THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS

The prehistoric savages, who settled, for safety from onslaught, on the largest of the islands in the Seine, known to us as Île de la Cité; the rabble of Gaulish fisherfolk, who came to camp here in after-years; the little tribe of Parisii who later builded a fortified hamlet on this sure ground, and bridged it with the mainland: all these, looking, through the centuries, northwardly across the transparent and unsullied stream, saw the flat river-bank opposite, over beyond it a ring of low wooded hills, and between these, on either hand, broad expanses of marsh, morass, and forest. That which stretched to their right is our Marais. In it the veteran Camulogenus, captaining the Parisii, hoped to mire down the Roman soldiers, once already stuck in the mud along the Bièvre on the southern bank of the Seine. But it is Labienus, that ablest of Cæsar's lieutenants, who "marches with four legions to Lutetia. (This is the fortress of the Parisii, situated on an island in the river Seine.)" And Labienus knows the country as well as his trade, and skirts around the Marais, and crosses the Seine at Auteuil to the solid ground he has chosen on the plains of Grenelle. There he wins battle in the year 52 B.C., and drives the Gauls in disorder to the high ground on which the Panthéon now stands, and the Luxembourg Gardens lie. The Romans, in possession of the island, rebuild the bridges, cut away by the Parisii, and restore the town partly burned by them; a palace for the resident Governors arises on the extreme western end of the island; and new defences are constructed for the Gallo-Roman Lutetia. Four centuries later, it was called his "dear and well-beloved Lutetia" by Julian, and from that conviction he was never apostate. He loved it for its soft air, its fair river, its honest wines coming from its own vineyards. On the slope of its southern suburb stood out the massive walls of the baths that bear his name; and his gardens, planted with vines, reached to the river. Where he swam, we go dry-shod, when we saunter through the Cluny; and we may sit, a little farther south, in Rue de Navarre just off Rue Monge, in the stone seats of the Roman arena, a perfect bit of loyal preservation of Lutetia.

The Romans meant to make their new town an important centre, and those impassioned road-builders began to bring to it the highways, in the making of which, and by means of which, they were easily masters of their world. The Gauls had trodden footpaths through the forests and over the marshes, and of these, the two most trodden on the northern bank started from near the end of their only bridge, now replaced by Pont Notre-Dame. That which went northerly to the southeastern corner of the Halles of our Paris, there split into two branches; the one, named the Voie des Provinces Maritimes, followed nearly the line of present Rue Montmartre, and went, by way of Pontoise, to the northwestern coast of Gaul; the other, named the Voie des Provinces du Nord, ran from the Halles on a line between Rues Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, about where now Boulevard Sebastopol stretches. It was the high road to Saint-Denis, Senlis, Soissons, and so away to the north. The other main pathway turned toward the east, just above the bridge-end, and went nearly parallel with the river-bank, along the line of present Rue Saint-Antoine. This road, to Sens and Meaux and thence eastwardly, was known as the Voie des Provinces de l'Est, and later in life as the Voie Royale.

This pathway was diked by the Romans, and when sufficiently raised, it was paved with stones. Even then it was often submerged, and the marsh over which it went made more marshy, by frequent floods of the swollen Seine, overwashing its slight banks; and by the ceaseless streams that carried down through this bowl the waters of the encircling slopes of Montmartre, Belleville, Chaumont, Ménilmontant. In our stroll through the Marais, you will walk above one of these streams, serving as a sewer to-day, and along the bank of still another, turned into the Gare de l'Arsenal.

On the two sides of this raised road, bit by bit the bog was planted; foot by foot the swamp was reclaimed; gardens were cultivated, farms were tilled, flocks were fed; herdsmen's huts dotted the plain; on the higher spots farmers' houses peeped from among the trees; and on the slopes above, all around from Chaillot to Charonne, shone the white walls of the villas—walls of marble from Italy—of great officials and of wealthy traders. The Church came along this road from its central seat at Sens, and, keen of eye, picked out choice sites for chapels, convents, monasteries. Little by little the entire Marais was levelled up as the surrounding hills were levelled down; yet keeping so well its forests, that it gave good hiding for eight years to Saint-Denis dodging Valerian's pursuit, until that day of the saint's long and winding walk down the street of his name, his head carried in his hands. This northern suburb grew more gradually, at first, than its southern sister, whose sunny breast had enticements for gardeners and for vine-growers. It was a strong man who woke the Marais to unwonted life, and by his wall, encircling and securing it, Philippe-Auguste quickened its sluggish suburban pulse into urban animation. The northern settlements became la Ville, the island being la Cité, and the southern suburb l'Université.

There was a beach or strand—la grève—near the middle of this northern bank, at which were moored and unloaded the boats bringing to the town light merchandise, such as grain, meats, stuffs, and fabrics. All heavy goods—timber, stone, metals—came to the Port Saint-Paul, in front of Quai des Célestins; still there under its old name, but its old business long since gone to the bustling Port de Grenelle. On the Grève gathered men out of place, wandering about while waiting for work; whence comes the modern meaning of grève—a strike, when men get out of place and are not anxious for a job. Here on the Grève, as their common ground, met the men who carried goods by water from up and down stream, and the men who carried goods by land, to and from the provinces. They were strong and turbulent men, and they made two mighty guilds, and these two, combined with other guilds, formed an all-powerful confraternity. In the course of years, there came to its head, as Prévôt des Marchands, that demigod of democracy, the notable Étienne Marcel. He had his home, while living, on Place de Grève, and in the river, when dead; to-day, in bronze he bestrides his bronze horse between those two dwelling-places, facing the strand he ruled and the city he tried to rule. It is he—none more worthy—who shall marshal us on our way to the Marais.

For, when Jean II., "le Bon," was sent to his long captivity in England from the field of Poictiers, won by the Black Prince in 1356, it was the first Dauphin France had had, known later as Charles V., who acted as Regent in his father's absence. He was a sickly and a studious youth, easily alarmed by the violence of these guilds, now making one more savage assault on royal prerogatives, in a desperate stroke to secure the right of the townsmen to rule their town. The Dauphin was afraid of being trapped in the Louvre, and he took refuge in the old Palace of the City. To him forces his way, one day, the boisterous Marcel at the head of three thousand armed and howling men, kills two of the royal marshals in the Presence, and places his own cap of the town colors, red and blue—these were combined with the Bourbon white to make the Tricolor, centuries later—on the head of the terrified Dauphin, either to protect him, or in insolent token of this new recruit to the faction. As soon as might be, the Dauphin got away from his revolted citizens, and came back to his town only when strong enough to hold it against them. Nor would he then trust himself to a permanent residence in the Island-Palace, and it was allowed to fall into disrepair through several successive reigns. Louis XII. made partial restorations, and occasionally sojourned in his palace "in mid-stream," that made him think of his Loire. Parliament already owned the building then, by gift from Charles VII., and since then it has always been known as the Palais de Justice. The returned Dauphin took up his abode in the Hôtel d'Étampes, in the quarter of Saint-Paul, outside Philippe-Auguste's wall; and, by successive purchases, secured other neighboring hôtels and their grounds. This spacious enceinte, within its own walls, stretched from behind the gardens of the Archbishop of Sens, on the river front, and from the grounds of the Célestins, just east of them, on Port Saint-Paul—where the Dauphin's new estate had a grand portal and entrance-way from the quay and the river—away back to Rue Saint-Antoine on the north; and from just outside the old wall, eastwardly to the open country. This domain, and the suburbs that had grown beyond that old wall, toward the north, now came to be embraced within a new enclosure. On the southern side of the river there seemed no need for any enlargement of the old enclosure.

This wall, known in history as the wall of Charles V., was partly quite new, partly an extension or a strengthening of a wall begun by Marcel in 1356; under the pretext of "works of defence of the kingdom against the English," and carried on in offence of his royal master. But before he had finished it, he came to his own end, opportunely for everyone but himself. It is midnight of July 31, 1358, and he is hastening, in darkness and stealth, to open his own gate of Saint-Antoine for the entrance of the combined forces of the English and of Charles the Bad, of Navarre. In Froissart's words: "The same night that this should have been done, God inspired certain burgesses of the city ... who, by divine inspiration, as it ought to be supposed, were informed that Paris should be that night destroyed." So they armed and made their way to Porte Saint-Antoine, "and there they found the provost of merchants with the keys of the gates in his hands;" and their leader, John Maillart, asked, "Stephen, what do you here at this hour?" When Stephen told John not to meddle, John told Stephen: "By God, you're not here for any good, at this hour, and I'll prove it to you." And so, as his notion of proof, "he gave with an axe on Stephen's head, that he fell down to the earth—and yet he was his gossip." Thus died Stephen Marcel, the martyr of devotion to the liberties of his fellow-citizens, in the eyes of many. To others of us, he is the original of the modern patriot of another land, who thanked God that he had a country—to sell; and his ignoble death seems to be the just execution of a traitor. It is due to him to own that he was a strong man, genuine and pitiless in his convictions, and might have merited well of his town and his country, but that the good in him was poisoned by his rapacity for power, and polluted by personal hatred of the Dauphin. His naked body, before being thrown into the Seine, lay exposed for days in front of the Convent of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, whose grounds stretched from without the old wall, eastwardly along the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine. Through them was cut our present Rue Sévigné, and it was on the spot made now by the corner of that street and Rue Saint-Antoine, half way between the old gate and the new gate just built by Marcel, that the crowd gathered to gaze on his corpse.

Froissart rightly claims, referring to Marcel's projected wall with his customary delightful enthusiasm, that it was "a great deed to furnish an arm, and to close with defence, such a city as Paris. Surely it was the best deed that ever any provost did there, for else it had been, after divers times, overrun and robbed by divers occasions." It was a greater deed that was now done by Charles V., and his Provost of Paris, Hugues Aubriot; and their new wall is well worth a little journey along its line, easily traced on our Paris map.

We have already made a visit to Quai des Célestins, and have read the tablet that marks the place where played Molière and his troupe, in 1645; and the other tablet that shows the site of Philippe-Auguste's Barbeau tower, constructed toward 1200, and taking its name from the great Abbey of Barbeau, whose extensive grounds bordered the river-bank here. From this huge tower and its gateway, kept intact as the starting-point at this end, the new wall turned at a right angle to the fast crumbling old wall, and went eastwardly along the shore; which they now banked up and planted with elms. That shore-line is now Boulevard Morland—named from that brave colonel of chasseurs who was killed at Austerlitz—and the land in front, as far as Quai Henri IV., was anciently the little Île des Javiaux, renamed Île Louvier in the seventeenth century, when it served as a vast woodyard for the town. The slight arm of the river that cut it off has been filled in, and the island is now one with the mainland. At the corner of Boulevard Bourdon—which records the name of a colonel of dragoons, who fell at Austerlitz—the new wall turned, and followed what is now the middle line of that boulevard to the present Place de la Bastille. Here was the two-round-towered gateway built by Marcel, and called, as were called all those gateways, Bastilia—a word of mediæval Latin, meaning a small fortress, such as was formed by each of these gates with its flanking towers. There were many of them opening into and guarding the town, that of Saint-Denis being the only other one of the size of this of Saint-Antoine; which was enlarged into the massive fortress known to us as the Bastille.

Of all the wretched memories of the accursed old prison, we shall awaken only one; that of Hugues Aubriot, its builder and its first tenant. Made Provost of Paris by Charles V.—who, after his hapless experience with Marcel, when Dauphin, would have no more Provost of Merchants—Aubriot had many enemies among the guilds and among the clerics. He was frank and outspoken of speech, humane to the priest-despoiled and mob-harried Jews, for whom he had, like his royal master, toleration if not sympathy, and to whom he returned their children, caught and christened by force. So, on the very day of the burial of his royal master, in September, 1380, Aubriot was arrested for heresy, and soon sent to his own Bastille of Saint-Antoine, "pour faire pénitence perpétuelle, au pain de tristesse, et à l'eau de douleur." The Church sentence gives a poetic touch to prosaic bread and water. Aubriot fed only a short time on these delicacies, for he was rescued by the mob that, for the moment, idolized him, and led in triumph to his home. That home, from which he speedily fled out of Paris in terror of his rescuers, was given by Charles V. to this good servant, and we may stop, just here, to look on what is left of it.

The Hôtel du Prévôt.

Under an arch at No. 102 Rue Saint-Antoine, we enter Passage Charlemagne, and go through an outer into an inner court. In its northwestern corner is a tower containing an old-time spiral staircase. This is the only visible vestige of the palace of the Provost of Paris, its unseen portions being buried under, or incorporated with, the structures of the Lycée Charlemagne, just behind us toward the east. The boundary railing, between this college and the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, is exactly on the line of Philippe-Auguste's wall. From the inner or city side of that wall, the provost's palace, with its grounds, stretched to Rue Prévôt, then Rue Percée; that name still legible in the carved lettering on its corner with Rue Charlemagne. In that street, behind us as we stand here, is the southern entrance of his grounds, whose northern line was on Rue Saint-Antoine. This tower before us has been sadly modernized and newly painted, but its fabric is intact, with its original, square, wide-silled openings at each of the three landing-places of the old staircase. These openings are within a tall, slender arch, a timid attempt at the ogival, whose bolder growth we shall see presently in the Hôtel de Sens.

Above this arch a superimposed story, its window cut in line with the others below, has taken the place of the battlements. On either side the tower joins a building obviously later than it in date, although it has been claimed that all three structures are fifteenth-century work. The high arch and the other decorations of the tower are undoubtedly of that time, but they are, as undoubtedly, applied over the small stones of a much more ancient fabric. This conviction is reinforced by the sentiment that makes us see Charles the Wise come into this court, with his good Aubriot, enter that low door, and climb that staircase, looking out through those windows as he mounts. In the year of that King's death there was born a future owner of this tower and its palace. This was Pierre de Giac, a charming specimen of the gang that helped John of Burgundy and Louis of Orleans in their ruin of France—the only job in which they were ever at one. Pierre de Giac, after betraying both sides, fell into the strong clutch of the Duke of Richmond, by whom, after torture, he was tied in a bag and flung into the Seine. His crony, Louis d'Orléans, had possession of this property in the closing years of the fourteenth century, when he instituted the order of the Porc-Épic in honor of the baptism of his eldest son, Charles the Poet. The family emblem which gave its name to this order, gave it also to this hôtel, to which it still clings.

Going back to Place de la Bastille, on our map, we may follow the course of the new town wall along the curve of the inner boulevards, to Porte Saint-Denis; whence it took a straight southwesterly course, parallel with present Rue Aboukir, through Place des Victoires and the Bank of France, and diagonally across the gardens of the Palais-Royal, to the gate of Saint-Honoré, nearly in the centre of our Place du Théatre-Français. It was this gate and its protecting works that were pounded by the "canons et coulevrines" of Joan of Arc, and it was this portion of the wall which was assaulted by her at the head of her men; an assault that would have succeeded, and so have given Paris to the French, had she not been struck down by a crossbow bolt, so striking panic to her followers. When you post your letters in the outside southern box of the Post-office on the corner of Avenue de l'Opéra and Place du Théâtre-Français, or when you look in at the incubating chickens in the shop window alongside, you are standing, as near as may be, on the spot where she fell wounded on September 8, 1429. Her tent was pitched, and her head-quarters fixed, on the outer slope of the Butte des Moulins, a few feet north of where now stands the apse of the Church of Saint-Roch. From Porte Saint-Honoré, the wall went direct, across present Place du Carrousel, to the round Tour de Bois on the river-shore, and from that tower a chain was swung slantwise up-stream to the Tour de Nesle on the southern bank.

This great wall, when quite finished, was an admirable example of mediæval mural masonry. Besides its round gate-towers, it was strengthened by many square towers, and was crenellated, and had frequent strong sentry-boxes and watch-towers between the battlements. On the outside was a wide, deep ditch bank-full of water. All stood intact until partly levelled by Louis XIII. in 1634, and entirely so by Louis XIV. in 1666, during which thirty years the popular pun had run: "Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant." It was about 1670 that the boulevards were laid out over the foundations of the wall, its ditch filled in, and trees planted. Two of the gates were kept, enlarged, and made into triumphal arches; and these Portes Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin stand there to-day, dingy memorials of Ludovican pride and pomposity. A century later, in 1770, every trace of wall and moat was wiped away, the driveway was partly paved, and building began; but it was not until 1830 that sidewalks were made, and that grand mansions replaced the former shabby structures. We cannot put hand on any stone of the wall itself, to-day.

Within the enceinte thus made, our Marais was at length entirely enclosed; away from its river-front, bordered by abbeys and monasteries; through its streets, walled off by palaces and mansions; and its other streets, packed with modest dwellings and shops; far back to the gardens and the vineyards, and the waste fields not yet tilled, that spread all around the inner zone of the wall. Within it, too, was brought the vast domain of the Templars, covering the space from this outer wall away south to Rue de la Verrerie, and between Rues du Temple and Vieille-du-Temple. It was partly under cultivation, partly left wild to forest and bog, this portion being known as the Marais du Temple. Farther north were the buildings—palaces, priories, chapels—all secure within their own crenellated wall, all commanded and defended by the moated and towered citadel known as the Temple.

The order had been founded early in crusading days, in the beginning of the twelfth century, by nine French gentlemen and knights, who, clad in white robes marked with a red cross, devoted themselves to the service and the safety of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Louis VII. gave them this waste land late in the same century. The small godly body, vowed to poverty and humility, grew large in numbers and appetite, great in wealth and pride. Its knights were equal with princes, its monks were bankers for kings, and all had become simply a gang of sanctimonious brigands. A Capet saw the birth of the order, a Capet thought it time to strangle it as it neared its two-hundredth birthday. Philippe IV., "le Bel," less solicitous for the genuine faith than for the good coin of the Templars, laid hands on them and on it. He got rid of them by axe and stake and in other ways approved of in that day, and parcelled out their lands; through which streets were cut later, and building begun, when this new wall put them on its safe side.

With the later history of the Temple we cannot concern ourselves, save to say that it long served as a sanctuary, later as a prison, and that its last stone was plucked away, six and a half centuries after it was laid, early in the nineteenth century. The palace of the Grand Prior stood exactly on the Rue du Temple front of the present Square du Temple. That little garden was his garden, and on its other edge, just at the junction of Rues des Archives and Perrée of to-day, rose the Tower, so famous and so infamous in prison annals.

Safely settled in his Hôtel Saint-Paul, within his own wall—Marcel quiet in his grave at last, the nobles curbed, the Jacquerie crushed—the young Dauphin, who had been weak and dissembling, and who was now grown, by long apprenticeship to his trade of royalty, into the strong, prudent, politic Charles V., known in history as Charles the Wise, made proclamation, on his accession in 1364, that this—"l'hôtel solennel des grands ébastements"—should be henceforth the royal residence. In the old Palace on the Island was held the official court; the Louvre, partly rebuilt and brightened by him, was kept for the occasional "séjour, souper, et gîte" of roving royalty. Here in "Saint-Pol" was his home, from whose windows he looked out, with keen, patient, far-sighted vision, over the Paris and the France he had quelled and tranquillized.

The Hôtel Saint-Paul was a town in itself, of many mansions, big and little, of châteaux with their parks, of farms with gardens, of orchards, fish-ponds, fowl-houses, a menagerie. Sauval goes with gusto into details of the buildings and their apartments, the decorations, furniture, and pavements; and the chronicle is appetizing of the dinners and banquets given to embassies and to honored visitors. Withal, pigeons perched on the carved balustrades, and guards lay on straw in the halls. It was a simple patriarchal life led here by Charles the Wise, and here begun by his son, Charles the Silly. A pretty, light-minded child of eleven, on his father's death, he remained a child through his dissolute and diseased early manhood, and through his later years of spasmodic madness and of intermittent reason, to his old age of permanent childishness.

While in Paris, this was his abode, and here he was left, almost a prisoner to unconcerned servants, by his shameless wife, Isabeau de Bavière. When she saw him, once in a way, he looked on her with unknowing eyes, or with knowing eyes of horror. His only companion was the low-born Odette de Champdivers, and with her he played the cards that untrue tradition claims to have been invented for him. He prowled about these halls, in filthy rags, eaten by ulcers and vermin, gnawing his food with canine greed; he ranged through these grounds, finding fellowship with the animals that were not let loose, but kept in cages. You may hunt up the stone walls of those cages—originally on pointed arches with short Romanesque pillars—and the stone foundations of the royal stables, in the yards on the southern side of Rue des Lions; a street whose name tells of these menageries, and that seems to echo with their roarings. The alleyway of cherry-trees now makes Rue de la Cerisaie, and Rue Beautreillis replaces the green tunnels of vines on trellises, where were gathered the grapes—good as are those of Thomery to-day—which produced the esteemed vin de l'hôtel Saint-Paul. Along the farther edge of its grounds, just under the old wall, ran the lane that is now Rue des Jardins; and Rue Charles V. keeps alive the memory of the founder of Saint-Paul. In all these streets, we are treading on the ground he loved.

After the wretched mad king died here in 1422, royalty came no more to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and the place ran to waste. It was no home for the new Dauphin, come to his kingdom as Charles VII., by the grace of Joan of Arc and of God. His boyish memories were of a dreary childhood, between a mad father, a devilish mother who had hated him from his birth, and princely relatives raging and wrestling over those two for the power to misgovern France. Outside the royal madhouse, Paris was a butcher-shop. Burgundians and Armagnacs were howling crazy war-cries in every street, ambuscading and assassinating at every corner, equally thirsty for blood, but both surpassed in that thirst by the butchers and horse-knackers, led by Jean Caboche and called Cabochians. All these factions, while intent solely on bloodshed, were loud-mouthed with loyalty and patriotism. They were all alike, and we may transfer to them and to their times the apt phrase of Joseph de Maistre, concerning the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew: "Quelques scélérats firent périr quelques scélérats." Almost every leader of men in those days came to his end by arms and in arms, and death by violence seemed the natural death. The town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black-death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came marching on; the while la danse Macabre whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries.

On the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Hôtel Saint-Paul, stretched the grounds of the old hôtel of Pierre d'Orgemont, Bishop of Paris. This property had come to the crown by purchase or by gift, and had been partly torn down, rebuilt, and its grounds greatly enlarged, to make a maison-de-plaisance for Charles VI. The principal building had so many and such various shaped towers and turrets that it was named the Palais des Tournelles. Viewed from a distant height, as from the tower of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo, it had the look of a set of giant chessmen. This was the place selected by the Duke of Bedford for his residence during the English occupation of Paris; and from here, after the death of his brother Henry V. of England—and heir of France, as was then claimed—he reigned as Regent for the little Henry VI. He enlarged the buildings and beautified the grounds, in which he kept many rare birds. He kept, too, the rare manuscripts brought together by Charles V. in the Louvre; and after his death in Rouen—where he had helped burn The Maid—this library was carried to England, when the English departed from France. It was ransomed with coin, and brought back to Paris, by the two grandsons of its original owner—Charles of Orleans, and his brother of Angoulême, and became the nucleus of the Royal, now the National Library.

So, when the sentries in English uniforms had gone from the gates, and the archers in Lincoln green were seen no more in the streets, Charles VII. came back, made King of France by The Maid who had found him King of Bourges, and whom he let the English burn for her pains. He entered Paris in November, 1437, nearly twenty years after he had been carried out from the town in the arms of Tanneguy Duchâtel. That quick-witted provost, discovering that the Burgundians had got into the town by the betrayed Porte de Buci, on the night of Saturday, May 28, 1418, had hastened to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, had wrapped the sleeping boy in his bedclothes, and had carried him up Rue Saint-Antoine to the Bastille, and out into the country on the following day, and so to Melun, where the King's son was safe.

During this first short stay of three weeks, the listless and sluggish young King grew as fond as had been the Duke of Bedford of the walled-in grounds of the Tournelles. They were very extensive, covering the space bounded by present Rues Saint-Antoine, Saint-Gilles, Turenne, and Boulevard Beaumarchais. Within this vast enclosure were many buildings and outbuildings, and in the words of Sauval: "Ce n'étoit que galeries et jardins de tous côtés, sans parler des chapelles."

And henceforth, for more than a hundred years, the Tournelles, "pour la beauté et commodité du dit lieu," was the favored abode of royalty, when royalty favored Paris with infrequent visits. The sombre shapes of Louis XI. and his ignoble comrades darkened its precincts, at times. When he made his entry, already narrated, into the town after his coronation at Rheims, he passed the night of August 31, 1461, in the old Island-Palace, and on the following day he installed himself in "son hôtel des Tournelles, près la Bastille de Saint-Antoine." Here he received, in September, 1467, a visit from his second wife, Charlotte de Savoie, who came up the river from Rouen. She was met, below the Island, by a boatful of choristers, who "sang psalms and anthems after a most heavenly and melodious manner." She landed on the Island, performed her devotions at Notre-Dame, and took boat to the water-gate of Quai des Célestins opposite, and thence made her way on a white palfrey to the Tournelles. The King's physician, Dr. Coictier—most skilled in bleeding, in all possible ways, his royal patient—had an astrological tower in the grounds, and in the centre was a maze named "Le Jardin Dædalus." About these grounds Louis prowled, seldom going beyond them, and then only by night, and with one trusted gossip. Indeed, he was less like the King of France here in his palace than anywhere else; camping rather than residing, with a small retinue of old Brabant servitors, and a larder filled mostly with cold victuals, says Michelet. It was Loches occasionally, and Plessis-les-Tours habitually, that had the pleasure of harboring the "universal spider"; in them both he spun his webs, and waited gloating, and found "many cockroaches under the King's hearthstone," as the saying went. And at last he died, triumphant and wretched, at Plessis-les-Tours.

"Le Petit Roi," Charles VIII., hardly knew Paris; and when he entered the town on February 8, 1492, with his young wife, Anne of Brittany, who had been crowned at Saint-Denis the day before, the populace was not agreeably impressed by his short stature, his bad figure, his heavy head, his big nose, his thick lips always open, and his great, blank, staring eyes. He was in curious contrast with the bride—pretty, sprightly, vivacious, and "very knowing," wrote home the Venetian Ambassador, Zaccaria Contarini. The gentle, weakly King—so strange a scion of Louis XI.—made his home in Touraine. On the terrace of Amboise, where he was born, we all know the little door, leading to the old Haquelebac Gallery, against which he struck his head as he started down to look on a game of tennis. There, on April 7, 1498, in a sordid and filthy chamber, a remnant of the old château he was just then rebuilding, he lay for hours until his death, so carrying out the curse of Savonarola, who had threatened him with the anger of God, if he failed to return to Italy with his army to cleanse the unclean Church with the sword.

Anne de Bretagne.
(From a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection.)

"Le bon Roi Louis, Père du Peuple, est mort," is the doleful pronouncement of the crieurs du corps, starting out from the Tournelles before dawn of New Year's day, 1515. The kindly old fellow has died in the night, a martyr to a young wife and to her fashionable hours. All his life long, Louis had been subject to the fancies of women, to his undoing. We meet him first, the young and ardent Duc d'Orléans, the best horseman and swordsman in the court, riding out from Plessis with the brave Dunois—both grandsons, with different bars, of the murdered Louis d'Orléans—to snatch the girl Isabelle from the escort of Quentin Durward. The duke has already taken the eye of the capable Anne, eldest daughter of Louis XI., as Brantôme is quick to note. Getting no return for her passion, the fury of a woman scorned, backed by her father's malign humor, marries the handsome prince to her younger sister, Jeanne—ugly and deformed and uncharming. Freed by divorce from this childless union, on taking the throne, Louis hastens to marry his former flame, Anne of Brittany, now the widow of Charles VIII. This lady, fair in person and fairer in her duchy, lively and not unlearned, a blameless yet imperious spouse, gave him many happy years. The personal court he allowed "sa Bretonne" outshone his own court, and glorified the gloomy Tournelles. For all his clinging to her, she was taken from him when only thirty-seven years of age; refusing to live, when she found, for the first time, that her self-will was not allowed its own way. She would have her daughter, Claude, marry Charles of Austria, Emperor-to-be, and the powers in France would not have it, because they were unwilling that Brittany should go, with its heiress, into foreign hands. A marriage was arranged between Claude and the young Duc d'Angoulême, who was to become François I., so keeping the rich duchy for France. After Anne's death, her widower made a third venture, and yet, the chronicler plaintively assures us, he had no need of a new wife. This was Mary, sister of Henry VIII. of England, who was glad to get her out of his country; and she was as glad to return as soon as, on finding herself a widow, she could become the wife of her first love, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. And so these two were the grandparents of Lady Jane Grey.

Now the customary hour for dining in those days was from five to ten in the morning, changing a little with the seasons. A French "Poor Richard" of the period says:

"Lever à cinq, diner à neuf,

Souper à cinq, coucher à neuf;

Fait vivre d'ans nonnante et neuf."

Montaigne owns that his dinner-hour of eleven in the morning was unduly late, but then his supper came correspondingly late, never before, and often after, six of the evening. Henri IV. dined at the same belated hour, while François I. could not wait later than nine o'clock. Once installed in the Tournelles, this young English bride of Louis's must needs, among other innovations, introduce her own country's customs into her husband's mode of life, as we are told in "la très joyeuse et plaisante histoire" of the "Loyal Serviteur," of Bayard: "His wife changed all his manner of living; he had been wont to dine at eight, and he now dined at mid-day; he had been wont to go to bed at six in the evening, and he now went to bed at midnight." Moreover, she beguiled him into supping late and heavily. So these changes, and other changes in his habits, brought him to his grave, six weeks after his marriage. His Parisians gathered in Rue Saint-Antoine, about the entrance of the Tournelles, in honest sorrow for the loss of the big and benevolent old boy, whom they looked on and loved as the Father of his People; indeed "one of the people," says Michelet, "without the soul of a king."

The Tournelles blazed out bravely for François I., the while the Hôtel Saint-Paul found itself cut up and sold off in lots by him; the two cases showing his way, all through life, of raising money by any means, squeezing his subjects, starting France's national debt as he did, all because of his puerile ambitions, his shallow levity, his selfish waste. He did his best to justify Louis XII.'s shrewd prophecy for him: "Ce grand gars-là gâtera tout." Recalling, one needy day, that he owned Saint-Paul, "un grand hôtel, fort vague et ruineux," he soon got rid of the buildings and the land for coin, reserving one large tract, along the eastern side under the wall, for the erection of an arsenal. And so, with streets cut through the old domain, no trace was left of Charles V.'s "hôtel solennel des grands ébastements." As for the Tournelles, its new master's fondness for all showy gimcrackery adorned it with furniture and fittings, and notably with the tapestries turned out so sumptuously from the factory at Tours, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, that they came into vogue for decoration, in place of wall-paintings. No need to say that the table at the Tournelles was profuse and its court resplendent. There had been few women in the court before now, and it was a garden without pretty flowers, as Brantôme puts it. Anne of Brittany had brightened it a bit for Brantôme with some few dames et demoiselles, but François crowded it with fair women, who brought music and dancing and flirting. This big and brutal dilettante—study his face in the countless portraits in the Louvre and at Azay-le-Rideau—gave little of his time to the Tournelles, however. Setting Pierre Lescot at work on the lovely western wing of his new Louvre, he rushed over the land, building and beautifying at Saint-Germain, Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Blois, Chambord, posing always as the patron and prodrome of the Renaissance in France. At least, he could say truly of himself, "On verra qu'il y a un roi en France;" but besides the throne and his pet foolishnesses, he handed down nothing worth owning to his son—that Henri II. of heavy fist and light brain, slow of thought and of speech, cold, uncongenial, commonplace. Yet the Tournelles was a cheerful home for him and for his official family, when he could get away from the exclusive holding of Diana of Poictiers and her family. His youngest daughter, Marguerite de France, has sketched, in her "Mémoires," a most winning picture of the place and of herself, a lovely maid of seven, playing about the garden or sitting on her father's knee, helping him select a suitor for her, from among the young swells at the court. That scene took place only a few days before his death.

Louis XII.
(Water color, from a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection.)

To the Tournelles comes François Rabelais, in the "Contes Drôlatiques" of Balzac, and gives to King and court that delicious sermon, worthy of Rabelais himself. He has come along Rue Saint-Antoine from his home in Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, a rural lane then, just outside Philippe-Auguste's wall, on the extreme edge of the gardens of Saint-Paul. In that paved and built-up street of to-day none of us can fix on the site of his house, and the tablet on its corner, of Quai des Célestins, tells us only that Rabelais died in a house in this street on April 9, 1553. Charles Nodier, starting out from his Librarian's rooms in the Arsenal Library, on his endless prowls about old Paris, always stopped and took off his hat in front of No. 8 of Rue des Jardins, in honor of the great French humorist. Ignorant of his reason for the selection of this site, we may be content, in imitation of this charming flâneur, to stand uncovered there, before or near the last dwelling of "le savant et ingénieux rieur," whose birthplace and whose statue at Chinon are worth a journey to see; where, too, the local wine will be found as delicate and as individual as when, sold by the elder Rabelais in the fourteenth century, it made the money that sent his famous son to the great schools of the capital. That son closed his life of congenial vagabondage, and of many métiers, in this sedate country road, where he had passed three blameless years, two of them as curé of Meudon, resigning that position in 1552. He was buried in the cemetery of old Saint-Paul, to which we shall find our way later. Modern Paris has doubtless built itself over the grave, as it certainly has over the last dwelling-place, of the narrator of the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel and the creator of Panurge.

The famous lists of the Tournelles extended along the southern edge of its grounds, just beyond the present northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, Rue de Birague being cut through almost their middle line. For more than a hundred years they had been the scene of many a tournament, and not one of them had been so crowded or so brilliant as that which began on June 28, 1559. The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, made in the previous April with England and Spain, was to be celebrated, and there were to be rejoicings over the recent marriage of Henry's sister, Marguerite, with the Duc de Savoie, and of his eldest daughter, Isabelle, with Philip II. of Spain. This girlish third wife of the Spanish King was the heroine of the Don Carlos affair, which has made so many dramas. To rejoice in royal fashion in those days, men must needs fight and ladies must look on. So it came that the King, proud of having shown himself "a sturdy and skilful cavalier" during the two days' tilting, insisted on running a course with Montgomery of the Scottish Guard, whose broken lance pierced Henri's visor through the eye into the brain. He lay unconscious in the Tournelles for eleven days, and there he died on July 10, 1559.

Those lists were never again used, the palace was never again inhabited. All the bravery of the two last courts could not hide the dry-rot of the wooden structures, and all its perfumes could not sweeten the stenches from the open drains all about. Even the hard-headed and strong-stomached Louise de Savoie, mother of François I., had sickened in the place. So "le misérable coup," that freed Catherine de' Medici from years of slighted wifehood, gave her an excuse for leaving the malodorous and unhealthful Tournelles, with her four sons and her unmarried daughter. A portion of the structures was kept by her second son, Charles IX., for his birds and dogs, until his mother got him to order its destruction by an edict dated January, 1565.

On his Pont-Neuf sits Henri IV. on his horse, and every Frenchman looks up as he passes, with almost the same emotion felt by the Frenchmen of Voltaire's day, at the effigy of the most essentially French of all French kings. The statue faces "the symmetrical structures of stone and brick," planned by him for his Place Dauphine, in honor of the birth of his son. They are hardly altered since their construction by his good friend Achille de Harlay, President of Parliament, whose name is retained in the street behind the place and in front of the Palace of Justice. The King looks out, a genial grin between his big, ugly, Gascon-Bourbon nose and his pushing chin, over his beloved Paris, well worth the mass he gave for it; for, from the day he got control, it grew in form and comeliness for him. His kindly, quizzical eyes seem to see, over the Island and the river, his own old Marais, the quarter which held the hôtel of his menus plaisirs, and which it was his greater pleasure to rebuild and make beautiful. And "la perle du Marais"—his Place Royale—deserves his unchanging regard, almost unchanged as it is, since he planned it and since its completion, which he never saw. It is the grand tangible monument he has left to Paris, and speaks of him as does nothing else in the town.

When he came into his capital on March 22, 1594, he found the enclosure of the Tournelles en friche. Within a few days he gave a piece of it, holding an old house, that fronted on Rue Saint-Antoine, to his good Rosny, whom he made Duc de Sully a little later. This Maximilien de Béthune had been the most faithful helper of Henri de Navarre and he continued to be the most faithful servant of Henri IV. He had many homely virtues, rare in those days, rare in any days. He was courageous, honest, laborious; he did long and loyal service to the State; he worked almost a miracle for the finances of the kingdom, carrying his economies into every detail, even to the ordering of costumes in black, to spare the expense of the richly colored robes in vogue. A vigilant watch-dog, he was surly and snappish withal, and he had a greedy grip on all stray bones that fell fairly in his way. His wealth and power grew with his chances. He seems to have put something of himself into his hôtel, which faces us at No. 143 Rue Saint-Antoine. It bears on its lordly front an honesty of intention that is almost haughty, with a certain self-sufficiency that shows a lack of humor; all most characteristic of the man. Neither he nor his abode appeals to our affections, howsoever they may compel our respect.

Sully.
(From a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musée Condé at Chantilly.)

Having got this well-earned gift of land from the King, he cleared away the old buildings upon it, and erected this superb structure. His architect was doubtless Jean du Cerceau, for the heaviness of his early work is apparent in these walls, but their owner evidently enforced his personal tastes on them. The façade, on the shapely court, has its own touch of distinction, dashed by the touch of pomposity that dictated, to the four secretaries employed on his memoirs, his stock phrase, "Such was Sully!" This front is over-elaborate. The main body and the two wings—which are a trifle too long and too large, and so crowd and choke that main body—are all heavily sculptured. On every side, stone genii bear arms, stone women pose as the seasons and the elements, stone masks and foliage, whose carving is finer than the sculpture, crowd about the richly chiselled windows. Yet those windows look down on the court in a most commanding way; and the fabric, behind all its floridness, shows a power in the rectitude of its lines that must needs be acknowledged.

The Court of the Hôtel de Béthune. Sully's Residence.

The garish windows of the restaurant on the ground floor glare intrusively out on the old-time court, and a discordant note is struck by the signs, all about its doorways, of the new-fangled industries within—a water-cure, a boxing-school, a gymnasium. School-boys play noisily in this court, and, in the garden behind, schoolgirls take the air demurely. To reach their garden, we pass through a spacious hall, along one side of which mounts a wide, substantial staircase, its ceiling overloaded with panels and mouldings. Set in a niche in the garden-wall is a bust of the Duke of Sully. This garden façade is in severer taste than that of the front court, its wings are less obtrusive, and its whole effect is admirable. The little garden once made one with the garden of the Hôtel de Chaulnes behind, that faced the Place Royale, to which Sully thus had entrance. That entrance may be found through the two small doors of No. 7, Place des Vosges, and behind that building is Sully's orangerie, in perfect preservation.

Having handsomely requited his servant and comrade, the King began, in the very centre of the Tournelles, a great square with surrounding structures. As soon as one of his pavilions was sufficiently finished, he installed in it a colony of two hundred Italians, brought to France for that purpose, skilled weavers and workers of silks shot with silver and with gold, such as made Milan famous. And to this man alone—who was, said a memorial of his Chamber of Commerce, pleading for the planting of the mulberry, "nearly divine, never promising without performing, never starting without finishing;" and who issued edicts for that planting, in spite of Sully's opposition—does France owe her mulberry plantations and her silkworms, as Voltaire truly points out. It is commonly asserted that his "mason," for these constructions of the Place Royale, was Androuët du Cerceau, whose name is claimed for many buildings that would make his working-life last for a century and more. This Jacques Androuët was so renowned in his day, that much of the architecture of his sons and his grandson was then, and is still, set down to him. That stern old Huguenot, born in 1515, went from Paris along with the dwellers in "Little Geneva," and is last heard of, still in exile, as late as 1584. Perhaps his son Baptiste joined him in 1585, when his convictions drove him, too, from the court and the capital, as has been told in the chapter, "The Scholars' Quarter." Baptiste came back to serve Henri IV. and Louis XIII., and trained his son Jean in his trade. For much of the work of this busy Jean his grandfather has the credit, as well as for other work done by Jean's uncle Jacques, second of that name. The Pont-Neuf is always ascribed to the great Androuët, who never saw one of its stones in place. That bridge was begun by his son Baptiste in 1578, and finished by his grandson Jean in 1607. He it was, if it were any du Cerceau, who planned and began the Place Royale.

The Hôtel de Mayenne.
In the distance, the Temple Sainte-Marie, called the Church of the Visitation.

We are fortunate in that we may see one example of the style of the founder of this notable family, in the massive structure at No. 212 Rue Saint-Antoine, its side walls extending along Rue du Petit-Musc. This street took its title from one of the numerous small hôtels that made up the grand Hôtel Saint-Paul; and on its foundations—still buried beneath these stones—was erected the present structure by Androuët du Cerceau. It is the only entire specimen of his work in Paris, and we may believe that he had done better work than this, albeit it carries the authority of the old Huguenot. He began it for Diane de Poictiers, and it was finished for an owner as heavy and as stolid as its walls. This was Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Mayenne, the eldest, the least brilliant, the most honest, of the famous brothers of Guise. As Lieutenant-General of the League, he led its troops to the defeats of Arques and Ivry. When Henri de Navarre became Henri IV. of France, the only punishment he inflicted on his fat opponent was to walk him, at a killing pace, about the grounds of Monceaux, while listening to his protests of future submission: "I will be to you, all my life long, a loyal subject and faithful servant. I will never fail you nor desert you." So promised Mayenne, and he kept his word. He lived here in this mansion, through sixteen years of honorable employment in the Council of State, surviving Henry only a few months, and dying in his bed, in pain and with patience. His house, once one of the noisy hatching-places of the Holy League, is now a noisy school for boys. Its well-set cornice has been mangled by the cutting through it of the dormer windows, its grand staircase has been degraded, its court, stern from du Cerceau's hand, has grown sullen, and its great gardens are built over, all along Rue du Petit-Musc.

In accordance with the King's scheme for his Place Royale, its eastern side was first built up at the crown's expense. The other sides were divided into lots of similar size, and leased to men of the court, of family, and of finance, on condition that they should begin to build at once, each after the original plans. With this stipulation, and an agreement to occupy their dwellings when finished, and to pay a yearly rental of one crown of gold, they and their heirs forever were given possession of these lots, as stated in the royal patent registered on August 5, 1605. Thirty-six structures were planned for these private dwellings, the two central pavilions on the northern and southern sides being reserved for royalty; so that thirty-six crowns were to come in as the entire annual revenue from the Place Royale; not an exorbitant rental, since the écu de la couronne of that day was worth from seven to ten francs. Thus began that historic square, and thus vanished, from off the face of the earth, the last trace of the historic Tournelles.

Henry was more eager to hurry on the constructions than were his tenants; only a few of whom, indeed, completed and occupied their houses. There were other delays in building, not to be overcome by his almost daily visits to the spot when in town, and by his appealing letters from Fontainebleau to Sully, urging him to "go and see" if the work were being pushed on. But it was still unfinished, when Ravaillac's knife cut off all his plans. This plan, however, was carried out by Marie de' Medici, who had made herself Queen-Regent by lavish payments and promises. Her memories of the style of Northern Italy influenced details of the new constructions, which were so far finished in 1615 as to serve for the scene of the festivities, planned by her as an expression of the joy that the Parisians did not know they felt. The occasion was the marriage of her son, the fourteen-year-old Louis XIII., with Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III. of Spain; and of her daughter, Isabelle, with the Spanish Infante, afterward Philip IV. That was a great day for the Place Royale. For this function its still uncompleted portions were hid by scaffoldings, and all its fronts were draped with hangings and festooned with flowers. One hundred thousand guests swarmed to see the childish mummery of bearded men pranking as nymphs, the circus antics of ballets de chevaux by day, and the fireworks by night.

This first public appearance of the place was, also, the last public appearance of the Queen-Regent. There can be woven no romance about this woman; fat and foolish, copious of emotion, impulsive of speech. The pencil of Rubens cannot give grace to her affluent curves, and her husband's strength could not stand against her "terribly robust" arms, working briskly when she raged. Whatever may be our summing-up of this man's morality, we must set down, to the credit of his account, his hard case with the two women to whom fate had married him, each so trying after her own fashion. Of sterner stuff than he, so far as that sex goes, was Richelieu, the new ruler of the young King Louis XIII. He would bear no more of Marie's meddling and muddling, and sent her into exile in 1617. These two died in the same year, 1642, she in poverty and neglect at Cologne, after having so long been "tossed to and fro by the various fortunes of her life," says English Evelyn; who, travelling on the Continent, notes the "universal discontent which accompanied that unlucky woman, wherever she went."

We see her in our Place Royale only during this one day, but her son and his minister are with us there to-day, as we stand in front of that King's statue, in the centre of the square. This statue is a reproduction of the original—melted down in 1792—erected by Richelieu in 1639, not less for his own glorification, than to immortalize the virtues of "Louis the Just, Thirteenth of that name." He had a score of the virtues of a valet, indeed, and with them the soul of a lackey. This present statue, placed here in the closing year of the Bourbon Restoration, 1829, prettifies and makes complacent that sombre and suspicious creature, the dismallest figure in his low-spirited court. On his hair, flowing to his shoulders, rests a laurel crown, and the weak lips, curved in an unwonted smile, not twisted by his habitual stutter, are half hid by a darling mustache. He sits his horse jauntily, clad in a long cloak and a skirt reaching to his naked knees, and tries to be ostentatiously Roman with bare arms and legs, his right hand pointing out across the square, from which he tried in vain to drive the duellists.

We have already come here, under the guidance of Dumas, to witness one famous duel in the time of Henri III. This spot had retained its vogue for the aristocratic pastime, in spite of the repeated edicts and the relentless punishments of Richelieu, under royal sanction and signature. Fair women hung over the infrequent balconies, or peeped from the windows, to view these duels and to applaud the duellists. A keener interest was given to the probability of the death on the ground of one combatant, by the certainty of the axe or the rope of the public executioner for the survivor.

Windows and balconies are deserted now; there is no clash of steel in the square, whose silence is in striking contrast with the sordid strife of neighboring Rue Saint-Antoine; and these stately mansions, dignified in their unimpaired old age, seem to await in patience the return of their noble occupants. There has been no change in them since, on their completion in 1630, they were regarded as the grandest in all Paris, and there is hardly any change in their surroundings. The commonplace iron railings of the square, put there at the same time with the fountains, by Louis-Philippe, were the cause of hot protest by Hugo and other residents of the quarter, who mourned the loss of the artistic rails and gateway of seventeenth-century fabrication. And Rue des Vosges has been cut through into the northern side of the square, making a thoroughfare to Boulevard Beaumarchais, such as was not planned originally. That plan provided for approach to the place only by the two streets under the two central pavilions, north and south, now named Béarn and Birague. Those two pavilions, higher than the others, were set apart for the King and Queen; and over the central window of the southern one, the King, in medallion, looks down. The stately fronts of red brick—new to Paris then—edged with light freestone, and the steep roofs of leaded blue slate, broken by great dormers reminiscent of Renaissance windows, are time-stained to a delicate tricolor; and it pleases us to fancy the first Bourbon King unconsciously anticipating the flag of the French Republic in the colors of his Place Royale.

These tall windows, opening from floor to ceiling, were a novelty to the Parisians of that day, the fashion having only just then been set in the new Hôtel Rambouillet. Behind them, the spacious blue and yellow salons were hung with Italian velvets, or with Flemish and French tapestries, interspaced with Venetian mirrors. Lebrun and his like decorated the ceilings later, and the cornices were heavily carved, and the furniture was in keeping with its surroundings. The arcades of brick, picked out with stone ribs—a trifle too low and heavy, it may be, for their symmetry with the otherwise perfect proportions of these façades—were imitated from those of Italy, to serve for shelter from sun, and for refuge from rain, to the strollers who thronged them for over a century. To tell over their names, one has merely to look down the list of the men who made themselves talked about, through the whole of Louis XIII.'s and almost to the close of Louis XIV.'s reign. Then there were the women, lovely or witty or wicked, and those others, "entre deux âges," for whom the Marais was noted. The creations of comedy are here, too, and Molière's Mascarille and le Menteur of Corneille are as alive as their creators, under these arcades.

For this spot was not only the centre of the supreme social movement of the capital during this long period, but it was the cradle of that bourgeois existence which grew absurd in its swelling resolve to grow as big as that above it. The Hôtel Rambouillet, for all its affectations, did some slight service to good literature and good morals; it rated brains and manners above rank and money; it gave at least an outside deference to decency. Molière himself, rebelling, had to yield, and his early license became restraint, at least. In the wild days of the Fronde, men and women were in earnest, and then came the days when they were in earnest only about trifles; when the "infinitely little" was of supremest importance, when shallow refinements concealed coarseness, stilted politeness covered mutual contempt, and the finest sentiments of a Joseph Surface in the salon went along with unrestricted looseness outside. To seem clean was the epidemic of the time, and its chronic malady was cant, pretence, and pollution. And the bourgeois imitated the noble; and, in the Place Royale and about, Molière found his Précieuses Ridicules. Just a little way from here, was a room full of them—that of Mlle. de Scudéry.

Go up Rue de Beauce, narrowest of Marais streets between its old house- and garden-walls, and you come to the passage that leads to the Marché des Enfants-Rouges, the market and its surrounding space taking the greater part of the site, and keeping alive the name, of the admirable charity for children originated by the good Marguerite de Navarre, sister of François I., and by him endowed at her urging. The little orphans cared for in this institution were clad all in red, and their pet popular name of "Enfants Rouges" soon took the place of the official title of "Enfants de Dieu." On the corner of this passage, you must stop to choose the abode of Mlle. de Scudéry from one of the two ancient houses there, for it is certain that she lived in one of these two, with a side door in the passage; and local legend and topographic research have failed to fix on the true one. She has told us that it stood alongside the Templars' grounds, in the midst of gardens and orchards tuneful with birds, so that the lower end of the street was called Rue des Oiseaux; and we find this narrow passage, since then close shut in with houses, still tuneful to-day, but the birds are kept in cages.

In this house Madeleine de Scudéry wrote her long and weary romance, "Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus," the most widely read and the most successful book of the day, from the money point of view. With this money she paid the debts of her brother, Georges, a dashing spendthrift with showy tastes; one of those chivalric souls, too fine to work, but not too fine to sponge on his sister and to take pay for, and put his name to, work done by her pen. Here she carried on the old business of the Hôtel Rambouillet, where she had served her apprenticeship before starting out for herself, and where she had produced the poem by which she won her nom de Parnasse, "Sapho." Here she was promoted to be the Tenth Muse, and sat enthroned amid her admirers, who trooped in from all about the Marais, on every Saturday for more than thirty years. As to the causerie littéraire et galante of these reunions, we learn all about it, and laugh at it, in Pellisson's "Chronique du Samedi." It is impossible to burlesque it; Molière himself could not do it. He has taken entire sentences concerning the education of woman from the "Grand Cyrus," and put them into his "Femmes Savantes"; and it is simply a portrait that he drew of Madelon, as she sat in this salon a year or so before he put her on the stage, awaiting the gifted authors of "La Carte du Royaume des Précieuses." And Mascarille's fatuous swagger and strident voice—as he walks the boards in Coquelin's skin—seem to come straight and uncaricatured from Pellisson's pages. When the valet's voice, quavering with complacency, shakes our midriff with his pronouncement: "We attach ourselves only to madrigals," he is making a direct quotation from the "Chronique."

Mlle. de Scudéry, while a précieuse herself, was too genuine and talented and good-hearted a woman to be ridiculous. She is really an admirable example of the writing-woman of the seventeenth century, a female Mignard in her pen-portraits. Dr. Martin Lister came to pay his respects to the Tenth Muse, in this little house in 1698, and found her over ninety years old, toothless, and still talking! One might wish to have been present at this meeting, but may be content with looking on the walls that harbored a worthy woman and her queer crowd of adorers.

They came from all about the Marais, it has been said. At the time of her death, in the first year of the eighteenth century, this quarter had become the chosen abode of the real swells of Paris, and so the only possible residence for all those who wished to be so considered. Long before, a new member of the body politic had been born—the bourgeois—and a place had to be found for him. The leisure he had gained from bread-getting need no longer be given to head-breaking, and for his vision there was a horizon broader than that of his father, of dignity in man and comeliness in life. His first solicitude was for his habitation, which must be set free from the rude strength of the feudal fortresses in which the noblesse had camped. He levelled battlements into cornices, and widened loop-holes into windows, open for sunlight and à la belle étoile. In this seemly home, his thoughts threw off the obstruction imposed by centuries of repression, and by the joyless dogmas of the Church. And so began that multiform process that, at last, flamed up through the frozen earth, and has been named the Renaissance.

Many of the new mansions of the bourgeoisie were in Marais streets that were still walled off by the shut-in grounds of the religious bodies, whose unproductive dwellers avoided all taxation. "You see, formerly, there were monasteries all about here," says light-hearted Laigle in "Les Misérables"; "Du Breul and Sauval give the list of them and the Abbé Lebeuf. They were all around here; they swarmed; the shod, the unshod, the shaven, the bearded, the blacks, the grays, the whites, the Franciscans, the Minimi, the Capuchins, the Carmelites, the Lesser Augustins, the Greater Augustins, the Old Augustins. They littered." These belated owls, blinking in the new sunlight and fresher air, had now to find other dark walls for their flapping. The zone of abbeys, stretching from the Bastille to the Louvre, began to be cut into, and the grounds of the great hôtels of the noblemen came into the market as well. There had been hardly any opening-up of this quarter, from the day when Charles V. ended his wall, to the day when Henri IV. began his Place Royale. He had planned, also, a monumental square at the top of the Templars' domain, to be called Place de France, with a grandiose entrance, from which eight wide streets, bearing the names of the great provinces of France, were to radiate, to be crossed by smaller streets named from the lesser provinces. For this scheme Sully had bought up, under cover of a broker, an immense tract in this region, just as the King's death put a sudden end to this project, along with all his other projects.

One man did much to make real the plan that had been put on paper only. This was Claude Charlot, a Languedoc peasant, who had come to the capital in wooden sabots, with no money, but with plenty of shrewdness and audacity. By 1618 he had managed to acquire almost the entire tract set aside by Sully, and through it he cut streets, the principal one of which is called after him, while, of those called after the provinces, some still keep their names and some have been renamed.

Even during his mapmaking of the Marais—summarily stopped by Richelieu's spoliation—this was yet a solitary and unsafe quarter, through which its honest citizens went armed against footpads by day, and by night stretched chains across the coupe-gorges of its narrow streets. It continued to grow slowly through the last years of the seventeenth century, and these streets, with the Place Royale as their centre, were in time lined by the portes-cochères of rich financiers, farmers-generals, and receivers of taxes, all swollen with their pickings and stealings. They adorned their dwellings with carved panels and painted ceilings, with sculptured halls and spacious stone stairways; and many of them were rich in manuscripts and rare books, and in collections of various sorts.

Of these mansions, a surprising proportion is still standing, given up to business-houses, factories, and schools; for all of which uses their capacious rooms readily lend themselves. Within these old walls, face to face with the bustling streets, shouldered by structures of yesterday, or in dignified withdrawal behind their courts, can be found actual treasures of decoration and of carving, along with invisible and intangible treasures of association. For the aspect of a street, or the atmosphere of a house, tells to the intelligent looker-on as much of its bygone inmates as of its bare masonry. And kindly fate has left such relics plentifully scattered about the Marais. In oldest Paris of the Island, and in that almost as old suburb on the southern bank, one must prowl patiently to find suggestive brick and stone. In those regions a concealed tower, or an isolated tourelle on the angle of a building, makes the whole joy of a day's journey. Here, in the Marais, at every step you stumble on history and tradition and romance.

For "the little province of the Marais" was far away from the capital, and was let alone; or, rather, it was an unmolested island, washed about and not washed over by the swift tide of traffic. The stormy waves of insurrection have broken against its shores, and its pavements have never been made into barricades in any of the recurring revolutions, which have all been but interludes and later acts of the Great Revolution, in the people's endeavor to carry on and complete the main motive of that drama.

The vogue of the Marais began to fade away with the middle years of the eighteenth century, when the old noblesse de famille adopted the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the new noblesse de finance migrated to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the gadding multitude sought the arcades of the Palais-Cardinal, renamed Palais-Royal. A few ancient families, poor and proud, remained to burrow in their ancestral homes, and retired pensioned officials and petits rentiers found a boon in the small rentals of the big apartments. All these locataires, preserving the old forms and keeping untarnished the old etiquette, gave an air of dignified dulness to the Marais. Their dinner-hour was at five o'clock, and after that solemn function, held in the hall hung with family portraits or with dingy tapestry, their sedate prattle, before going to bed at nine o'clock, would touch on the unhallowed Edict of Nantes and on its righteous revocation; even as in a certain London club of to-day, musty old gentlemen still lament, with subdued dismay, "the murder of the Martyr, Charles Stuart." The sole diversion of these ancient dames of the Marais was a stroll in the Place Royale, arrayed in old-time costumes, their white hair dressed high above their patrician brows.

Nowadays, under the horse-chestnuts and baby elms of its ground, school-boys from the neighboring institutions romp on the grit, and babies are wheeled about by their nurses, and on the benches sit faded old men, blinking and inarticulate. They cling to the historic name of the place, while to us of the real world it is known as Place des Vosges; this title having been given it, in honor of the province of that name, by Lucien Bonaparte, while he was Minister of the Interior. The appellation was officially adopted by the Republic of 1848, and once more, perhaps finally and for all time, by the Third Republic.