THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION

Charlotte Corday.
(From the copy by Baudry of the only authentic portrait, painted in her prison.)

It is no part of the province of this book to reconstruct the Paris of the Revolution, nor is there room for such reconstruction, now that M. G. Lenôtre has given us his exhaustive and admirable "Paris Révolutionnaire." Despite the destruction of so much that was worth saving of that period, there yet remain many spots for our seeing. The cyclone of those years had two centres, and one of them is fairly well preserved. It is the Cour du Commerce, to which we have already come in search of the tower and wall of Philippe-Auguste. Outside that wall, close to the Porte de Buci, there had been a tennis-court, which was extended, in 1776, into a narrow passage, with small dwellings on each side. The old entrance of the tennis-court was kept for the northern entrance of the new passage, and it still remains under the large house, No. 61 Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. The southern entrance of the passage was in the western end of Rue des Cordeliers, now Rue de l'École-de-Médecine. In 1876, exactly one hundred years after the construction of this Cour du Commerce, its southern half and its southern entrance were cut away by modern Boulevard Saint-Germain, on the northern side of which a new entrance to the court was made. At the same time the houses on the northern side of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine were demolished, and replaced by the triangular space that holds the statues of Danton and Paul Broca among its trees. Those houses faced, across the street, whose narrowness is marked by the two curbstones, the houses, of the same age and the same style, that are left on the southern side of this section of the modern boulevard. One of the houses then destroyed had been inhabited by Georges-Jacques Danton. It stood over the entrance of the court, and his statue—a bronze of his own vigor and audacity—has been placed exactly on the spot of that entrance, exactly under his dwelling-place. The pediment of this entrance-door is now in the grounds of M. Victorien Sardou, at Marly-le-Roi. Danton's apartment, on the first floor above the entresol, had two salons and a bedroom looking out on Rue des Cordeliers, while the dining-room and working-room had windows on the Cour du Commerce. Here in 1792 he had his wholesome, peaceful home, with his wife and their son; and to them there sometimes came his mother, or one of his sisters, for a visit.

In the entresol below lived Camille Desmoulins and his wife in 1792. The two young women were close friends, and M. Jules Claretie has given us a pretty picture of them together, in terrified suspense on that raging August 10th. Lucile Desmoulins knew, on the next day, that the mob had at least broken the windows of the Tuileries, for someone had brought her the sponges and brushes of the Queen! And on the 12th, Danton carried his wife from here to the grand hôtel in Place Vendôme, the official residence of the new Minister of Justice. His short life in office being ended by his election to the Convention in the autumn of that year, he returned to this apartment; to which, three months after the death of his first wife in that same year, he brought a youthful bride. And here, on March 30, 1794, he was arrested. Before his own terrible tribunal his reply, to the customary formal questions as to his abode, was: "My dwelling-place will soon be in annihilation, and my name will live in the Panthéon of history." He spoke prophetically. The clouds of a century of calumny have only lately been blown away, and we can, at last, see clearly the heroic figure of this truest son of France; a "Mirabeau of the sans-culottes," a primitive man, unspoiled and strong, joyous in his strength, ardent yet steadfast, keen-eyed for shams, doing when others were talking, scornful of phrasemongers, and so genuine beside the petty schemers about him that they could not afford to let him live.

Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist Desmoulins had, in his queer and not unlovable composition, a craving for a hero and a clinging to a strong nature. His first idol was Mirabeau. That colossus had died on April 2, 1791, and Desmoulins had been one of the leaders in the historic funeral procession that filled the street and filed out from it four miles in length. Mont-Blanc was then the street's name, and for a few days it was called Rue Mirabeau, but soon took its present name, Chaussée-d'Antin, from the gardens of the Hôtel d'Antin, through which it was cut. The present No. 42, with a new front, but otherwise unchanged, is the house of Mirabeau's death, in the front room of its second floor. Mirabeau's worthy successor in Camille's worship was Danton, near whom he lived, as we have seen, and with whom he went as secretary to the Ministry of Justice. After leaving office, Camille and his wife are found in his former bachelor home in Place du Théâtre-Français, now Place de l'Odéon. The corner house there, that proclaims itself by a tablet to have been his residence, is in the wrong; and that tablet belongs by right to the house on the opposite corner, No. 2 Place de l'Odéon and No. 7 Rue Crébillon. From his end windows in this latter street, when he had lived there as a bachelor, Camille could look slantwise to the windows of an apartment at No. 22 Rue de Condé, and he looked often, attracted by a young girl at home there with her parents. There is still the balcony on the front, on which Lucile Duplessis ventured forth, a little later, to blow kisses across the street. At the religious portion of their marriage, in Saint-Sulpice on December 29, 1790, the témoins of the groom were Brisson, Pétion, Robespierre. The last-named had been Camille's schoolfellow and crony at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and remained his friend as long as it seemed worth while. The wedding party went back to this apartment—on the second floor above the entresol—for the dîner de noces. Everything on and about the table—it is still shown at Vervins, a village just beyond Laon—was in good taste, we may be sure, for Desmoulins was a dainty person, for all his tears over Marat; his desk, at which he wrote the fiery denunciations of "Le Vieux Cordelier," had room always for flowers. It was here that he was arrested, to go—not so bravely as he might—to prison, and then to execution with Danton, on April 5, 1794. His Lucile went to the scaffold on the 12th of the same month, convicted of having conspired against the Republic by wandering about the gardens of the Luxembourg, trying to get a glimpse of her husband's face behind his prison window. To us he is not more visible in this garden than he was to her, but in the garden of the Palais-Royal he leaps up, "a flame of fire," on July 12, 1789, showing the Parisians the way they went to the Bastille on the 14th.

In the same section with Danton and Desmoulins, and equally vivid with them in his individuality, we find Jean-Paul Marat. His apartment, where lived with him and his mistress, Simonne Evrard, his two sisters, Albertine and Catherine—all three at one in their devotion to his loathsome body—was in a house a little easterly from Danton's, on the same northern side of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine. It was at this house that Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday d'Armans, on July 13, 1793, presented herself as "l'ange de l'assassination," in Lamartine's swelling phrase. She had driven across the river, from the Hôtel de la Providence. In our Dumas chapter we shall try to find her unpretending inn, and shall find only its site. In the Musée Grévin, in Paris, you may see the baignoire in which Marat sat when he received Charlotte Corday and her knife—a common kitchen-knife, bought by her on the day before at a shop in the Palais-Royal. The bath is shaped like a great copper shoe, and on its narrow top, through which his head came, was a shelf for his papers.

The printing-office of Marat's "L'Ami du Peuple," succeeded in 1792 by his "Journal de la République Française," was in that noisiest corner of Paris, the Cour du Commerce. It was in that end of the long building of two low stories and attic, numbered 6 and 8, now occupied by a lithographer. After Marat's death, and that of his journal, the widow Brissot opened a modest stationer's shop and reading-room in the former printing-office, we are told by M. Sardou. It is an error that places the printing-office at the present No. 1 of the court, in the building which extended then through to No. 7 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie. These two lots do, indeed, join in their rear, but Marat has no association with either. In Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, certainly, the "Friend of the People" had storage room in the cellar and an office on an upper floor, but it was in one of the tall houses on the western side of the street, just north of the old theatre.

The only claim to our attention of No. 1 Cour du Commerce—a squalid tavern which aspires to the title of "La Maison Boileau"—comes from the presence of Sainte-Beuve. The great critic is said to have rented a room, under his pen-name of "Joseph Delorme," for a long time in this then cleanly hôtel-garni, for the ostensible purpose of working in quiet, free from the importunate solicitors of all sorts who intruded on his home in Rue du Mont-Parnasse, No. 11.

Marat's death was frantically lamented by the rabble, that was quite unable to recognize the man's undeniable abilities and attainments, and that had made him its idolized leader because of his atrocious taste in saying in print exactly what he meant. They carried his body to the nave of the church, and later to its temporary tomb in the garden, of the Cordeliers, a step from his house. In the intervals of smiling hours spent in watching heads fall into the basket, in new Place de la Révolution, they crowded here to weep about his bedraped and beflowered bier. The remains were then placed, with due honors, in the Panthéon. Then, within two years, the same voices that had glorified him shrieked that his body and his memory should be swept into the sewer. It was the voice of the people—the voice of Deity, in all ages and in all lands, it is noisily asserted.

When the Franciscan monks, who were called Cordeliers because of their knotted cord about the waist, came to Paris early in the thirteenth century, they were given a goodly tract of ground just within the Saint-Germain gate, stretching, in rough outlines, from Rues Antoine-Dubois and Monsieur-le-Prince nearly to Boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel. The church they built there was consecrated by the sainted Louis IX. in 1262, and when burned, in 1580, was rebuilt mainly by the accursed Henri III. New chapels and cloisters were added in 1672, and there were many other structures pertaining to the order within these boundaries. Of all these, only the Refectory remains to our day. The site of the church, once the largest in Paris, is covered by Place de l'École-de-Médecine and by a portion of the school; something of the shape and some of the stones of the old cloisters are preserved in the arched court of the Clinique; bits of the old walls separate the new laboratories, and another bit, with its strong, bull-nosed moulding, may be seen in the grounds of the water-works behind No. 11 Rue Racine, this street having been cut through the monks' precincts, so separating the Infirmary, to which this wall belonged, and that stretched nearly to the rear walls of Lycée Saint-Louis, from the greater portion of "Le Grand Couvent de l'Observance de Saint François."

Turn in at the gateway in the corner of Place de l'École-de-Médecine, and the Refectory stands before you, a venerable fabric of Anne of Brittany's building, with sixteenth and seventeenth century adornments, all in admirable preservation. The great hall, filled with the valuable collection of the Musée Dupuytren, attracts us as a relic of ancient architecture, and as the last existing witness of the Revolutionary nights of the Cordeliers Club. That club had its hall just across the garden alongside the Refectory, in one of the buildings of the cloisters, which, with the church, had been given over to various uses and industries. Hence the name of the club, enrolled under the leadership of Danton, on whom the men of his section looked as the incarnation of the Revolution. To him Robespierre and his republic were shams, and to his club the club of the Jacobins was at first distinctly reactionary. It took but little time, in those fast-moving days, for the Cordeliers, in their turn, to be suspected for their unpatriotic moderation!

The Refectory of the Cordeliers.

We must not leave our Cour du Commerce, without a glance at the small building on the northern corner of its entrance from Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie. It was here that the first guillotine was set up for experiments on sheep, by Dr. Antoine Louis, Secretary of the Academy of Surgeons, and the head of a committee appointed by the National Assembly on October 6, 1791. On that day a clause in the new penal code made death by decapitation the only method of execution, and the committee had powers to construct the apparatus, which was to supersede Sanson's sword. It was not a new invention, for the mediæval executioners of Germany and Scotland had toyed with "the Maiden," but for centuries she had lost her vogue. On December 1, 1789, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had tried to impress on the Assembly the need of humane modes of execution, and had dwelt on the comfort of decapitation by his apparatus until he was laughed down. That grim body could find mirth only in a really funny subject like the cutting off of heads! After two years and more, the machine, perfected by Dr. Louis, and popularly known as "La Louisette," was tried on a malefactor in the Place de Grève on April 25, 1792. Three days later the little lady received her official title, "La Guillotine."

Dr. Guillotin had made his model and his experiments at his residence, still standing, with no external changes, at No. 21 Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs. It was already a most ancient mansion when he came here to live, and perhaps to remain until his death—in bed—in 1814. It had been known as the Hôtel de Bretagne, and it is rich in personal history. To its shelter came Catherine de Lorraine, the young widow of the Duc de Montpensier, the "lame little devil" whom Henri III. longed to burn alive, for her abuse of him after the murder of her brother Guise. Within its walls, Anne of Austria's treasurer, the rich and vulgar Bertrand de la Bazinière—whom we have met on Quai Malaquais—hoarded the plunder which he would not, or dared not, spend. Louis XIV. gave him, later, lodgings in the Bastille, in that tower named Bazinière always after. In this same Hôtel de Bretagne, Henrietta of France, widowed queen of England, made her temporary home in the winter of 1661, near her daughter, lately installed as "Madame," wife of the King's brother, in the Palais-Royal. Returning from England in 1665, this unhappy queen went to the last refuge of her troubled life in the convent she had founded on the heights of Chaillot. From that farther window of the first story on the right of the court, the Comte de Maulevrier, Colbert's nephew, threw himself down to his death on the pavement on Good Friday, 1706. In time the stately mansion became a hôtel-garni, was appropriated as National Domain in the Revolution, and sold in a lottery.

"La Guillotine," having proved the sharpness of her tooth, was speedily promoted from Place de Grève to a larger stage in Place de la Réunion, now Place du Carrousel, and thence in May, 1793—that she might not be under the windows of the Convention—to Place de la Révolution, formerly Place de Louis XV., at present Place de la Concorde. This wide space, just beyond the moat of the Tuileries gardens, had in its centre, where now is the obelisk of Luxor, a statue of the late "well-beloved," then altogether-detested, King for whom the place had been named; and a little to the east of that point the scaffold was set up. Lamartine puts it on the site of the southern fountain, for the effect he gets of the flowing of water and of blood; this is one of his magniloquent phrases, which scorn exactness. On January 21, 1793, for the execution of Louis XVI., the guillotine was removed to a spot just westward of the centre, that it might be well protected by the troops deploying about the western side of the place, and into the Champs Élysées and Cours la Reine. For a while in 1794, the guillotine was transferred to the present Place de la Nation—where we shall find it in a later chapter—to come back to Place de la Révolution in time to greet Robespierre and his friends.

Standing here, we are near the other centre of Revolutionary Paris, made so by the Club of the Jacobins, that met first in the refectory, later in the church of the monastery from which it took its name. The site of these buildings is covered by the little Marché Saint-Honoré and by the space about. The club of the more moderate men, headed by Bailly and Lafayette, had its quarters in the monastery of the Feuillants, which gave its name to the club, and which extended along the south side of Rue Saint-Honoré, eastwardly from Rue de Castiglione; this street being then the narrow Passage des Feuillants, leading from Rue Saint-Honoré to the royal gardens, and to the much-trodden Terrasse on the northern side of those gardens facing the Manège. This building had been erected for the equestrian education of the youth who afterward became Louis XV., and was converted into a hall for the sitting of the Assembly, after that body had been crowded for about three weeks, on coming to Paris from Versailles, into the inadequate hall of the Archbishop's palace, on the southern shore of the City Island, alongside Notre-Dame. The Convention took over the Manège from the Assembly, and there remained until May, 1793, when it removed to the more commodious quarters, and more befitting surroundings, of the Tuileries. The old riding-school, whose site is marked by a tablet on the railing of the garden opposite No. 230 Rue de Rivoli, was swept away by the cutting of the western end of that street, under the Consulate in 1802.

When Maximilien Robespierre came up from Arras—where he had resigned his functions in the Criminal Court, because of his conscientious objections to capital punishment—he found squalid quarters, suiting his purse—which remained empty all through life—in Rue Saintonge. That street, named for a province of old France, remains almost as he saw it, one of the few Paris streets that retain their original buildings and ancient atmosphere. The high and sombre house, wherein he lodged from October, 1789, to July, 1791, is quite unaltered, save for its number, which was then 8 and is now 64. From here, Robespierre was snatched away, suddenly and without premeditation on his part, and planted in the bosom of the Duplay family. They had worshipped him from afar, and when, from their windows, they saw him surrounded by the acclaiming crowd, on the day after the so-called massacres of the Champ-de-Mars of July 17, 1791, the peaceful carpenter ran out and dragged the shrinking great man into his court-yard for temporary shelter. The house was then No. 366 Rue Saint-Honoré. If any reader wishes to decide for himself whether the modern No. 398 is built on the site of the Duplay house, of which no stone is left, as M. Ernest Hamel asserts; or whether the present tall structure there is an elevation on the walls of the old house, every stone of which is left, as M. Sardou insists; he must study the pamphlets issued by these earnest and erudite controversialists. There is nothing more delightful in topographical sparring. The authors of this book can give no aid to the solicitous student; for they have read all that has been written concerning the subject, they have explored the house, and they have settled in silence in the opposing camps!

In the Duplay household, to which he brought misery then and afterward, Robespierre was worshipped during life and deified after death. To that misguided family, "this cat's head, with the prominent cheekbones, seamed by small-pox; his bilious complexion; his green eyes rimmed with red, behind blue spectacles; his harsh voice; his dry, pedantic, snappish, imperious language; his disdainful carriage; his convulsive gestures—all this was effaced, recast, and transformed into the gentle figure of an apostle and a martyr to his faith for the salvation of men." From their house, it was but a step to the sittings of the Assembly. It was but a few steps farther to the garden of the Tuileries and to the "fête de l'Être Suprême," planned by him, when he had induced the Convention to decree the existence of God and of an immortal soul in man. He cast himself for the rôle of High Priest of Heaven, and headed the procession on June 8, 1794, clad in a blue velvet coat, a white waistcoat, yellow breeches and top-boots; carrying in his hand flowers and wheat-ears. He addressed the crowd, in "the scraggiest prophetic discourse ever uttered by man," and they had games, and burned in effigy Atheism and Selfishness and Vice! Such of the stage-setting of this farce as was constructed in stone remains intact to-day, for our wonder at such childishness, and our admiration of the architectural perfection of the out-of-door arena.

From this Duplay house, Robespierre used to go on his solitary strolls, accompanied only by his dogs, in the woods of Monceaux and Montmorenci, where he picked wild-flowers. From this house he went to his last appearance in the Convention on the 9 Thermidor, and past it he was carted to the scaffold, on the following day, July 28, 1794. He had followed Danton within a few months, as Danton had predicted. They were of the same age at the time of their death, each having thirty-five years; the younger Robespierre was thirty-two, Saint-Just was twenty-six, Desmoulins thirty-four, when their heads fell. Mirabeau died at the age of forty-two, Marat was forty-nine when stabbed. Not one of the conspicuous leaders of the Revolution and of the Terror had come to fifty years!

The Carré d'Atalante in the Tuileries Gardens.

When the tumbrils and their burdens did not go along the quays to Place de la Révolution, they went through Rue Saint-Honoré, that being the only thoroughfare on that side of the river. From the Conciergerie they crossed Pont au Change, and made their way by narrow and devious turnings to the eastern end of Rue Saint-Honoré, and through its length to Rue du Chemin-du-Rempart—now Rue Royale—and so to the scaffold. Short Rue Saint-Florentin was then Rue de l'Orangerie, and was crowded by sightseers hurrying to the place. Those of the victims not already confined in the Conciergerie were sent to the condemned cells there, for the night between sentence and execution. The trustworthy history of the prisons of Paris during the Revolution remains to be written, and there is wealth of material for it. There were many smaller prisons not commonly known, and of the larger ones that we do know, there are several, quite unchanged to-day, well worth unofficial inspection. The Salpêtrière, filling a vast space south of the Jardin des Plantes, was built for the manufacture of saltpetre, by Louis XIII.; and, by his son, was converted into a branch, for women, of the General Hospital. A portion of its buildings was set apart for young women of bad character, and here Manon Lescaut was imprisoned. The great establishment is now known as the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, and is famous for its treatment of women afflicted with nervous maladies, and with insanity. The present Hospice de la Maternité was also perverted to prison usages during the Revolution. Its formal cloisters and steep tiled roofs cluster about its old-time square, but its ancient gardens, and their great trees, are almost all buried beneath new masonry. The façade of the chapel, the work of Lepautre, is no longer used as the entrance, and may be seen over the wall on Boulevard de Port-Royal. Another prison was that of Saint-Lazare, first a lazar-house and then a convent, whose weather-worn roofs and dormers show above the wall on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. On the dingy yellow plaster of the arched entrance-gate one may read, in thick black letters: "Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction." Unaltered, too, is the prison in the grounds of the Carmelites, to be visited later in company with Dumas; and the Luxembourg, that was reserved for choice captives. The prison of the Abbey of Saint-Germain was swept away by the boulevard of that name. Its main entrance for wheeled vehicles was through Rue Sainte-Marguerite, the short section left of that street being now named Gozlin. Of the other buildings of the abbey, there remain only the church itself, the bishop's palace behind in Rue de l'Abbaye, and the presbytery glued to the southern side of the church-porch. Its windows saw the massacres of the priests and the prisoners, which took place on the steps of the church and in its front court. When you walk from those steps across the open place, to take the tram for Fontenay-aux-Roses, you step above soil that was soaked with blood in the early days of September, 1792. Some few of the abbey prisoners were slaughtered in the garden, of which a portion remains on the south side of the church, where the statue of Bernard Palissy, by Barrias, stands now. In other chapters, the destruction of the Grand- and the Petit-Châtelet has been noted. La Force has gone, and Sainte-Pélagie is soon to go. And the Conciergerie has been altered, almost beyond recognition, as to its entrances and its courts and its cells. Only the Cour des Femmes remains at all as it was in those days.

There are three victims of the Terror who have had the unstinted pity of later generations, and who have happily left traces of their presence on Paris brick and mortar. The last of these three to die was André-Marie de Chénier, and we will go first to his dwelling. It is an oddly shaped house, No. 97 Rue de Cléry—Corneille's street for many years—at its junction with Rue Beauregard; and a tablet in its wall tells of de Chénier's residence there. Born in Constantinople in 1762, of a French father—a man of genius in mercantile affairs—and a Greek mother, the boy was brought to Paris with his younger brother, Joseph-Marie, in 1767. They lived with their mother in various streets in the Marais, before settling in this final home. Here Madame de Chénier, a poet and artist in spirit, filled the rooms with the poets and artists and savants of the time, the friends of her gifted sons. Hither came David, gross of body, his active mind busied with schemes for his annual exhibitions of paintings, the continuation of those begun by Colbert, and the progenitor of the present Salons; Alfieri, the poet and splendid adventurer; Lavoisier, absorbed in chemical discovery. Here in his earlier years, and later, when he hurried home from the French Embassy in London on the outbreak of the Revolution, André de Chénier produced the verse that revived the love of nature, dead in France since Ronsard, and brought a lyric freshness to poetry that shamed the dry artificialities so long in vogue. That poetry was the forerunner of the Romantic movement. In his tranquil soul, he hoped for the pacific triumph of liberty and equality, and his delicate spirit abhorred the excesses of the party with whose principles he sympathized. He was taken into custody at Passy, early in 1794, while visiting a lady, against whose arrest he had struggled, locked up in Saint-Lazare for months, convicted, and sent to the Conciergerie. He was guillotined in Place de la Nation on July 26, 1794, only the day before Robespierre's fall, and was one of the last and noblest sacrifices to the Terror. We shall look on his burial-place in our later rambles. Müller has made André de Chénier the central figure of his "Roll-Call," now in the Louvre. He sits looking toward us with eyes that see visions, and his expression seems full of the thought to which he gave utterance when led out to execution: "I have done nothing for posterity, and yet," tapping his forehead, "I had something here!"

In 1795 this little house was surrounded by a great crowd of citizens come to bury Louis de Chénier, the father. The Section of Brutus guarded the bier, draped with blue set with silver stars, to suggest the immortality of the soul! And they gave every honor they could invent to the "Pompe funèbre d'un Citoyen Vertueux," whose worthy son they had beheaded.

Joseph-Marie de Chénier lived for many years under suspicion of having given his assent if not his aid to his brother's death, albeit the mother always asserted that he had tried to save André. Joseph was a fiery patriot, and a man of genius withal. He wrote the words of the "Chant du Départ" which, set to music by Méhul, proved almost as stirring as the "Marseillaise" to the pulses of the Patriots. Music was one of the potent intoxicants of the time, and the Revolution was played and sung along to the strains of these two airs, and of "Ça ira" and the "Carmagnole." The classic style, which had hitherto prevailed, gave way before the paltry sentimentality and the tinkling bombast of the music adored by the mob. David planned processions marching to patriotic airs, and shallow operas were performed in the streets. Yet Rouget-de-l'Isle, the captain of engineers who had given them the "Marseillaise," was cashiered and put into a cell; being freed, he was left to starve, and no aid came to him from the Empire or the Bourbons, naturally enough. Louis-Philippe's government found him in sad straits, in that poor house No. 21 of the poor Passage Saulnier, and ordered a small pension to be paid to him during his life. His death came in 1836.

Joseph-Marie de Chénier was a playwright, also, and in 1798 he had created a sensation by his "Charles IX.," produced at the Comédie Française, now the Odéon. In the part of the King, wonderfully made up and costumed, Talma won his first notable triumph. "This play," cried Danton from the pit, "will kill royalty as 'Figaro' killed the nobility." Joseph-Marie lived, not too reputably, but very busily, until January 10, 1811; a fussy politician, a member of the Convention, of the Council of Five Hundred, and of the Institute, Section of the French Tongue and Literature, always detested by his associates, by the Emperor, and by the common people.

When the Place Dauphine of Henri IV. was finished, the new industry of the spectacle-makers established itself in the same buildings we see to-day, and gave to the place the name of Quai des Lunettes. Later came the engravers, who found all the light they needed in these rooms, open on three sides. Among them was a master-engraver, one Phlipon, bringing his daughter, Marie-Jeanne—her pet name being Manon—from the house of her birth, in 1754, in Rue de la Lanterne, now widened into Rue de la Cité. It is not known whether the site of that house is under the Hôtel-Dieu or the Marché-aux-Fleurs. Their new home stood, and still stands, on the corner of the northern quay, and is now numbered 28 Place Dauphine and 41 Quai de l'Horloge. The small window of the second floor lights the child's alcove bedroom, where this "daughter of the Seine"—so Madame Roland dubs herself in her "Memoirs"—looked out on the river, and up at the sky, from over Pont au Change to beyond the heights of Chaillot, when she could lift her eyes from her Plutarch, and her thoughts from the altar she was planning to raise to Rousseau. It must be owned that this all too-serious girl was a prig; a creature over-fed for its size, the word has been happily defined. At the age of eleven, she was sent to the school of the "Dames de la Congrégation," in the Augustinian convent in Rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne. It has been told how that ancient street was cut in half by Rue Monge. In its eastern section, now named Rue de Navarre, was Manon's school, directly above the Roman amphitheatre, discovered only of late years in the course of excavations in this quarter. The portion that is left of this impressive relic is in good preservation and in good keeping. Her school-days done, the girl spent several years in this house before us, until her mother's death, and her father's tipsiness, sent her back to her convent for a few months. Then, having refused the many suitors who had thronged about her in her own home, she found the philosopher she wanted for a husband in Jean-Marie Roland de la Platrière, a man much older than she; lank, angular, yellow, bald, "rather respectable than seductive," in the words of the girl-friend who had introduced him. But Manon Phlipon doubtless idealized this wooden formalist who adored her, as she idealized herself and all her surroundings, including The People, who turned and rent her at the last. She gave to her husband duty and loyalty, and it was not until she counted herself dead to earth and its temptations, in her cell at Sainte-Pélagie, that she addressed her last farewell to him, whom "I dare not name, one whom the most terrible of passions has not kept from respecting the barriers of virtue." This farewell was meant for François-Léonard-Nicolas Buzot, Girondist member of the Assembly and later of the Convention. He remained unnamed and unknown, until his name and their secret were told by a bundle of old letters, found on a book-stall on Quai Voltaire in 1864. She had met him first when her husband came from Lyons, with petitions to the Assembly, in February, 1791, and took rooms at the Hôtel Britannique, in Rue Guénégaud. Her salon soon became the gathering-place of the Girondists, where those austere men, who considered themselves the sole salvation of France, were austerely regaled with a bowl of sugar and a carafe of water. Their hostess could not bother with frivolities, she, who in her deadly earnestness, renounced the theatre and pictures, and all the foolish graces of life! The Hôtel Britannique was the house now numbered 12 Rue Guénégaud, a wide-fronted, many-windowed mansion of the eighteenth century. Its stone steps within are well worn, its iron rail is good, its second floor—the Roland apartment—still shows traces of the ancient decorations.

The Girlhood Home of Madame Roland.

Buzot lived at No. 3 Quai Malaquais, an ancient mansion now replaced by the modern structure between the seventeenth-century houses numbered 1 and 5. For when the Convention outlawed the Girondists, and Buzot fled, it was decreed that his dwelling should be levelled to the ground, and on its site should be placed a notice: "Là fut la maison du roi Buzot." So that it would seem that his colleagues of the Convention had found him an insufferably Superior Person.

Leaving this apartment on his appointment to office in 1792, Roland took his wife to the gorgeous salons of the Ministry of the Interior, in the hôtel built by Leveau for the Comte de Lionne, and beautified later by Calonne. It occupied the site of the present annex of the Bank of France just off Rue des Petits-Champs, between Rues Marsollier and Dalayrac. Here, during his two terms of office in 1792 and 1793, Roland had the aid of his wife's pen, as well as the allurements of her personal influence, in the cause to which she had devoted herself. The masculine strength of her pen was weakened, it is true, by too sharp a feminine point, and she embittered the Court, the Cordeliers, the Jacobins, all equally against her and her party. For "this woman who was a great man," in Louis Blanc's true words, was as essentially womanly as was Marie Antoinette; and these two most gracious and pathetic figures of their time were yet unconscious workers for evil to France. The Queen made impassable the breach between the throne and the people; Madame Roland hastened on the Terror. And each of them was doing exactly what she thought it right to do!

On January 23, 1793, two days after the King's death, Roland left office forever and removed to a house in Rue de la Harpe, opposite the Church of Saint-Cosme. That church stood on the triangle made by the meeting of Rues de l'École-de-Médecine and Racine with Boulevard Saint-Germain. On the eastern side of that boulevard, once the eastern side of Rue de la Harpe, where it meets modern Rue des Écoles, stood the Roland house. The students and studentesses, who sip their coffee and beer on the pavement of Vachette's, are on the scene of Madame Roland's arrest, on the night between May 31st and June 1st. On the former day, seeing the end so near, Roland had fled. His wife was taken to the prison of the Abbaye, and given the cell which was to be tenanted, six weeks later, by Charlotte Corday. Released on June 22d and returned to her home in Rue de la Harpe, she was re-arrested on the 24th and locked up in Sainte-Pélagie. It was an old prison, long kept for the detention of "femmes et filles, dont la conduite est onéreuse," and its character had not been bettered by the character of the female prisoners sent there by the Terror. This high-minded woman, subjected to infamous sights and sounds, preserved her serenity and fortitude in a way to extort the "stupefied admiration" of her fellow-prisoners, as one of these has testified. It was only in her cell that the great heart gave way. There she found solace, during her four months' confinement, with Thomson's "Seasons," "done into choice French," with Shaftesbury and an English dictionary, with Tacitus, and her girlhood companion, Plutarch. And here she busied herself with her "Memoirs," "writing under the axe," in her own phrase. In the solitude of her cell, indeed, she was sometimes disturbed by the unseemly laughter of the ladies of the Comédie Française, at supper with the prison-governor in an adjacent cell. We shall see, later, how these ladies came to be here. More acceptable sounds might have come almost to her ears; that of the hymn-singing or of the maiden laughter of the girls in her old convent, only a few steps away. The prison-register contains her description, probably as accurate as matter-of-fact: "Height, five feet; hair and eyebrows, dark chestnut; brown eyes; medium nose; ordinary mouth; oval face, round chin, high forehead." From Sainte-Pélagie she went to the Conciergerie on November 1st, the day after the guillotining of the Girondists, and thence in eight days to her own death. It has been told, by every writer, that she could look over at her girlhood home, as her tumbril crossed Pont au Change. It has not been told, so plainly as it deserves, that her famous utterance on the platform was made fine for historic purposes, as was done with Cambronne's magnificent monosyllable at Waterloo. She really said: "O Liberté, comme on t'a jouée!" With these words, natural and spontaneous and without pose, she is, indeed, "beautiful, amazonian, graceful to the eye, more so to the mind."

Within a few days of her death died her husband and her lover. Roland, on hearing of her execution, in his hiding-place near Rouen, thrust his cane-sword into his breast; Buzot, wandering and starving in the fields, was found half-eaten by wolves. She had confided her daughter Eudora and her "Memoirs" to the loyal friend Bosc, who hid the manuscript in the forest of Montmorenci, and in 1795 published it for the daughter's benefit. The original is said to be in existence, on coarse gray paper, stained with her tears. Sainte-Beuve speaks of them as "delicious and indispensable memories," deserving a place "beside the most sublime and eloquent effusions of a brave yet tender philosophy." When he praises that style, clearer and more concise than that of Madame de Staël, "that other daughter of Rousseau," he does not say all; he might have added that, like Rousseau, she occasionally speaks of matters not quite convenient to hear.

It is difficult to refrain from undue admiration and pity, to remain temperate and modest, when one dwells on the character and qualities, the blameless life and the ignominious death, of Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. We may look up at his thoughtful face in bronze on Quai Conti, alongside the Mint, where he lived in the entresol of the just completed building, when appointed Director of the Hôtel de la Monnaie by his old friend Turgot, in 1774. We may look upon the house in Rue Servandoni where he hid, and from which he escaped to his death. His other Paris homes have no existence now. His college of Navarre—oldest of all those in the University—has been made over into the École Polytechnique; and the house he built for himself in Rue Chantereine, which was afterward owned by Josephine Beauharnais, has long since disappeared. When only twenty-two years of age he wrote his famous essay on the Integral Calculus, when twenty-six he was elected to the Academy of Sciences. Made Perpetual Secretary of that body in 1777, it came in the course of his duties to deliver eulogies on Pascal, d'Alembert, Buffon, and Franklin, and others of the great guild of science. These are more than perfunctory official utterances, they are of an eloquence that shows his lovable character as well as his scientific authority. He contributed largely to Diderot's Encyclopædia, and put forth many astronomical, mathematical, and theological treatises during his busy life. He wrote earnestly in favor of the independence of the American colonies, and was one of the earliest advocates of the people's cause in France. But he was much more than a man of science and of letters; he was a man with a great soul, "the Seneca of the modern school," says Lamartine; the most kindly and tolerant friend of humanity, and protector of its rights, since Socrates. He believed in the indefinite perfectibility of the human race, and he wrote his last essay, proving its progress upward, while hiding in a garret from those not yet quite perfect fellow-beings, who were howling for his head! He was beloved by Benjamin Franklin and by Thomas Paine. Members of the Convention together, he and Paine prepared the new Constitution of 1793, in which political document they found no place for theological dogma. Robespierre prevented the adoption of this Constitution, having taken God under his own protection. Condorcet made uncompromising criticism, and was put on the list of those to be suspected and got rid of. Too broad to ally himself with the Girondists, he was yet proscribed with them, on June 2, 1793. His friends had forced him to go into hiding, until he might escape. They had asked Madame Vernet—widow of the painter Claude-Joseph, mother of Carle, grandmother of Horace—to give shelter to one of the proscribed, and she had asked only if he were an honest man. This loyal woman concealed him in her garret for nearly one year, and would have kept him longer, but that he feared for her safety, and for that of his wife and daughter, who might be tracked in their visits to him by night. He had finished his "Esquisse d'un Tableau historique des Progrès de l'Esprit humain," full of hope for humanity, with no word of reproach or repining, and then he wrote his last words: "Advice of one proscribed, to his Daughter." This is to be read to-day for its lofty spirit. He gives her the names of certain good men who will befriend her, and among them is Benjamin Franklin Bache, the son of our Franklin's daughter Sally, who had been in Paris with his grandfather.

Then, this letter finished, early on the morning of April 5, 1794, he left it on his table and slipped out, unseen by the good widow Vernet, from the three-storied plaster-fronted house now No. 15 of Rue Servandoni, and still unaltered, as is almost the entire street. Through it he hurried to Rue de Vaugirard, where he stood undecided for a moment, the prison of the Luxembourg on his left, and the prison of the Carmelites on his right, both full of his friends. And on the walls, all about, were placards with big-lettered warning that death was the penalty for harboring the proscribed. Here at the corner, he ran against one Sarret, cousin of Madame Vernet, who went with him, showing the way through narrow streets to the Barrière du Maine, which was behind the present station of Mont-Parnasse. Safely out of the town, the two men took the road to Fontenay-aux-Roses, and at night Sarret turned back. Condorcet lost his way, and wandered about the fields for two days, sleeping in the quarries of Clamart, until driven by hunger into a wretched inn. Demanding an omelet, he was asked how many eggs he would have; the ignorant-learned man ordered a dozen, too many for the working-man he was personating, and suspicions were aroused. The villagers bound and dragged him to the nearest guardhouse at Bourg-la-Reine. He died in his cell that night, April 7, 1794, by poison, it is believed. For he wore a ring containing poison; the same sort of poison, it is said, that was carried by Napoleon, with which he tried—or pretended to try—to kill himself at Fontainebleau. In the modern village of Bourg-la-Reine, five and a half miles from Paris, the principal square bears the name of Condorcet, and holds his bust in marble.

"La Veuve Condorcet" appears in the Paris Bottin every year until 1822, when she died. She had been imprisoned on the identification of her husband's body, but was released after Robespierre's death. She passed the Duplay house every day during those years, going to her little shop at 232 Rue Saint-Honoré. There she had set up a linen business on the ground floor, and above, she painted portraits in a small way. She was a woman of rare beauty and of fine mind, with all womanly graces and all womanly courage. Married in 1786, and much younger than her husband, timorous before his real age and his seeming austerity, she had grown up to him, and had learned to love that "volcano covered with snow," as his friend d'Alembert had said he was. She had a pretty gift with her pen, and her translation into French of Adam Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" is still extant. Her little salon came to be greatly frequented in her beautiful old age.

Condorcet's famous fellow-worker in science, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, was guillotined in May, 1794, the two men having the same number of years, fifty-one. He was condemned, not for being a chemist, albeit his enlightened judges were of the opinion that "the Republic has no need of chemists," but because he had filled, with justice and honesty, his office of Farmer-General under royalty. Their contemporaries of nearly equal age, Gaspard Monge and Claude-Louis Berthollet, escaped the guillotine, and were among the savants in the train of General Bonaparte in his Italian and Egyptian campaigns. After many years of useful labors, they died peacefully under the Restoration.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, of almost equal years with these four, lived to a greater age, and received higher honors from the Emperor and the Bourbons. Coming from his birth-place in Calvados in 1767, his first Paris home to be found is in Rue des Noyers; one side of which ancient street now forms that southern section of Boulevard Saint-Germain opposite Rue des Anglais, its battered houses seeming to shrink back from the publicity thrust upon them. In that one now numbered 57 in the boulevard, formerly No. 33 Rue des Noyers, Alfred de Musset was born in 1810; and in the same row lived Laplace in 1777. In 1787 we find him in Rue Mazarine, and in 1790 in Rue Louis-le-Grand, and this latter residence represents his only desertion of the University side of the Seine. He returned to that bank when placed by the Consuls in the Senate, and made his home in 1801 at No. 24 Rue des Grands-Augustins, and in the following year at No. 2 Rue Christine. These stately mansions of that period, only a step apart, remain as he left them. When Laplace was made Chancellor of the Senate, in 1805, his official residence was in the Luxembourg, and there it continued until 1815, the year of the Restoration. His private residence, from 1805 to 1809, was at No. 6 Rue de Tournon, a house still standing in all its senatorial respectability. He gave this up, and again took up his quarters in the Luxembourg, when made a Count of the Empire and Vice-President of the Senate.

From the Medician palace, which appears in the Bottin of those years as simple No. 19 Rue de Vaugirard, Laplace removed to No. 51 of that street, when the returned Bourbons made him a Peer of France. This house, near Rue d'Assas—named for the Chevalier Nicolas d'Assas, the heroic captain of the regiment of Auvergne during the Seven Years' War—is unaltered since his time. His last change of abode was made in 1818, to Rue du Bac, 100, where he died in 1827. It is a mansion of old-fashioned dignity, with a large court in front and a larger garden behind, and is now numbered 108. The growing importance of his successive dwellings, every one of which may be visited to-day, mark his growth in importance as a man of state. The growth of the man of science is represented by his colossal "La Mécanique Céleste," which first appeared in 1799, and was continued by successive volumes until its completion in 1825. Its title, rather than his titles, should be inscribed on his monument.

A little later than these famous confrères, Georges Cuvier appears in Paris—in Hugo's half-truth—"with one eye on the book of Genesis and the other on nature, endeavoring to please bigoted reaction by reconciling fossils with texts, and making the mastodons support Moses." His first home, at the present 40 Rue de Seine, is a fine old-fashioned mansion. He removed to the opposite side of that street in 1810, and there remained until 1816, his house being now replaced by the new and characterless structure at No. 35. Full of character, however, is his official residence as Professor in the Jardin des Plantes, which took again its ancient title of Jardin du Roi during the Restoration. "La Maison de Cuvier" is a charming old building near the garden-entrance in Rue Cuvier, and within is the bust of this most gifted teacher of his time. His genuine devotion to science and his tolerance for all policies carried him through the several changes of government during his life. He completed the Napoleonic conquest of Italy and Holland by his introduction of the French methods of education, perfected by him. The Bourbons made him Baron and Chancellor of the University, and the Orleans king elevated him to the Peerage of France. He died in 1832.

Paul-François-Jean-Nicolas, Comte de Barras—soldier, adventurer, a power in the Convention, the power of the Directory, practically dictator for a while—has added to the hilarity of the sceptical student of history by his "Memoirs," kept concealed since his death, in 1829, until their publication within a few years. Splendidly mendacious in these pages as he was in life, Barras posed always as the man on horseback of his "13 Vendémiaire." On that day, unwittingly yet actually, he put into the saddle—where he stayed—his young friend Buonaparte, whose qualities he had discovered at the siege of Toulon. This artillery officer, while planting his batteries to cover every approach to the Tuileries, where cowered the frightened Convention, took personal command of the guns that faced Saint-Roch. The front of that church still shows the scars of the bullets that stopped the rush of the Sections in that direction. This battery was placed at the Rue Saint-Honoré end of the narrow lane leading from that street to the gardens of the Tuileries—there being then no Rue de Rivoli, you will bear in mind. This lane was known as Rue du Dauphin, because of the royal son who had used it, going between the Tuileries and the church; after that day, it was popularly called Rue du 13-Vendémiaire, until it received its official appellation of Rue Saint-Roch, when widened and aligned in 1807. At this time there were only two houses in the street, near its southern end, and one of them was a hôtel-garni, in which young Buonaparte caught a short sleep on that night of October 5, 1795. The oldest structure in Rue Saint-Roch to-day is that with the two numbers 4 and 6, and it is known to have been already a hôtel-garni in the first years of the nineteenth century, when it was refaced. So that it is well within belief that we have found here Buonaparte's head-quarters for that one night.

Let us now, crossing the river, get on the ground of positive proof, safe from doubts or conjectures. The Duchesse d'Abrantès, wife of that adorable ruffian, Andoche Junot, made a duke in 1807 by the Emperor, writes in her "Memoirs": "To this day, whenever I pass along Quai Conti, I cannot help looking up at the garret windows at the left angle of the house, on the third floor. That was Napoleon's chamber, when he paid us a visit; and a neat little room it was. My brother used to occupy the one next it." Madame Junot had been Mlle. Laure Permon, whose father, an army contractor, had brought his family to Paris early in 1785, and leased for his residence the Hôtel Sillery, formerly the Petit Hôtel Guénégaud. Madame Permon, a Corsican lady, had been an early friend of Madame Buonaparte, and had rocked young Buonaparte in his cradle; so that he was called by his first name in her family, as her daughter shows in this quotation. Finding him at the École Royale Militaire in Paris, she invited him to her house for frequent visits, once for a week's stay, whenever permission could be got from the school authorities. He was a lank, cadaverous, dishevelled lad, solitary, taciturn, and morose; brooding over the poverty that had forced him to seek an unpaid-for scholarship, and not readily making friends with the more fortunate Albert Permon. Yet he came often, and was nowhere so content as in this house before us. It stands far back from the front of the quay, half-hidden between the Institute and the Mint, and is numbered 13 Quai Conti, and its entrance is on the side at No. 2 Impasse Conti. Its upper portion is now occupied by a club of American art students. Constructed by Mansart, its rooms are of admirable loftiness and proportion, and retain much of their sixteenth-century decoration. Here in this salon after dinner, young Buonaparte would storm about the "indecent luxury" of his schoolmates, or sit listening to Madame Permon, soothed by her reminiscent prattle about Corsica and his mother, to whom he always referred as Madame Letitia. Here he first showed himself to the daughters in his new sub-lieutenant's uniform, before joining his regiment on October 30, 1785, and they laughed at his thin legs in their big boots.

No. 13 Quai Conti.

The École Supérieure de Guerre, commonly called the "École Militaire," remains nearly as when constructed under Louis XV., but it is impossible to fix on the room allotted to this student during his year there—a small, bare room, with an iron cot, one wooden chair, and a wash-stand with drawers. The chapel, now unused, remains just as it was when he received his confirmation in it. He arrived at this school, from his preparatory school at Brienne, on the evening of October 19, 1784, one of a troop of five lads in the charge of a priest. They had disembarked, late that afternoon, at Port Saint-Paul, from the huge, clumsy boat that brought freight and passengers, twice a week, from Burgundy and the Aube down the Seine. The priest gave the lads a simple dinner near their landing-place, and led them across the river and along the southern quays—where the penniless young Buonaparte bought a "Gil-Blas" from a stall, and a comrade in funds paid for it—and, stopping for prayers at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he handed them over to the school authorities.

From that moment every hour of young Buonaparte's year in Paris can be accounted for. And no foundation can be discovered or invented for the fable, mendaciously upheld by the tablet, placed by the Second Empire in the hallway of No. 5 Quai Conti, which claims a garret in that tall, up-climbing, old house as his lodging at that time or at any later time. This flimsy legend need no longer be listened to. Not far away, however, is a garret that did harbor the sub-lieutenant in the autumn of 1787. It is to M. Lenôtre that we owe this delightful find. Arriving in Paris from Corsica, after exactly two years of absence, Buonaparte took room No. 9, on the third floor of the Hôtel de Cherbourg, Rue du Four-Saint-Honoré. That street is now Rue Vauvilliers, its eastern side taken up by the Halles, and its present No. 33, on the western side, is the former hôtel-garni, quite unchanged as to its fabric. Here he was always writing in his room, going out only for the frugal meals that cost him a few sous, and here he had his first amorous adventure, recited by him in cynical detail under the date: "Jeudi 22 Novembre 1787, à Paris, Hôtel de Cherbourg, Rue du Four-Saint-Honoré."

On August 10, 1792, Buonaparte saw the mob carry and sack the Tuileries. He was in disgrace with the army authorities, having practically deserted to Corsica, and he had come back for reinstatement and a job. In his Saint-Helena "Memorial," he says that he was then lodging at the Hôtel de Metz in Rue du Mail. This is evidently the same lodging placed by many writers in Rue d'Aboukir, for many of the large houses that fronted on the first-named street extended through to the latter, as shall be shown later. The hotel is gone, and the great mercantile establishment at No. 22 Rue du Mail covers its site.

Gone, too, is the shabbily furnished little villa in Rue Chantereine, where he first called on Josephine de Beauharnais, where he married that faded coquette—dropping the u from his name then, in March, 1796—and whence he went to his 18 Brumaire. The court-yard, filled with resplendent officers on that morning, is now divided between the two courts numbered 58 and 60 Rue de la Victoire; that name having been officially granted to the street, on his return from his Italian campaign in 1797. The villa, kept by the Emperor, and lent at times to some favorite general, was not entirely torn down until 1860. Its site is now covered by the houses Nos. 58 and 60.

Rue Chantereine was, in those days, almost a country road, bordered by small villas; two of them were associated with Napoleon Bonaparte. In one of them, Mlle. Eléonora Dennelle gave birth, on December 13, 1806, to a boy, who grew up into a startling likeness of the Emperor, as to face and figure, but who inherited from him only the half-madness of genius. He lived through the Empire, the Restoration, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, and into the Republic that has come to stay, dying on April 15, 1881. To another modest dwelling in this same street, there came the loving and devoted Polish lady, Madame Walewski, who had thrown herself into the Emperor's arms, when she was full of faith in his intent to liberate her native land. Their son, Alexandre Walewski, born in 1810, was a brilliant figure in Paris, where he came to reside after the fall of Warsaw. A gifted soldier, diplomat, and writer, he died in 1868.

So, of the roofs that sheltered the boyhood of Napoleon, three still remain. Of those loftier roofs that sheltered his manhood, there are also three still to be seen. In the Paris Bottin of the first year of the nineteenth century, the name of Napoleon Bonaparte appears as a member of the Institute, Section of Mechanism, living in the palace of the Luxembourg. In 1805 his address is changed to the palace of the Tuileries, and he is qualified "Emperor of the French;" enlarging that title in 1806 to "Emperor of the French and King." The Tuileries are swept away, and Saint-Cloud has left only a scar. The Luxembourg remains, and so, too, the Palais de l'Élysée, where he resided for a while, and the château of Malmaison has been restored and refurnished in the style of Josephine, as near as may be, and filled with souvenirs of her and of her husband. Her body lies, with that of her daughter Hortense, in the church of the nearest village, Reuil, and his remains rest under the dome of the Invalides—his last roof.

There is a curious letter, said to be still in existence, written by young Buonaparte to Talma, asking for the loan of a few francs, to be repaid "out of the first kingdom I conquer." He goes on to say that he has found nothing to do, that Barras promises much and does little, and that the writer is at the end of his resources and his patience. This letter was evidently written at that poverty-stricken period between 1792 and 1795, when he was idly tramping Paris streets with Junot, the lovable and generous comrade from Toulon; or with Bourrienne, now met first since their school-days at Brienne, who was to become the Emperor's patient confidential secretary. At that period Talma had fought his way to his own throne. Intimate as he had been with Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins, Joseph-Marie de Chénier and David, he had, also, made friends with the Corsican officer, either during these years of the letter or probably earlier. He made him free of the stage of the Théâtre Français, and lent him books. His friendship passed on to the general, the Consul, and the Emperor, and it was gossipped that he had taught Bonaparte to dress and walk and play Napoleon. Talma always denied this, avowing that the other man was, by nature and training, the greater actor!

Joseph-François Talma used to say that he first heard of a theatre, from seeing and asking about the old Théâtre de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne, whose entrance was in Rue Mauconseil, opposite the place of his birth, on January 15, 1763. As he grew up he learned a good deal more about the theatre, for he went early and often. He was only fifteen when he was one of the audience in the Théâtre Français, on that night of the crowning of Voltaire, and one of the crowd that tried to unharness the horses, and drag the old man from the Tuileries to his house on the quay. By day the lad was learning dentistry, his father's profession—it was then a trade—and the two went to London to practice. For a while young Talma got experience in that specialty from the jaws of the sailor-men at Greenwich, and got gayer and more congenial experience in amateur theatricals in town. They returned to Paris, and the father's sign, "M. Talma, Dentiste," was hung by the doorway of No. 3 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, next to the corner of Rue Saint-Honoré. From the house that was there before the present modern structure, young Talma went across the river to the Comédie Française, on the night of November 21, 1787, and made his début as Seide in "Mahomet."

In our chapter on Molière, we left the Comédie Française, on its opening night in 1689, at the house in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie. There it remained for nearly a century, until forced, by overflowing houses, to find a larger hall. While this was in course of construction the company removed, in 1770, to the Salle des Machines in the Tuileries, already transformed into a theatre by the Regent for his ballets. Here the troupe played until the completion of the new theatre in 1782. That new Comédie Française is now the Second Théâtre Français, the Odéon, the second largest hall in Paris. It was burned in 1799 and again in 1818. In 1789 it took the title of Théâtre National; in 1793, Théâtre de l'Égalité was the newest name forced upon the unwilling comedians, who were, as always with that profession, fond of swelldom and favorites of princes. The house being in the very centre of the Cordeliers quarter, in la Section Marat, there was always constant friction between players and audience, and by 1793 this had so exasperated the ruling powers—the sans-culottes—that nearly the whole troupe was sent to prison, charged with having insulted the Patriots on the boards, and with having given "proofs of marked incivism." The ladies of the company, aristocrats by strength of their sex, occupied cells in Sainte-Pélagie, where we have already listened to their merriment. They escaped trial through the destruction of their dossiers by a humane member of the Committee of Safety, and the 9 Thermidor set them free. Talma had already left the troupe in April, 1791, driven away, with two or three friends, by dissensions and jealousies. They went over to the new house which had been constructed, in 1789, at a corner of the Palais-Royal, by enterprising contractors with influential politicians between them. It was called at first Théâtre Français de la Rue de Richelieu, and, in 1792, Théâtre de la République. On Talma's desertion of the old house, there began a legal process against him, exactly like that instituted by the same Comédie Française against M. Coquelin, a century later, when the theatre had for its lawyer the grandson of its advocate of 1792; and the decision of the two tribunals was the same in effect. Talma stayed at the theatre in the Palais-Royal, to which he drew the discerning public, and, after ten years of rivalry, the two troupes joined hands on those boards, and so the Comédie Française came to the present "House of Molière."

It would seem that Talma was a shrewd man of business, and drew money in his private rôle of landlord. He owned the house in which Mirabeau died, in Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and always referred to the great tribune as "mon ancien locataire, Mirabeau." Just beyond, in Rue Chantereine, Talma was attracted by the small villa built by the architect Ledoux, for Condorcet, it is said. Perhaps the actor had seen, in that street, an even more plausible actor, Giuseppe Balsamo by name, calling himself the Count Cagliostro. He had established himself in one of the villas in this street, on coming to Paris to ply his trade, toward 1784. And in 1778 the wonder-working Mesmer had set up his machinery and masqueraded as a magician in a house in the same street. Benjamin Franklin went there, one of a government commission sent to investigate the miracles.

In his new residence in Rue Chantereine, Talma welcomed his friends among the Revolutionary leaders, and gave them bouillon in the kitchen, when he came home from the theatre at night. In 1795 he sold the villa to Josephine de Beauharnais, and he always said that her first payment was made to him from moneys sent to her, by her husband, from Italy. It is not known whether Talma owned, or leased, an apartment in No. 15 Quai Voltaire, where he lived from 1802 until 1806. The house, now No. 17, one of the ancient stately structures facing the quay, is somewhat narrower than its neighbors. During the ten years between 1807 and 1817 he had an apartment at No. 6 Rue de Seine; possibly in that pavilion in the court which was built by Marguerite de Valois for her residence, and which has been heightened by having two new floors slipped between the lower and top stories, leaving these latter and the façade much as she built them. His home, from 1818 to 1821, at No. 14 Rue de Rivoli, is replaced by the new structures at the western end of that street, which is entirely renumbered. After two more changes on the northern bank, he finally settled at No. 9 Rue de la Tour-des-Dames. Until 1822 there was still to be seen the tower of the windmill owned by the "Dames de Montmartre," which gave its name to this street. At its number 3, a small hôtel, circular-fronted and most coquettish, lived Mlle. Mars, it is believed, and here she was the victim of the earliest recorded theft of an actress's jewels. The simple and stately house, of a low curtain between two wings, with two stories and a mansard roof, bearing the number 9, is the scene of Talma's last years and of his death, on October 19, 1826. His final appearance had been on June 11th of that year, in his marvellous personation of Charles VI. At this house we shall see Dumas visit the old actor, who had seen Voltaire! Dumas says that Talma spared nothing in his aim at accuracy, historic and archæologic, when creating a new rôle or mounting a new play. Indeed, we know that Talma was the first great realist in costume and scenery, as we know that he first brought the statues of tragedy down to human proportions and gave them life-blood. Dumas dwells especially on the voice of the great tragedian—a voice that was glorious and sincere, and in anguish was a sob.

There is a glowing portrait of Talma from the pen of Chateaubriand, in which he makes plain that the tragedian, while he was, himself, his century and ancient centuries in one, had been profoundly affected by the terrible scenes of the Terror which he had witnessed; and it was that baleful inspiration that sent the concentrated passion of patriotism leaping in torrents from his heart. "His grace—not an ordinary grace—seized one like fate. Black ambition, remorse, jealousy, sadness of soul, bodily agony, human grief, the madness sent by the gods and by adversity—that was what he knew. Just his coming on the scene, just the sound of his voice, were overpoweringly tragic. Suffering and contemplation mingled on his brow, breathed in his postures, his gestures, his walk, his motionlessness."

Thomas Carlyle seems strangely placed in the stalls of the Théâtre Français, yet he sat there, at the end of his twelve-days' visit to Paris in 1825. "On the night before leaving," he writes, "I found that I ought to visit one theatre, and by happy accident came upon Talma playing there. A heavy, shortish, numb-footed man, face like a warming-pan for size, and with a strange, most ponderous, yet delicate expression in the big, dull-glowing black eyes and it. Incomparably the best actor I ever saw. Play was 'Œdipe'; place the Théâtre Français."

Monogram from former entrance of the Cour du Commerce, believed to be the initials of the owner, one Girardot.