The Stones of Paris in History and Letters.
by Benjamin Ellis Martin and Charlotte M. Martin.
VOL. II
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 Pantaleon, 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 mediaeval _Pays Latin_, filling up the s.p.a.ce 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 Pre-aux-Clercs, and in the fields beyond, and along the river-bank toward the west. In the centre of this new quarter the n.o.bility 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 Inst.i.tute to the Pantheon, 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 lumiere_" 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-Peres.
This eastern end, nearly as far west as Rue de Bellecha.s.se, has been carried away by new Boulevard Saint-Germain, and with it the _hotel_ 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 Clerel, 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 inst.i.tutions 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 Democratie en Amerique," 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-a.s.sistant lion in the _salon_ of Madame Recamier, whose head lion was always Chateaubriand.
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 Francois-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot, a young professor at the Sorbonne. His cla.s.ses 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 Hotel 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 Bellecha.s.se. 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 Amba.s.sador 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-Honore. 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 _opera-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 sh.o.r.es 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 "Memoires," 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 "Meditations Poetiques" appeared. In 1830, his "Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses" had made it sure that here was a soul filled with true harmony. And while he sang the consolations of religion, as Chateaubriand 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 Ill.u.s.trious 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 Hotel 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 rect.i.tude, 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 l.u.s.tre. 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"Universite. 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 chast.i.ty, 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 pa.s.sed over. In 1867, in its and his dying years, that government gave him money, and the munic.i.p.ality gave him a house. These gifts came to him in Rue Cambaceres, in a small hotel now rebuilt into No. 7 of that street.
Where it meets with Rue de Penthievre, 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 Pa.s.sy, 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 nave 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 apprais.e.m.e.nt 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."
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.similate, during the twelve hours of each of the five following days; on Sat.u.r.day 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, Merimee. 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-Parna.s.se, 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 Inst.i.tute. 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-Parna.s.se, saw his thirty years of colossal work. From here, he went to take his chair of Latin poetry in the College 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 ill.u.s.trious 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-Parna.s.se, which he thought of as the pleasure-ground of the mediaeval 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, Theodore 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 pa.s.sing 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.ds 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 facade, 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 Lycee 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. Gra.s.s and foliage, and a sky above an open s.p.a.ce, 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 College 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 College de France made him its professor of History and Moral Science. In that inst.i.tution, he and his colleague Quinet caused immense commotion by their a.s.saults 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"Arbalete, a street named from the "_Chevaliers de l"Arbalete_," who had made it their archery grounds in mediaeval 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 Fosses-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 Lh.o.m.ond. Otherwise, no change has come to this quiet street, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century buildings, among which is the Hotel 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"a.s.sas, 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 a.s.sures 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 a.n.a.lysis; I consider that history should be a resurrection." This idea is translated into durable marble on his striking tombstone in Pere-Lachaise, done in high relief by the chisel of Mercie.
The life of Maximilien-Paul-emile Littre, a few years longer than that of Michelet and equally full of strenuous labor, was pa.s.sed on this same slope and ended in this same Street of a.s.sas. 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 Lycee 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 Macons, 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"a.s.sas--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, Littre gave up medicine, to which he had been trained, for journalistic work; some of which, in his early days, was done for the Gazette Medicale, 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 pa.s.sing, and we cannot even glance at the altered residences, in this quarter, of the gifted Amedee 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-Parna.s.se, 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 Odeon, the theatre in which he had his habitual seat. He died at Pa.s.sy in 1874.
This _faubourg_ has had no more striking figure than that of Prosper Merimee, tight-b.u.t.toned in frock-coat, and of irreproachable starchedness; with a curiously round, cold eye behind gla.s.ses, a large nose with a square end, a forehead seamed with fine wrinkles. It was his pride to pa.s.s as an Englishman in his walk. In his work, in romance equally with archaeology, 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 ecole des Beaux-Arts, at No. 16 Rue des Pet.i.ts-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 Inst.i.tute, 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 Merimee"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 Ca.s.sette, 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce flashes with that adorable creation of the Abbe Prevost; 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 Chateaubriand"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 G.o.ddess, 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 sh.e.l.ls, wherein Bossuet and Fenelon 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 Fenelon"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 _hotel-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-eglises, now renamed Rue de l"Abbe-de-l"epee.
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 College Bossuet, where priests teach their dogmas. Old Pa.s.sage 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, "gra.s.s-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 College de France, and there took up his official residence. His appointment to the chair of Hebrew in that inst.i.tution, 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 College 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 aeolian harp of our time"; and Beranger"s verse well fits her:
"_Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitot qu"on le touche il resonne._"
It vibrated to the touch of outrages on woman and of injustice to man, and it pulsated with equal pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sumed the male costume which enabled her to pa.s.s 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 Konigsmark 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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_.