Mansart"s commission for this construction came from that Duc d"Aumont who was Marechal of France and Governor of Paris under Louis XIII. A descendant of the early fighters of old France, he seems to have been one of those favorites of fortune who, in the phrase of Beaumarchais, give themselves only the trouble to be born. At the age of ten he began his career as a colonel of cavalry, and continued it through a long line of lucky promotions in place and pay. Dying in 1704, he left this _hotel_ packed with furniture, paintings, _bibelots_, and curios, and its stables filled with the carriages he had invented; an amazing collection, requiring months for its sale by his heirs.
The _hotel_ is now occupied by the Pharmacie Centrale of France, to whose officials is due our grat.i.tude for their rare and scrupulous respect for this delightful relic. Over its s.p.a.cious gardens behind they have erected their immense laboratories and offices, which we may enter under the great vaulted porch at No. 21 Rue des Nonnains-d"Hyeres.
That once narrowest of the streets of old Paris, as quaint as its name, given it by the branch of the Hyeres nunnery having its seat here, has become a broad and bustling thoroughfare. The plain rear elevation of the _hotel_ can be seen here from the little corner of the garden that is still kept, and kept green by the choice plants of the company. In it is a capital bust of Dorvault, physician, author, founder of the Pharmacie Centrale. This may be the very bit of garden noticed by Dr. Martin Lister, an English traveller in France at the close of the seventeenth century. He dined with the Duc d"Aumont, and records that, opening from the dining-room, was a greenhouse through which his n.o.ble host led him into the garden.
Along through the rocky ravine that bears the name of Charlemagne, and does him no honor, we pa.s.s, by way of Rue Saint-Paul, into the short street that started in life as Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul, and has now taken the name of Charles V. Here, among the ancient fronts, we are attracted by that which is numbered 12, low and wide, with two floors and dormers above. Through its entrance-door, capped by a well-carved mask that smiles stonily down on us, we may enter the court by the courtesy of the sister, who smiles sweetly. This building is occupied by the girls" school of a sisterhood, whose youthful _communiantes_ happen to be forming in procession for a function to-day. They flutter about in innocent white, in unconscious contrast with the great lady and great criminal whom we have come to see. For this was the Hotel d"Aubray, and its most distinguished tenant was the Marquise de Brinvilliers.
Let us look about the court and the little garden behind, both embraced by the two wings of the structure. That wing on our right, with round arches and a round tower at its end, is evidently of the original fabric and intended for stabling. This wing on our left, now extended by a new chapel, was, when built, meant to contain only this staircase, whose wide and broad stone steps and well-wrought iron bal.u.s.trade mount gradually about a s.p.a.cious central well. Here, resting on the bench at its foot, we may recall what is known about the strange and monstrous woman who once lived here.
She was Marie-Madeleine Dreux d"Aubray, and her father was an officer of Louis XIV., appointed Civil Lieutenant of the Chatelet Prison. He married her in 1651, when she was twenty-one, to the wealthy and dissolute Marquis de Brinvilliers, who was not a model husband. She was nothing loath, with her inborn instincts, to follow the example set by him. Among her lovers, a certain Gaudin de Sainte-Croix was much talked of; so much so that the lady"s father, more powerful than her husband, and doubtless more outraged by the shameless publicity of the _liaison_, had Sainte-Croix taken from his daughter"s carriage, as they rode together, and put into the Bastille. There his cell-mate was an Italian known only as Exili, a past-master in poisons, who boasted that he had brought to death at least one hundred and fifty men and women in Rome alone. He taught his trade to Sainte-Croix, who proved to be an apt pupil, and who continued his studies after his release.
He took rooms with an apothecary in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and fitted up a laboratory. There his Marquise visited him, and was taught in her turn the use of his potions, among which the "manna of Saint-Nicholas" became her favorite.
For she took pains and showed conscience in her experiments, mainly on the patients in the hospitals, wherein she was a constant charitable worker. Thus she soon learned to dispense her poisoned wafers with scientific slowness and precision. But she was anxious that her charity should begin at home. Her father failed gradually with some obscure and unaccountable malady, and died in torment; and she nursed him tenderly to the end. There were too many in her family for her comfort, and her relatives outside had been too solicitous about her; so some sickened and some died off, she caring for all and lamenting each death. She had a sister, a Carmelite nun, who was never blinded by the round, girlish face, appealing blue eyes, and beguiling ways that bewitched so many. This woman guarded her own life and watched over others of the family. The attempts made by the marchioness on her husband"s life were caused to fail, it is believed, by the attenuation of the poisons mixed for her by Sainte-Croix, who doubtless feared that he must marry the widow if he allowed her to become a widow. He himself was found dead, in 1672, in his laboratory, poisoned by the fumes of his devilish brews, through the breaking of the gla.s.s mask worn at his work. The official search among his effects discovered a casket, addressed to the marchioness at this dwelling; being opened, its contents were found to be her own ardent love-letters to him, a doc.u.ment detailing the doses and periods for the proper administration of the poisons, and a choice a.s.sortment of preparations of opium, antimony, sulphur. There was also a water-like liquid, unknown to chemists, which was found to kill animals instantaneously, leaving no lesions of any organ that could be traced by science. Sainte-Croix"s servant made a disclosure, and the marchioness, hearing of his arrest and the finding of her package, made "confession by avoidance" by a flight to England. She slipped down these stairs, out through that doorway, and took coach around the corner for a northern port.
Colbert"s brother was then Amba.s.sador at the court of Saint James, and between them her capture was planned; she got wind of it, and fled to Liege, where she felt sure of safety in a convent. To her appears, after a while, a handsome and susceptible young _abbe_, who allows himself to be corrupted, and arranges for an elopement to a more congenial refuge for lovers. She climbs gayly into his carriage, his men surround it, and she is driven across the frontier into France and to the Bastille. The _abbe_ was Desgrais, an eager police officer detailed for this duty. He returned to her room in the convent, and found scattered sheets of paper containing notes that began a confession. This confession she was forced to complete and confirm by the torture by water--repugnant to her coquetry, because it would spoil her figure; "_toute mignonne et toute gracieuse_," had said an adorer of her early days. She showed courage at the last, Madame de Sevigne states, in the letters that were full of the trial and execution. She was burned, having first been beheaded. "Her poor little body was thrown, after her execution, into a good large fire, and her ashes blown about by the wind; so that we may be breathing her," Sevigne writes. This took place late in the afternoon of July 16, 1676--she was just over forty-five years of age--on Place de Greve, to which she was carted in a tumbril, having stopped on the way in front of Notre-Dame, and there, on her knees on the stones--her feet bare, a rope around her neck, a consecrated lighted taper in her uplifted hand--made to confess afresh.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de Brinvilliers.]
The painter Lebrun was one of the great crowd that gathered to see her go by, and he made a drawing, which you may see in the gallery of Old French Designs in the Louvre. She half sits, half reclines, in her tumbril, clad in a gown, its cowl drawn forward; her head is thrown back; her thick chestnut hair brushed away from her face; her eyes are wide and her mouth drawn with terror; her face is round, her lips are thick; in her folded hands she holds a cross, and she stares straight before her without seeing. At one side is the profile of a woman, very lean and ugly, her expression full of horror as she bends forward to gaze.
Turning from this street down through Rue Beautreillis, we pa.s.s the end of Rue des Lions, on whose southern side we have already found remains of the Hotel des Lions du Roi. On its northern side is a row of plaster-fronted houses, commonplace and shabby. In one of those garrets there was living, shortly after 1830, a poor family of Jews named Felix, lately arrived from the Canton Aarau in Switzerland.
Their two little girls went about the streets, singing and picking up coppers. One day in the Place Royale, among those who stopped to listen was a kindly eyed gentleman, who handed to the younger and thinner of the two pinched children a piece of silver. "That is Victor Hugo," said a woman in the crowd, as he went his way to his home in the corner. That small singer was elisa Rachel Felix, known to us as the great Rachel.
Years after, when the world had given all that it could give to Rachel, she returned, from a voyage to Egypt in search of health, to the Place Royale to die. "It is on the way to Pere-Lachaise," she said, when, in 1857, she moved into the immense and superbly furnished apartment on the first floor of No. 9, where her friends, she thought, would have ample room for her burial service. It is only a step in s.p.a.ce from this garret to that palace. There, within a few months--although her death came at the country-seat of Victorien Sardou"s father, whom she was visiting--that service was held, and from there her body was borne to Pere-Lachaise.
Going down Rue du Pet.i.t-Musc, we reach the Quai des Celestins, and here on our left is the beginning of broad Boulevard Henri IV., cutting away, in its diagonal course through the grounds of the Hotel Saint-Paul, much history and romance. Nothing is left of the gardens of the Hotel de Lesdiguieres, whose site is marked by a tablet on the corner of the street of that name, at No. 10 Rue de la Cerisaie. This tablet tells us that the _hotel_ was the residence of the Czar Peter the Great in 1717; the guest, during his short sojourn in Paris, of the Marechal de Villeroy, its owner then. We prefer to go back from that visit over a hundred years to a more attractive presence in this house. This was Gabrielle d"Estrees, beloved of Henry, who--for his fondness for her and their two fine boys--would have made her his wife, and have made them his legitimate successors, if he could have had his way.
It was Sebastien Zamet who was their host in this "_palais d"amour du roi_." The son of a shoe-maker of Lucca, he had found his fortune in Paris, like so many of his countrymen in those days, and he built here "a true fairy palace, such as romances describe," says Saint-Simon.
And here, walking in the garden after supper on the evening of April 9, 1599, the lovely Gabrielle was taken ill very suddenly. They carried her to the Hotel de Sourdis and put her in the care of her aunt, with whom she had pa.s.sed a portion of her girlhood in that mansion. It stood within the precincts of Saint-Germain-l"Auxerrois, its entrance on Rue de l"Arbre-Sec, where now is the end of Rue Perrault. Here Gabrielle died, in agony, at six o"clock of the next morning; poisoned, say Sismondi, Michelet, and the rest, but by whose hand we shall never know. The Hotel des Mousquetaires, that you will find at No. 4 of Rue de l"Arbre-Sec, was then in existence, and so, too, were many of these tall facades, with ancient, iron balconies that look down on the narrow winding street, then a crowded thoroughfare of old Paris. After Zamet"s death his house was bought by the Duc de Lesdiguieres, Marshal and later Constable of France, from whom it took its permanent name. We have already come here with Boileau to see the veteran _Frondeur_, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, whose last years were pa.s.sed in this mansion, under the care of one niece, Madame de Lesdiguieres, and comforted by another niece, Madame de Sevigne.
On the quay, off on our left, the Celestins _caserne_ occupies a small portion of the immense grounds of the Celestins Monastery. It was a rich community, made so by the many gifts of kings, from Charles V.
down, to "_leurs bien aimes chapelains et serviteurs en Dieu_." These pious beggars were not too proud to accept anything, and time fails to tell of the splendors of their church, which became a museum of monuments, tombs, statues, and was demolished in 1849, many of its treasures having been destroyed during the Revolution. The G.o.dly brethren are remembered in the name of the barracks and of the quay, and to some of us, it must be owned, by the delectable dish of their invention, _omelette a la Celestins_.
That long facade beyond, on Rue de Sully, belongs to the a.r.s.enal, the building alone left, its s.p.a.cious gardens now under streets and houses. We have come to its library with young Balzac, when he escaped from his grinding drudgery and his dreary garret in Rue Lesdiguieres.
We have driven here with Madame Recamier on the day before her death.
The most winning memory of the place is that of Charles Nodier, an adorable man of genius, whose very defects were lovable, we are told by the elder Dumas, who loved him. Nodier and Charles Lamb were hissing, almost in the same year, each his own d.a.m.ned play. Many others besides Dumas loved Nodier--Royalists and Republicans, Cla.s.sicists and Romanticists; and they crowded his _salon_ here of an evening. For this was his official residence as Librarian, occupied by him from his appointment in 1823 until his death in 1844. His historic green drawing-room, where men were friendly who fought outside, and the smaller rooms of his apartment on the first floor overlooking Boulevard Morland, have been thrown into the library, and are now its reading-rooms. They have kept their old-time panelling, carvings, mouldings, but their walls, once decorated _en grisaille_, have been toned to a uniform delicate gray-white.
This library was begun in 1785 by the Comte d"Artois, who purchased the valuable books and ma.n.u.scripts of Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d"Argenson, and of the Duc de la Valliere. Rooms in the a.r.s.enal were arranged for this collection, and it was named the "_Librairie de Monsieur_;" the Comte d"Artois, brother of Louis XVI. and of Louis XVIII., having been the last "_Monsieur_" in France. His library has grown to be the grandest in Paris after the Bibliotheque Nationale. It contains the original archives of the Bastille--such as were saved, when so many were scattered and destroyed at its taking--and it is especially rich in dramatic literature and in ma.n.u.scripts.
Here, above our heads as we stand in Rue du Pet.i.t-Musc, is the tasteful, unspoiled side wall of the Hotel de Lavallette, formerly the Hotel Fieubet. It was built by the younger Mansart, on the corner of Saint-Paul"s grounds, for the Chancellor of Maria Theresa, Gaspard de Fieubet, and it became a gathering-place of the writers of those days.
They were courted by its owner, whose name is frequent in the letters of Madame de Sevigne, and he himself turned his hand to rhyming, at odd hours. Nearly two hundred years after he had gone, his mansion was rescued from the sugar-refiners, who had degraded it to their uses, by the Lavallette who has given it his name, and who "restored" it beyond the recognition of its great architect, could he see it now. Its facade behind the little court is overloaded with carvings, b.u.t.tressed by caryatides, surmounted by campaniles; it is a debauch of sculpture, an orgy of ornamentation, under which the stately lines of the original fabric are almost lost. They are quite hidden, on one side, by a modern wing that has been thrust in on the court. All this dishonor to architecture does not trouble the boys, whose big school fills the building now, and who troop about the court in their black jackets and trousers, their wide, white collars, their big, white ties, pulling on reluctant gloves, as they line up on their unwilling way to some church function.
We pa.s.s along the quay, glancing at the homelike and homely house numbered 4, whose quiet dignity behind its court is in pleasing contrast with the place just left. Here were the home and the studio of Antoine-Louis Barye, and here he died on June 25, 1875.
On the quay at the corner of Rue Saint-Paul there stood until very lately the entire and unspoiled _hotel_ built for young Charles, Duc de La Vieuville, in the last days of the Valois men. It was an admirable specimen of the architecture of their time, as we may still a.s.sure ourselves by a glance at the wing that is left within the court entered from Rue Saint-Paul; a stone side wall toned to the glorified grayness of age, pierced by tall, slender windows of graceful proportions, and, above, the picturesque brick dormers of that period.
The last of the Valois women, Marguerite, had her home hard by here, and its story begins just on this spot. When Charles V., to round out and make entire his Saint-Paul estate, was taking in neighboring _hotels_ and outlying bits of land, he found, here where we find the Hotel de La Vieuville, the Paris seat of the archbishops of Sens.
Their palace on this corner, and its grounds extending along the river-front and back along the east side of Rue Saint-Paul, up beyond present Rue des Lions, cut out a goodly slice from this angle of the royal domain. The King took this property, giving in exchange, to the archbishop, the feudal fortress, the Hotel d"estomenil, a little farther west on the river-bank, at the meeting-place of several country roads. Those roads are now the streets named Hotel-de-Ville, Figuier, Fauconnier, de l"Ave-Maria; and where they meet stands the Hotel de Sens, in almost the same state, as to its walls, as when they were finished by the archbishop Tristan de Salazar. This soldier-priest had rebuilt the old structure in the last years of the fifteenth and the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and it remains an authentic and authoritative doc.u.ment of the domestic architecture of that period. The delicate ornamentation of its facade has suffered, some few mutilations have despoiled the fabric, its gardens are built upon, their great trees are gone, yet it stands, time-stained and weather-worn, a most impressive example of that Gothic strength and beauty whose frozen lines were just beginning to melt under the fire of the upspringing Renaissance.
The n.o.ble arch of the ogival portal is, by a touch of genius, pinched forward at its topmost point, and is there sliced away, so as to make a snub-nosed protuberance that seems to lift up the whole front. Its two high-peaked bartizan turrets are a trifle heavy, as we see them hemmed in by other buildings, but their panelling and moulding plead for pardon for any slight disproportion; and the one on the corner is perfect in situation and in effect. The few windows of the front have lost their stone-crossed mullions, some broken, some bricked up. The great dormer window above, possibly of later construction, is a prediction of the loveliness that was to come to dormers, such as we see in the roofs of Rouen"s Hotel de Ville and of the _chateau_ of Blois. The fine effect of the chimneys, once entirely of stone, has been marred by cheap patching. As to the rest, the oddities and irregularities of this facade are yet all in good taste and all captivating. Within the groined porch we see, across the small court, the main building meant for the archbishop"s dwelling, and the solid square tower meant for defence and for watching. Its entrance-door tells, in its size and shape, the entire tale of feudal days. Away up on one angle of this tower is an imitation sentry-box, battlemented and supported by corbelled brackets. The interior of the buildings has been defaced and degraded by the base usages to which it has been subjected, yet traces are left of its past grandeur in some of the rooms and halls.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Hotel de Sens.]
These awaited in orderly and decorous silence, in their early days, the coming of their owner from the mother-church at Sens. He came along the banks of the Yonne and the Seine on his richly caparisoned mule, his foot-servants in advance, his clerkly servitors and ecclesiastics riding behind, and so he entered into this tranquil court. Years later the place was noisy enough, when the religious wars made it one of the meeting-places of the leaders of the Holy League.
On the very day when Henri IV. entered Paris, the Archbishop of Sens, Cardinal de Pelleve, lay dying in this his palace, almost within hearing of the triumphant Te Deum in Notre-Dame.
The King had been allowed his divorce by his childless wife, Marguerite, and he in turn allowed her to return to Paris from her long exile in Auvergne; ordering that this _hotel_ should be fittingly arranged for her residence, in 1605. We saw her last, a charming child, in the gardens of the Tournelles. And now she comes here, a worn wanton of nearly fifty-five, her wonted fires still smouldering under the ashes. It is between these two appearances that we like to look on her in the pages of Brantome and on the canvas of Clouet. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantome, has been aptly dubbed the _valet-de-place_ of history; and yet a valet has the merit of looking out of his own eyes from his own point of view. It was for him that Marguerite wrote her "Memoires," and to him she left them. In after days, when exiled from the court he loved, able only to lick the chops of memory, he wrote her _eloge_ in these glowing words: "If there has ever been anyone in the world perfect in beauty, it is the Queen of Navarre. All who have been, or shall be, near her, are ugly beside her. If there is a miscreant who believes not in the miracles of G.o.d, let him look upon her. Many believe that she is rather a G.o.ddess of heaven than a princess of earth, and yet perhaps no G.o.ddess was ever so lovely."
It is indeed a lovely creature, yet all of earth, whom we see in Clouet"s half life-size portrait in the _chateau_ of Azay-le-Rideau.
Her plentiful blond hair curves back above her fine brow, and her bluish-gray eyes smile out with inviting mischievousness. Yet Brantome has to own that his G.o.ddess was easily first in the _escadron volant_ that sailed under her mother"s flag, and we may guess what that meant in the court "whose vices it would be repulsive to suggest, and whose virtues were homicide and adultery."
In this Hotel de Sens, Madame Marguerite held receptions, twice a week, of men of letters and of the arts, with whom her learning allowed her to converse on equal terms; and her kindliness allowed them to feel at ease. For "from her behavior it could never be discovered that she had once been the wife of the King." But the wayward Margot made trouble for herself that ended her stay here after a year or less. She came home from ma.s.s at the Celestins on the morning of Wednesday, April 5, 1606, and as she was helped from her coach by her newest favorite page of eighteen, he was killed by her latest discarded favorite, already twenty. She sat in one of these front windows the next day, having neither eaten nor drunk nor slept meanwhile; she looked out on the beheading of the jaunty a.s.sa.s.sin; that evening she left the Hotel de Sens forever. For a while she stayed at her hunting-lodge at Issy, already visited by us in former pages, and then went to her last dwelling, on the southern bank in the Pre-aux-Clercs, which looked out across the river at the Louvre, where Henry was unhappy with her successor. The two women remained always friendly, and were seen together in festivities and processions, and the reigning Queen paid many a debt of the deposed Queen. To the last she rouged to the eyes, and wore a flowing wig and low frocks, albeit she had turned _devote_, and had found a new idol in her confessor.
This was young Vincent de Paul, not yet canonized, whose chaste ministrations made him adored by sinners elderly enough to repent.
There she died in the spring of 1615, at the age of sixty-three, the last of the Valois name, leaving everything, mostly debts, to young Louis XIII.
Later along in the seventeenth century, when the court end of the town went to the west, and the Church dignitaries found this region too far afield, this Hotel de Sens was sold. Its new owners and tenants were the merchants and financiers who crowded then to this quarter. They, too, soon moved farther west, and the place had many strange employments forced upon it. As early as 1692, the _messageries_ for Dijon and Lyons rented it for their town head-quarters. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the palace of the archbishops was degraded to a livery stable and a horsedealer"s lair, and the ancient arms of Sens on its front and the escutcheons of Lorraine and Bourbon, prelates of the Church, were covered by a great sign, "_Maison de Roulage et de Commission_." From this court, in the words of the advertis.e.m.e.nt of that date, "_Le Courrier de la Malle de Paris a Lyons part.i.t a cinq heures et demi du soir, 8 Floreal, an IV._"--which was April 27, 1796.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Marguerite de Valois.
(From a portrait by an unknown artist, in the Musee de Montpellier.)]
That mail-coach was stopped near Lieussart, its driver killed, and a large sum in a.s.signats and gold carried off. For this crime one Joseph Lesurques was arrested, and was recognized by several witnesses as the robber. He had been an official in Douai, had saved money, and had gone to Paris for the education of his children. Neither his record nor his alibi sufficed to acquit him, the strongest of circ.u.mstantial evidence convicted him, and he was executed on October 30, 1796. Two years later the murderer and robber was captured in one Dubosc, who, after a daring escape and recapture, went to the guillotine. By Dubosc"s conviction Lesurques was posthumously morally acquitted, but his judicial rehabilitation has never been made, albeit his broken and crazed children pet.i.tioned, courts debated, and Deputies chattered through many long years. This true story, our last reminiscence of the Hotel de Sens, has been put on the French stage as "Le Courrier de Lyons," and on the English stage as "The Lyons Mail."
We go on to the upper end of Rue Fauconnier, and across Rue Saint-Antoine, to where begins Rue Pavee-au-Marais, a most ancient and aristocratic street, filled with grand mansions in its best days and in days not so long gone. It had taken its name as early as the middle of the fifteenth century, when, first of all the Marais streets, it was paved. It was known, unofficially and popularly, as _le pet.i.t Marais_, so closely did it crowd, within its short and select limits, the essential characteristics in architecture and atmosphere of the great Marais. Now, wofully modernized, it holds one relic only, a magnificent relic, that suggests to us, in its solitary dignity, something of the lost glories of this street.
We cross Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, a main thoroughfare of old Paris, whose odd name came from Charles, brother of Saint Louis, Count of Anjou and Provence, and King of Naples and Sicily in 1265. His fortified abode stood on the northern side of this street, at its eastern end just within the old walls. It became, in after times, the _hotel_ and then the prison of La Force. Its entrance was over yonder, at the corner of modern Rue Malher; and opposite, on the southern corner, was the stone that served as the axeman"s block for the Princess of Lamballe. Along this pavement the small Gavroche led the two smaller Thenardier boys, on his way to _his hotel_--the plaster elephant in Place de la Bastille. A wide avenue, bordered by modern constructions, is fast taking the place of the old street and robbing it of all its character.
Where Rue Pavee meets Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, stands the Hotel Lamoignon, formerly the Hotel d"Angouleme. At that corner a square turret juts out from above the ground floor, overhanging the pavement, its supporting bracket cut under in sh.e.l.l-like curves. About the stately court, entered from Rue Pavee, rise the imposing walls, those of the wings of a little later date and a little more ornate than that of the facade. This front is pre-eminently impressive in its height, in the unusual loftiness of its floors and their windows, in the single Corinthian pilasters, tall and slender and graceful, rising from ground to cornice. They may serve us as a souvenir of Jean Bullant"s work in the _chateau_ of Ecouen and in his portion of Chantilly. Above that cornice the dormer windows spring high under their gabled ends. Beneath them, and over the entrance porch, and on the side wall of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois--profusely decorating, but not overloading, the s.p.a.cious surfaces that carry them easily--we trace without effort the unworn hunting-horns, the stags" heads, the dogs in chase, the crescent and the initial H so interlaced as to form an H and a D--all the carved emblems of Diane de France, for whom this remarkable structure was planned and built, a little after 1580, by a now unknown architect.
She was born of an Italian mother, during a stay in her country of the son of Francois I., who was later Henri II. On coming to the throne, in 1547, he legitimatized this daughter, then ten years of age, and gave her education and position in France. She grew up to be a good woman and a good wife to Horace Farnese, Duc de Castro, and to her second husband, Francois, the eldest son of the Constable Montmorenci.
She spent her long life--which saw seven monarchs sitting on the French throne--doing kindly acts, not one of which meant so much for the France she loved as the reconciliation between Henri III. and Henri de Navarre; possible through her, because the sceptic Bearnais took her word for or against any written word of anyone. Dying in 1619, she left this mansion to Charles, Duc d"Angouleme, son of Charles IX. and Marie Touchet, the last of her many benefactions to him. He added these wings, and placed in that on the northern side this stately stone staircase, filling the width between the stone walls, with no hand-rail to break its sweep. Nothing is left of the former grandeur of the interior, which is given up to large industries and petty handicrafts; even the vast and lofty chambers are cut up for trade purposes by part.i.tions and by interposed floorings.
In 1658 the Hotel d"Angouleme became the Hotel Lamoignon by purchase of Guillaume de Lamoignon, a wealthy President of Parliament, and in 1684 it went to his son, Chretien-Francois de Lamoignon. It was a dwelling worthy of him and of his ill.u.s.trious name, which it still bears. In it he received the best society of that day--represented to us by Racine, Boileau, Bourdaloue, Regnard, and others of their kidney, all honored in finding a friend in this magistrate of ability, probity, kindliness. It was to him that Boileau addressed his "Sixth Epistle," and to him, when, as Master of Requests, it was his official duty to forbid further performances of "Tartufe" after the first night, Moliere submitted without rancor. Perhaps his highest honor, during a life of honors, was his refusal of an election to a _fauteuil_ in the Academie Francaise.
On April 13, 1763, in this building was opened the first public library of the Hotel de Ville of Paris. One Antoine Moriau had been for many years collecting, in his apartment on this second floor, some 14,000 volumes and 200 ma.n.u.scripts, all left to the town at his death in 1759. The munic.i.p.ality kept his rooms, and rented additional rooms on this first floor, opening them to the public on Wednesdays and Sat.u.r.days.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Hotel Lamoignon.]
The _concierge_ or his wife, honored by the interest shown in their splendid show-place, will conduct such curious strangers as may wish around the corner into Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and through a little gate on that street into a small back court. This is the shabby remnant of Diane"s and of Lamoignon"s extensive gardens, which once stretched to those of the Hotel de La Force on the south, and eastwardly to Rue Sevigne. From this spot you may see four or five windows away up in the rear wall of the mansion, and you will be told that these are the windows of Alphonse Daudet"s former apartment, wherein he wrote "Fromont jeune et Risler aine." His large study on the top floor had two high, wide windows, from which he saw the roofs of all Paris on that side. Against the wall at one end of the room was his shelf for standing at his work, and his wife"s desk was at the other end; while, between them, carrying the freshly written sheets, trotted the little boy Leon, who is now a man, wielding his own good pen. To him, in those days, the tall Flaubert and Tourgueneff were "giants" by the side of his father, and of the other friends who used to climb these many stairs to this _salon_ in the sky. Daudet has left affectionate records of the old house. His "Rois-en-exil" was written in a pavilion in the garden of Richelieu"s old mansion, which stood in the northwestern corner of the then Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, where has been cut, through house and garden, the prolongation of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Rue des Vosges.
The gentle artist, "handsome as a Hindoo G.o.d" in those days, says M.
Claretie, brought from his beloved _Midi_ a longing for s.p.a.ce and air and quiet, and all his abodes in the city were high above the street, with ample breathing-s.p.a.ce and unbroken horizon. His earliest Paris home was at the very top of the furnished Hotel du Senat, still at No.
7 Rue de Tournon. This was the wretched room to which he came back, early one morning, from his first swell reception, his only dress-suit drenched with the wet snow through which he had waded, owning no overcoat. Then, for a while, he occupied an _entresol_ in No. 4 Place de l"Odeon, in "_la maison A. Laissus_," one of the unaltered houses of that historic place. His last home was on the third floor of No. 31 Rue Bellecha.s.se, in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and one of its delightful old gardens lay beneath his windows, giving him the greenness and the tranquillity so dear to him.
The name of Madame Daudet may not be omitted from this record of the ill.u.s.trious women of the Marais, although now, in the maturity of her distinction and elegance, she adorns another quarter of Paris. She has made for herself an honored place among French women of letters, and she helped her husband to his own place by her critical powers and her sympathetic appreciation. She both tranquillized and stimulated him through his earlier years of robust strength, and the later invalidism that was yet filled with labor. Her son, who carried the father"s sheets across the room to her for approval or correction, has dedicated his "Alphonse Daudet" to his mother, "who aided and encouraged her husband alike in the hours of discouragement and of hopefulness."
There are bits and fragments of vanished antiquity--portals, windows, balconies, brackets, pitifully sundered from the grandeur they stand for and suggest--scattered all about this portion of the Marais. Much of this bygone grandeur was to be found in Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, a street that had been a country road just outside the wall of Philippe-Auguste, and, with the crumbling of the wall, had been speedily built up with stately mansions. One of these, with a fund for its support, was willed, in 1415, to the Grand Prior of France, in trust for such burghers as were freed from all taxation by reason of their extreme poverty. So it came that these _francs bourgeois_ gave their name to the street. Here at No. 30 is a quaint low front, mostly taken up by a s.p.a.cious entrance-porch, decorated with finely cut dragons; here at No. 31 is the superb portal of the Hotel Jeanne d"Albret; all that is left of the n.o.ble residence of that niece of Francois I. who married the Duc de Cleves in 1541. It is more than a century from that date before this _hotel_ holds any history for us, when it became tenanted by Cesar Phebus d"Albret, Marshal of France; a rich and frolicsome Gascon, a friend of Scarron, an especial friend of young Madame Scarron. It was he who killed the Marquis de Sevigne in a duel. The d.u.c.h.esse d"Albret was an eminently proper person, a bit of a _precieuse_, and her _salon_ here was a flimsy copy of that of the Hotel Rambouillet. Scarron"s widow, poor and by no means unfriended, found a temporary home in this house, after a short stay with her life-long friend, Mlle. de Lenclos, before taking rooms in the convent, where we have seen her.
When _la veuve_ Scarron, reincarnated in Madame de Maintenon, was living in the grand establishment at Vaugirard, provided by the King for his two children, she is said, by local tradition, to have had her private apartment in the Marais, near where we stand. It was on the first floor of the small and shabby house at No. 7 bis Rue du Perche, and you are shown a ceiling in an upper room, that is claimed to have been painted for the great lady. It is in four sunken squares, wherein pose the four Seasons, in conventional att.i.tudes and unconventional raiment.
Let us stop here on the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, where it meets the end of a little street with the big name of des Hospitalieres-Saint-Gervais, given to it by the great hospital and monastery that occupied these grounds, through which this street was afterward cut, when Philippe-Auguste gathered them just within the safe-keeping of his wall. Just without that wall lay the Hotel Barbette, in the midst of its own wide lands. On this corner, we stand just on the line of the wall, and look across Rue des Francs-Bourgeois into a court, once the Allee aux Arbaletriers, over whose entrance is a tablet, recording the murder of Louis d"Orleans, near that spot--a scene sketched in our first chapter. That maze of courts, crowded close with ancient wooden structures, tempts us to search within it for vestiges of the outbuildings of the Hotel Barbette. And it is worth while exploring the interior of the corner house, if only for its mediaeval staircase. Coming out by the courts opening into Rue Vieille-du-Temple, we take a few steps to where it meets the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and we stand on the exact site of the Porte Barbette of the old wall.