"_Dans la cour du Palais, je naquis ton voisin_," wrote Voltaire to Boileau, in one of those familiar rhymed letters that soften the austere rhetoric of the French verse of that day. The place of Voltaire"s birth, nearly sixty years after that of Boileau, was in the same Street of Jerusalem, at its corner with the Street of Nazareth, and it was only thus as a baby that he came ever in touch with the Holy Land. On November 22, 1694, the day after his birth, he was carried across the river to Saint-Andre-des-Arts--no one knows why his baptism was not in the island church of the parish--and there christened Francois-Marie Arouet. His earlier years were pa.s.sed in the house of Boileau"s nephew Dongois, whose airs of importance did not escape the keen infant eyes, as we have seen in the same letter in verse in our preceding chapter. Then he was sent to Lycee Louis-le-Grand, whither we have gone with young Poquelin, seventy years earlier. The college stands in its new stone on its old site in widened Rue Saint-Jacques.
We hear of no break in the tranquil course of young Arouet"s studies, beyond the historic scene of his presentation to Mlle. Ninon de Lenclos at her home in the Marais, to which we shall go in a later chapter. This was in 1706, when she owned to ninety years of age at least, and she was flattered by the visit of the youth of twelve, and by the verse he wrote for her birthday. Dying in that year, she left a handsome sum to her juvenile admirer, to be spent for books. So, "_seconde de Ninon, dont je fus legataire_," the lad was strengthened in his inclination for the career of literature he had already planned for himself, and in his disinclination for the legal career planned for him by his father. The elder Arouet was a flourishing notary--among his clients was the Boileau family--who considered his own the only profession really respectable. He placed his boy, the college days being done, with one Maitre Alain, whose office was near Place Maubert, between Rues de la Bucherie and Galande, a quarter crowded then with notaries and advocates, now all swept into limbo.
But young Arouet spent too many of his days and nights with the congenial comrades that met in the Temple; "an advanced and dangerous"
troop of swells and wits and pen-workers, light-heartedly bent on fun, amid the general gloom brought by Marlborough"s victories, and by Madame de Maintenon"s persistence in making Paris pious. Father Arouet sent his son away to The Hague; the first of his many journeys, enforced and voluntary. When allowed to return in 1715, he lost no time in hunting up his old a.s.sociates; and soon, stronger hands than those of his father settled him in the Bastille, in punishment for verse, not written by him, satirizing the Regent and his daughter, d.u.c.h.esse de Berri. There he spent his twenty-third year, utilizing his leisure to plan his "Henriade," and to finish his "Oedipe." When set free, he came out as Voltaire. Whether he took this new name from a small estate of his mother, or whether it was an anagram of _Arouet fils_, is not worth the search; enough for us that it is the name of him, who was to become, as John Morley rightly says, "the very eye of eighteenth-century illumination," and to whom we may apply his own words, used magnanimously of his famous contemporary, Montesquieu; that humanity had lost its t.i.tle-deeds, and he had recovered them.
Once again in the world, he produced his "Oedipe" in 1718, with an immediate and resounding success, which was not won by his succeeding plays between 1720 and 1724. It was during this period that he spasmodically disappeared from Paris, reappearing at Brussels, Utrecht, The Hague; "_jouant a l"envoye secret_," as was his mania then and in later years. During one of these flittings as an amba.s.sador"s ghost, he met Rousseau, and they were close friends until the day when Rousseau, showing to Voltaire his "Letter to Posterity,"
was told that it would never reach its address! That gibe made them sworn enemies. In Paris, during these years, Voltaire had no settled home. We have seen him in the _salon_ of Mlle. Lecouvreur, in Rue Visconti, and we have seen him there, a sincere mourner at her death-bed. It has been told in an earlier chapter, how that fine creature had sat by Voltaire"s sick-bed, careless of her own danger from the small-pox, with which he was stricken in November, 1723. He frequented many haunts of the witty and the wicked during these years, and a historic scene in one of these has been put on canvas by Mr.
Orchardson. One evening in the year 1725, Voltaire was a saucy guest at the table of the Duc de Sully, descendant of Henri IV."s great minister, in the n.o.ble mansion in Rue Saint-Antoine, to be visited by us later. On going out, he was waylaid and beaten by the lackeys of the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, who desired to impress by cudgels the warning that, while princes are willing to be amused at the table where sit "only princes and poets," the poets must not presume on the privilege. In the painting, Voltaire reappears in the room to the remaining guests, dishevelled and outraged. Later he challenged Rohan, whose reply came in an order of committal to the Bastille. After two weeks in a cell, Voltaire"s request to go to England in exile was gladly accorded by the government.
We all know well the Voltaire of an older day, in his statues beside the Inst.i.tute and within that building, beside the Pantheon, in Square Monge, and in the _foyer_ of the Theatre Francais. To see him at this younger day, we must turn into the court-yard of the Mairie of the Ninth Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt at No. 6 Rue Drouot--an ancient and attractive family mansion. In the centre of the court is a modern bronze, showing "the ape of genius" at the age of twenty-five, a dapper creature with head perked up and that complacent smile so marked in all his portraits. This smirk may be due less to self-satisfaction than to that physical peculiarity, claimed by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his own case, which is caused by the congenital shortening of the levator muscles of the mouth. The statue"s right hand rests jauntily on the hip, in the left hand is a book, and the left skirt of the long coat is blown back, showing the sword that was worn by young philosophers who would be young bloods. The pedestal holds two bas-reliefs; the youth in Ninon"s _salon_, the patriarch at Ferney, and cut in it are his words: "If G.o.d did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
During his years in England, Voltaire made acquaintance with all the notable men of letters then living, and with William Shakespeare in his works. In them he tolerantly found much merit, but always styled their author a barbarian. Those barbarisms and savageries he civilized and smoothed to his pattern, for his "Brutus" is an unconscious echo of "Julius Caesar," his "Zare" a shadow of "Oth.e.l.lo." He refused to call on Wycherly "the gentleman," as Wycherly insisted, but was glad to meet Wycherly the playwright. Nor did Voltaire turn his back on men and women of fashion, but used them so cleverly as to enable him to carry home to France a small fortune, from the subscriptions to his English edition of the "Henriade." He was shrewd in money matters, and a successful speculator for many years. We first hear of him again in Paris in 1729, getting army contracts and making money in queer ways.
Yet all through life his pen was always busy, and in this same year it is at work in a grand apartment of the Hotel Lambert. This was the mansion of M. du Chatelet, husband--officially only--of "_la sublime emilie_," with whom Voltaire had taken up his abode. The Hotel Lambert remains unchanged at the eastern end of ile Saint-Louis, looking, from behind its high wall and its well-shaded garden, at its incomparable prospect. Its entrance at No. 2 Rue Saint-Louis-en-l"ile opens on a grand court and an imposing facade. "This is a house made for a king, who would be a philosopher," wrote Voltaire to his august correspondent Frederick the Great. He himself was neither king of this realm nor proved himself a philosopher in its grotesque squabbles.
Madame du Chatelet was as frankly unfaithful to him as to her husband, who was frequently called in to reconcile the infuriated lovers. She was a woman of unusual abilities as well as of unusual indelicacies, with an itch for reading, research, and writing, her specialties being Newton and mathematics.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Hotel Lambert.]
In 1733 this queer couple found it to their comfort to quit Paris, where Voltaire was ceaselessly beset by the suspicions of the powers that regulated thought in France. They moved about much, to Voltaire"s discomfort, living sometimes at Cirey, on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine, with or without the complaisant du Chatelet; sometimes in a mansion taken by Voltaire in Paris. This stood on the corner of two streets no longer existing, Rues du Clos-Georgeau and Traversiere-Saint- Honore, at No. 25 of the latter; and its site now lies under the roadway of new Avenue de l"Opera. The cutting of this avenue has left unchanged only the northern end of Rue Traversiere, and this has been renamed in honor of Moliere. To place Voltaire"s residence in the old mansion at the new number 25 in this street, as a recent topographer has done, is an ingenuous flight of fancy.
Here Voltaire went back to live after death had taken "_la sublime emilie_" from him, from her other lover, and from her husband. This legal husband was less inconsolable than Voltaire, whose almost incredible reproach to the third man in the case makes Morality hold her hand before her face--peeping between the fingers, naturally--while Immorality shakes with frank laughter. On the second floor of this house, Voltaire remained, "_de moitie avec le Marquis du Chatelet_;"
the first floor, which had been her own, being thenceforward closed to them both. Here he tried to find companionship with his selfish and stolid niece, Madame Denis, and with his _protege_ Lekain. He transformed the garret into a private theatre, for the production of his plays, free from the royal or the popular censor; and for the training of Lekain in the part of t.i.tus, in "Brutus." That promising, and soon accepted, actor made his _debut_ at the Theatre Francais in September, 1750, and his patron was not among the audience. From this house, Voltaire went frequently across the river to visit Mlle.
Clairon in her apartment in Rue Visconti, so well known to him when tenanted by Mlle. Lecouvreur, twenty years earlier. And from this house, wherein he came to be too desolate and lonely, Voltaire went forth from France in 1751, to find a still more uncongenial home at Potsdam. With his queer life there, and his absurd quarrels with Frederick the Great, this chronicle cannot concern itself.
"_Cafe a la Voltaire_" is the legend you may read to-day on a pillar of the Cafe Procope, in Rue de l"Ancienne-Comedie, directly opposite the old Comedie Francaise. We have seen the mixed delight and doubt with which coffee was first sipped by the Parisians of the end of the seventeenth century, but it won its way, and in 1720 the Sicilian Procope opened this second Paris _cafe_. It soon became the favorite resort by night of the playwrights and play-actors, and the swells among the audience, of the playhouse across the street. Gradually the men of letters, living in and visiting the capital, made this _cafe_ their gathering-place of an afternoon; so that, on any day in the middle years of the eighteenth century, all the men best worth knowing might be found here. Their names are lettered and their atrocious portraits painted on its inner walls. In the little room on the left, as you walk in on the ground floor, they treasure still, while these lines are written, Voltaire"s table. He sat here, near the stage that produced his plays, sipping his own special and abominable blend of coffee and chocolate. With him sat, among the many not so notable, Diderot, d"Alembert, Marmontel, Rousseau, with his young friend Grimm--hardly yet at home in Paris, not at all at home with its language--and Piron, Voltaire"s pet enemy, who wrote his own epitaph:
"_Ci-git Piron, Que ne fut rien, Pas meme Academicien._"
Here, on an evening in 1709, sat Alain-Rene Le Sage, awaiting in suspense the verdict on his "Turcaret," brought out in the theatre opposite, after many heart-breaking delays; for the misguided author had convinced himself that his t.i.tle to fame would be founded on this now-forgotten play, rather than on his never-to-be-neglected "Gil Blas"!
During the Revolution, while the Cafe de la Regence, which faces the present Comedie Francaise, was the pet resort of the royalist writers, this Cafe Procope was the gathering-place of the Republican penmen; and they draped its walls in black, and wore mourning for three days, when word came across the water in 1790 of the death of Benjamin Franklin, the complete incarnation to them of true republicanism.
Toward the unlamented end of the Second Empire, a small group of young American students was to be found, of an evening, in the Cafe Procope, harmlessly mirthful over their beer. After a while, they were content to sit night after night in silence, all ears for the monologue at a neighboring table; a copious and resistless outburst of argument and invective, sprinkled with Gallic anecdote and with _gros mots_, and broken by Rabelaisian laughter, from a magnificent voice and an ample virility. They were told that the speaker was one Leon Gambetta, an obscure barrister, already under the suspicion of the police of the "lurking jail-bird," whom he helped drive from France, within a few years.
The old house is to-day only a pallid spectre of its aforetime red-blooded self, and is nourished by nothing more solid than these uncompact memories. Loving them and all his Paris, its kindly proprietor tries to revitalize its inanimate atmosphere by his "_Soirees litteraires et musicales_." In a room upstairs "ancient poems, ancient music, old-time song," are listened to by unprinted poets, unplayed dramatists, unhung painters. Some of them read their still unpublished works. The _patron_ enjoys it all, and the waiters are the most depressed in all Paris.
Denis Diderot gives the effect in his work, as Gambetta did in the flesh, of a living force of nature. When, at that same table, Diderot opened the long-locked gate, the full and impetuous outflow swept all before it, submerged and breathless. In his personality, as vivid as that of Mirabeau, we see a fiery soul, a stormy nature, a daring thinker, a prodigious worker. His head seemed encyclopaedic to Grimm, his life-long friend; and Rousseau, first friend and later enemy, a.s.serted that in centuries to come that head would be regarded with the reverence given to the heads of Plato and of Aristotle. Voltaire could imagine no one subject beyond the reach of Diderot"s activity.
a.r.s.ene Houssaye names him "the last man of the day of dreaming in religion and royalty, the first man of the day of the Revolution." And John Morley, looking at him from a greater distance than any of these, and with keener eyes, ranks him higher as a thinker than either Rousseau or Voltaire. As thinker, essayist, critic, cyclopaedist, Diderot is indeed the most striking figure of the eighteenth century.
Rugged, uncouth, headlong, we see him, "_en redingote de peluche grise ereintee_," in the philosophers" alley of the Luxembourg garden, strolling with more energy than others give to striding. Striking and strong he is in the exquisite bust by Houdon in the Louvre, yet with a refinement of expression and a delicacy of poise of the head that are very winning. This effect might have been gained by a Fragonard working in the solid.
Here, under the trees where meet Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rues de Rennes and Bonaparte, it is the student whom we see in bronze, leaning forward in his chair, a quill pen in hand, his worn face bent and intent. This spot was selected for the statue because just there Diderot resided for many years. His house was at No. 12 Rue Taranne, on the corner of Rue Saint-Benoit, and it was torn down when the former street was widened into the new boulevard. Here, young Diderot, refusing to return to the paternal home at Lancres, when he left the College d"Harcourt--the school of Boileau and Racine--lived in a squalid room, during his early days of uncongenial toil in a lawyer"s office and of all sorts of penwork that paid poorly--translations, sermons, catalogues, advertis.e.m.e.nts. Here he was hungry and cold and unhappy; here, in 1743, he married the pretty sewing-girl who lived in this same house with her mother, and who became a devoted and faithful wife to a trying husband. For her he had the only clean love of his not-too-clean life. From this garret he poured forth prose, his chosen form of expression, when poetry was the only vogue, and it is by his persistence, perhaps, that prose has come to the throne in France. And it was while living here that he originated the art-criticism of his country; clear and thorough, discriminating and enthusiastic. Earlier notices of pictures had been as casual as the shows themselves; begun in 1673, under Colbert"s protection and the younger Mansart"s direction, in a small pavilion on the site of the present Theatre Francais, having one entrance in Rue de Richelieu, another in the garden, into which the pictures often overflowed. When Diderot wrote his notices for Grimm, the exhibitions had permanent shelter in the halls of the Louvre. In 1746, still in this house, he published his "Philosophic Thoughts" and other essays that were at first attributed to Voltaire, and that at last sent the real author to Vincennes. There he was kept for three maddening months by an outraged "Strumpetocracy"
and a spiteful Sorbonne, on its last legs of persecution for opinion.
You may go to this prison by the same road his escort took, now named Boulevard Diderot, with unconscious topographic humor.
To visit "great Diderot in durance," Grimm and Rousseau came by this road; stopping, before taking the Avenue de Vincennes, at a farm-house on the edge of Place du Trone--now, Place de la Nation--where the sentimentalist quenched his thirst with milk. That was the day when Rousseau picked up the paradox, from Diderot, which he elaborated into his famous essay, showing the superiority of the savage man over the civilized man. There is as slight trace to be found of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Paris of to-day as in the minds of the men of to-day.
We see him first, in 1745, at the Hotel Saint-Quentin of our Balzac chapter, carrying from there the uncomely servant, Therese le Va.s.seur.
After this he appears fitfully in Paris through many years. In 1772 he is in Rue Platriere--a street now widened and named for him--on the fourth floor of a wretched house opposite the present Post-office.
There he was found by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre--as thin-skinned and touchy as Rousseau, yet somehow the two kept friendly--with his repulsive Therese, whom he had made his wife in 1768. This preacher of the holiness of the domestic affections had sent their five children to the foundling hospital, according to his own statement, which is our only reason for doubting that he did it. Bernardin found him, clad in an overcoat and a white _bonnet_, copying music; of which Rousseau knew nothing, except by the intuition of genius. For those who wish, there are the pilgrimages to the Hermitage at Montmorenci, occupied by him in 1756, and nearly forty years later by a man equally attractive, Maximilien Robespierre; and to Ermenonville, the spot of Rousseau"s death in 1778. It is easier to stroll to the Pantheon, where, on one side, is a statue of the author of "Le Contrat Social" and "emile,"
which gives him a dignity that was not his in life. This tribute from the French nation was decreed by the National Convention of _15 Brumaire, An II_, and erected by the National a.s.sembly in 1791.
Durable as its bronze this tribute was meant to be, at the time when he was deified by the nation; since then, his body and his memory have been "cast to the dogs; a deep-minded, even n.o.ble, yet wofully misarranged mortal." While acknowledging his impress on his generation as an interpreter of moral and religious sentiment, and without denying the claim of his admirers, that he is the father of modern democracy, we may own, too, to a plentiful lack of liking for the man.
Released and returned to his wife in Rue Taranne, Diderot lost no time in beginning again that toil which was his life. With all his other work--"Letters on the Blind, for the use of those who can see," dramas now forgotten, an obscene novel that paid the debts of his mistress--he began and carried out his Encyclopaedia. "No sinecure is it!" says Carlyle: "penetrating into all subjects and sciences, waiting and rummaging in all libraries, laboratories; nay, for many years fearlessly diving into all manner of workshops, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g stocking-looms, and even working thereon (that the department of "Arts and Trades" might be perfect); then seeking out contributors, and flattering them, quickening their laziness, getting payment for them, quarrelling with bookseller and printer, bearing all miscalculations, misfortunes, misdoings of so many fallible men on his single back." On top of all, he had to bear the spasmodic persecution of the Government instigated by the Church. The patient, gentle d"Alembert, with his serenity, his clearness, and his method, helped Diderot more than all the others. And so grew, in John Morley"s words, "that mountain of volumes, reared by the endeavor of stout hands and faithful," which, having done its work for truth and humanity, is now a deserted ruin.
As he brought it to an end after thirty years of labor, Diderot found himself grown old and worn, and the busiest brain and hand in France began to flag. By now, he stood next in succession to the King, Voltaire. Yet, for all the countless good pages he has written, it has been truly said that he did not write one great book. Other urgent creditors, besides old age, hara.s.sed him, and he had to sell his collection of books. They were bought by the Empress Catharine of Russia, at a handsome value, and she handsomely allowed him to retain them for her, and furthermore paid him a salary for their care. Grimm urged on her, in one of his gossiping _feuilles_, that have given material for so much personal history, the propriety of housing her library and its librarian properly, and this was done in the grand mansion now No. 39 Rue de Richelieu. We have come to this street with Moliere and with Mignard, and there are other memories along this lower length, to which a chapter could be given. We can awaken only those that now belong to No. 50. Here lived a couple named Poisson, and on March 19, 1741, they gave in marriage to Charles Guillaume le Normand their daughter Jeanne-Antoinette, a girl of fifteen. That blossom ripened and rottened into La Pompadour. The house is quite unchanged since that day. In a large rear room on its first floor, in the year 1899, future chroniclers will be glad to note that Moncure D. Conway made an abbreviation of his n.o.ble life of Thomas Paine for its French translation. His working-room was in the midst of the scenes of Paine"s Paris stay, but not one of them can be fixed with certainty.
The house numbered 39 of this street is occupied by the "_Maison Sterlin_," a factory of artistic metal-work in locks and bolts and fastenings for doors and windows. It is an attractive museum of fine iron and steel workmanship, ancient and modern. There, in a case, is preserved the superbly elaborate key of Corneille"s birth-house in Rouen. The brothers Bricard have had the reverent good taste to retain the late seventeenth-century interior of their establishment, and you may mount by the easy stairs, with their fine wrought-iron rail, to Diderot"s dining-room on the first floor, its panelling unaltered since his death there, on July 31, 1784. He had enjoyed, for only twelve days, the grandest residence and the greatest ease his life had known. They had been made busy days, of course, spent in arranging his books and pictures. Sitting here, eating hastily, he died suddenly and quietly, his elbows on the table. On August 1st his body was buried in the parish church of Saint-Roch, and the tablet marking the spot is near that commemorating Corneille, who had been brought there exactly one hundred years before.
This church is eloquent with the presence of these two, with the voice of Bossuet--"the Bible transfused into a man," in Lamartine"s phrase--and with the ping of Bonaparte"s bullets on its porch; yet there is a presence within, less clamorous but not less impressive than any of these. In the fourth chapel, on your left as you enter, is a bronze bust of a man, up to which a boy and a girl look from the two corners of the pedestal. This is the monument of Charles Michel, Abbe de l"epee, placed above his grave in the chapel where he held services at times, and the boy and girl stand for the countless deaf-and-dumb children to whom he gave speech and hearing. The son of a royal architect, with every prospect of preferment in the Church, with some success as a winning preacher, his liberal views turned him from this career. His interest in two deaf-mute sisters led him to his life-work. There were others in England, and there was the good Pereira in Spain, who had studied and invented before him, but it is to this gentle-hearted Frenchman that the world of the deaf and dumb owes most for its rescue from its inborn bondage. He gave to them all he had, and all he was; for their sake he went ill-clad always, cold in winter, hungry often. He had but little private aid, and no official aid at all. He alone, with his modest income, and with the little house left him by his father, started his school of instruction for deaf-mutes in 1760.
The house was at No. 14 Rue des Moulins, a retired street leading north from Rue Saint-Honore, and so named because near its line were the mills of the b.u.t.te de Saint-Roch--where we are to find the head-quarters of Joan the Maid. One of these mills may be seen to-day, re-erected and in perfect preservation, at Crony-sur-Ourcq, near Meaux, and above its doorway is the image of the patron-saint, to whom the mill was dedicated in the fifteenth century. This quarter of the town had become, during the reign of Louis XIV., the centre of a select suburb of small, elegant mansions, tenanted by many ill.u.s.trious men. On the rear of his lot the good _abbe_ built a small chapel, and in it and in the house he pa.s.sed nearly thirty years of self-sacrifice, ended only by his death on December 23, 1789. When the Avenue de l"Opera was cut in 1877-8, his street was shortened and his establishment was razed. At the nearest available spot, on the wall of No. 23 Rue Therese, two tablets have been placed, the one that fixes the site, the other recording the decree of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly of July, 1789, by which the Abbe de l"epee was placed on the roll of those French citizens who merit well the recognition of humanity and of his country. And, in 1791, amid all its troubled labors, the a.s.sembly founded the Inst.i.tution National des Sourds-Muets of Paris, on the base of his humble school. The big and beneficent inst.i.tution is in Rue Saint-Jacques, at its intersection with the street named in his honor. And it is an honor to the Parisians that they thus keep alive the memory of their great men, so that, in a walk through their streets, we run down a catalogue of all who are memorable in French history. In the vast court-yard, at that corner, under a glorious elm-tree, is a colossal statue of the _abbe_, standing with a youth to whom he talks with his fingers. It is the work of a deaf-mute, Felix Martin, well named, for he is most happy in this work.
Like the Abbe de l"epee, and for as many years--almost thirty of his half-voluntary, half-enforced exile--Voltaire had devoted himself in his own way to the bettering of humanity, crippled mentally and spiritually. He had given vision to the blind, hearing to the deaf, voice to the speechless. He took in the outcast, and cherished the orphan. With his inherent pity for the oppressed, and his deep-rooted indignation with all cruelty, he had made himself the advocate of the unjustly condemned; and none among his brilliant pages will live longer than his impa.s.sioned pleadings for the rehabilitation of the illegally executed Jean Calas. And now he comes back from Ferney, through all the length of France, in a triumphal progress without parallel, welcomed everywhere by exultant worshippers. At four in the afternoon of February 10, 1778, his coach appears just where his statue now stands at the end of Quai Malaquais, then Quai des Theatins. He wears a large, loose cloak of crimson velvet, edged with a small gold cord, and a cap of sable and velvet, and he is "smothered in roses." His driver makes his way slowly along the quay, through the acclaiming crowd, to the home of "_la Bonne et Belle_," the girl he had rescued from a convent and adopted, now the happy wife of the Marquis de Villette. Their eighteenth-century mansion stands on the corner of Rue de Beaune and present Quai Voltaire, unaltered in its simple stateliness. Here Voltaire is visited by all Paris that was allowed to get to him. Mlle. Clairon is one of the first, on her knees at the bedside of her old friend, exhausted by his triumph. She is no longer young, and shows that she owns to fifty-five years, by her retired life at the present numbers 34 and 36 Rue du Bac. There she has her books and her sewing and her spendthrift Comte Valbelle d"Oraison, who lives on her.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Seventeenth-century Buildings on Quai Malaquais, with the Inst.i.tute and the Statue of Voltaire.]
D"Alembert and Benjamin Franklin are among his visitors, and the dethroned Du Barry, and thirty _chefs_, each set on the appointment of cook for the master. He goes to the Academy, then installed in the Louvre, and to the Comedie Francaise, temporarily housed in the Tuileries, the Odeon not being ready. There his "Irene," finished just before leaving Switzerland, is produced, and at the performance on the evening of March 30th he is crowned in his box, his bust is crowned on the beflowered stage, and the palms and laurels and plaudits leave him breath only to murmur: "My friends, do you really want to kill me with joy?" That was the last seen of him by the public. He had come to Paris, he said, "to drink Seine water"; and either that beverage poisoned him, or the cup of flattery he emptied so often. One month after that supreme night, on May 30, 1778, at a little after eleven at night, he died in that corner apartment on the first floor. For thirty years after it was unoccupied and its windows were kept closed.
Almost his last words, as he remembered what the Church had meant to him, and what it might mean for him, were: "I don"t want to be thrown into the roadway like that poor Lecouvreur." That fate was spared his wasted frame by the quickness of his nephew, the Abbe Mignot. Here, at the entrance-gate in Rue de Beaune, this honest man placed his uncle"s body, hardly cold, in his travelling carriage, and with it drove hastily, and with no needless stops, to Scellieres in Champagne. There he gave out the laudable lie of a death on the journey, and procured immediate interment in the nave of his church, under all due rites.
The grave was hardly covered before orders from the Bishop of Troyes arrived, forbidding the burial. The trick would have tickled the adroit old man. His body was allowed to rest for thirteen years, and then it was brought back in honor to Paris. A great concourse had a.s.sembled, only two weeks earlier, at the place where the Bastille had been, hoping to hoot at the royal family haled back from Varennes.
Now, on July 11, 1791, a greater concourse was stationed here, to look with silent reverence on this _cortege_, headed by Beaumarchais, all the famous men of France carrying the pall or joining in the procession. They entered by the Vincennes road, pa.s.sed along the boulevards, crossed Pont Royal to stop before this mansion, and went thence to the Pantheon. There his remains lay once more in peace, until the Bourbons "de-Pantheonized" both Voltaire and Rousseau.
Benjamin Franklin had come to visit Voltaire here on the quay, by way of the Seine from Pa.s.sy, in which retired suburb he was then living.
The traces he has left in the capital are to be found in two inscriptions and a tradition. We know that he had rooms, during a part of the year 1776, in Rue de Penthievre, and his name, carved in the pediment of the stately facade of the house numbered 26 in that street, is a record of his residence in it or on its site. There is another claimant to his tenancy for a portion of this same year. The American who happens to go to or through Pa.s.sy, on a Fourth of July, will have opportune greeting from the Stars and Stripes, draped over the doorway of the old-fashioned building, more a cottage than a mansion, now numbered 21 Rue Franklin. Its owners do this each year, they tell you, in honor of the great American who occupied the cottage in 1776. Their claim is the more credible, inasmuch as the street has been given his name since his day there, when it was Rue Ba.s.se. In the following year he went farther afield, and for nine years he remained in a villa in the large garden, now covered by the ugly ecole des Freres de la Doctrine Chretienne, at the corner of Rues Raynouard and Singer. The Historical Society of Pa.s.sy and Auteuil has placed a tablet in this corner wall, recording Franklin"s residence at this spot from 1777 to 1785. His friend, M. Ray de Chaumont, occupied only a portion of his Hotel de Valentinois, and gave up the remaining portion to Franklin for his residence and his office, eager to show his sympathy for the colonies and his fondness for their envoy. Only John Adams, when he came, was shocked in all his scrupulosity to find an American agent living rent-free! In this garden he put up the first lightning-conductor in France, and in this house he negotiated the treaty that gave the crown"s aid to the colonies and made possible their independence. To this spot came the crowd to catch a glimpse of the homely-clad figure, and men of science and letters to learn from him, and ladies from the court to caress him. And it may have been here that he made answer to the enamoured _marquise_, in words that have never been topped for the ready wit of a gallant old gentleman.
The _cortege_ that accompanied Voltaire"s remains to the Pantheon was headed, it has been said, by Beaumarchais; fittingly so, for Beaumarchais was then heir-presumptive to the dramatic crown, and his "Figaro" had already begun to laugh the n.o.bility from out of France.
Louis XVI. saw clearly, for once, when he said: "If I consent to the production of the "Marriage of Figaro," the Bastille will go." He did consent, and it was played to an immense house on April 27, 1784, in the Comedie Francaise, now the Odeon. That night the old order had its last laugh, and it rang strangely and sadly. Yet in this comedy, that killed by ridicule--the most potent weapon in France--once played a queen that was, and once a queen that was to be. On August 19, 1785, on the stage of the Little Trianon at Versailles, the Comte d"Artois--brother to Louis XIV., later to be Charles X.--appeared as the Barber, to the Rosina of Marie Antoinette. And, in the summer of 1803, during the Consulate, when Malmaison was the scene of gayeties, a theatre was constructed in the garden, and on its boards, Hortense (soon after Queen of Holland) made a success as Rosina.
Playwriting was merely a digression in the diversified career of this man of various apt.i.tudes, whose ups and downs we have no excuse for dwelling on, as we trace him through Paris streets. There is no tablet to mark his birth, on January 24, 1732, in the house of his father, Caron, the watchmaker of Rue Saint-Denis, opposite the old Cemetery of the Innocents, nearly at Rue de la Ferronerie. Pierre-Augustin Caron he was christened, and it was in his soaring years that he added "de Beaumarchais." This quarter is notable in that it was the scene of the birth and boyhood of four famous dramatists--of Moliere, as we have seen, and of Regnard, as we shall see; of Beaumarchais and of Eugene Scribe. To record this latest birth, on December 24, 1791, a tablet is set in the wall of No. 32 Rue Saint-Denis, at the corner of Rue de la Reynie, only a few steps south of the Caron house. It is a plain, old-style house of four stories and a garret, and has become a shop for chocolates and sweets. It has on its sign, "_Au Chat Noir_"; black cats are carved wherever they will cling on its front and side, and a huge, wooden, black cat rides on the cart that carries the chocolate.
Beaumarchais had a residence at No. 6 Rue de Conde in 1773, and at the Hotel de Hollande, Rue Vielle-du-Temple 47, in 1776. We shall go there later. On the wall of the house, No. 2 Boulevard Beaumarchais, a tablet marks the site of his great mansion and its s.p.a.cious gardens.
These covered the entire triangle enclosed by Rues Amelot, Daval, and Roquette. He had found the money for this colossal outlay, not in his plays, but in all sorts of mercantile transactions, some of them seemingly shabby. It is claimed that he lost large sums in supplying, as the unavowed agent of the crown, war equipment to the struggling American colonies. His palace went up in sight of the Bastille, then going down. The Parisians came in crowds to see his grounds, with their grottoes, statues, and lake; and he entertained all the swelldom of France. There, one day in 1792, the mob from the too-near Faubourg Saint-Antoine came uninvited, and raided house and grounds for hidden arms and ammunition, not to be found. The owner went to the Abbaye prison and thence into exile and poverty. Returning in 1796, he spent his last years in a hopeless attempt to gather up remnants of his broken fortunes, a big remnant being the debt neglected and rejected by the American Congress. The romance of this "Lost Million" cannot be told here. Beaumarchais died in this house in 1799, and was buried in the garden. When the ground was taken for the Saint-Martin Ca.n.a.l in 1818, his remains were removed to Pere-Lachaise. The grave is as near that of Scribe as were their birthplaces. His name was given to the old Boulevard Saint-Antoine in 1831, and in 1897 his statue was placed in that wide s.p.a.ce in Rue Saint-Antoine that faces Rue des Tournelles.
The pedestal is good, and worthy of a more convincing statue of this man of strong character and of contrasting qualities. And at the Washington Head-quarters at Newburgh-on-Hudson, and at the various collections of Revolutionary relics in the United States, you will find cannon that came from French a.r.s.enals, and that, it was hinted, left commissions in the hands of Caron de Beaumarchais.
THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION
[Ill.u.s.tration: Charlotte Corday.
(From the copy by Baudry of the only authentic portrait, painted in her prison.)]
THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION