Years before, he had found that the inspiration for work given by coffee had lessened in length and strength. "It now excites my brain for only fifteen days consecutively," he had complained; protesting that Rossini was able to work for the same period on the same stimulus! So he spurred himself on, listening to none of the warnings of worn nature nor of watchful friends. "Well, we won"t talk about that now," was always his answer. "In the olden days," says Sainte-Beuve, "men wrote with their brains; but Balzac wrote, not only with his brains, but with his blood." And now, he went to pieces all at once; his heart and stomach could no longer do their work; his nerves, once of steel and Manila hemp, were torn and jangled, and snapped at every strain; his very eyesight failed him. The most pitiful words ever penned by a man-of-letters were scrawled by him, at the end of a note written by his wife to Gautier, a few weeks after their home-coming: "_Je ne puis ni lire ni ecrire._"
"On the 18th August, 1850"--writes Hugo in "Choses Vues"--"my wife, who had been during the day to call on Madame Balzac, told me that Balzac was dying. My uncle, General Louis Hugo, was dining with us, but as soon as we rose from table, I left him and took a cab to Rue Fortunee, Quartier Beaujon, where M. de Balzac lived. He had bought what remained of the _hotel_ of M. de Beaujon, a few buildings of which had escaped the general demolition, and out of them he had made a charming little house, elegantly furnished, with a _porte-cochere_ on the street, and in place of a garden, a long, narrow, paved court-yard, with flower-beds about it here and there."
[Ill.u.s.tration: Plaque marking place of death of Balzac]
It was to No. 14, Allee Fortunee, that Hugo drove. That suburban lane is now widened into Rue Balzac, and where it meets Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honore there is a bit of garden-wall, and set in it is a tablet recording the site of this, Balzac"s last home. The house itself has quite vanished, but one can see, above that wall, the upper part of a stone pavilion with Greek columns, built by him, it is believed.
"I rang," continues Hugo; "the moon was veiled by clouds; the street deserted. No one came. I rang again. The gate opened; a woman came forward, weeping. I gave my name, and was told to enter the _salon_, which was on the ground floor. On a pedestal opposite the fireplace was the colossal bust by David. A wax-candle was burning on a handsome oval table in the middle of the room.... We pa.s.sed along a corridor, and up a staircase carpeted in red, and crowded with works of art of all kinds--vases, pictures, statues, paintings, brackets bearing porcelains.... I heard a loud and difficult breathing. I was in M. de Balzac"s bedroom.
"The bed was in the middle of the room. M. de Balzac lay in it, his head supported by a mound of pillows, to which had been added the red damask cushions of the sofa. His face was purple, almost black, inclining to the right. The hair was gray, and cut rather short. His eyes were open and fixed. I saw his side face only, and thus seen, he was like Napoleon.... I raised the coverlet and took Balzac"s hand. It was moist with perspiration. I pressed it; he made no answer to the pressure...."
The bust that Hugo saw was done by David d"Angers; a reduced copy surmounts Balzac"s tomb. His portrait, in water-color, painted, within an hour after his death, by Eugene Giraud, is a touching portrayal of the man, truer than any made during life, his widow thought. While long suffering had wasted, it had refined, his face, and into it had come youth, strength, majesty. It is the head of the t.i.tan, who carried a pitiable burden through a life of brave labor.
Balzac"s death was known in a moment, it would seem, to his creditors, and they came clamoring to the door, and invaded the house--a ravening horde, ransacking rooms and hunting for valuables. They drove the widow away, and she found a temporary home with Madame de Surville, at 47 Rue des Martyrs. This house and number are yet unchanged. Cabinets and drawers were torn open, and about the grounds were scattered his letters and papers, sketches of new stories, drafts of contemplated work--all, that could be, collected by his friends, also hurrying to the spot. They found ma.n.u.scripts in the shops around, ready to enwrap b.u.t.ter and groceries. One characteristic and most valuable letter was tracked to three places, in three pieces, by an enthusiast, who rescued the first piece just as it was twisted up and ready to light a cobbler"s pipe.
"He died in the night," continues Hugo. "He was first taken to the Chapel Beaujon.... The funeral service took place at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule.
As I stood by the coffin, I remembered that there my second daughter had been baptized. I had not been in the church since.... The procession crossed Paris, and went by way of the boulevards to Pere-Lachaise. Rain was falling as we left the church, and when we reached the cemetery. It was one of those days when the heavens seemed to weep. We walked the whole distance. I was at the head of the coffin on the right, holding one of the silver ta.s.sels of the pall. Alexandre Dumas was on the other side.... When we reached the grave, which was on the brow of the hill, the crowd was immense.... The coffin was lowered into the grave, which is near to those of Charles Nodier and Casimir Delavigne. The priest said a last prayer and I a few words.
While I was speaking the sun went down. All Paris lay before me, afar off, in the splendid mists of the sinking orb, the glow of which seemed to fall into the grave at my feet, as the dull sounds of the sods dropping on the coffin broke in upon my last words."
Yes, stretched before his grave, lies all Paris, as his Rastignac saw it, when he turned from the _fosses-communes_, into which they had just thrown the body of Pere Goriot, and with his clinched fist flung out his grand defiance toward the great, beautiful, cruel city: "_a nous deux, maintenant!_"
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Just as Balzac was a victim of calumny during life, so, since death, has he suffered from carelessness. It is almost impossible to make sure of incidents and dates in his career. These errors begin with his birth, which is placed on the 20th May by many writers, and is so cut on the memorial tablet in Paris. In this text, his birth-date is fixed on the 16th May, on the strength of his family records, and the statements of his life-long friends. Of these, some say that he was born on the _27 Floreal_, and others on the day of Saint-Honore. No figuring can make these dates fall on any other day than the 16th May. As for the many conflicting statements concerning him that have been handed down, in the absence of indisputable evidence, those alone are accepted here which are most nearly in keeping with the proven facts and dates in his life.
THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Figure of d"Artagnan.
(From the Dumas Monument, by Gustave Dore.)]
THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS
It was in 1823 that Alexandre Dumas, in his twenty-first year, took coach for Paris from his boyhood-home with his widowed mother, at Villers-Cotterets. He was set down at the princ.i.p.al landing-place of the provincial diligences in Place des Victoires, and found a room near by in an inn at No. 9 Rue du Bouloi. Its old walls are still there on the street and in the court, and the Hotel de Blois still awaits the traveller. Thence he started on foot, at once, for No. 64 Rue du Mont-Blanc, the home of the popular Liberal spokesman in the Chamber of Deputies, General Foy, an old comrade-in-arms of General Dumas, to whom his son brought a letter of introduction.
About that house, two years later, a few days after November 28, 1825, all Paris a.s.sembled, while all France mourned, for the burial of this honest man, whose earnest voice had been heard only in the cause of freedom and justice. Marked by a tablet, his house still stands, and is now No. 62 Rue de la Chaussee-d"Antin--the renamed Rue du Mont-Blanc--on the corner of Rue de la Victoire.
Besides this letter, young Dumas carried only a meagre outfit of luggage, and such meagre education as may be picked up by a clever and yet an idle lad, in a notary"s office in a provincial town.
Indeed, when he was made welcome by General Foy, he was questioned, too; and, to his chagrin, he was found to be without equipment for any sort of service. On the strength, however, of his "_belle ecriture_,"
he obtained, through the influence of the general, a petty clerkship in the household of the Duc d"Orleans, coming naturally enough to the boy from Villers-Cotterets, the country-seat of the Orleans family.
Its stipend of 1,200 francs a year was doubtless munificent in the eyes of Orleans thrift, and was certainly sufficient for the needs then of the future owner of Monte-Cristo"s millions. He earned his wage and no more; for his official pen--at his desk in the Palais-Royal--while doing its strict duty on official doc.u.ments, was more gladly busied on his own studies and his own paper-spoiling. For the author within him had come to life with his first tramping of the Paris streets and his first taking-in of all that they meant then.
The babies, begotten by French fathers and mothers during the Napoleonic wars, and during those tremendous years at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, breathed, full-lunged, an air of instant and intense vitality. Now, come to stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, eager to speed the coming of red-blooded Romanticism and the going of cold and correct Cla.s.sicism, showed itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in literature and the arts, after the sterility of so many years.
When Dumas came to Paris, Lamartine had already, in 1820, charmed the public by the freshness and grace of his "Meditations." His admirers were content with the sonorous surface of his vague, spiritual exaltations, satisfied not to seek for any depth below. Hugo, barely twenty, had thrilled men with the sounding phrases of his "Odes et Ballades." These two, coming behind Chenier the herald and Chateaubriand the van-courier, were imposing pioneers of the great movement. Even more popular than these two Royalist poets, as they were regarded, was Casimir Delavigne--already installed over Dumas as Librarian at the Palais-Royal--rather a cla.s.sicist in form, yet hailed as the poet and playwright of the Liberal Opposition. Soulie, not so well known now as he merits, won his first fame in 1824 by his poems and plays. De Vigny had brought out his earliest poems in 1822; and now, "isolated in his ivory tower," he was turning the periods of his admirable "Cinq-Mars." De Musset was getting ready to try his wings, and made his first open-air flight in 1828; a flight alone, for the poet of personal pa.s.sion joined no flock, ever. Gautier was serving his apprenticeship to that poetic art, to whose service he gave a life-long devotion and the most perfect craftsmanship in all France.
"They all come from Chateaubriand," said Goethe, of these and of other rhymesters of that time. Chateaubriand himself had closed his career as poet and as imaginative writer as far back as 1809, and had by now taken his rank as a cla.s.sic in literature, and in life as a Peer of France and a Minister of the Bourbons.
But of all the singers of that day it was to Beranger that the public ear turned most quickly and most kindly; even though he, then forty-three years of age, might also seem to be of an earlier generation. Those others touched, with various fingers, the lyre or the lute; he turned a most melodious hand-organ, with a.s.sured and showy art, and around it the captivated crowd loved to throng, with enraptured long ears. His cheaply sentimental airs were hummed and whistled all over France, and, known to everybody everywhere, there was really no need of his putting them in type on paper, and no need of his being sent to prison for that crime by Charles X. Yet he had his turn, soon again, and his _chansons_, as much as any utterance of man, upset the Bourbon throne and placed Louis-Philippe on that shaky seat. That most prosaic of monarchs was sung up to the throne, and the misguided poet soon found him out for what he was.
In prose, during these years, Nodier, Librarian at the a.r.s.enal, was plying his refined and facile pen. Merimee showed his hand in 1825, not to clasp, with any show of sympathy, the hand of any fellow-worker, yet willing to take his share of the strain. Guizot, out of active politics for a time, did his most notable pen-work between 1825 and 1830. His untiring antagonist, Thiers, not yet turned into the practical politician, produced, between 1823 and 1827, his "History of the French Revolution," voluminous and untrustworthy; its author energetically earning Carlyle"s epithet, "a brisk little man in his way." His life-long crony, Mignet, was digging vigorously in dry, historic dust. Sainte-Beuve left, in 1827, his medical studies for those critical studies in which he soon showed the master"s hand; notably with his early paper on Hugo"s "Odes et Ballades." Michelet was finding his _metier_ by writing histories for children. The two Thierry brothers, Augustin and Amedee, proved the genuine historian"s stuff in them as early as 1825. Balzac was working, alone and unknown, in his garret; and young Sue was handling the naval surgeon"s knife, before learning how to handle the pen.
And nearly all of these, nearly all the fine young fellows who made the movement of 1830, had got inspiration from Villemain, who had spoken, constantly and steadfastly, from his platform in the Sorbonne during the ten years from 1815 to 1825, those st.u.r.dy and graphic words which gave cheer and courage to so many.
There were a similar vitality and fecundity in painting and music and their sister arts, and the brilliant host stirring for their sake might be cited along with the unnumbered and unnamable pen-workers of this teeming decade.
Less aggressive was the theatre. Scribe had possession, flooding the stage with his comedies, vaudeville, opera-librettos, peopling its boards with his pasteboard personages. There was call for revolt and need of life. Talma, near his end, full of honors, devoted to his very death to his art, longed to fill the role of a _man_ on the boards, after so many years" impersonation of bloodless heroes. So he told Dumas, who had come to see him only two weeks before his death, in 1826, when the veteran thought he was recovering from illness--an illness acceptable to the great tragedian, for it gave him, he pointed out with pride, the lean frame and pendent cheeks, "beautiful for old Tiberius"--the new part he was then studying. Death came with his cue before that role could be played.
This wish for a real human being on the boards came home to Dumas, when he saw the true Shakespeare rendered by Macready and Miss Smithson at the Salle Favart in 1826. It was Shakespeare, in the reading before and now in the acting, that helped Dumas more than any other influence. No Frenchman has comprehended more completely than Dumas the Englishman"s universality, and he used to say that, after G.o.d, Shakespeare was the great creator. His first attempt to put live men and women on the stage, in "Christine," was crowded out by a poorer play of the same name, pushed by the powers behind the Comedie Francaise. But on its boards, on the evening of February 16, 1829, was produced his "Henri III. et sa Cour," an instantaneous and una.s.sailable success. He might have said, in the words of Henri IV. at Senlis, "My hour has struck"; for from that hour he went on in his triumphant dramatic career. The Romantic drama had come at last, with its superb daring, its sounding but spurious sentiment, its engorgement of adjectives, and its plentiful lack of all sense of the ludicrous. Perhaps if it had not taken itself so seriously, and had been blessed with a few grains of the saving salt of humor, it had not gone stale so soon.
Dumas had removed, soon after coming to town, from the inn in Rue du Bouloi to another of the same sort just around the corner, Hotel des Vieux-Augustins, in the street of the same name--now widened and renamed Rue Herold. In the widening they have cut away his inn, at present No. 12, and that of "_La Providence_," next door at No. 14, where Charlotte Corday had found a room on coming to Paris, thirty years before, to visit Monsieur Marat. The sites of the two hotels are covered by the rear buildings of the Caisse d"Epargne, which fronts on Rue du Louvre. One ancient house, which saw the arrival of both these historic travellers, has been left at No. 10; in it was born, on January 28, 1791, the musician Herold, composer of "Zampa" and "Pre-aux-Clercs." Dumas lived for a while later at No. 1 Place des Italiens, now Place Boeldieu. In the summer of 1824 he brought his good mother to town, and took rooms on the second floor of No. 53 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, next door to the old _cabaret_, "_Au Lion d"Argent_." Mother and son soon after moved across the river, where he found for her a home in Rue Madame, and found for himself an apartment at No. 25 Rue de l"Universite, on the southeastern corner of Rue du Bac. There had been an ill.u.s.trious tenant of this house, in 1816 and 1817, who was named Chateaubriand. Dumas, in his "Memoires," gives both the third and the fourth floors for his abode, as he happens to feel like fixing them. He had windows on both streets, and he fitted up the rooms "with a certain elegance." Shoppers at the big establishment, "_Au pet.i.t Saint-Thomas_," may explore its annex and mount to Dumas"s rooms in the house that now hides its stately facade and its entrance _perron_ in the court behind modern structures. Here he remained from 1824 to 1833, making a longer stay than in any of the many camping-places of his migratory career. And here he gave his name to his most memorable endowment to the French drama, in the person of his only son, born on July 29, 1824, at the home of the mother, Marie-Catherine Lebay, a dressmaker, living at No. 1 Place des Italiens, where Dumas had had his rooms. On March 17, 1831, the father formally owned the son by _l"acte de reconnaissance_, signed and recorded at the office of the mayor of the Second Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, May 6, 1831. So came into legal existence "Alexandre Dumas, _fils_."
Portions of the child"s early life were pa.s.sed with his father, but separations became more frequent and more prolonged, as the boy developed his own marked character--in striking contrast with that of the elder. Their mutual att.i.tude came, before many years, to be as queer and as tragi-comic as any att.i.tudes invented by either of them for the stage. The son used to say, in later life, that he seemed to be the elderly guardian and counsellor of the father--a happy-go-lucky, improvident, chance child. For the son of the Parisienne had inherited her hard shrewdness along with his father"s dramatic range, and this happy commingling of the stronger qualities of the parents gave him his special powers.
The doings of the elder Dumas during the famous three days of July, 1830, would make an amusing chapter. Eager to play the part of his own boisterous heroes, he flung himself, with hot-headed and bombastic ardor, into throne-upsetting and throne-setting-up. Of course he allied himself with the opponents of Louis-Philippe--possibly in keen memory of his monthly hundred francs worth of drudgery--and of course the success of the Orleanists left him with no further chance for place or patronage.
So his pen was his only ally, and it soon proved itself to be no broken reed, but a strong staff for support. Strong as it was and unresting, no one pen could do even the manual labor required by the endless volumes he poured forth. In 1844, having finished "Monte-Cristo," he followed it by "The Three Musketeers," and then he put out no less than forty volumes in that same year; each volume bearing his name as sole author. But this st.u.r.dy and undaunted toiler was no laborious recluse, like Balzac, and he was surrounded by clerks for research, secretaries for writing, young and unknown authors for collaborating; reserving, for his own hand, those final telling touches that give warmth and color to the canvas signed by him. His "victims," as they are described in the "Fabrique de Romans, Maison Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie," a malicious exposure, are hardly subjects for sympathy; they earned money not otherwise within their power to earn, and not one of them produced, before or after, any work of individual distinction. In his historical romances, their work is evident in the study and research that give an accuracy not commonly credited to Dumas and about which he never bothered. The _belle insouciance_ of his touch is to be seen in the dash of the narrative, and above all in the dialogues, not only in their dramatic force and fire, but in their growing long-windedness. For he was paid by the line at a royal rate, and he learned the trick of making his lines too short and his dialogues too long, his paymasters complained. And, as he went on, it must be owned that he used his name in unworthy ways, not only for books of no value and for journalistic paltriness, but for shameless signature to shopkeepers" puffs, composed for coin.
As the volumes poured out, money poured in, and poured out again as freely. For he was a spendthrift of the old _regime_, spending not only for his own caprices, but for his friends and flatterers and hangers-on. He made many foolish ventures, too, such as building his own theatre and running it; and he squandered fabulous sums in his desire to make real, at Saint-Gratien, his dream of a palace fit for Monte-Cristo himself. The very dogs abused his big-hearted hospitality, quartering themselves on him there, until his favorite servant, under pretence of fear of the unlucky number thirteen, to which they had come, begged to be allowed to send some of them away.
He gave up his attempt toward reformatory thrift when Dumas ordered him to find a fourteenth dog! He would have drained dry a king"s treasury, and have bankrupted Monte-Cristo"s island of buried millions. Yet with all his ostentatious swagger and his preposterous tomfoolery, he had a childlike rapture in spending, and a manly joy in giving, that disarm stingy censure. The lover of the romancer must mourn for the man, growing poorer as he grew older, and must regret the degrading shifts at which he s.n.a.t.c.hed for money, by which he sank to be a mountebank in his declining years. Toward the last his purse held fewer _sous_ than it held when he came to Paris to hunt for them.
From his eight years" home in Rue de l"Universite, Dumas crossed the Seine, preferring always thereafter the flashily fashionable quarters of the northern side; and none of his numerous dwellings henceforward are worth visiting for their character or color. For nearly two years he lived in a great mansion, No. 40 Rue Saint-Lazare, in other rooms of which George Sand lived a little later. His next home, from 1835 to 1837, at 30 Rue Bleue, has been cut away by Rue Lafayette. From 1838 to 1843 he had an apartment, occasionally shared by his son, at No. 22 Rue de Rivoli, between Place des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Roch.
Twenty-five years after the death of the father, when the son, as he says, was older and grayer than his father had ever grown to be, a letter to him was written by that son. It is an exquisite piece of literature. He brings back their life in this apartment, when, twenty-two years apart in their birth, they were really of the same age. He tells how he, a young man going early to his studies, left the elder at his desk, already at work at seven in the morning, clad only in trousers and shirt, the latter with open neck and rolled-up sleeves. At seven in the evening his son would find him planted there still at work, his mid-day breakfast often cold at his side, forgotten and untouched! Then these two would dine, and dine well, for the father loved to play the cook, and he was a master of that craft. All the while he was preparing the _plats_ he would prattle of his heroes, what they"d done that day, and what he imagined they might do on the next day. And then the letter calls back to the father that evening, a little later, when he was found by his son sunk in an armchair, red-eyed and wretched, and mournfully explained: "Porthos is dead!
I"ve just killed him, and I couldn"t help crying over him!" It must have been at this period that the romancer tried to secure his son as his permanent paid critic, offering him 25,000 francs a year, and "you"ll have nothing to do but to make objections." The offer was declined, and rightly declined.
It was in this and in his succeeding residences--Rue de Richelieu, 109, in 1844, and Rue de la Chaussee-d"Antin, 45, in 1845--that he brought out in newspaper _feuilletons_ "The Count of Monte-Cristo,"
and "The Three Musketeers," these amazing successes written from day to day to keep pace with the press. In 1846, while his address was at No. 10 Rue Joubert, he was in Spain with the Duc de Montpensier, one of his many companions among princes. They, along with other cronies, male and female, more or less worthy, found Dumas at Saint-Germain from 1847 to 1854. Then, suddenly, he disappeared into Belgium, "for reasons not wholly unconnected with financial reverses," as he and his only peer in fiction, Micawber, would have put it. He was in town again in 1856, at No. 77 Rue d"Amsterdam, and there remained until 1866, when he rushed off to the head-quarters of the "Dictator of Sicily," Garibaldi, to whom Dumas appointed himself aide and messenger. Between 1866 and 1870 his residence was at 107 Boulevard Malesherbes. On the coming of the Prussians, he was carried, ailing and feeble, to his country-place at Puys, near Dieppe, where he died December 5, 1870. His public burial was delayed until the close of the war, and then, in 1872, was solemnized in the presence of all that was notable in French art and literature, at his birthplace and his boyhood-home, Villers-Cotterets.
When Dumas was asked how a monument might be erected in memory of a dead pen-worker, who in life had been misunderstood and maligned, he replied: "Use the stones thrown at him while he lived, and you"ll have a tremendous monument." The lovers in all lands of the great romancer could well have brought together more telling stones than those that make Dore"s monument in Place Malesherbes, near his last Paris home.
And yet, curiously weak in its general impression, its details are effective. The group in front is well imagined: a girl is reading to a young student, and to an old, barefooted workman; on the other side is our hero d"Artagnan. The seated statue of Dumas, on too tall a pedestal, is an admirable portrait, with his own vigorous poise of head and gallant regard.
In 1864 the American Minister to France, Mr. John Bigelow, breakfasted with Dumas at Saint-Gratien, near Paris, where the romancer was temporarily sojourning. It was toward the close of our Civil War, and he had a notion of going to the United States as war-correspondent for French papers, and to make another book, of course. Mr. Bigelow gives an accurate and admirable description of the host, as he greeted him at the entrance of his villa; over six feet in height, corpulent, but well proportioned; a brown skin, a head low and narrow in front, enlarging as it receded, covered with crisp, bushy hair growing gray, thick lips, a large mouth, and enormous neck. Partly African and wholly stalwart, from his negress grandmother, he would have been a handsome creature but for his rapidly retreating forehead. But in his features and his expression nothing showed that was sordid or selfish, and his smile was very sweet.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Alexandre Dumas.]
Dumas lives and will never die as long as men love strength and daring, loyalty and generosity, good love-making and good fighting. He has put his own tenderness and frankness and vivacity into the real personages, whom he has reanimated and refined; and into the ideal personages, whom he has made as real as the actual historic men and women who throng his thrilling pages. His own virility and l.u.s.t of life are there, too, without one prurient page in all his thousands.
And he tells his delightful stories not only with charm and wit, but in clean-cut, straightforward words, with no making of phrases.
Very little of the Valois Paris is left to-day, and the searcher for the scenery familiar to Margot and to Chicot must be content with what is left of the Old Louvre, and of the then new Renaissance Louvre as it was known to the grandchildren of its builder, Francois I. Of the old, the outer walls and the great central tower are outlined by light stones in the darker pavement of the southwest corner of the present court. Of the new structure, as we see it, the cold and cheerless Salle des Caryatides lights up unwillingly to us with the brilliancy of the marriage festival of Marguerite de France and Henri de Navarre, as it is pictured by Dumas. This festivity followed the religious ceremony, that had taken place under the grand portal of Notre-Dame, for Henry"s heresy forbade his marriage within. He and his _suite_ strolled about the cloisters while she went in to ma.s.s. In this hall of the Caryatides his body, in customary effigy, lay in state after the a.s.sa.s.sination. There is no change in these walls since that day, except that a vaulted ceiling took the place, in 1806, of the original oaken beams, which had served for rare hangings, not of tapestries, but of men. The long corridors and square rooms above, peopled peaceably by pictures now, echoed to the rushing of frightened feet on the night of Saint Bartholomew, when Margot saved the life of her husband that was and of her lover that was to be. Hidden within the ma.s.sive walls of Philippe-Auguste"s building is a spiral stairway of his time, connecting the Salle des Sept Cheminees with the floor below, and beneath that with the c.u.mbrous underground portions of his Old Louvre. As one gropes down the worn steps, around the sharp turns deep below the surface, visions appear of Valois conspiracy and of the intrigues of the Florentine Queen-Mother.
Here the wily creature had triumphed at last after waiting through weary years of humiliated wifehood; pa.s.sed, such of them as Henri II.
was willing to waste in Paris far from his beloved Touraine, in the old Palais des Tournelles. We shall visit, in another chapter, that residence of the early kings of France, when they had become kings of France in more than name.