them both to us.

Stroll down Rue Servandoni, in its short length from Rue de Vaugirard
to Rue Palatine against Saint-Sulpice Church--the architect of whose
western towers, Servandoni, gave his name to this street--and you will
not fail to find, among the old houses still left, one which might
have sheltered d'Artagnan during his early days in de Tréville's
troop. This street was then known as Rue des Fossoyeurs, and, still as
narrow though not quite so dirty as in d'Artagnan's day, has been
mostly rebuilt. His apartment--"a sort of garret," made up of one
bedroom and a tiny room in which Planchet slept--was at the top of a
house, given as No. 12 and No. 14 in different chapters, owned by the
objectionable and intrusive husband of the beloved Constance. For her
sake, d'Artagnan remains in these poor rooms, and there his three
friends say good-by to Paris and to him, now lieutenant of the famous
troop.

"Twenty Years After" we find our friend, but slightly sobered by those
years, in search of a good lodging and of a good table. He fell on
both at the inn, "_La Chevrette_," kept by the pretty Flemish
Madeleine, in Rue Tiquetonne. Once a path on the outer side of the
ditch, north of the town-wall, named for Rogier Tiquetonne, or
Quinquetonne, a rich baker of the fourteenth century, that narrow
curved street is, still, as to most of its length, a village highway
in the centre of Paris. Its tall-fronted houses rise on either hand
almost as he saw them. Among them is the Hôtel de Picardie, and it is
out of reason to doubt that d'Artagnan, in memory of Planchet--for
Planchet came from Picardy--was attracted by the name and made search
therein for suitable rooms. Or, it may please our fancy to believe
that this inn bore then the sign of The Kid, and that the kindly
hostess changed its name, later, in memory of Planchet, grown
prosperous and rich.

D'Artagnan, mounting still higher in rank and income while here, went
down lower in the inn; and one fine morning said to his landlady:
"Madeleine, give me your apartment on the first floor. Now that I am
captain of the Royal Musketeers, I must make an appearance;
nevertheless, still keep my room on the fifth story for me, one never
knows what may happen!"

Good Master Planchet, sometime valet, and lifelong friend of the great
d'Artagnan, turned grocer, and lived over his shop at the sign of "_Le
Pilon d'Or_," in Rue des Lombards. This had been a street of bankers
and money-dealers in the outset, and it was named, to alter De
Quincey's ornate reference to another Lombard Street, after the
Lombards or Milanese, who affiliated an infant commerce to the matron
splendors of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. When the financial
centre went westward, this street was invaded by the grocers and
spice-dealers, who hold it to this day. Its narrow length is still
fragrant with the descendants of the spices in which Planchet traded,
and of the raisins into which d'Artagnan plunged his hands so
greedily.

  [Illustration: Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hôtel de Picardie.]

To those of us who go through the short and stupid Rue de la Harpe of
our Paris, it is puzzling to read of its re-echoing with the ceaseless
clatter of troopers riding through. But in those old days, and up to a
comparatively recent date, it was one of the important arteries of
circulation between the southern side of the town and the Island; the
most frequented road between the Louvre and the Luxembourg, when they
were both royal residences. It started from the little open _place_,
now enlarged and boasting its fountain, where Rue Monsieur-le-Prince
comes out opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, and curved down to the
river-bank, and to the first Pont Saint-Michel. It was the only long,
unbroken thoroughfare to the west of Rue Saint-Jacques, that street
leading to Petit-Pont, and so across the Island to Notre-Dame Bridge.
So Rue de la Harpe was a crowded highway, bordered by busy shops. Its
western side was done wholly away with by the cutting of Boulevard
Saint-Michel, and that broad boulevard has usurped the site of most of
the old street; its eastern side saved only in that section along the
Cluny garden.

D'Artagnan, while living on the left bank in his early days, made his
way by this street to visit his flame Lady de Winter. That dangerous
adventuress is domiciled by Dumas at No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des
Vosges, the number of the house still the same. It is a historic
house, and its story is told in our Hugo pages. Dumas was one of the
frequenters of Hugo's apartment there, and made use of it and its
approaches in "The Three Musketeers."

When Athos came to town, in later years, it was his custom to put up
at the _auberge_, "_Au Grand Roi Charlemagne_," in Rue Guénégaud; a
street bearing still its old name, but the inn has gone. So, too, has
gone the sign of The Fox, in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, where he found
quarters for himself and his son Bragelonne, twenty years after. He
brought the youth here, to the scenes of his own youth, hoping to
launch him in a like career of arms.

From there, the two went, one night, across the river to a house in
the Marais, known to all the footmen and sedan-chairmen of Paris, says
Dumas; a house not of a great lord or of a great lady, and where was
neither dancing, dining, nor card-playing; yet it was the favorite
resort of the men best worth knowing in Paris. It was the abode of
"_le petit Scarron_." About his chair, wherein he was held helpless by
his paralysis, met especially the enemies of Mazarin, the witty and
lewd rhymesters of the Fronde--not one of them as witty or as lewd as
was the crippled host. Yet some _soupçon_ of decency had been brought
into his house by his young wife; the poor country girl of sixteen,
Françoise d'Aubigné, who accepted the puny paralytic of forty and
more, rather than go into a convent. After his death she became Madame
de Maintenon, and later Queen of France, by her secret marriage with
Louis XIV., as old and almost as decrepit as was her first husband.

Dumas has brought Scarron to this house a few years later than history
warrants, and he places the house in Rue des Tournelles, while it was
really a short step from there, being at the corner of Rues des
Douze-Portes and de Saint-Louis, now Rue Turenne. We shall visit it in
our final stroll.

With the going of time came the loosening of the ties that held the
great quartette together; yet, each passing on his own way, all were
ready to reunite, at any moment, for a new deed of emprise and for the
joy of countless readers. We spare ourselves the pain of seeing them
at that cruel moment when they found themselves on opposing sides,
blade crossing blade. We take leave of Aramis, the Bishop, deep in the
intrigues dear to his plotting spirit; of Porthos, complacent in his
wealth, growing more corpulent at his well-spread table; of Athos,
sedate and dignified, content in the tranquil life of his beloved
_château_, at Blois.

And d'Artagnan? Most fitting in _his_ eyes, mayhap, would it be to
take our last look at him in the height of his glory, host of the
Hôtel de Tréville, receiving the King at his own table. We prefer,
rather, to hold him in memory just when Athos introduces his old
comrade to the assemblage at Blois, as "Monsieur le Chevalier
d'Artagnan, Lieutenant of his Majesty's Musketeers, a devoted friend
and one of the most excellent and brave gentlemen I have ever known."

The reading world echoes his words. In the whole range of fiction
there exists no gentleman more excellent and more brave!




THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO




THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO


When Madame Hugo brought her two younger boys, Eugène and Victor, to
Paris in 1808, she took a temporary lodging in Rue de Clichy, until
she found an apartment with a garden, on the southern side of the
Seine. In this part of the town, where gardens, such as she needed,
are plentiful even yet, she sought all her future abodes. Her first home
in this quarter was near the old Church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.
Victor, then six years old, could never recall its exact site, after
he grew up, and could not say if the house were still standing. This
ground-floor apartment proved to be too small for the small family;
which was soon installed, a few steps farther south, in a roomy old
house within its own garden. It was a portion of the ancient Convent
of the Feuillantines, left untouched by the Revolution, at Impasse des
Feuillantines, No. 12--an isolated mansion in a deserted corner of
southern Paris. The great garden running wild, its fine old trees, and
its ruined chapel, claimed the first place in the recollections of
Victor's boyhood; "a religious and beloved souvenir," he fondly
regarded it.

This homely paradise has disappeared; partly invaded by the aggressive
builder, and partly cut away to make room for Rue d'Ulm, called by
Hugo a "big and useless street." The greater portion of the site of
his house and garden is now covered by the huge buildings of one of
the city schools. By a curious coincidence, at No. 12 Rue des
Feuillantines--which must not be confused, as it is often confused,
with the Impasse of the same name--there stands just such an old
house, in the midst of just such gardens, shaded by just such old
trees, as Hugo describes in the pathetic reminiscences of his youth,
and as those of us remember, who saw his old home, only a few years
ago.

His childish memories went back, also, to his days at school in Rue
Saint-Jacques, not far from home; and to a night lit up by the
illumination of all Paris, in celebration of the birth of the little
King of Rome, in 1811. This was just before the sudden journey of the
three to Madrid to join General Hugo. The delineation of the boy
Marius, swaying between his clashing relatives, is a vivid drawing of
the attitude, during these and later years, of the young Victor,
leaning at times toward his Bourbonist mother, at times toward his
Bonapartist father. Of that gallant soldier, whose hunt for "Fra
Diavolo"--the nickname of a real outlaw--seems to belong rather to the
realm of fiction than of fact, one hears but little in his son's early
history. Except to send for them from Madrid, and except for his brief
appearance in Paris, during the Hundred Days, General Hugo seldom saw
and scarcely influenced these two younger sons during their boyhood.

Once more in Paris, and for awhile at the Feuillantines, we find the
devoted mother settling herself and her sons, on the last day of the
year 1813, in a roomy old building of the time of Louis XV., in Rue du
Cherche-Midi. Her rooms were on the ground floor, as usual, with easy
access to the health-giving garden, and the boys slept above. There
was a court in front, in which, during the occupation of Paris by the
Allies, were quartered a Prussian officer and forty of his men; to the
disgust of the mother, and to the joy of her boys, captivated by
soldierly gewgaws. The site of court and house and garden is covered
by a grim military prison, in which history has been made in the
closing years of the nineteenth century.

On the other side of the street, at the corner of Rue du Regard, was
and is the Hôtel de Toulouse, a seventeenth-century structure, named
for its former occupant, the Comte de Toulouse, son of Madame de
Montespan. It was used as a prison early in the nineteenth century,
and since then it has been the seat of the Conseil-de-Guerre; famous,
or infamous, in our day, as the head-quarters of the Court-Martial.
The wide façade on the court has no distinction, nor has the "Tribunal
of Military Justice" on the first floor; to which we mount by the
broad staircase at the left of the entrance-door. Above are the
living-rooms of the commandant, who was a Monsieur Foucher at that
time, with whose family, the Hugo family, already acquainted, formed
now a lasting friendship. It was this intimacy that made their home
here the brightest spot in Hugo's boyish horizon.

  [Illustration: The Hôtel de Toulouse.]

When Napoleon's return from Elba brought his old officers back to
their allegiance, General Hugo hurried to Paris, and, before hurrying
away again, placed his boys in a boarding-school--the Abbaye Cordier,
in Rue Sainte-Marguerite. This was a gloomy little street, dingy with
the smoke of the smiths' forges that filled it, elbowed in among
equally narrow ways between the prison of the Abbaye--then standing
where now runs the roadway of modern Boulevard Saint-Germain--and the
Cour du Dragon. This superb relic of ancient Paris has been left
untouched, and the carved dragon above its great arched entrance looks
down, out of the past, on modern Rue de Rennes. Rue Sainte-Marguerite
has been less lucky, for such small section of it, as remained after
the cutting of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue de Rennes, is mainly
rebuilt, and renamed Rue Gozlin.

A little later, Victor was advanced to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the
college of many another Frenchman who became famous in after life,
notably of Molière. These two youths saw the same buildings of the
Lycée and studied in the same rooms; for it was demolished and rebuilt
only under the Second Empire. It stood--and the new structure
stands--in Rue Saint-Jacques, behind the Collége de France. It was
something of a stretch for youthful legs by the roundabout way between
college and home, but he plodded sturdily along, that solemn lad,
taking himself and all he did as seriously then as when he became a
Peer of France, and the self-elected Leader of a Cause.

In 1818 Madame Hugo and her boys came to a new home on the third floor
of No. 18 Rue des Petits-Augustins, in a wing of that old _abbaye_ of
the Augustin fathers, which had given its name to the street, now Rue
Bonaparte. The entrance court, on that street, of the École des
Beaux-Arts, covers the site of this wing, and the school has replaced
the rest of the monastery, saving, within its modern walls, only the
chapel built by Queen Marguerite. In the old court and the old
buildings behind, at that time, were stored tombs of French kings and
historic monuments and historic bones, removed from their original
grounds, as has been told in our Molière chapter, to save them from
mutilation at the hands of the Revolutionary Patriots. On this queer
assemblage the boys' room looked down; their mother, from her front
windows, looked down on the remains of the vast gardens of the Hôtel
de La Rochefoucauld, once a portion of the grounds of Marguerite, that
stretched to the north of Rue Visconti, between Rues de Seine and
Bonaparte. The view, so far below, could not compensate Madame Hugo
for the loss of her own garden, which meant sun and air and health.
She drooped and fell ill, and her only solace was the devotion of her
son Victor. Whenever she was able to go out, they spent their evenings
with the Foucher family, at the Hôtel de Toulouse. While the boys sat
silent, listening to the talk of their elders, Victor's eyes were
busy, and they taught him that Adèle Foucher was good to look upon.
These two children walked, open-eyed, into love, as simply and as
naturally as did Cosette and Marius; and after a brief period of storm
and stress, their marriage came in due time, and they began their long
and happy life together.

This Hugo home in Rue des Petits-Augustins, rising right in front of
all who came along Rue des Beaux-Arts, was a familiar sight to a young
Englishman, about ten years after this time. His name was William
Makepeace Thackeray, and he was lodging in this latter street among
other students of the Latin Quarter, and trying to make a passable
artist with the material given him by nature for the making of an
unsurpassable author. His way lay in front of the old _abbaye_, each
time he went to or from the schools, or his modest restaurant.
Thirion was the host of this cheap feeding-place, esteemed by art
students, on the northern side of old Rue des Boucheries; of which
this side and some of its buildings have been saved, while the street
itself has been carried away in the wider stream of Boulevard
Saint-Germain. There, at No. 160, to-day, you will find the same
restaurant, under the same name on the sign, and the same rooms,
swarming with students as during Thackeray's days in Paris.

In 1821, at the end of her term of three years in the _abbaye_, Madame
Hugo took her sons and her furniture directly up Rue Bonaparte and
turned into Rue des Mézières, and in its No. 10 they were soon settled
in a ground floor with its garden. The great new building at No. 8
stands on the site of house and court and garden. There is left, of
their day there, only the two-storied cottage on the western end of
No. 6 Rue des Mézières--then No. 8--which preserves the image of the
Hugo cottage, and brings back the aspect of the street as they saw it,
countrified with just such cottages.

Early in their residence here, Victor was honored by a summons to
visit Châteaubriand, long the literary idol of the schoolboy, who had
written in his diary, when only fourteen: "I will be Châteaubriand or
nothing!" For he had begun to rhyme already at the Cordier school, and
in his seventeenth year he had established, in collaboration with his
eldest brother, Abel, "Le Conservateur Littéraire," a bi-monthly of
poetry, criticism, politics, most of it written by Victor. It lived
from December, 1819, to March, 1821, and its scarce copies are prized
by collectors. Now the precocious boy's ode "On the death of the Duke
of Berry"--assassinated by Louvel in February, 1820, in Rue Rameau, on
the southern side of Square Louvois, then the site of the
opera-house--had fallen under the eye of Châteaubriand, who was
reported to have dubbed him "The Sublime Child." Châteaubriand denied
this utterance, in later years, but agreed to let it stand, since the
phrase had become "consecrated." It was at the door of No. 27 Rue
Saint-Dominique, then the residence of the elder author, that the
young poet knocked in those early days of his fame; and here, a little
later, he was invited by the diplomat to join his Embassy to Berlin.
Madame Hugo's health prevented the acceptance of this flattering
offer.

While still at this home in Rue des Mézières, Victor received another
honor in a call from Lamartine, the lately and loudly acclaimed author
of "Les Méditations," who was then about thirty-one years of age. In a
letter, written many years after, Lamartine described this first
meeting: "Youth is the time for forming friendships. I love Hugo
because I knew and loved him at a period of life when the heart is
still expanding within the breast.... I found myself on the ground
floor of an obscure house at the end of a court. There a grave,
melancholy mother was industriously instructing some boys of various
ages--her sons. She showed me into a low room a little apart, at the
farther end of which, either reading or writing, sat a studious youth
with a fine massive head, intelligent and thoughtful. This was Victor
Hugo, the man whose pen can now charm or terrify the world."

The grave, melancholy mother died in the early summer of 1821, and her
bereaved sons carried her body across the Place, to the Church, of
Saint-Sulpice and then to the Cemetery of Mont-Parnasse. On the
evening of that day of the burial, Victor returned to the cemetery,
and there, overcome with grief and choked by sobs, the boy of only
nineteen wandered alone for hours, recalling his mother's image and
repeating her name. Seeking blindly for some comforting presence, he
found his way, that same night, to the Hôtel de Toulouse, for a
glimpse of Adèle Foucher. Unseen himself, he saw her dancing, all
unconscious of his mother's death and his heart-breaking loss.

After weeks of wretched loneliness, young Hugo went to live, with a
country cousin just come to town, on the top floor of No. 30 Rue du
Dragon. This street is connected with the court of the same name by a
narrow passage under the houses at the western end of the court. No.
30 is still standing, a high, shabby old building, that yet suggests
its better days. In the belvedere high above the attic windows, Hugo
lived the life of his Marius, keeping body and soul together on a
slender income of 700 francs a year. Luckier than Marius, who could
only follow Cosette and the old convict in the Luxembourg Gardens,
Hugo was allowed little walks there with his adored lady, her mother
always accompanying them. This chaperonage did not prevent the secret
slipping of letters between the lovers' hands, and many of these have
been preserved for future publication.

It was at this time that the Post-office officials held up, in their
_cabinet-noir_, a letter from Hugo, offering the shelter of his one
room, "_au cinquième_," to a young fellow implicated in the conspiracy
of Saumur, and hiding from the royal police. Hugo makes this offer,
his letter explains, in pure sympathy for a misguided young man in
peril of arrest and death; his own allegiance to the throne being so
established as to permit him to give this aid with no danger to
himself and no discredit to his loyalty. The letter was copied,
resealed, sent on its way; the copy was carried to Louis XVIII., and
so moved him--_not_ in the direction meant by his officials--that he
made inquiry about its writer, and presently gave him a pension. This
incident was not known to Hugo until many years after.

Among the men who visited him in this garret was Alfred de Vigny, then
a captain in the Royal Guard, and dreaming only, as yet, of his
"Cinq-Mars." Hugo was dreaming many dreams, too, over his work, and
his brightest dream became a reality in October, 1822, when, in
Saint-Sulpice's Chapel of the Virgin--the chapel from which his mother
had been buried eighteen months earlier--was performed the Church part
of his marriage with Adèle Foucher. The wedding banquet was given at
the Hôtel de Toulouse by her father, who had been won over to this
immediate marriage, despite the delay he had urged because of the
youth of the bride and the poverty of the bridegroom.

The young couple, whose combined ages barely reached thirty-five,
found modest quarters for awhile in Rue du Cherche-Midi, near her and
his former homes, and then removed to No. 90 Rue de Vaugirard. Their
abode, cut away by the piercing of that end of Rue Saint-Placide, is
replaced by the new building still numbered 90 Rue de Vaugirard, near
the corner of Rue de l'Abbé-Grégoire.

In this first real home of his married life, Hugo produced his "Hans
d'Islande" and his "Bug Jargal"--the latter rewritten from a crude
early work--by which, poor things though they were, he earned money,
as well as by his poems, poured forth in ungrudging flood. In the
ranks of the Classicists at first, he soon fell into line with the
Romanticists, and by 1827 he was the acknowledged leader of "_La Jeune
France_." On his marriage, he had been allotted the pension, already
alluded to, of 1,500 francs yearly, by Louis XVIII., in recognition of
his Royalist rhymings, and this sum was doubled in 1823.

With their growing fortune, the young couple allowed themselves more
commodious quarters. These they found, early in 1828, in a house
behind No. 11 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a street somewhat curtailed
in its length by the cutting of Rue de Rennes, and the old No. 11 is
now No. 27. A long alley, once a rural lane between bordering trees,
leads to the modest house hidden away from the street. Quiet enough
to-day, it was quieter then, when it was really in the Fields of Our
Lady, in that quarter of the town endeared to Hugo by his several
boyhood-homes.

The long, low cottage, since divided and numbered 27 and 29, still
faces the street, just as when he first passed under its northern end
into the lane, with his young wife. She writes, in her entrancing
"Life of Victor Hugo, by a Witness": "The avenue was continued by a
garden, whose laburnums touched the windows of his rooms. A lawn
extended to a rustic bridge, the branches of which grew green in
summer." The rustic bridge, the lawn, and the laburnums are no longer
to be found, but the house is untouched, save by time and the
elements. Behind those windows of the second floor, where was their
apartment, was written "Marion Delorme," his strongest dramatic work,
in the short time between the 1st and the 24th of June, 1829; and
there he read it to invited friends, among whom sat Balzac, just then
finishing, in his own painstaking way, "Les Chouans." In October of
this year "Hernani" was written and put on the boards of the Comédie
Française, long before reluctant censors allowed "Marion Delorme" to
be played.

To these rooms came, of evenings, those brilliant young fellows and
those who were bent on being brilliant, who made the vanguard of the
Romanticists. Here was formed "_le Cénacle_," of which curious circle
we shall soon see more. Here Sainte-Beuve dropped in, from his rooms a
few doors off, at No. 19, now No. 37, Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs;
dropped in too frequently, for the "smiling critic" came rather to
smile on young Madame Hugo than for other companionship. Sometimes of
an afternoon, such of the group as were walkers would start for a long
stroll out to and over the low hills surrounding the southern suburbs,
to see the sun set beyond the plains of Vanves and Montrouge. As they
returned they would rest and quench their modest thirst in a suburban
_guinguette_ and listen to the shrill fiddling of "_la mère Saguet_."
All this and much more is told in Hugo's verse. The town has grown
around and beyond the tavern, where it stands on the southwestern
corner of Rue de Vanves and Avenue du Maine, its two stories and steep
roof and dormer windows all like an old village inn going to decay.

One day, late in 1828, Hugo started from his house for the prison of
the Grande-Force, to visit Béranger. The simple-seeming old singer,
during his nine months' imprisonment, had an "at home" every day,
receiving crowds of men eminent in politics and in letters. His
conviction made one of the most potent counts in the indictment of the
Bourbons by the populace, two years later.

It was in this way that Hugo had opportunity to study the prison, in
such quick and accurate detail, as enabled him to make that dramatic
description of the escape of Thénardier; an escape made possible, at
the last, by little Gavroche, fetched from his palatial lodging in the
belly of the huge plaster elephant on Place de la Bastille, on the
very night of his giving shelter to the two lost Thénardier boys,
whom he--the heroic, pathetic, grotesque creature--didn't know to be
his brothers any more than he knew he was going to rescue his father!

This prison had been the Hôtel du Roi-de-Sicile, away back in the
"middling ages," and had been enlarged and renamed many times, until
it came, about 1700, to Caumont, Duc de La Force, whose name clung to
it until its demolition early in the Second Empire. Taken in 1754 by
the Government, Necker made of it what was then considered a "model
prison," to please the King, and to placate himself and the
philosophers about him, righteously irate with the horrors of the
Grand-Châtelet. The Terror packed its many buildings, surrounding
inner courts, with political prisoners, and killed most of them in the
September Massacres. Its main entrance was on the northern side of Rue
du Roi-de-Sicile, near Rue Malher, recently cut. Just at the
southwestern junction of those two streets, stood--men yet living have
seen it--the _borne_ (a large stone planted beside the roadway to keep
wheels from contact with the bordering buildings), on which was hacked
off the head of the Princesse de Lamballe, as she was led from that
entrance to be "_élargie_," on the morning of September 3, 1792.

The landlady of the Hugo household had retired from trade with enough
money to buy this quiet place, set far back from this quiet street,
intending to end her days in an ideal resting-place. From the first,
her smug comfort had been violated by many queer visitors, and when
"Hernani" made its hit, there was a ceaseless procession of the
author's noisy admirers, by night and by day, on her staircase and
over her head--she had kept the ground floor for her tranquil
retreat--until the maddened woman gave Monsieur Hugo "notice to quit."
She liked her tenants, she hastened to say, she felt for the poor
young wife in _her_ loss of sleep, and, above all, she pitied her for
having a husband "who had taken to such a dreadful trade!"

So they had to move, and late in 1830, or early in 1831, they went
across the river to No. 9 Rue Jean-Goujon, where, in an isolated house
surrounded by gardens, in the midst of the then deserted and desolate
Champs-Élysées, they could be as noisy as they and their friends
chose. Soon after coming here they took their new daughter and their
last child, Adèle, to Saint-Philippe-du-Roule for her baptism, as Hugo
recalled, twenty years later, at Balzac's burial service in the same
church. But here, despite the fields that tempted to walks in all
directions, Hugo shut himself in and shut out his friends. For he was
bound, by contract with his publisher, to produce "Notre-Dame de
Paris" within a few months. With his eye for effect, he put on a
coarse, gray, woollen garment, reaching from neck to ankles, locked up
his coats and hats, and went to work, stopping only to eat and sleep.
He began his melodramatic book to the booming of the cannon of a
Parisian insurrection, and he ended it in exactly five and one-half
months, just as he had got to the last drop of ink in the bottle he
had bought at the beginning. He thought of calling this romance "What
there is in a Bottle of Ink," but gave that title to Alphonse Karr,
who used it later for a collection of stories. Goethe's verdict on
"Notre-Dame de Paris" must stand; it is a dull and tiresome show of
marionettes.

This house has gone, that street has been rebuilt, the whole quarter
has a new face and an altered aspect. After his book was finished,
Hugo hurried out to see the barricades of 1832, which he has glorified
in "Les Misérables." At this time, too--by way of contrast--he permits
a glimpse of his undisturbed home life. It is seen by a friend, who,
"ushered into a large room, furnished with simple but elegant taste,
was struck with the womanly beauty of Madame Hugo, who had one of her
children on her knee." When he saw the poet, sitting reading by the
fireside close by, "he was vividly impressed with the resemblance of
the entire scene to one of Van Dyck's finest pictures."

During the rehearsals of "Le Roi s'Amuse," in October, 1832, Hugo
found time to settle himself and his family in the apartment on the
second floor of No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des Vosges. We shall
prowl about this historic spot when we come to explore the Marais;
just now, only this apartment and this house come under our scrutiny.
It was one of the earliest and grandest mansions of this grand square,
and took its title of Hôtel de Guéménée when that family held
possession in 1630. Ten years later one of its floors was tenanted by
Marion Delorme, whose gorgeous coach with four horses drew a crowd to
that south-eastern corner whenever she alighted, and whose dainty
rooms drew a crowd of another sort on her evenings, so much the vogue.
They were the gathering-place of the swells of her day, of dignitaries
of the court and the Church, of men famous in letters and science, all
attracted by the charm and wit and polish of this young woman. In his
"Cinq-Mars," de Vigny brings together in her _salon_, among many
nameless fine people, Descartes, Grotius, Corneille--fresh from his
latest success, "Cinna"--and a youth of eighteen, Poquelin, afterward
Molière. This is well enough, but he goes too far in his fancy for a
telling picture, and drags in Milton, shy and silent. John Milton had
long before passed through Paris, on his way home from Italy, and was
then busy over controversial pamphlets in London. Nor can the English
reader take seriously the recitation, urged on "_le jeune Anglais_,"
of passages from his "Paradise Lost"--written twenty years later--a
recitation quite comprehended by this exclusively French audience. For
the Delorme is moved to tears, and Georges Scudéry to censure, so
shocked are his religious scruples and his poetic taste! De Vigny is
surer of his stepping when on French ground, and plausibly makes
Marion a spy on the conspirators, in the pay of Richelieu. At that
time, during the construction of his Palais-Cardinal--now the
Palais-Royal--his residence was diagonally opposite No. 6, in the
northwestern corner of Place Royale. That corner has been cut through,
and his house cut away, by the prolongation of Rue des Vosges along
that side of the square. It has been said that the cardinal's hunting
to death of Cinq-Mars was less a punishment for the conspiracy against
King and State than a personal vengeance on the dandy, with a hundred
pairs of boots, who had supplanted him with Mlle. Delorme. The Marais
streets knew them both well. Cinq-Mars lived with his father in the
family Hôtel d'Effiat, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, demolished in 1882.
Marion did not pine long after his execution, but went her way gayly,
until she was driven by her debts to a pretended death and a sham
funeral, at which she peeped from these windows. She sank out of sight
of men, and died in earnest, before she had come to forty years, in
her mother's apartment in Rue de Thorigny, leaving a fortune in fine
lace and not a _sou_ in cash for her burial.

De Vigny proves his intimate acquaintance with this house, during
Hugo's residence, by his use of its back entrance for the confederates
of Cinq-Mars, making their way to Delorme's house, on the night of
their betrayal. And Dumas makes this entrance serve for d'Artagnan in
his visits to Lady de Winter and to her attractive maid.

That entrance is still in existence from Rue Saint-Antoine, by way of
the Impasse--then Cul-de-sac--Guéménée, and at its end through a small
gate into the court, and so by a back door 

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