This Hugo home in Rue des Pet.i.ts-Augustins, rising right in front of all who came along Rue des Beaux-Arts, was a familiar sight to a young Englishman, about ten years after this time. His name was William Makepeace Thackeray, and he was lodging in this latter street among other students of the Latin Quarter, and trying to make a pa.s.sable artist with the material given him by nature for the making of an unsurpa.s.sable author. His way lay in front of the old _abbaye_, each time he went to or from the schools, or his modest restaurant.
Thirion was the host of this cheap feeding-place, esteemed by art students, on the northern side of old Rue des Boucheries; of which this side and some of its buildings have been saved, while the street itself has been carried away in the wider stream of Boulevard Saint-Germain. There, at No. 160, to-day, you will find the same restaurant, under the same name on the sign, and the same rooms, swarming with students as during Thackeray"s days in Paris.
In 1821, at the end of her term of three years in the _abbaye_, Madame Hugo took her sons and her furniture directly up Rue Bonaparte and turned into Rue des Mezieres, and in its No. 10 they were soon settled in a ground floor with its garden. The great new building at No. 8 stands on the site of house and court and garden. There is left, of their day there, only the two-storied cottage on the western end of No. 6 Rue des Mezieres--then No. 8--which preserves the image of the Hugo cottage, and brings back the aspect of the street as they saw it, countrified with just such cottages.
Early in their residence here, Victor was honored by a summons to visit Chateaubriand, long the literary idol of the schoolboy, who had written in his diary, when only fourteen: "I will be Chateaubriand or nothing!" For he had begun to rhyme already at the Cordier school, and in his seventeenth year he had established, in collaboration with his eldest brother, Abel, "Le Conservateur Litteraire," a bi-monthly of poetry, criticism, politics, most of it written by Victor. It lived from December, 1819, to March, 1821, and its scarce copies are prized by collectors. Now the precocious boy"s ode "On the death of the Duke of Berry"--a.s.sa.s.sinated by Louvel in February, 1820, in Rue Rameau, on the southern side of Square Louvois, then the site of the opera-house--had fallen under the eye of Chateaubriand, who was reported to have dubbed him "The Sublime Child." Chateaubriand denied this utterance, in later years, but agreed to let it stand, since the phrase had become "consecrated." It was at the door of No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique, then the residence of the elder author, that the young poet knocked in those early days of his fame; and here, a little later, he was invited by the diplomat to join his Emba.s.sy to Berlin.
Madame Hugo"s health prevented the acceptance of this flattering offer.
While still at this home in Rue des Mezieres, Victor received another honor in a call from Lamartine, the lately and loudly acclaimed author of "Les Meditations," who was then about thirty-one years of age. In a letter, written many years after, Lamartine described this first meeting: "Youth is the time for forming friendships. I love Hugo because I knew and loved him at a period of life when the heart is still expanding within the breast.... I found myself on the ground floor of an obscure house at the end of a court. There a grave, melancholy mother was industriously instructing some boys of various ages--her sons. She showed me into a low room a little apart, at the farther end of which, either reading or writing, sat a studious youth with a fine ma.s.sive head, intelligent and thoughtful. This was Victor Hugo, the man whose pen can now charm or terrify the world."
The grave, melancholy mother died in the early summer of 1821, and her bereaved sons carried her body across the Place, to the Church, of Saint-Sulpice and then to the Cemetery of Mont-Parna.s.se. On the evening of that day of the burial, Victor returned to the cemetery, and there, overcome with grief and choked by sobs, the boy of only nineteen wandered alone for hours, recalling his mother"s image and repeating her name. Seeking blindly for some comforting presence, he found his way, that same night, to the Hotel de Toulouse, for a glimpse of Adele Foucher. Unseen himself, he saw her dancing, all unconscious of his mother"s death and his heart-breaking loss.
After weeks of wretched loneliness, young Hugo went to live, with a country cousin just come to town, on the top floor of No. 30 Rue du Dragon. This street is connected with the court of the same name by a narrow pa.s.sage under the houses at the western end of the court. No.
30 is still standing, a high, shabby old building, that yet suggests its better days. In the belvedere high above the attic windows, Hugo lived the life of his Marius, keeping body and soul together on a slender income of 700 francs a year. Luckier than Marius, who could only follow Cosette and the old convict in the Luxembourg Gardens, Hugo was allowed little walks there with his adored lady, her mother always accompanying them. This chaperonage did not prevent the secret slipping of letters between the lovers" hands, and many of these have been preserved for future publication.
It was at this time that the Post-office officials held up, in their _cabinet-noir_, a letter from Hugo, offering the shelter of his one room, "_au cinquieme_," to a young fellow implicated in the conspiracy of Saumur, and hiding from the royal police. Hugo makes this offer, his letter explains, in pure sympathy for a misguided young man in peril of arrest and death; his own allegiance to the throne being so established as to permit him to give this aid with no danger to himself and no discredit to his loyalty. The letter was copied, resealed, sent on its way; the copy was carried to Louis XVIII., and so moved him--_not_ in the direction meant by his officials--that he made inquiry about its writer, and presently gave him a pension. This incident was not known to Hugo until many years after.
Among the men who visited him in this garret was Alfred de Vigny, then a captain in the Royal Guard, and dreaming only, as yet, of his "Cinq-Mars." Hugo was dreaming many dreams, too, over his work, and his brightest dream became a reality in October, 1822, when, in Saint-Sulpice"s Chapel of the Virgin--the chapel from which his mother had been buried eighteen months earlier--was performed the Church part of his marriage with Adele Foucher. The wedding banquet was given at the Hotel de Toulouse by her father, who had been won over to this immediate marriage, despite the delay he had urged because of the youth of the bride and the poverty of the bridegroom.
The young couple, whose combined ages barely reached thirty-five, found modest quarters for awhile in Rue du Cherche-Midi, near her and his former homes, and then removed to No. 90 Rue de Vaugirard. Their abode, cut away by the piercing of that end of Rue Saint-Placide, is replaced by the new building still numbered 90 Rue de Vaugirard, near the corner of Rue de l"Abbe-Gregoire.
In this first real home of his married life, Hugo produced his "Hans d"Islande" and his "Bug Jargal"--the latter rewritten from a crude early work--by which, poor things though they were, he earned money, as well as by his poems, poured forth in ungrudging flood. In the ranks of the Cla.s.sicists at first, he soon fell into line with the Romanticists, and by 1827 he was the acknowledged leader of "_La Jeune France_." On his marriage, he had been allotted the pension, already alluded to, of 1,500 francs yearly, by Louis XVIII., in recognition of his Royalist rhymings, and this sum was doubled in 1823.
With their growing fortune, the young couple allowed themselves more commodious quarters. These they found, early in 1828, in a house behind No. 11 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a street somewhat curtailed in its length by the cutting of Rue de Rennes, and the old No. 11 is now No. 27. A long alley, once a rural lane between bordering trees, leads to the modest house hidden away from the street. Quiet enough to-day, it was quieter then, when it was really in the Fields of Our Lady, in that quarter of the town endeared to Hugo by his several boyhood-homes.
The long, low cottage, since divided and numbered 27 and 29, still faces the street, just as when he first pa.s.sed under its northern end into the lane, with his young wife. She writes, in her entrancing "Life of Victor Hugo, by a Witness": "The avenue was continued by a garden, whose laburnums touched the windows of his rooms. A lawn extended to a rustic bridge, the branches of which grew green in summer." The rustic bridge, the lawn, and the laburnums are no longer to be found, but the house is untouched, save by time and the elements. Behind those windows of the second floor, where was their apartment, was written "Marion Delorme," his strongest dramatic work, in the short time between the 1st and the 24th of June, 1829; and there he read it to invited friends, among whom sat Balzac, just then finishing, in his own painstaking way, "Les Chouans." In October of this year "Hernani" was written and put on the boards of the Comedie Francaise, long before reluctant censors allowed "Marion Delorme" to be played.
To these rooms came, of evenings, those brilliant young fellows and those who were bent on being brilliant, who made the vanguard of the Romanticists. Here was formed "_le Cenacle_," of which curious circle we shall soon see more. Here Sainte-Beuve dropped in, from his rooms a few doors off, at No. 19, now No. 37, Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs; dropped in too frequently, for the "smiling critic" came rather to smile on young Madame Hugo than for other companionship. Sometimes of an afternoon, such of the group as were walkers would start for a long stroll out to and over the low hills surrounding the southern suburbs, to see the sun set beyond the plains of Vanves and Montrouge. As they returned they would rest and quench their modest thirst in a suburban _guinguette_ and listen to the shrill fiddling of "_la mere Saguet_."
All this and much more is told in Hugo"s verse. The town has grown around and beyond the tavern, where it stands on the southwestern corner of Rue de Vanves and Avenue du Maine, its two stories and steep roof and dormer windows all like an old village inn going to decay.
One day, late in 1828, Hugo started from his house for the prison of the Grande-Force, to visit Beranger. The simple-seeming old singer, during his nine months" imprisonment, had an "at home" every day, receiving crowds of men eminent in politics and in letters. His conviction made one of the most potent counts in the indictment of the Bourbons by the populace, two years later.
It was in this way that Hugo had opportunity to study the prison, in such quick and accurate detail, as enabled him to make that dramatic description of the escape of Thenardier; an escape made possible, at the last, by little Gavroche, fetched from his palatial lodging in the belly of the huge plaster elephant on Place de la Bastille, on the very night of his giving shelter to the two lost Thenardier boys, whom he--the heroic, pathetic, grotesque creature--didn"t know to be his brothers any more than he knew he was going to rescue his father!
This prison had been the Hotel du Roi-de-Sicile, away back in the "middling ages," and had been enlarged and renamed many times, until it came, about 1700, to Caumont, Duc de La Force, whose name clung to it until its demolition early in the Second Empire. Taken in 1754 by the Government, Necker made of it what was then considered a "model prison," to please the King, and to placate himself and the philosophers about him, righteously irate with the horrors of the Grand-Chatelet. The Terror packed its many buildings, surrounding inner courts, with political prisoners, and killed most of them in the September Ma.s.sacres. Its main entrance was on the northern side of Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, near Rue Malher, recently cut. Just at the southwestern junction of those two streets, stood--men yet living have seen it--the _borne_ (a large stone planted beside the roadway to keep wheels from contact with the bordering buildings), on which was hacked off the head of the Princesse de Lamballe, as she was led from that entrance to be "_elargie_," on the morning of September 3, 1792.
The landlady of the Hugo household had retired from trade with enough money to buy this quiet place, set far back from this quiet street, intending to end her days in an ideal resting-place. From the first, her smug comfort had been violated by many queer visitors, and when "Hernani" made its. .h.i.t, there was a ceaseless procession of the author"s noisy admirers, by night and by day, on her staircase and over her head--she had kept the ground floor for her tranquil retreat--until the maddened woman gave Monsieur Hugo "notice to quit."
She liked her tenants, she hastened to say, she felt for the poor young wife in _her_ loss of sleep, and, above all, she pitied her for having a husband "who had taken to such a dreadful trade!"
So they had to move, and late in 1830, or early in 1831, they went across the river to No. 9 Rue Jean-Goujon, where, in an isolated house surrounded by gardens, in the midst of the then deserted and desolate Champs-elysees, they could be as noisy as they and their friends chose. Soon after coming here they took their new daughter and their last child, Adele, to Saint-Philippe-du-Roule for her baptism, as Hugo recalled, twenty years later, at Balzac"s burial service in the same church. But here, despite the fields that tempted to walks in all directions, Hugo shut himself in and shut out his friends. For he was bound, by contract with his publisher, to produce "Notre-Dame de Paris" within a few months. With his eye for effect, he put on a coa.r.s.e, gray, woollen garment, reaching from neck to ankles, locked up his coats and hats, and went to work, stopping only to eat and sleep.
He began his melodramatic book to the booming of the cannon of a Parisian insurrection, and he ended it in exactly five and one-half months, just as he had got to the last drop of ink in the bottle he had bought at the beginning. He thought of calling this romance "What there is in a Bottle of Ink," but gave that t.i.tle to Alphonse Karr, who used it later for a collection of stories. Goethe"s verdict on "Notre-Dame de Paris" must stand; it is a dull and tiresome show of marionettes.
This house has gone, that street has been rebuilt, the whole quarter has a new face and an altered aspect. After his book was finished, Hugo hurried out to see the barricades of 1832, which he has glorified in "Les Miserables." At this time, too--by way of contrast--he permits a glimpse of his undisturbed home life. It is seen by a friend, who, "ushered into a large room, furnished with simple but elegant taste, was struck with the womanly beauty of Madame Hugo, who had one of her children on her knee." When he saw the poet, sitting reading by the fireside close by, "he was vividly impressed with the resemblance of the entire scene to one of Van Dyck"s finest pictures."
During the rehearsals of "Le Roi s"Amuse," in October, 1832, Hugo found time to settle himself and his family in the apartment on the second floor of No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des Vosges. We shall prowl about this historic spot when we come to explore the Marais; just now, only this apartment and this house come under our scrutiny.
It was one of the earliest and grandest mansions of this grand square, and took its t.i.tle of Hotel de Guemenee when that family held possession in 1630. Ten years later one of its floors was tenanted by Marion Delorme, whose gorgeous coach with four horses drew a crowd to that south-eastern corner whenever she alighted, and whose dainty rooms drew a crowd of another sort on her evenings, so much the vogue.
They were the gathering-place of the swells of her day, of dignitaries of the court and the Church, of men famous in letters and science, all attracted by the charm and wit and polish of this young woman. In his "Cinq-Mars," de Vigny brings together in her _salon_, among many nameless fine people, Descartes, Grotius, Corneille--fresh from his latest success, "Cinna"--and a youth of eighteen, Poquelin, afterward Moliere. This is well enough, but he goes too far in his fancy for a telling picture, and drags in Milton, shy and silent. John Milton had long before pa.s.sed through Paris, on his way home from Italy, and was then busy over controversial pamphlets in London. Nor can the English reader take seriously the recitation, urged on "_le jeune Anglais_,"
of pa.s.sages from his "Paradise Lost"--written twenty years later--a recitation quite comprehended by this exclusively French audience. For the Delorme is moved to tears, and Georges Scudery to censure, so shocked are his religious scruples and his poetic taste! De Vigny is surer of his stepping when on French ground, and plausibly makes Marion a spy on the conspirators, in the pay of Richelieu. At that time, during the construction of his Palais-Cardinal--now the Palais-Royal--his residence was diagonally opposite No. 6, in the northwestern corner of Place Royale. That corner has been cut through, and his house cut away, by the prolongation of Rue des Vosges along that side of the square. It has been said that the cardinal"s hunting to death of Cinq-Mars was less a punishment for the conspiracy against King and State than a personal vengeance on the dandy, with a hundred pairs of boots, who had supplanted him with Mlle. Delorme. The Marais streets knew them both well. Cinq-Mars lived with his father in the family Hotel d"Effiat, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, demolished in 1882.
Marion did not pine long after his execution, but went her way gayly, until she was driven by her debts to a pretended death and a sham funeral, at which she peeped from these windows. She sank out of sight of men, and died in earnest, before she had come to forty years, in her mother"s apartment in Rue de Thorigny, leaving a fortune in fine lace and not a _sou_ in cash for her burial.
De Vigny proves his intimate acquaintance with this house, during Hugo"s residence, by his use of its back entrance for the confederates of Cinq-Mars, making their way to Delorme"s house, on the night of their betrayal. And Dumas makes this entrance serve for d"Artagnan in his visits to Lady de Winter and to her attractive maid.
That entrance is still in existence from Rue Saint-Antoine, by way of the Impa.s.se--then Cul-de-sac--Guemenee, and at its end through a small gate into the court, and so by a back door into the house. Through that rear entrance crowded a squad of the National Guard, from Rue Saint-Antoine, during the street fighting of February, 1848, intending by this route to enter the square unseen, and secure it against the regular troops of Louis-Philippe. Some few among them amused themselves by mounting the stairs and invading Hugo"s deserted apartment. He had gone, that day, at the head of a detachment of the royal force, not leading it against the rioters, but lending his influence as Peer of France to save, from its bayonets, the fellow-rioters of the men just then intruding on his home. They did no harm, happily, as they filed through the various rooms, and past a child"s empty cradle by the side of the empty bed. It had been the cradle of the daughter, Adele, and perhaps of the other babies, and was always cherished by Madame Hugo. In a small room in the rear, that served as Hugo"s study, the leader of the band picked up some written sheets from the table, the ink hardly dry, and read them aloud. It was the ma.n.u.script of "Les Miserables," just then begun, but not finished and published until 1862, when the exile was in Guernsey.
While plodding along with that great work, Hugo put forth from this study much verse and his last plays. Here, in 1838, he wrote his final dramatic success, "Ruy Blas," and his final dramatic failure, "Les Burgraves," which ended his stage career. From here he went to his _fauteuil_ in the Academy in 1841, the step to the seat of Peer of France, accorded him by the King within a few years. Meanwhile, his larger rooms hardly held the swelling host of his friends, and, it must be said, his flatterers. Not Marion Delorme had more, nor listened to them with a more open ear. Their poison became his food.
Indeed, the men who formed "_le Cenacle_," in these and other _salons_, seemed to find their breath only in an atmosphere of mutual admiration. Each called the other "_Cher Maitre_," and all would listen, in wistful reverence, to every utterance of the others and to the deliverance of his latest bringing-forth, vouchsafed by each in turn. While Lamartine, standing before the fireplace, turned on the pensive tune of his latest little thing in verse, Hugo gazed intent on him as on an oracle. Then Hugo would pour forth his sonorous rhymes, his voice most impressive in its grave monotone. The smaller singers next took up the song. No vulgar applause followed any recitation, but the elect, moved beyond speech, would clutch the reciter"s hand, their eyes upturned to the cornice. Those not entirely voiceless with ecstasy might be heard to murmur the freshest phrases of sacramental adoration: "_Cathedrale_," or "_Pyramide d"egypte_!"
There were certain minor chartered _poseurs_ in the circle. There was Alfred de Vigny, "before his transfiguration," to whom might be applied Camille Desmoulins"s gibe at Saint-Just: "He carries his head as if it were a sacrament." To which Saint-Just replied by the promise, that he kept, to make Camille carry _his_ head after the fashion of Saint-Denis. There was Alfred de Musset, who had been brought first to the cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs by Paul Foucher, his schoolmate and Hugo"s brother-in-law. Like his Fantasio, de Musset then "had the May upon his cheeks," and was young and gay and given to laughter; now, old at thirty, he posed as the bored and _blase_ prey and poet of pa.s.sion.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Alfred de Musset.
(From the sketch by Louis-Eugene Lami.)]
Yet there were others, by way of contrast: Dumas, fresh from his romance-factory, full-blooded, stalwart, sane; Gautier, dropping in from his rooms near by, at No. 8 in the square, ship-shape inside his skull for all its mane of curling locks, and for all his eccentric costume; Barye, coming from his simple old house at No. 4 Quai des Celestins, sitting isolated and silent, dreaming of the superb curves of his bronze creatures; Nodier, escaping from his Librarian"s desk in the a.r.s.enal, the _flaneur_ of genius, with no convictions about anything, and with generous friendships for everybody; Delacroix, impetuous chief of the insurgents in painting, most mild-mannered of men, his personal suavity disarming those who were going gunning for him, because of his insurrectionary brush; Merimee, frock-coated, high-collared, b.u.t.toned-up, self-contained, cold and correct, of formal English cut.
Among the guests were occasional irreverent onlookers, not deemed worthy of admission to the inner circle, who sat outside, getting much fun out of its antics. Such a one was Madame Ancelot, whose graphic pen is pointed with her jealousy as a rival lion-hunter, who had outlived her vogue of the early Restoration. Daudet"s sketch of her blue-stockinged _salon_, a faded survival of its splendors under Louis XVIII., is as daintily malicious as is her sketch of Hugo"s evenings.
Through those evenings, Madame Ancelot says, Madame Hugo reclined on a couch, as if over-wearied by the load of glory she was helping to carry. That lady had one relief in this new home, its doors being shut against the ugly face of Sainte-Beuve, at the urging of the indignant young wife. This happened in 1834, and within a few years Sainte-Beuve gave to the world his "Book of Love," a book of hatred toward Hugo, with its base suggestion of the wife"s complaisance for the writer.
Him it hurt more than it hurt Hugo. _He_ had taken, and he still keeps, his una.s.sailable place in the affection, as in the admiration, of his countrymen. There can be no need to summon them as witnesses, yet it may be well to quote the words of two foreign fellow-craftsmen.
The Englishman, Swinburne, in his wild and untamed enthusiasm, acclaims Hugo as a healer and a comforter, a redeemer and a prophet; burning with wrath and scorn unquenchable; deriving his light and his heat from love, while terror and pity and eternal fate are his keynotes. No great poet, adds Swinburne, was ever so good, no good man was ever so great. Heine, German by birth, scoffs at Hugo, claiming that his greatest gift was a lack of good taste, a condition so rare in Frenchmen that his compatriots mistook it for genius. He sees merely a studied pa.s.sion and an artificial flame in Hugo"s specious divine fire; and the product is nothing but "fried ice." And Heine sums him up: "Hugo was more than an egoist, he was a Hugoist."
Charles d.i.c.kens describes Madame Hugo as "a little, sallow lady, with dark, flashing eyes." Making the round of Paris with John Forster, in the winter of 1846-47, they came to this "n.o.ble corner house in the Place Royale." They were struck by its painted ceilings and wonderful carvings, the old-gold furniture and superb tapestries; and, more than all, by a canopy of state out of some palace of the Middle Ages. It is worthy of note here that Hugo was almost the first man of his period--a deplorable period for taste in all lands--to value and collect antiques of all sorts. They were a fit setting for these rooms, and for the youth and loveliness that crowded them, up to the open windows on the old square. The young smokers among the men were driven forth to stroll under its arcades, recalling the strollers of Corneille"s and Moliere"s time, albeit these were painfully ignorant of tobacco bliss, so loud were the papal thunders against its temptations then.
d.i.c.kens and Forster found Hugo the best thing in that house, and the latter records the sober grace and self-possessed, quiet gravity of the man, recently enn.o.bled by Louis-Philippe, but whose nature was already written n.o.ble. "Rather under the middle size, of compact, close b.u.t.toned-up figure, with ample dark hair falling loosely over his close-shaven face. I never saw upon any features, so keenly intellectual, such a soft and sweet gentility, and certainly never heard the French language spoken with the picturesque distinctness given it by Victor Hugo."
Within the portal of the Church of Saint-Paul and Saint-Louis, in Rue Saint-Antoine, on either side, is a lovely sh.e.l.l holding holy-water, given by Hugo in commemoration of the first communion of his eldest child, Leopoldine. In this church she and young Charles Vacquerie were married in February, 1842. Both were drowned in August of that year.
And this is the church selected by Monsieur Gillenormand for the marriage of Marius and Cosette, because the old gentleman considered it "more coquettish" than the church of his parish. For he lived much farther north in the Marais, at No. 6 Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, where a new block of buildings has taken the place of his eighteenth-century dwelling. For this marriage, after playing the obdurate and irascible G.o.dfather so long, he was suddenly transformed into a fairy G.o.dmother.
Toward the end of 1848, after the escape of Louis-Philippe, Hugo moved to Rue d"Isly, No. 5, for a short period, and then to No. 37, now No.
41 Rue de la Tour-d"Auvergne, where he remained until 1851. In the Paris _Bottin_ during these years he is ent.i.tled--considering it, strangely to us, his especial distinction--"_Representant du Peuple_."
The youthful Royalist poet, the friend of Charles X., the friend later of Louis-Philippe, had become an oracle of Democracy. He added nothing to his honestly earned fame by his long-winded bombast in the _Tribune_; and however genuine his att.i.tude may have been, it appealed almost entirely to the groundlings.
They came in crowds about this house, with flaming torches and blaring bands, howling their windy homage. They are remembered, with mute disapproval, by the old _concierge_ of the house, Lagoutte Armand. With real pleasure does he recall "Monsieur Hugo," and prattle memories of his friends like Beranger, and of his family. There were two sons, Charles and Francois-Victor, the former known as "Toto," a "_tres gentil garcon_." In his _loge_, pointed out with pride by the _concierge_, to whom it was given by Hugo, is a rare engraving of the poet, which makes him serious, almost stern, of aspect, his mouth showing its strength in the beardless face, his hair plastered down about the superb brow. His head was carried always well bent forward, and he went gravely, the old man tells us. The house is unaltered, but the street has grown commonplace since the days when its half-countryfied cut attracted Hugo and Beranger and Alphonse Karr.
This witty editor of "Les Guepes," something of a _poseur_ with his pen, had a genuine love of flowers and of women, on whom he lavished his pet camelias and tulips. He cultivated them in the garden of the house, now numbered 15, which he occupied in this street from 1839 to 1842. The sculptor Carrier-Belleuse is now in possession of Karr"s old rooms, and his studio covers the one-time garden. Beranger came, in 1832, to No. 31, then a small cottage behind a garden, where he lived for three years. The bare walls of the communal school, numbered 35, now cover the site of his home, and there are no more cottages nor gardens in the street.
From 1851, when the _coup-d"etat_ of December drove him first into hiding and then into exile, through all the years of the empire, we find in each year"s _Bottin_: "_Hugo, Victor, Vicomte de, de l"Inst.i.tut_, ... . ." These dots represent a home unknown to the Paris directory; no home indeed, for there can be none for a Frenchman beyond his country"s borders. Of Hugo"s dwellings during these years nothing need be said here, save that his long residence in Guernsey gave him his characters and colors for "Les Travailleurs de la Mer,"
and such slight acquaintance with seafaring and ships as is shown in "Quatre-Vingt-Treize." Where he got the fantastic English details of "L"Homme-qui-rit," no man shall ever know.
Here, too, he finished "Les Miserables," writing it, he said, with all Paris lying before him in his mind"s eye; or, as he puts it, with the exile"s longing, "_on regarde la mer, et on voit Paris_." His topographical memory was none too accurate, and errors of slight or of real importance may be detected in "Les Miserables." It is really in his poetry that he has done for his "maternal city" what Balzac did for her in prose; singing in all tones the splendor and the squalor of "_la ville lumiere_," to use his swelling phrase. Despite some errors, and despite the pulling-about of Paris since Valjean"s day, we may still trace his flight through nearly all that thrilling night, when Javert and his men hunted him about the southern side of the town, and across the river from the Gorbeau tenement. This tenement, so striking a set in many scenes of the drama, was an historic mansion run to seed, standing just where Hugo places it--on the site of Nos. 50 and 52 Boulevard de l"Hopital, almost directly opposite Rue de la Barriere-des-Gobelins. Facing that street--renamed Rue f.a.gon in 1867--on the northern side of Boulevard de l"Hopital, the little market of the Gobelins replaces the squalid old shanty which gave perilous shelter to Valjean and Cosette, and later to Marius.
From here, driven by a nameless terror after his recognition of Javert in the beggar"s disguise, the old convict started, leading Cosette by the hand. He took a winding way to the Seine, through the deserted region between the Jardin des Plantes and Val-de-Grace, turning strategically on his track in streets through which we can follow him as easily as did Javert. He was not certain that he was followed, until, turning in a dark corner, he caught full sight of the three men under the light before the police-station. Hugo places this station in Rue de Pontoise, and this is a mistake; it was then and is still in the next parallel street, Rue de Poissy, at No. 31.
Now, Valjean turns away from the river, carrying the tired child in his arms, and makes a long circuit around by the College Rollin--long since removed to the northern boulevards--and by the lower streets skirting the Jardin des Plantes--no longer the Jardin du Roi--and so along the quay. He is bent, as Javert guessed, on putting the river between himself and his pursuers. He crosses Pont d"Austerlitz, and plunges into the maze of roads and lanes, lined with woodyards and walls, on the northern side of the river. There Javert loses the trail; while for us, that trail is hidden under new streets laid out along those lanes, and under railway tracks laid down on those roads.
We come in sight of the fugitive again, as he climbs the convent wall, drawing up Cosette by the rope taken from the street lantern. Here is that high gray wall, stretching along the eastern side of old Rue de Picpus, and the southern side of the new wide Avenue Saint-Mande. This wall--of stone, covered with crumbling plaster--is as old as the garden of "_Les Religieuses de Picpus_," which it surrounds, and as the buildings within, which it hides from the street. We may enter the enclosure by the old gate at No. 35 Rue de Picpus, the very gate through which Cosette was carried out in a basket, and Valjean borne alive in the nun"s coffin to his mock burial. About the court within, the red-tiled low roofs of the ancient foundation peep out among more modern buildings. Behind all these and beyond the court stretches the garden, a portion still set aside for vegetables, and we look about for Fauchelevent"s protecting gla.s.ses for his cherished melons. What we do find is the very outhouse, in an angle of the wall, on which Valjean dropped; it is a shanty nearly gone to ruin, but serving still to store the garden tools of Fauchelevent"s successor.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Cemetery of Picpus.]
"Near the old village of Picpus, now a part of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, under the walls of the garden which belonged to the Canoness of Saint-Augustin, in a bit of ground not more than thirty feet in length, repose thirteen hundred and six victims beheaded at Barriere du Trone, between _26 Prairial_ and _9 Thermidor_, in the second year of the republic." This extract, from the "Memorial Europeen" of April 24, 1809, is a fitting introduction to the small cemetery, hid away at the very end of this convent garden. In this snug resting-spot sleep many ill.u.s.trious dead. On the wall, alongside the iron-railed gate, under a laurel-wreath, is a tablet inscribed with the name of "Andre de Chenier, son of Greece and of France," who "_servit les Muses, aima la sagesse, mourut pour la verite_." He and his headless comrades were carted here and thrown into trenches, when the guillotine was busy at the Barriere du Trone, now Place de la Nation, only a step away, in the early summer of 1794, up to the day of Robespierre"s arrest. Their mothers, widows, children, dared not visit this great grave nor, indeed, ask where it was. In that time of terror, grief was a crime and tears were no longer innocent. It was only in after years that this bit of ground was bought, and walled in, and cared for, by unforgetting survivors. Some few among them, of high descent or of ancient family, planned for their own graves and those of their line to come and to go, within touch of this great common grave that held the clay of those dear to them. They bought, in perpetuity, this bit of the convent garden on the hither side of the gate, through which we have been looking, and it is dotted with many a cross and many a slab. And this tiny burial-ground draws the American pilgrim as to a shrine, for in it lies the body of Lafayette.
The sisters of the Seminaire de Picpus, who inherited the duties, along with the domain of "_Les Religieuses_" of the eighteenth century, devote themselves to the instruction and the training of their young _pensionnaires_. The story of the establishment is told in "Les Miserables," in detail that allows no retelling.