By happy chance, or through pious care, this precious fragment has survived the centuries that looked with unconcern on things of the past, and has come into the safe keeping of our relic-loving age. It is an authentic doc.u.ment from the archives of the earliest architecture of the fifteenth century, convincing in its proof of the strength for defence of ducal homes in that day. Its ma.s.sive stones are scrupulously shaped and fitted, the grim faces of its quadrangular walls are softened by wide ogival windows, its top is crowned all around by a deep cornice. Above, the former corbelled machiolations, heavy yet elegant, are debased into water-spouts, and a new roof has been added. Only the southern and eastern sides of the oblong are wholly disengaged, the other faces being mostly shut in by crowding buildings. On the angle behind is a _tourelle_ supported by corbels, and in the ogival door is a tympanum, in whose carvings we make out a plane and a plumb-line. This was the device of John of Burgundy, worn on his liveries, painted and carved everywhere. Louis of Orleans had chosen a bunch of knotted f.a.gots as his emblem, with the motto "_Je l"ennuie_;" and Burgundy"s arrogant retort was the plane that cut through all that was not in plumb-line with his measurements, and the motto in Flemish "_Ik houd_," meaning "_Je le tiens_."
The great hall within has been part.i.tioned off into small rooms, fit for the workingmen and their families formerly installed here; so that its ancient aspect of amplitude and dignity is somewhat marred. We "must make believe very much," to see either the sinner John mustering here his a.s.sa.s.sins, who file out through that door to their rendezvous with Orleans, or the saint Vincent gathering here his herd of hungry children. Happily, the grand stairway, on one side, is unmutilated, and it serves to bring home to us the ample magnificence of these Burgundian dukes. Dagobert"s stair crawls, through twisting darkness, within its tower; Blanche"s stair modestly suggests a venture toward ease and elegance in life; here we mount the stairway of a feudal _chateau_, broad and easy and stately, fitting frame for bejewelled courtiers and iron-clad men-at-arms. Its one hundred and thirty-eight steps, each a single stone, turn s.p.a.ciously about the central column, which does not reach to the tower top. Its upper section is carved into a stone pot, from which springs a stone oak-tree to the centre of the vaulted ceiling of the broad platform that ends the stairway, the ribs of the vaulting outlined by carved branches and foliage. On each floor below, a large chamber, deserted and dreary, opens on the landing-place; from this upper stage a narrow staircase leads, through the thickness of the wall and up through the _tourelle_ on the angle, to the tiny chamber occupied by John of Burgundy, tradition tells us.
Here in his bedroom, that was an a.r.s.enal, at the top of his impregnable tower, the fearless one found safety and sleep. We peep out from his one small window, and far down we see the swarming length of Rue etienne Marcel, and hear the low pervasive murmur of Paris all astir, accented by the shrill cries of the boys from the adjoining school, at play in the courtyard of our tower. Their voices chase back to their shadowy haunts all these companions of our stroll through the ages, and call us down to our own time and to our Paris of to-day.
THE SCHOLARS" QUARTER OF THE MIDDLE AGES
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Church of Saint-Severin.]
THE SCHOLARS" QUARTER OF THE MIDDLE AGES
On that river-bank of the City-Island which is called Quai aux Fleurs, you will find a modern house numbered 11; and you will read, in the gold letters of the weather-stained stone slab set in the front wall, that here, in 1118, dwelt Heloise and Abelard. Their ideal heads are carved over the two entrance doors. This is the site of the pleasant residence occupied by Canon Fulbert, looking across its own garden and the beach to the river--one of the dwellings in the cloisters that were set apart for the clergy and clerks of the cathedral, and of the many parish churches cl.u.s.tering about it. The chapter of Notre-Dame owned nearly all this end of the island eastwardly from the boundaries of the old Palace, and had built up this clerical village of about three dozen small houses, each within its garden and clump of acacias, all sequestered and quiet. You may see one of these houses, still owned by the cathedral, and happily left unchanged, at No. 6 Rue Ma.s.sillon. Its low two stories and tiled roof on the court keep their old-time look, and within is a good staircase, with a wooden railing of the days before wrought iron came into use. Boileau-Despreaux has mounted this staircase, for he certainly visited this abode of the Abbe Menage, who had literary and scientific _salons_ here, on Wednesday evenings. Boileau himself lived in these cloisters for many years, and here he died; and here had died Philibert Delorme and Pierre Lescot. These and many another, not connected with the Church, sought this quarter for its quiet. It was quiet enough, shut in as it was by its own walls, that made of it a _cite_ inside the City of the Island. The two gates at the western ends of present Rues du Cloitre-Notre-Dame and Chanoinesse, with two others on the sh.o.r.e, were safely closed and barred at nightfall, against all intrusion of the profane and noisy world without. So greedy for quiet had the dwellers grown, that they would not permit the bridge--the Pont-Rouge, the seventeenth-century predecessor of Pont Saint-Louis--to step straight out from Saint Louis"s island to their own, lest the speed of traffic should perturb them; they made it turn at an angle, until it set its twisted foot on the retired spot where now Rues des Ursins and des Chantres meet in a small open s.p.a.ce. The southern sh.o.r.e by the side of the cathedral was given up to the Archbishop"s palace and garden; and the piece of waste land, behind the cathedral and outside the wall, known as Le Terrain, was in 1750 banked up into the quay at the end of the present pretty garden. All around the northern and eastern sides of the original Notre-Dame, stretched the Gothic arched cloisters, and in them the Church taught what little it thought fit its scholars should learn.
Here, toward the end of the eleventh century, Pierre Abelard was an eager pupil of Guillaume de Champeaux; and early in the next century, here and in the gardens of Saint-Genevieve, he was a honey-tongued teacher. He lodged in the house of Canon Fulbert, in whose niece of seventeen--less than half his own age--he found an ardent learner, not alone in theology. Here, on this spot, she taught herself that devotion to the poor-spirited lover who was so bold-spirited a thinker; a devotion, that, outlasting his life by the twenty years of her longer life, found expression in her dying wish, put into verse by Alexander Pope:
"May one kind Grave unite each hapless Name, And graft my Love immortal on thy Fame."
He died at the Priory of Saint-Marcel near Chalons, whose prior sent the body, at her request, to Heloise, then Abbess of the Convent at Nogent-sur-Seine, and famed as a miracle of erudition and piety. She was buried in the grave she there dug for him, and in 1800, when her convent was destroyed, leaving no stone, the tomb and its contents were removed to the Museum of French Monuments in Paris, and in 1817 they were placed in Pere-Lachaise.
We willingly lose sight of Abelard"s sorry story in face of his splendid powers. These came into play at a period of mental and spiritual awakening, brought about by unwonted light from all quarters of the sky. Theological questions filled the air; asked, not only by priests and clerks, but by the silly crowd and by wistful children, and by gray-headed men sitting on school benches. The Crusades, failing in material conquest, had won the Holy Land of Eastern Learning; and Constantinople, lost later to the Christian world, gave to it fleeing Greek scholars, carrying precious ma.n.u.scripts, Byzantine logic and physics, all through Europe. Pious soldiers, coming home with wealth; stay-at-home churchmen, who had ama.s.sed riches; royalty, anxious to placate Rome--all these built colleges, founded scholarships, endowed chairs, subsidized teachers.
From the cloisters on the island--the cradle of the University, as the Palace at the other end of the island was the cradle of the Town--from the new cathedral that Abelard had not seen, the schools stepped over to the mainland on the south. There, on the sh.o.r.e, were built the College of the Four Nations, and the School of Medicine, alongside that annex of the old Hotel-Dieu, which was reached by the little bridge, that went only the other day, and that led from the central structure on the island. From this sh.o.r.e the scholars" quarter spread up the slope to the summit of Mont-Sainte-Genevieve. There teachers and scholars met in the cloisters of the great abbey, that had grown up around the tomb of the patron saint of Paris, where now stands the Pantheon. Of the huge basilica, its foundations laid by Clovis--who had paid for a victory by his baptism into Christianity--there is left the tower, rising, aged and estranged, above the younger structures of the Lycee Henri IV. Its foundations under ground are of Clovis, its lower portion is of eleventh-century rebuilding, its upper portion of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The plan of his cloisters, and some of its stones, are kept in the arches of the college court, to which one enters from No. 23 Rue Clovis. And, in the street named for his wife, Clotilde, you may see the ma.s.sive side wall of the abbey refectory, now the college chapel.
Around about the southern side of the abbey, and around the schools on the slope below, that were the beginning of the University, Philippe-Auguste threw the protecting arm of his great wall. Within its clasp lay the _Pays Latin_, wherein that tongue was used exclusively in those schools. This language, sacred to so-called learning and unknown to the vulgar, seemed a fit vehicle for the lame science of the doctor, and the crippled dialectics of the theologian, both always in arms against the "new learning." It was not until the close of Henri IV."s reign, that it was thought worth while to use the French language in the cla.s.ses. All through the Middle Ages, this University was a world-centre for its teaching, and through all the ages it has been "that prolific soil in which no seeds, which have once been committed to it, are ever permitted to perish." While _la Cite_ was the seat of a militant Church, and _la Ville_ the gathering-place of thronging merchants, this hill-side swarmed with students, and their officials were put to it to house them properly and keep them orderly. They got on as best they might, ill-lodged, ill-fed, ill-clad, often begging, always roistering, in the streets.
By day the sedate burghers of the other quarters trembled for their ducats and their daughters, and found peace only when night brought the locking of the gate of the Pet.i.t-Chatelet, and the shutting up in their own district of the turbulent students.
Turbulent still, the students of our day, of every land and all tongues--except Latin--stream through the streets of the Latin Quarter, intent on study, or on pleasure bent. Only the Revolution has ever thinned their ranks, what time the Legislative a.s.sembly nearly wrecked the parent University, with all its offspring throughout France. Napoleon rescued them all, and by his legislation of 1806 and 1808, the University has been builded solidly on the foundations of the State. The ancient scholars" quarter, unlighted and undrained and unhealthful, is almost all gone; its narrow, tortuous streets are nearly all widened or wiped out; open s.p.a.ces and gardens give it larger lungs; its dark, damp, mouldy colleges have made way for grandiose structures of the latest sanitation. Yet the gray walls of the annex of the Hotel-Dieu still gloom down on the narrow street; the fifteenth-century School of Medicine, its vast hall perverted to base uses, is hidden behind the entrance of No. 15 Rue de la Bucherie; and above the buildings on the west side of Rue de l"Hotel-Colbert rises the rotunda of its later amphitheatre. Rue Galande retains many of its houses of the time of Charles IX., when these gables on the street were erected. Except for the superb facade at No. 29 Rue de la Parcheminerie--a munic.i.p.al residence dating from about the middle of the eighteenth century--that venerable street remains absolutely unaltered since its very first days, when the parchment-makers took it for their own. Some of their parchment seems to be still on sale in its shop windows. In the ancient house No. 8 Rue Boutebrie you will find as perfect a specimen of a mediaeval staircase, its wooden rail admirably carved, as is left in Paris. And the street of the Mountain of Sainte-Genevieve still winds, stonily steep, up the slope.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Rue Hautefeuille, a Survivor of the Scholars" Quarter.]
Nothing of Rue du Fouarre, as it was known to Rabelais and Dante, is left but its name in the broadened curtailment of this most ancient street. That name comes from the old French word meaning "forage," and was given to it at the time when the wealthier students bought near there and brought into it the trusses of hay and straw, which they spread on the floor for seats during the lectures, the reader himself being seated on a rude dais at the end of the hall. The forage market is still held, not far away, in Place Maubert. And the churches of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and of Saint-Severin are unchanged, except by age, since those days when their bells were the only timekeepers for lecturers and lectured; giving signal, throughout the day, for the divisions of the cla.s.ses, until vespers told that the working-day was done. The schools opened with the early ma.s.s at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, then the chapel adjoining the Hotel-Dieu, now an exquisite relic of simple twelfth-century Gothic. Still older had been Saint-Severin, a chapel of the earliest years of the monarchy, destroyed by the Normans when they camped just here in 866, besieging the island city and making their onslaught on the wooden tower that guarded the abutment of the Pet.i.t-Pont on the mainland. The twelve heroes, who held that tower against the Norman horde, are commemorated by the tablet in the wall of Place du Pet.i.t-Pont. Saint-Severin was rebuilt in the thirteenth century, and its vast burial-ground on the south covered by the buildings and the street of la Parcheminerie. So that of the University seen by Dante, we can be sure only of the body of Saint-Severin--its tower was built in 1347--and of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, and the buildings that are glued to it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Interior of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.]
Dante"s bronze figure looks pensively down from the terrace of the College de France on all the noise and the newness of modern Rue des ecoles. The date of his short stay in Paris cannot be fixed, but it was certainly after his exile from Florence, therefore not earlier than 1302, and probably not later than 1310, his own years being a little less, or a little more, than forty. There can be no doubt as to his having visited Paris, for Boccaccio, his admirer and biographer, records the fact; told him perhaps by the elder Boccaccio, who lived in the capital--where his famous son was born--and who probably met the expatriated poet there. And in the tenth canto of "_Paradiso_," we find these words in Longfellow"s translation:
"It is the light eternal of Sigieri, Who, reading lectures in the street of straw, Did syllogize individious verities."
This closing line, meaning that Sigier of Brabant had the courage to speak truths that were unpopular, explains why he was Dante"s favorite lecturer. In Balzac"s pretty fragment of romance, in which the great Frenchman makes so vivid the presence of the great Italian, the home of the latter is in one of the small houses on the extreme eastern end of the City Island--such as the modest dwelling in which died Boileau-Despreaux, four centuries later. From there, Balzac has Dante ferried over to Quai de la Tournelle, and so stroll to his lectures.
But Dante"s home was really in that same street of straw, to which he had come from his quarters away south on the banks of the Bievre, too far away from the schools. He had taken up his abode in that rural suburb, on first coming to Paris, as did many men of letters, of that time and of later times, who were drawn to the pleasant, quiet country without the walls.
There was one among these men to whose home, tradition tells us, Dante was fond of finding his way, after he had come to live in the narrow town street. The grave figure goes sedately up Rue Saint-Jacques, always the great southern thoroughfare, pa.s.sing the ancient chapel of the martyrs, Saint-Benoit-le-Betourne, and the home and shelter for poor students in theology, started by the earnest confessor of Saint Louis, Robert de Sorbon. The foundations of his little chapel, built in 1276, were unearthed in 1899 during the digging for the new Sorbonne; and its walls are outlined in white stone in the gray pavement of the new court. Not a stone remains of the old Sorbonne, not a stone of the rebuilt Sorbonne of Richelieu, except his chapel and his tomb; well worth a visit for the exquisite beauty of its detail. But the soul of the historic foundation lives on, younger than ever to-day, in its seventh century of youth. Through Porte Saint-Jacques, Dante pa.s.ses to the dwelling, just beyond, of Jean de Meung, its site now marked by a tablet in the wall of the house No.
218 Rue Saint-Jacques. No doubt it was a sufficiently grand mansion in its own grounds, for it was the home of the well-to-do parents of the poet, whose lameness gave him the popular nickname of "_Clopinel_,"
preferred by him to the name by which he is best known, which came from his natal town. In this home, a few years earlier, he had finished his completion of "Le Roman de la Rose," one of the earliest of French poems, a biting satire on women and priests, begun by Guillaume de Lorris. "_Clopinel_" carried on the unfinished work to such perfection, that he is commonly looked on as the sole author.
Dante admired the work as fully as did Chaucer, who has left a translation into English of a portion:--so admirable a version that it moved Eustace Deschamps to enthusiasm in his ballad to "_le grand translateur, n.o.ble Geoffroi Chaucer_." And Dante liked the workman as well, his equal in genius, many of their contemporaries believed; and we shall not aggrieve history, if we insist on seeing the grim-visaged Florentine and the light-hearted Gaul over a bottle of _pet.i.t vin de Vouvray or de Chinon_--for the vineyards of this southern slope of Paris had been rooted up by the builder early in the twelfth century--in the low-browed living-room, discussing poetry and politics, the schism in the Church, the quarrel between the French King and his spiritual father of Rome.
Behind us in Rue Saint-Jacques, beneath the new Sorbonne, we have left the site of the chapel of Saint-Benoit-le-Betourne. The entrance to its cloisters and gardens was opposite Rue du Cimetiere-Saint-Benoit, a short street, now widened, that retains a few of its ancient houses, the cemetery at its farther end being entirely builded over. This entrance-gate is standing in the gardens of the Cluny Museum, and we see it as it was first seen by the boy Francois Villon, and last seen when he fled under it, after killing a priest in the cloisters. He got his name from the worthy canon of Saint-Benoit, Guillaume de Villon, who took in the waif and gave him a roof and food, and tried to give him morals; and it is by his name that the poet is known in history rather than by the other names, real or a.s.sumed, that he bore during his shifty life. He lived here with his "more than father," as the young scamp came to own that the canon had been; whose house in the cloister gardens, named "_la Porte Rouge_," was not far from the house of the canon Pierre de Vaucel, with whose niece Francois got into his first sc.r.a.pe. Loving her then, he libelled her later in his verse.
Full of sc.r.a.pes of all sorts were his thirty short years of life--he was born in the year of the burning of Joan the Maid, and he slips out of sight and of record in 1461--and it needed all his nimble wits to keep his toes from dangling above ground and his neck from swinging in a noose. They did not keep him from poverty and hunger and prison.
Parliament, nearly hanging him, banished him instead from Paris, and the footsore c.o.c.kney figure is seen tramping through Poitou, Berri, Bourbonnais. Louis XI. finds him in a cell at Meung and, sympathizing with rascality that was not political, sets him free and on foot again; so playing Providence to this starveling poet as he did to Gringoire. And from Meung, Francois Villon steals out of history, leaving to us his "Small" and "Large Testament," a few odes and sonnets, with bits of wholly exquisite song. No French poet before him had put _himself_ into his verse, and it is this flavor of personality that gives its chiefest charm to his work. We are won by the graceless vagabond, who casts up and tells off his entire existence of merriment and misery, in the words of Mr. Henley"s superb translation:
"Booze and the blowens cop the lot."
He seems to be owning to it, this slight, alert figure of bronze in Square Monge, as he faces the meeting-place of wide modern streets.
The s.p.a.ciousness of it all puzzles him, who prowled about the darkest purlieus, and haunted the uncleanest _cabarets_, of the old University quarter. He is struck suddenly quiescent in his swagger; his face, slightly bent down, shows the poet dashed with the reprobate; his expression and att.i.tude speak of struggling shame and shamelessness.
His right hand holds a ma.n.u.script to his breast, his left hand clasps the dagger in his belt. Behind, on the ground, lie the mandolin of the poet-singer and the shackles of the convict. It is a delightfully expressive statue of Francois Villon, by his own election one of the "_Enfants sans Souci_," and by predestination a child of grievous cares.
From Square Monge it is but a step to the tablet that marks the place of Porte Saint-Victor, on the northern side of the remnant left of the street of that name. It is but a step in the other direction to the tablet on the wall of No. 50 Rue Descartes, which shows the site of Porte Saint-Marcel, sometimes called the Porte Bordee. Through either of these gates of the great wall one might pa.s.s to the home of a poet, a hundred years after Villon had gone from sight; like him, born to true poetry, but unlike him who was born to rags, Pierre de Ronsard was born to the purple. He was a gentleman of n.o.ble lineage, he had been educated at the famous College de Navarre, the college at that period of Henri III. and of the Duke of Guise, _le Balafre_--its site and its prestige since taken by the ecole Polytechnique--he had entered the court of the Duke of Orleans as a page, he had gone to Scotland as one of the escort of Madeleine of France, on her marriage with James V. He was counted among the personal friends of Mary Stuart and of Charles IX., and by him was selected always as a partner in tennis. That King visited Ronsard here, and so, too, did his brother Henri III. Ta.s.so found his way here, while in Paris in 1571, in the train of Cardinal Louis d"Este. It seems that nothing in all France was to Ta.s.so"s taste, except the windmills on Montmartre; easily in view, at that day, from the Louvre, at whose windows he watched the ceaseless whirling of their sails, which mitigated his boredom. Twenty years earlier, Rabelais was fond of ferrying across the river, from his home in Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, to prowl about his once familiar haunts in this quarter, and to drop in on Ronsard and Baf, the leaders of the school of "learned poets." They lived in Rue des Fosses-Saint-Victor, the street formed over the outer ditch of the wall, now named Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Their house and grounds, just at the corner of present Rue des Boulangers, have been cut through and away by the piercing of Rue Monge. Here, Ronsard looked across the meadows to the Seine, while he strolled in the gardens, book in hand, eager "to gather roses while it is called to-day," in the words of Mr.
Andrew Lang"s version of the "Prince of Poets." For Ronsard"s deafness, which had cut short his adroit diplomatic career, had given him quicker vision for all beauty; and his verse, Greek and Latin and French, trips to the music made in him by the sights and scents of summer, by roses and by women, by the memories of "shadow-loves and shadow-lips." And, still rhyming, this most splendid of that constellation--those singers, attuned to stately measure, called the Pleiades--died in the year 1585, soon after his sixtieth birthday.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Pierre de Ronsard.
(From a drawing by an unknown artist, in a private collection.)]
From here we go straight away over the hill of Sainte-Genevieve and through Porte Saint-Michel--nearly at the meeting-place of Rues Soufflot and Monsieur-le-Prince and Boulevard Saint-Germain--to the house, also in the fields outside the wall, where dwelt Clement Marot, a poet who sang pleasantly of the graces of life, too, but who had a more serious strain deep down. The "_Cheval d"Airan_"--so was the house named--was a gift to the poet from Francois I. "for his good, continuous, and faithful services." These services consisted chiefly in the writing of roundelays and verses, in which "he had a turn of his own," says Sainte-Beuve; a turn of grace and of good breeding, and no pa.s.sion that should startle the King"s sister, good Marguerite of Navarre, who had made him her groom of the chamber. He had been a prisoner at Pavia with the King, and his life had been spent in the camp and the court. At Ferrara, in 1534, he had met his fellow-countryman Calvin, and returned to Paris to prove his strengthened convictions in the new heresies by those translations of the psalms, which carried comfort to Calvin and to Luther, and which have given to their writer his permanent place in French literature.
During this period he lived in this grand mansion, the site of which is exactly covered by the houses No. 27 Rue de Tournon and No. 30 Rue de Conde. And from here Marot went into exile, along with the well-to-do Huguenots, who clung together in this quarter outside the wall. "_Nous autres l"appelons la Pet.i.te Geneve_," said d"Aubigne, and that appellation held for a long time. Its centre was the short, narrow lane in the marshes, named later Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, and now Rue Visconti, wherein the persecuted sect had their hidden place of worship. On its corner with the present Rue de Seine was the home of Jean Cousin, that gentleman-worker in stained gla.s.s--the sole handicraft allowed to men of birth--who has left for our joy that exquisite window in the Church of Saint-Gervais. At the western end of the lane was the residence built for himself by Baptiste du Cerceau, son of the ill.u.s.trious Jacques Androuet, and as stanch as was his father for the faith. His great mansion took up the whole end of the block, on the ground covered now by the equally large building that makes 32 Rue Jacob, 21 Rue Bonaparte, and 23 and 25 Rue Visconti. A portion of this latter structure may be of the sixteenth century.
Baptiste du Cerceau, a Huguenot by birth and bringing-up, had yet joined Henri III."s famous "Forty-Five," in 1575, when he was only twenty years old. For ten years he served that King as soldier and architect, and then, rather than attend ma.s.s or conform against his convictions, he left King and court and home in 1585. He came back with Henri IV. as royal architect, to find that his elegant residence had fallen into ruin.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Balcony over the Entrance of the Cour du Dragon.]
When Bernard Palissy, released from his dungeon in Bordeaux, came to Paris, he was made "Worker in Earth and Inventor of Rustic Figulines,"
for the new abode in the Tile Fields, beyond the Louvre, that was planned for the Queen-Mother, Catherine de" Medici. "Bernard of the Tuileries," as he was known, in order to be near his work, lodged on the northern side of Rue Saint-Honore, just east of present Rue de Castiglione. Later he removed to Rue du Dragon, nearly opposite the little street now named in his honor, and so became one of the colony of "_la Pet.i.te Geneve_." Here he worked as he worked always in his pa.s.sion for perfection in ornamental pottery, giving to it all "my affection for pursuing in the track of enamels," in his own quaint words. For his single-mindedness in praising his Creator, and in making worthy images of His creations, he was looked on as a "_huguenot opiniatre_," and hated by the powers of the Church and State, who, failing to burn him, because of the mercy of the Duke of Mayenne, cast him into the Bastille. With all Paris hungry, during the siege of the League by Henry of Navarre, the prisoners took their turn, and this old man renewed the experience of his youth, when he had starved himself for his beloved enamels. And so, at the age of eighty, in the year of the stabbing by Jacques Clement of the most Christian King, Henri III., Bernard Palissy died in his cell "naturally," the report said. A medallion of the great potter may be seen over the entrance of a house in Rue du Dragon, and his statue stands in the little garden of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, not far away.
He is in his workman"s garb, gazing down at a platter on which he has stamped his genius in clay.
We have seen John Calvin, fresh from Picardy, a student at the College du Cardinal-Lemoine, in Rue Saint-Victor, and this is his only residence in Paris known to us. Appointed Cure of Pont l"Eveque, at the age of sixteen, he was induced by a daring relative to read the Bible, and the ultimate result was Calvinism, as it has been interpreted by his bigoted disciples. The immediate result was his persecution by the Sorbonne, and his flight to Ferrara, about the year 1534. There he met with welcome and protection, as did many a political fugitive of the time, from Renee, the reigning d.u.c.h.ess, as kindly a creature as was her father, Louis XII. of France. But her goodwill could not prevail against the ill-will of the Church, and Calvin was forced to find his way finally to Switzerland, to live there for thirty useful years. Marot, who was with Calvin in Ferrara, went back to Paris, still countenanced at court; but no favor of king or king"s sister could save a sinner who would eat meat during Lent; and in 1543 Marot was forced to flee to Italy, and died in Turin in 1544. He lives less in his special verse than in his general influence, along with Rabelais and Montaigne, in the formation of French letters. These three cleansed that language into literature, by purging it of the old Gallic chaos and clumsiness of form.
So the Church made a desert, and called it peace, and "Little Geneva"
was at last laid waste, and those leaders, who escaped the cell and the stake, were made refugees, because they had been insurgents against enslaved thought. But they left behind them him who has been styled the "Martyr of the Renaissance," etienne Dolet. Here, in Place Maubert, this bronze figure on the high pedestal, which he somehow makes serve as a Protestant pulpit, looks all the martyr, with his long, stubborn neck, his stiff spine of unbending conviction, his entire att.i.tude of aggressive devotion to principle. In life he was so strong and so genuine that he made friends almost as many as enemies.
That glorious woman, Marguerite of Navarre--whose absurd devotion to her brother Francis is only a lovable flaw in her otherwise faultless nature--stood by Dolet as she stood by so many men who had the courage to study and think and speak. She saved him from execution, when he had killed a man in self-defence at Lyons, and she should have been allowed to sit at table with the friends who gave him a little dinner in the _Pays Latin_ to celebrate his escape. Among those about the board were Marot, Rabelais, Erasmus, Melancthon, tradition says, and says no more. We are told nothing about the speechmakers, and we can only guess that they were terribly in earnest. Dolet was soon again in arrest for printing books forbidden by the Church; his trial resulted in an acquittal. Soon again he was arrested for importing the forbidden literature, and escaped from prison. Rearrested, he was speedily convicted, and on August 3, 1546, he was burned in Place Maubert, on the spot where they have put his statue.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Clement Marot.
(From the portrait by Porbus le Jeune, in a private collection.)]
It was during one of his visits in later life to Paris that Erasmus came to be among these _convives_; perhaps at the time he was considering, before declining, the offer of Francois I. to make him the head of the great College Royal, planned--and no more than planned--by the King on the site of the Hotel de Nesle, where Mazarin afterward placed his College of the Four Nations, now the seat of the Inst.i.tute. Many years before this visit, some time between 1492 and 1497, Erasmus had lived in Paris, a poor and unhappy student in the College Montaigu. It had earned the nickname of "_College des Haricots_," because of the Lenten fare lavished on its inmates--beans, stale eggs, spoiled fish, and that monotony broken by frequent fasts.
Erasmus had a Catholic conscience, as he owns, but a Lutheran stomach withal, and this semi-starvation, with the filth and fleas in the rooms, sickened him and drove him home to cleanly and well-fed Flanders. From this college, he says in his "Colloquia," "I carried nothing but a body infected with disease, and a plentiful supply of vermin." A few years later young Rabelais suffered similar horrors at the same college, and has cursed its memories through Grangousier"s capable lips. This "galley for slaves" was indeed used as a prison during the Revolution, and was torn down in 1845, to give place to the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve.
From Place Maubert we walk up Rue Monge--named from the great _savant_ of the First Empire--and down to the seventeenth century, to where, on the corner of Rue Rollin, we find the tablet that records the scene of Blaise Pascal"s death in 1662. He lived and died in the house of his sister, in the fields just beyond Porte Saint-Marcel. Thirty-one years before, he had left Auvergne for Paris, a precocious lad of eight, already so skilled in mathematics and geometry that he produced his famous treatises while still in his teens, and at the age of twenty-three was known for his abilities throughout Europe. No man dying, as he did, not yet forty years of age, has left so distinct and permanent an impress on contemporary, and on later, thought.
He gained the honor of being hated by the Church, and the Jesuits named him "_Porte d"Enfer_." His only answer was the philosophic question, "How can I _prove_ that I am not the gate of h.e.l.l?" This many-sided genius invented the first calculating machine and the first omnibus. The line was started on March 18, 1662, and ran from the Palace of the Luxembourg to the Bastille. Its route was probably by Rue de la Harpe--almost all gone under Boulevard Saint-Michel--across Pet.i.t-Pont and the Island and Pont Notre-Dame, to Place de Greve, and thence by Rues Francois-Miron and Saint-Antoine, to the gate and the prison at the end.
It was long a matter of dispute between the towers of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie and Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas--this latter much nearer his home--as to which one had been selected by Pascal for the experiments he made, to prove his theory of atmospheric pressure, and to refute the theory of his opponents. Within a few years this question has been answered by an old painting, found in a curiosity shop, which represents Pascal, barometer in hand, standing on the top of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, beside the statue of the Chimaera, that has been carried to the Cluny Museum. This figure alone would fix the spot, but, in addition, the picture gives a view of old Paris that could be seen only from this point of view. This elegant isolated tower--all that is left of a church dating from the beginnings of Christian construction, and destroyed during the Revolution--was itself erected late in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth century, and shows the last effort of mediaeval Gothic in Paris. It is now used as a weather observatory. Pascal"s statue, by Cavelier, has been placed under the great vaulted arch that forms its base, and all about, in the little park, are instruments for taking and recording all sorts of atmospheric changes.