THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In preceding chapters we have come upon the small beginnings of the Scholars' Quarter; we have had glimpses of the growth of the great mother University and of her progeny of out-lying colleges; and we have trodden, with their scholars and students, the slope of "the whole Latin Mountain," as it was named by Pantaléon, that nephew of Pope Urban IV., who extolled the learning he had acquired here. Looking down from its crest, over the hill-side to the Seine, we have had under our eyes the mediæval Pays Latin, filling up the space within its bounding wall, built by Philippe-Auguste and left untouched by Charles V.; we have seen that wall gradually obliterated through the ages, its gate-ways with their flanking towers first cut away, its fabric picked to pieces, stone by stone; while, beyond its line, we have watched the building up, early in the seventeenth century, of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, over the Pré-aux-Clercs, and in the fields beyond, and along the river-bank toward the west. In the centre of this new quarter the nobility of birth was soon intrenched behind its garden-walls, and in the centre of the old quarter the aristocracy of brains was secluded within its courts. The boundary-line of the two quarters, almost exactly defined by the straight course from the Institute to the Panthéon, speedily became blurred, and the debatable neutral ground between was settled by colonists from either region, servants of the State, of art, of letters. In our former strollings through long-gone centuries, we have visited many of these and many of the dwellers on the University hill; we are now to turn our attention to those brilliant lights on the left bank who have helped to make Paris "la ville lumière" during the forenoon of the nineteenth century.

Through the heart of the faubourg curved the narrow Rue Saint-Dominique, from Esplanade des Invalides to Rue des Saints-Pères. This eastern end, nearly as far west as Rue de Bellechasse, has been carried away by new Boulevard Saint-Germain, and with it the hôtel of the de Tocqueville family, which stood at No. 77 of the ancient aristocratic street. Here in 1820 lived the Comtesse de Tocqueville, with her son, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, a lad of fifteen. Here he remained until the events of 1830 sent him to the United States, with a mission to study their prison systems; a study extended by him to all the institutions of the Republic, which had a profound interest for the French Republicans of that time. His report on those prisons appeared in 1832, and in 1835 he put forth the first volume of "De la Démocratie en Amérique," its four volumes being completed in 1840. That admirable survey of the progress of democracy—whose ascendancy he predicted, despite his own predilections—still carries authority, and at the time created a wide-spread sensation. It made its author famous, and promoted him to the place of first-assistant lion in the salon of Madame Récamier, whose head lion was always Châteaubriand. De Tocqueville had settled, on his return to Paris, in this same faubourg; residing until 1837 at 49 Rue de Verneuil, and from that date to 1840 at 12 Rue de Bourgogne. Elected Deputy in 1839, he soon crossed the Seine, and we cannot follow him to his various residences in the quarter of the Madeleine. For a few months in 1849 he served as Minister for Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of the Prince-President, and was among the Deputies put into cells in December, 1851. His remaining years, until his death at Cannes in 1859, were spent in retirement from all public affairs.

A notable inhabitant of the University quarter, in the early years of the nineteenth century, was François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot, a young professor at the Sorbonne. His classes were crowded by students and by men from outside, all intent on his strong and convincing presentation of his favorite historical themes. He lived, near his lecture-room, at No. 10 Rue de la Planche, a street that now forms the eastern end of Rue de Varennes, between Rues du Bac and de la Chaise. From 1823 to 1830 his home was at 37 Rue Saint-Dominique, where now is No. 203 Boulevard Saint-Germain, next to the Hôtel de Luynes, already visited with Racine. This latter period saw Guizot, after a temporary dismissal from his chair by the Bourbon King, at the height of his powers and his prestige as a lecturer. He carried his oratory to the Chamber of Deputies in 1830, and there compelled equal attention. In 1832 we find him, Minister of Public Instruction, installed in the official residence at 116 Rue de Grenelle, on the corner of Rue de Bellechasse. His work while there still lasts as the basis of the elementary education of France, and it is to him that she owes her primary schools. Pushed out from this office in 1836 by the pushing Thiers, he went to England as Ambassador for a few months in 1840, and in the autumn of that year he took up his abode in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he remained until he was driven out in 1848. That ancient mansion, no longer in existence, stood on the triangle made by Boulevard and Rue des Capucines. With his desertion of this Southern Bank, we lose sight of his dwellings, always thereafter in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Guizot and Louis-Philippe failed in their fight against a nation, and the men of February, 1848, revolted against the Prime Minister as well as against the King of the French. That opéra-bouffe monarch with the pear-shaped face, under the guise of Mr. Smith, with a fat umbrella, slipped out of the back door of the Tuileries and away to England; Guizot got away to the same safe shores in less ludicrous disguise. He returned to his own land in 1849, and lived until 1874, always poor, always courageous, and always at work. Among his many volumes of these years, all marked by elevation of thought and serenity of style, as well as by absence of warmth and color, were his "Mémoires," wherein he proves, to the satisfaction of his austere dogmatism, that he had always been in the right throughout his public career.

The Revolution of 1830, that sent de Tocqueville on his voyage, and that started Guizot in political life, brought Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine to the public ear as an orator. He had filled the public eye as a poet since 1820, when his "Méditations Poétiques" appeared. In 1830, his "Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses" had made it sure that here was a soul filled with true harmony. And while he sang the consolations of religion, as Châteaubriand had sung its splendors, he gave proof of his devotion to the Church and throne. But he bore the Revolution of 1830, and the flight of the Bourbons, with the same equanimity he always summoned for the reverses of others, as well as for his own. When a literary genius is out of work, says Sainte-Beuve, he takes to politics and becomes an Illustrious Citizen, for want of something better to do. Lamartine was elected a Deputy soon after the upset of 1830, and sprang at once into the front rank of parliamentary orators. His speeches in the Chamber, and his "History of the Girondists"—enthralling and untrustworthy—helped to bring on the Revolution of 1848, quite without his knowing or wishing it. It was his superb outburst of rhetoric, as he stood alone on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, on February 25th, backed by no colleague and clad in no authority, that saved to France her Tricolor—"that has swept all around the world, carrying liberty and glory in its folds"—in place of the white flag of the Bourbons that had gone, and the red rag of the mob that was near coming. Between that month of February and June of that same year, Lamartine had been on the crest of his highest wave, and had sunk to his lowest level in the regard of his Parisians. Their faith was justified in his genius and his rectitude, but a volcano is not to be squirted cold by rose-water, and the new republic could not be built on phrases. After his amazing minority in the election for president, Lamartine sank out of sight, accepting without complaint his sudden obscurity, as he had accepted without intrigue his former lustre. The conspiracy of December, 1851, sent him into retirement, and he lived alone with his pen, his only weapon against want—a pathetically heroic figure during these last years. George Sand had seen a good deal of Lamartine in the days of 1848, and he struck her as "a sort of Lafayette without his shrewdness. He shows respect for all men and all ideas, while believing in no ideas and loving no man." A more just and complete judgment is that of Louis Blanc: "He is incessantly laboring under a self-exalting hallucination. He dreams about himself marvellous dreams, and believes in them. He sees what is not visible, he opens his inward ear to impossible sounds, and takes delight in narrating to others any tale his imagination narrates to him. Honest and sincere as he is, he would never deceive you, were he not himself deceived by the familiar demon who sweetly torments him."

For twenty years he had been a resident of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Indeed, when he came to Paris for a while, in 1820, to see to the publication of his first poems, he found rooms on Quai d'Orsay. From there he went to make that call on young Hugo, to be narrated later. From 1835 to 1855 his apartment was in the grand mansion, "between court and garden," No. 82 Rue de l'Université. His reception-room was decorated with portraits and busts of Alphonse de Lamartine, we are told by Frederick Locker-Lampson, who visited him there. His host was a handsome and picturesque figure, he says, albeit with an over-refinement of manner. No keener criticism of the poet and his poetry, at this period, has been made than that by Locker-Lampson, in one curt sentence. His sane humor is revolted by that "prurient chastity, then running, nay, galloping, to seed in an atmosphere of twaddle and toadyism."

The desolate fallen idol was rescued from oblivion and poverty by the Second Empire, whose few honorable acts may not be passed over. In 1867, in its and his dying years, that government gave him money, and the municipality gave him a house. These gifts came to him in Rue Cambacérès, in a small hotel now rebuilt into No. 7 of that street. Where it meets with Rue de Penthièvre, just above, you will find the attractive old mansion, with its ancient number 43 cut in the stone over the doorway, in which, during the years after leaving the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he carried on his courageous struggle with his pen against debt and poverty. He had but few months' enjoyment of his last home, the gift of the people of Paris, for he died there in 1869. It was at Passy, not far from the square in Avenue Henri-Martin, named for him and holding his statue. The chair in which he is seated might be a theatrical property, perhaps humorously and fittingly so suggested by the sculptor; who has, however, done injustice to his subject, in robbing him of his natural grace and suavity, and in giving him a pedantic angularity that was never his.

When Lamartine writes to Sainte-Beuve, "I have wept, I who never weep," we are amused by the poet's naïve ignorance of his persistent lachrymose notes. The "smiling critic" accepted them simply as a pardonable overflow of the winning melancholy of that nature, in which he recognized all that was genuine and laudable. This wide-minded tolerance is perhaps the secret of Sainte-Beuve's strength as a critic. With his acute discernment of the soul of a book and of its author, his subtle appreciation of all diverse qualities, he was splendidly impartial. He could read anything and everything, with a keenness of appraisement that did not prejudice his enjoyment of that which was alive, amid much that might be dead. "A pilgrim of ideas, but lacking the first essential of a pilgrim—faith"—he gave all that he was to literature through all his life, and when near its end, he had the right to say: "Devoted with all my heart to my profession of critic, I have tried to be, more and more, a good and—if possible—a skilful workman."

Alphonse de Lamartine.
(From a sketch by David d'Angers. "un soir chez Hugo.")

He devoted himself so entirely to his profession, that his life was like a mill, as he said, perpetually feeding and grinding. On the Monday morning, he would shut himself in with the new volumes, which he was to feed into himself and assimilate, during the twelve hours of each of the five following days; on Saturday he was ready to grind out the result. His Sunday holiday was given to the proof-reading of his next day's "Causerie du Lundi." On that evening he took his only relaxation, in the theatre. His work-room was bare of all superfluities, and his daily life went in a round, with simple diet, no wine, nor coffee, nor tobacco.

At the age of twenty-five, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was living, with his mother, in a small apartment on the fourth floor of No. 19—now 37—Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He had given himself to letters instead of medicine, for which he had studied, and had become a regular contributor of critical papers to the press. His name was already spoken along with the names of Victor Cousin, Villemain, Guizot, Mérimée. He had produced his "Historical and Critical Pictures," his "French Poetry and French Theatre of the Sixteenth Century," and the "Poems of Joseph Delorme"—his selected pen-name. The poet in him had abdicated to the critic, handing down many choice gifts. In this apartment he received for review a volume of poems, "by a young barbarian," his editor wrote. This was the "Odes et Ballades" of Victor Hugo, with whom the critic soon made acquaintance, and at whose house, a few doors away in the same street, he became a constant visitor. From here Madame Sainte-Beuve removed, with her son, in 1834, to Rue du Mont-Parnasse, and in that street he had his home during his remaining years. His official residence, from 1840 to 1848, as a Keeper of the Mazarin Library, was in that building now occupied by the Institute. He found installed there, among the other Keepers, Octave Feuillet. The upheaval of February, 1848, drove Sainte-Beuve into Belgium. On his return in the following year, he settled in the house left him by his mother, and there he died in 1869. This two-storied, plaster-fronted, plain little No. 11 Rue du Mont-Parnasse, saw his thirty years of colossal work. From here, he went to take his chair of Latin poetry in the Collège de France, where he was hissed by the students, who meant to hiss, not the critic and lecturer, but the man who had accepted the Second Empire in accepting that chair. He was no zealous recruit, however, and preserved his entire independence; and when he consented to go to the Senate in 1865, it was for the sake of its dignity and its salary. He was always poor in money.

To his workroom in this house, came every French writer of those thirty years, anxious to plead with or to thank that Supreme Court of Criticism. Among those who bowed to its verdicts and who have owned to its influence, Edmond de Goncourt has given us the most vivid sketch of the critic in conversation: "When I hear him touch on a dead man, with his little phrases, I seem to see a swarm of ants invading a body; cleaning out all the glory, and in a few minutes leaving a very clean skull of the once illustrious one." And, in his written reviews, Sainte-Beuve had the supreme art of distilling a drop of venom in a phial of honey, so making the poison fragrant and the incense deadly. There is no more constant presence than his on this southern hill-side, where all his days and nights were spent. We seem to see there the short, stout figure, erect and active, the bald head covered with a skull-cap, the bushy red eyebrows, the smooth-shaven face, redeemed from ugliness by its alert intelligence. His walks were down this slope of Mont-Parnasse, which he thought of as the pleasure-ground of the mediæval students of the University, to the quays, where he hunted among the old-book stalls. And he loved to stroll in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens. In the Poets' Corner, now made there, you will find his bust along with those of Henri Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, and Paul Verlaine.

Crossing the street from Sainte-Beuve's last home to No. 32, we find a modest house set behind its garden-wall, in which is a tablet containing the name of Edgar Quinet. More than passing mention of his name is due to this fine intellect and this great soul. His mother thought that "an old gentleman named M. Voltaire"—whom she might have seen in her childhood, as her village crowded about his carriage on its way to Paris—was the cleverest man who ever lived. She brought up her boy to think for himself, after that philosopher's fashion, and the boy bettered her teachings. He spent his life in looking into the depths of beliefs and institutions, in getting at the essence of the real and the abiding, in letting slip that which was shallow and transitory; so that, towards the end, he could say: "I have passed my days in hearing men speak of their illusions, and I have never experienced a single one." He became, in Professor Dowden's apt phrase, "a part of the conscience of France," and as such, his influence was of higher value than that exerted by his busy pen in politics, history, poetry. Indeed, his enthusiasms for the freedom and progress of his fellow-beings carried his pen beyond due restraint. Of course he was honored by exile during the Second Empire, and when it tumbled to pieces, he returned to Paris, and soon went to Versailles as a Deputy. At his grave, in 1875, Hugo spoke of him as living and dying with the serene light of truth on his brow, and he can have no happier epitaph.

Quinet had outlived, by only a few months, his life-long friend Jules Michelet, who died in 1874. He, too, had his homes and did his work, private and public, on this same hill-side. His birth-place, far away on the northern bank, on the corner of Rues de Tracy and Saint-Denis, is now given over to business. It was a church, built about 1630 in the gardens of "Les Dames de Saint-Chaumont," and had been closed in 1789, along with so many other churches. Going fast to ruin, it was fit only for the poverty-stricken tenant, who came along in the person of the elder Michelet, a printer from Laon. He set up his presses in the nave and his household gods in the choir, where the boy Jules was born on August 22, 1798. The building is unchanged as to its outer aspect, with its squat columns supporting the heavy pediment of the façade, except that two stories have been placed above its main body. In these strange surroundings for a child, and in the shelters equally squalid, to and from which his father removed during many years, the boy grew up, haunted and nervous, cold, hungry and ill-clad, and always over his books when set free from type-setting.

He got lessons and took prizes at the Lycée Charlemagne, but the pleasantest lesson and the dearest prize of his youth did not come in school. They were his first sight, from his father's windows in Rue Buffon, of the sun setting over beyond the trees, tuneful with birds, of the Jardin du Roi. Grass and foliage, and a sky above an open space, had been unknown to his walled-in boyhood. When he became able to choose a home for himself, it had always its garden, or a sight of one. At an early age he went to tutoring; in 1821 he was appointed lecturer on history in the Collège Rollin, then in its old place on the University hill; soon after 1830 he succeeded to Guizot's chair in the Sorbonne, and in 1838 the Collège de France made him its professor of History and Moral Science. In that institution, he and his colleague Quinet caused immense commotion by their assaults on the Church intrenched in the State, and from their halls the hootings of the clericals, and the plaudits of the liberals, re-echoed throughout France. The priesthood complained that "the lecturer on history and morals gave no history and no morals," and it began to be believed—rightly or wrongly—that he was using his professor's platform as a band-stand, and was beating a big drum for the gratification of the groundlings. He was speedily dismissed, he was reinstated soon after 1848, and was finally thrown aside by the Second Empire.

At this period only, he disappears from the Scholars' Quarter for a while. His earliest residence there was, soon after his marriage in 1827, at 23 Rue de l'Arbalète, a street named from the "Chevaliers de l'Arbalète," who had made it their archery grounds in mediæval days. The site of Michelet's residence is fittingly covered by a large school, on the corner of that street and of the street named for Claude Bernard. After a short stay in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor—that street nearly all gone now—he returned to this neighborhood, and settled in Rue des Postes, which, in 1867, received the name of the grammarian Lhomond. Otherwise, no change has come to this quiet street, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century buildings, among which is the Hôtel Flavacourt, set in the midst of gardens. On its first floor Michelet lived from 1838 to 1850. At No. 10 is the arched gateway through which he went, in its keystone the carved head of a strong man with thick beard and curling locks. Above the long yellow-drab wall shows the new chapel of the priests, who, with unknowing irony, have taken his favorite dwelling for their schools.

Absent from this quarter during the early years of the Second Empire, and absent from Paris during part of that time, it was in 1856 that Michelet settled in his last abode. It was at 44 Rue de l'Ouest, and his garden here was the great Luxembourg Garden. In 1867, the street was renamed Rue d'Assas, and his house renumbered 76. After his death in the south of France in 1874, his widow lived there until her own death in 1899, and kept that modest home just as he had left it. She was his second wife, and had been of great help to him in his work, and had done her own work, aided by his hand, which sprinkled gold-dust over her manuscript, as she prettily said. That hand had not been idle for over fifty years. He gave forty years of labor, broken only by his other books, to his "History of France," which at his death was not yet done, as he had meant that it should be done. It is a series of pictures, glowing and colored by his sympathetic imagination, which let him see and touch the men of every period, and made him, for the moment, the contemporary of every epoch. And Taine assures us, contrary to the general belief, that we may trust its accuracy. His style has a magic all its own. He had said: "Augustin Thierry calls history a narration, Guizot calls it an analysis; I consider that history should be a resurrection." This idea is translated into durable marble on his striking tombstone in Père-Lachaise, done in high relief by the chisel of Mercié.

The life of Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littré, a few years longer than that of Michelet and equally full of strenuous labor, was passed on this same slope and ended in this same Street of Assas. Born on February 1, 1801, in the plain house of three stories and attic at No. 21 Rue des Grands-Augustins, he got his schooling at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where we have seen other famous scholars. He appears for a day and a night on the barricades of 1830, and then settles quietly at No. 11 Rue du Colombier, now Rue Jacob. On his marriage, in 1835, he removed to No. 21 Rue des Maçons, now Rue Champollion, once Racine's street, in the heart of the University. In 1838 he made his home in Rue de l'Ouest, and in that home he remained until his death on June 2, 1881. His apartment took up the entire second floor of present 44 Rue d'Assas—the new name of Rue de l'Ouest—at the corner of Rue de Fleurus, and its windows on the curve opened on ample light and air.

Like Sainte-Beuve, Littré gave up medicine, to which he had been trained, for journalistic work; some of which, in his early days, was done for the Gazette Médicale, and much of it all through life for the political press. He was an ardent Liberal, and after the fall of the Empire, was elected a Deputy, and later a Senator, of the Third Republic. Nothing in the domain of literature seemed alien to this catholic mind, equally at ease in science and philosophy, philology and history. The enduring achievement of his life is his Dictionary of the French Language. It was begun in 1844 and completed in 1872, and a supplement was added in 1877. In his fortieth year, he was attracted by the teachings of Comte, and became a leader of the Positivists and a copious contributor to their review. His career is that of an earnest and a self-denying student; a teacher of unfettered thinking in science, religion, politics; a modest and disinterested fellow-worker in letters.

His master in the cult that won him solely by its scientific fascinations, Auguste Comte, had lived for the last fifteen years of his life at No. 10 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and there he died in 1857. We can but glance at the tablet in passing, and we cannot even glance at the altered residences, in this quarter, of the gifted Amédée Thierry and of his more gifted brother, Augustin, the historian "with the patience of a monk and the pen of a poet." He died, in 1856, in Rue du Mont-Parnasse, in the house that had been Quinet's, it is said. We look up, as we go, at the sunny windows, facing full south over the Luxembourg Gardens, of the home of Jules Janin, in his day "the prince of critics." They are on the first floor at the corner of Rues Rotrou and de Vaugirard, alongside the Odéon, the theatre in which he had his habitual seat. He died at Passy in 1874.

This faubourg has had no more striking figure than that of Prosper Mérimée, tight-buttoned in frock-coat, and of irreproachable starchedness; with a curiously round, cold eye behind glasses, a large nose with a square end, a forehead seamed with fine wrinkles. It was his pride to pass as an Englishman in his walk. In his work, in romance equally with archæology, the gentleman prevails over the author, so that he seems to stand aloof, reserved, sceptical, correct; never showing emotion, never giving way to his really infinite wit and frisky mockery. He began his working-life in 1825, as a painter with his father, alongside the École des Beaux-Arts, at No. 16 Rue des Petits-Augustins, now 12 Rue Bonaparte. In 1840 he moved around the corner to No. 10 Rue des Beaux-Arts, half way between the school and his other place of work in the Institute, as Inspector of the Historical and Artistic Monuments of France. From 1848 to 1851 he was to be found at 18 Rue Jacob, and close at hand he found "l'Inconnue," at 35 of the same street. In 1852 he removed to his last residence at 52 Rue de Lille, on the corner of Rue du Bac. The Commune burned that house along with others adjacent, and until rebuilding began, long after, there stood in the ruins a marble bust on its pedestal, unharmed except for the stain of the flames. It was all that was left of Mérimée's great art-collection, with which, and with his books and cats, he had lived alone since his mother's death. He had gone away to Cannes to die in 1870. So that he did not see the ruins of the Empire, to which he had rallied, altogether from devotion to the Empress, whom he had known in Spain when she was a child. He accepted nothing from the Emperor except the position of Librarian at Fontainebleau, and was as natural and sincere with the Empress, as he had been with Eugenie Montijo playing about his knee. In his other office he was a loyal servant of the State, and to his alert, artistic conscience France owes the preservation of many historic structures.

There are those who claim that the influence of Taine on modern thought has been deeper and will be more durable than that of Renan. They base their belief on the groundless notion that men are most profoundly impressed by pure reason, forgetful of that well-grounded experience, which proves that all men are touched and moved and persuaded rather by sentiment than by conviction. And the writer is irresistible, who, like Renan, appeals to our emotional as well as to our thinking capacities. We are captivated by those feminine qualities in his strain that are disapproved of by his detractors; his refined fancy and his undulating grace seduce us. We are convinced by his zest in the search for truth, by his courage in speaking it as he found it; we recognize his sincerity and sobriety that do not demand applause; we respect the magnanimity that looked on curses as oratorical ornaments of his enemies, and that took no return in kind. And so we stand in the peaceful court of homelike No. 23 Rue Cassette, on whose first floor Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine died in 1893, in respectful memory of the man who has helped us all by his dissections, his cataloguing, and his array of facts. The structure of the philosophy of history, that he raised, stands imposing and enduring on the bank of the stream of modern thought, and yet it may be that Edmond de Goncourt was not wholly wrong, in his characterization of Taine as "the incarnation of modern criticism; most learned, most ingenious, and most frequently unsound." We turn away and follow eagerly the steps of sympathetic Joseph-Ernest Renan.

We have already seen the country boy coming to school, at Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, in 1838. After four years' tuition there, he passed on to higher courses in the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice. That renowned school faces the place of the same name, which it entirely covered, when built in the early years of the seventeenth century. When the Revolution demolished the old structure, it destroyed the parloir where the young student, the Chevalier des Grieux, gave way before the beguilements of his visitor, Manon Lescaut. The fountain in this open space flashes with that adorable creation of the Abbé Prévost; the original of two creations as immortal, says Jules Janin: "For who is the Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre but Manon made pure; and who is Châteaubriand's Atala but Manon made Christian?"

Once a week, while at the seminary, young Renan took an outing with the other pupils to its succursale at Issy. It is a dreary walk, along the wearisome length of Rue de Vaugirard, to the village to which Isis gave her name, when that goddess, once worshipped in Lutetia, was banished to this far-away hamlet. There "Queen Margot" had a hunting-lodge and vast grounds, and when these were taken by the brothers of Saint-Sulpice, they saved the grounds and transformed the cupids on the walls of the lodge into cherubs, and the Venus into a Madonna. Now their new structures in Caen stone face the street named for Ernest Renan. In the gardens is a chapel built around the grotto, roofed with shells, wherein Bossuet and Fénelon used to meet, toward the end of the eighteenth century. There they doubtless began that controversy over the mystical writings of Madame Guyon, which ended in Fénelon's dismissal from the court through the influence of the imperious Bossuet. Under these trees that shaded them, walked Renan in his long and cruel conflict between his conscience and his traditions, most dreading the pain he would give his mother by the step he felt impelled to take. He took that step in October, 1845, when he laid aside the soutane—to be adorned and glorified by him, his teachers had hoped—and walked out from the seminary to a small hôtel-garni on the opposite side of Place Saint-Sulpice. Supported at first only by the savings of his devoted sister, Henriette, he started as a tutor, and began his life's pen-work, in a cheap pension, in one of the shabby houses just west of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, in Rue des Deux-Églises, now renamed Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Épée.

His future dwellings, befitting his modest gains, were all in quiet streets of this scholarly quarter. The site of that one occupied from 1862 to 1865, at 55 Rue Madame, is covered by Collége Bossuet, where priests teach their dogmas. Old Passage Sainte-Marie, where he lodged for a while in 1865, is now Rue Paul-Louis-Courier, and his lodging is gone. During the ten years from 1866 to 1876, he lived in the plain house numbered 29 of retired Rue Vaneau. Then for three years, he had an apartment at No. 16 Rue Guillaume; "a short street of provincial aspect," says Alphonse Daudet, "grass-grown, with never a wheel; of silent mansions and unopened gates, and of closed windows on the court; faded and wan after centuries of sleep." This mansion was built for Denis Talon, an advocate-general at the end of the seventeenth century, and described by Germain Brice, writing in 1684, as having "most agreeable apartments, with outlook on neighboring gardens, and a large court, and great expense in building." He did not mention the entrance-door, which is monumental, nor the knocker, worth a pilgrimage to see. In 1880 Renan removed to No. 4 Rue de Tournon, so finding himself between No. 6, once occupied by Laplace, and No. 2, once occupied by Balzac. In 1883 he was made Administrator of the Collége de France, and there took up his official residence. His appointment to the chair of Hebrew in that institution, on his return from the Orient in 1861, had so perturbed the Church behind the State that he was dismissed after he had given but one lecture.

The Second Empire gone, he came back, mainly through the action of Jules Simon, a wise and learned statesman and a most lovable man. Renan the administrator remained the lecturer as well, and has left ineffaceable memories with those who saw and heard him in his declining years; when, his body disabled by maladies, he still went singing on his way, as he manfully put it. It was a gross and clumsy body; to use Edmond de Goncourt's words, an ungraceful, almost disgraceful body, full of the moral grace of this apostle of doubt, this priest of science. His lectures were rather readings of the scriptures, interspersed with his own exegesis. On chairs about a large table, and against the wall, in a small room of the college, were seated the few intent listeners. Renan sat at one end of the table, his head—"an unchurched cathedral"—bent over a bulky copy of the scriptures as he read; then, as he talked, he would raise his head and throw back the long hair that had tumbled over his brow, the subtle humor of his mobile mouth and his dreamy eyes effacing the effect of his big nose and fat cheeks, his beardless face luminous with an exalted intellectual urbanity. His interpretations and illustrations were spoken with his perfect art of simple and limpid phrase, and in those tones that told of his dwelling with the saints and prophets of all the ages, and with the elusive spirits of mockery of our own day.

He died, on October 2, 1892, in his official residence in the Collége de France, an apartment on the second floor of the main structure facing the front court. The austere simplicity of this Breton interior was leavened by the books and the equipment of the scholar. The window of his death-chamber is just under the clock.

The "touch of earth" demanded by Tennyson's Guinevere was a need of the nature of George Sand. The three stages of her growth, shown in her work, reveal the three inspirations of her life, each most actual: the love of man, the love of humanity, the love of nature. The woman's heart in her made her, said Renan, "the Æolian harp of our time"; and Béranger's verse well fits her:

"Son cœur est un luth suspendu;

Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne."

It vibrated to the touch of outrages on woman and of injustice to man, and it pulsated with equal passion for her children and for the rural sights and scents of her birth-place. And we feel her heart in her phrases, that stir us, as Thackeray puts it, like distant country-bells. This half-poet, half-mystic, came fairly by her fantastic inheritance; for she was, in the admirable phrase of Mr. Henry James, "more sensibly the result of a series of love affairs than most of us." On the other side, we may accurately apply to her Voltaire's words concerning Queen Elizabeth: "And Europe counts you among her greatest men." There were masculine breadth and elevation in her complex, ample nature, with divine instincts and ideal purities, that left no room for vulgar ambitions and mean avidities. Balzac, of kindred qualities, wrote, after having learned to know her a little: "George Sand would speedily be my friend. She has no pettiness whatever in her soul; none of the low jealousies that obscure so many contemporary talents. Dumas resembles her in this."

When Madame Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant, a young woman of twenty-six, came, in 1830, to Paris to stay—she had already, while a girl, been a pensionnaire in the convent of the "Augustines Anglaises," where, under its ancient name, we have met with Mlle. Phlipon—she found her only acquaintance in the capital, Jules Sandeau, living on Quai Saint-Michel. He had known M. Dudevant and his wife during his visit to Nohant, a year or so earlier. She rented a garret in the same house, one of the old row on the quay, just east of Place Saint-Michel. Here she discovered that she could use a pen; at first with scant success and for small pay in the columns of the "Figaro," and then, with not much greater power, in a romance, written conjointly with Sandeau. They named it "Rose et Blanche," and its authors' pseudonyme was Jules Sand. Here she assumed the male costume which enabled her to pass for a young student, unmolested in her walks in all weathers and with all sorts and conditions of men, whom she delighted to scrutinize. In a letter written in July, 1832, she says that she is tired of climbing five long flights so many times a day, and is seeking new quarters. She found them, with the same superb outlook over the Seine as that she had left, on a third floor of Quai Malaquais.

It may have been, for she always dwelt on her royal ancestry, in the house now No. 5, which had been the home of Maurice de Saxe. That son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and of the Countess of Königsmark was the father of a natural daughter, who became the grandmother and guardian of Mlle. Lucile-Aurore. Madame Dudevant gave his name to her son, and this young Maurice, and his sister Solange, were now brought to their mother's new home. She devoted hours to their amusement and instruction, and hours to her pen-work; writing far into the night when daylight did not suffice. She improvised a study in the ground floor on the court, cool when the westering sun flooded her windows above, and quiet when too many visitors disturbed her. For she had sprung into fame with her "Indiana"—its author styled George Sand—and after only two months' interval with her "Valentine." Naturally inert, she had to push herself on to work, and then her "serene volubility" knew no pause. She had now to be reckoned with in the guild of letters, and its members met in the "poets' garret," as she termed her little salon.

Balzac came—he who discouraged her in the beginning, on Quai Saint-Michel—and Hugo and Dumas and Sainte-Beuve and young de Musset. With this last-named she went from here to Italy, having persuaded his mother that his infatuation would reform the wayward youth. All the world knows, from the books on both sides, the story of the short-lived liaison. She returned to this home in August, 1834, hungry for her children. Then we lose sight of her for many years, in her visits to her beloved provincial scenes, and her journeys to other lands, and her temporary residences on the right bank of the Seine. In the winter of 1846 and 1847 she had a pied-à-terre in her son's studio, in the secluded square of Cours d'Orléans, its entrance now at 80 Rue Taitbout. There she was visited by Charles Dickens, who describes her as "looking like what you'd suppose the queen's monthly nurse would be; chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed; a singularly ordinary woman in appearance and manner." Others describe her, at this period, when she had just passed her fortieth year, as having a wearied, listless bearing, her only notable feature being her dull, mild, tranquil eyes. In February, 1852, she was found by Mr. and Mrs. Browning in the small apartment attached to her son's studio, at No. 3 Rue Racine. It is at the top of the house, and can be rented to-day. A curious picture of her and her surroundings is given by the Brownings. She was a constant attendant at this time at the Odéon—on whose stage her plays were produced—and at the restaurant in the place in front of the theatre. There she used to sit among her male friends, smoking "those horrid big cigars" which so revolted Rachel that she would never meet the smoker.

George Sand's last Paris home was in Rue Gay-Lussac, and she was one of the earliest tenants in that street, opened in 1868. She had three or four small rooms in the entresol of No. 5, the lease of which, after her death in 1876, was sold by her son to a Roumanian lady, along with some of his mother's furniture. This lady is delighted to chatter about her illustrious predecessor in this apartment, and allows the favored visitor to sit on the broad couch, covered in dingy and worn leather, whereon George Sand was fond of reclining in her last tranquil days, at rest after stormy and laborious years.

There is a hospitable little inn in the Faubourg Saint-Germain endeared to many of us by memories, joyous or mournful. The Hotel de France et de Lorraine, in narrow Rue de Beaune, just south of the quay, was one of the earliest hotels in Paris, and was an approved resort of the Royalists, before emigration and after Restoration. They seem still to haunt its court and halls, where there lingers that atmosphere of decayed Bourbonism, which James Russell Lowell humorously hits off in a letter written when he was a guest here. The pervading presence is that of Châteaubriand, and our amiable hosts have a pride in keeping his apartment—on the first floor, in plain wood panelling of time-worn gray—much as it was when he wrote, in its salon, his letter of resignation of his post in the Diplomatic Service, to the First Consul, to be Emperor within two months. Châteaubriand was in Paris on leave of absence at the time of the shooting of the Duc d'Enghien, in the ditch of Vincennes on the night of March 20, 1804, and he refused to serve any longer the man whom he regarded as an assassin. Just seventeen years earlier these two men had arrived in Paris, both sub-lieutenants, of nearly the same age, equally obscure and ambitious, equally without heart. Napoleon Bonaparte, coming from Corsica, took a room in the Hôtel de Cherbourg, as we have seen; François-Auguste, Vicomte de Châteaubriand, coming from his natal town of Saint-Malo, found lodging in the Hôtel de l'Europe in Rue du Mail. This street, between Porte Saint-Denis, by which the coaches entered, and Place des Victoires, where they put up, was full of hôtels-garnis for travellers. Installed there, Châteaubriand hunted up the great Malesherbes, a friendly counsellor who put him in the way of meeting men of note; among others Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, at the top of them all, just then, with his "Paul et Virginie." These two, the one just fifty, the other not yet twenty, then in 1787, strolled together in the Jardin du Roi, forgetting their old world and its worries, in their talks of the new world and its glories.

During the next two or three years, Châteaubriand came frequently to Paris, an intent and disgusted onlooker at its doings. He stood, with his sisters, at their windows in Rue de Richelieu, open on that September day, when the mob surged by holding aloft on pikes the heads of Foulon and Berthier. His Royalist stomach revolted, and he joined his regiment at Rouen, to retire soon from the service, and to sail in 1791 for the new United States, with dreams of distinction as the discoverer of the Northwest Passage. He dined with George Washington, to whom he carried a letter from a French officer, who had served in the colonial army. The President waved aside Châteaubriand's florid compliments, and advised him to give up his futile quest. The young Breton wandered far into the new country, and while resting in a clearing on the Scioto, where now is Chillicothe, Ohio, he read in an old newspaper of the royal flight to Varennes, and of the enforced return.

At once he started for France, to offer his sword to his King, arriving in January, 1792, and in the summer of that year he joined the growing train of émigrés to England. For eight years he toiled and starved in London, and returned to Paris in 1800. His passport bore the name of "Lassague," and he posted, in company, as far as Porte de l'Étoile. Thence he went on foot down the Champs Élysées, finding none of the silence and desolation his fancy had pictured, but, on either hand, lights and music. On the spot where the guillotine had stood he stopped, provided with the proper emotions. He crossed Pont Royal, then the westernmost bridge, and betook himself to lodgings in Rue de Lille, in an entresol of one of the dignified mansions, that seem still to stand aloof from their bourgeois neighbors. From here, he stole out to his meals, hiding his face behind his journal, in which he had been reading impassioned praise of the new book, "Atala," and listened to the other guests speculating as to the unknown genius who had written it. The picture is to be cherished, for it is the only known portrait of Châteaubriand, modest and shrinking. He had brought the manuscript of "Atala" to Paris in his pocket, and had sought long before securing a publisher. The book found a public eager for novelty. It came in a period of sterility in letters, when all the virility of France had been spent in her colossal wars, and the new century was alert to greet the serene light of science and literature. That came from all points of the horizon, but the resplendent figures of these years were Madame de Staël and Châteaubriand.

These two had nothing in common, but they were not inimical, and Châteaubriand was one of the minor lions at Madame de Staël's receptions. For this was a little earlier than 1803, when a more beneficial air than that of Paris was ordered for her by the First Consul, whom she bored. This "cyclone of sentiment" must have bored Mr. Pitt, also, when she visited England during the Terror; for he seemed to think that the lady did protest too much about the absence of an equivalent in English for the French word "sentiment," and he replied: "Mais, Madame, nous l'avons; c'est 'My eye and Betty Martin.'" And when she got to Germany she bored Goethe, not only with her sloppy sentimentality, but with her shapely arms, too lavishly displayed. There could be no sympathy between the woman, who, in Sainte-Beuve's words, "could not help being even more French than her compatriots," and the stuff of whose dreams was a union of the theories of the dead and of the newly born centuries; and Châteaubriand, the hard-headed opponent of every revolutionary idea, who pompously labelled himself "a Bourbon by honor, a Royalist by reason, and still by taste and nature a Republican"!

A year after his "Atala," in 1802, his "Génie du Christianisme" had placed him, in the estimation of his country and of himself, on a literary throne level with the military throne of Bonaparte. The rhetorical fireworks of this book, corruscating around the Catholic Church, lighted up the night of scepticism, when worship had been abolished and God had been outlawed. Yet, as he poetized beyond recognition the North American savages in his "Atala," so now he prettified the sanctuary and "gilded the Host." The First Consul, welcoming any aid in his scheme to use the Church for his own ends, sent the author to the legation at Rome. We have seen his return. After this, he moves about Paris, lodging, for a while, he says, "in a garret" offered him by Madame la Marquise de Coislin, a stanch friend and stanch Royalist. "Hotel de Coislin" may still be read above the doorway of the stately mansion that faces Place de la Concorde, at the western corner of Rue Royale, and aggressive Bourbonism speaks from its stone pillars and pediment. His garret there was no squalid lodging. On his return from the Holy Land in 1807, Châteaubriand planted the Jerusalem pines and cedars of Lebanon he had brought back, in the garden of "Vallée-aux-Loups," a little place he then purchased near Aulnay, on the south of the city. Here, while the Empire lasted, he passed years of quiet content, with his wife, his plants, and his books, but writing no more romance after 1809. In 1817, having a town residence, and finding himself too poor to keep this country place, he sold it, and new buildings cover the site of his cottage and garden.

Recalled to active life by the Restoration, Châteaubriand posed as one who was more Royalist than the King, with a mental reservation of his platonic fancy for a republic. He was a pretentious statesman, none too sincere. His pamphlet, "De Buonaparte et des Bourbons," had been worth an army to the cause, said Louis XVIII., who placed him in the Chamber of Peers, and in 1822, after a short stay at the Berlin Embassy, in the Ambassador's residence in London. Lording it there, in all "the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power," he recalled his former years of obscurity and privation in London streets, and began his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." In writing about himself he was at his ease, feeling that he had a subject worthy of his best powers, and these memoirs have little of the inflated and fantastic mannerisms of his romances about other people. As to the rest, they are a colossal monument to his conceit and selfishness. Dismissed suddenly and indecently by Louis XVIII., from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Châteaubriand was made Ambassador to Rome on the accession of Charles X., in 1828. He refused to recognize the younger branch of the Bourbons in 1830, and when the crown was given to Orleans, he strode out of the Chamber of Peers, and stripped himself of his peer's robe, with great theatric effect. Appearing no more in public life, he was active in pamphlets and in the press as an opponent of the new royalty, which would lead to a republic, he predicted.

"Châteaubrillant, Vicomte de, Rue de l'Université 25," is his address in the Bottin of 1817; a record of interest in its antiquated spelling of his name, and because this is the house, on the corner of Rue du Bac, which we shall visit later with Alexandre Dumas. This three years' lease expiring in 1820, he removed to the fine old mansion, where he gave reception to young Victor Hugo, to be described later, at No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique. Its site is covered by the modern building numbered 197 in Boulevard Saint-Germain, whose southern side, just here, replaces the same side of Rue Saint-Dominique, as has been already told. He kept other town addresses, to which we need not follow him, during his absences on diplomatic duty. From 1827 to 1838 we find him and Madame de Châteaubriand in their retired home, in the southern outskirts of the city. Their 84 Rue d'Enfer is now 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, the old street name thus punningly extended, in homage to the heroic defender of Belfort.

The dingy yellow front of the long wall and the low building is broken by a gate-way, and within is a small lodge on the left, wherein sits a woman in the costume of a sisterhood. She permits entrance into the cottage on the right, and you are in Châteaubriand's small salon, the remaining portion of the cottage being now in possession of the Institution des Jeunes Filles Aveugles, alongside. His portrait in pencil, and a water-color sketch of his wife, hang on the wall. Her face shows the boredom and patience that were put into it by her life with this man of irascible genius and of frequent infidelities. She is buried behind the altar of the chapel of the Marie-Thérèse Infirmary, which she founded and carried on, in the devoutness that dwelt in her soul for the Church, whose appeal to him was in its artistic endowments. A portion of the revenue that supports this institution comes from the sale of chocolate, made first to her liking by her chef, and made after his rule ever since. As Sœur Marie shows you out from the salesroom, alongside this little reception-room, you see the group of trees in the circular lawn, that was planted by husband and wife; on the farther side are the dilapidated buildings of their day, now used for the chocolate fabrique; behind the great court rise the walls of the Infirmary for aged and invalid priests. Châteaubriand had known, while in Kensington during his exile, many of the impoverished curés who were, like himself, refugees from the Revolution; and some of them had followed him here, and had become domesticated pets of the household, together with the big gray cat given him by the Pope. To them and their successors in poverty and illness, he bequeathed this comfortable retreat.

There is an episode of these years that shows a kindly side of Châteaubriand, that he seldom allows us to see. He was suggested for the presidency of the republic, adventured by the political clubs for a year or two after the unwelcome accession of Louis-Philippe. Châteaubriand did not join the plotters, but he was arrested, along with many of them, and locked up for two weeks or so. Now, when the Bourbons had put Béranger in prison, in 1828, Châteaubriand had been one of the many sympathizers who had flocked to the cell of the courageous singer. In 1832 the rôles were reversed, and Béranger came in, from his cottage in Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne, to visit the imprisoned statesman. And after Châteaubriand's release, he wrote a charming letter to Béranger, thanking him for that token of fellow-feeling, and begging him not to "break his lyre," as the veteran chansonnier had threatened to do, and urging him to go on "making France smile and weep; for, by a secret known only to you, the words of your chansons are gay and the airs are plaintive." Béranger's songs touch no chord now, their plaintiveness is commonplaceness, his philosophy has no loftiness, his sentimentality is of the earth earthy, and his lyre is, to us, a tinkling hurdy-gurdy.

When the young Breton officer walked through Rue du Mail first in 1787, his gaze might have turned, as our gaze turns to-day, to two striking façades in that street: that of No. 7, built by Colbert, whose emblematic serpents are carved high up in the capitals of the heavy columns; and that of No. 12, as stolid as the other is fantastic, its heaviness not lightened by the two balconies, and their massive supports, on the wide stone front. It was erected in 1792 by Berthault, the architect whose work we see at Malmaison and in the Palais-Royal. Châteaubriand might well have been attracted by this house, for it was soon to shelter the woman who became later the lasting influence of his life.

In 1793, at the very top of the Terror, Jacques Récamier brought to this house his bride not yet sixteen, who had been Mlle. Jeanne-Françoise-Julie-Adélaïde Bernard. Here they lived for five years. Their house is unaltered as to fabric, and the original heavy, circular, stone staircase still mounts to the upper floors. These are now divided by partitions into small rooms, and the lofty first story is cut across by an interposed floor; all for the needs of trade. The ceiling of the grand salon retains its admirable cornice. Like other mansions on the south side of Rue du Mail, this Récamier house extended, behind a large court, now roofed over with glass, through to Rue d'Aboukir, where its rear entrance is at No. 11. On the first floor of this wing, in the oblong ceiling of a small room, is a deeply sunk oval panel, that holds a painting of that time, in good preservation.

From here Jacques Récamier, just then wealthy, removed to the newest fashionable quarter of which the centre was Rue du Mont-Blanc, now Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, whose No. 7 covers the site of his magnificent mansion. It was then a street of small and elegant hôtels, each in its own grounds, and M. Récamier bought the one that had belonged to Necker, and had been confiscated by the State. He bought also the adjoining house, and rebuilt the two into one. Its furniture, fittings, bronzes, and marbles were all especially designed for this new palace of a prosperous financier. Here was the scene of those balls that were the wonder of Paris during the Consulate and the early years of the Empire. The costumes of the period, both for men and women, were picturesque in cut and coloring. Among the guests shone Caroline Bonaparte, later to marry Murat, the youngest of the sisters and most resembling her great brother in face and character. M. and Mme. Récamier spent their summers in a château owned by him in the suburbs of Clichy; and to it every man of note in the State and the army found his way. Napoleon said he, too, would be glad to go to Clichy, if the fair châtelaine would not come to court, and sent Fouché to arrange it, but with no success. She fought shy of Napoleon, the man and the Emperor, as Madame de Staël itched for his attention, personal and political. Nor did Madame Récamier like his brother Lucien, who languished about her, to the ridicule of his equally love-lorn rivals.

His justification, and that of all her other adorers, speaks from David's unfinished canvas in the Louvre. Yet this shows only the outer shell of her loveliness; within was a lovely nature, simple and kindly, sympathetic and loyal, that made her generous in her friendships with men and women, and devoted to the welfare of her friends. The single passion of her life was her passion for goodness. Her modesty kept her unconscious of her attractions of mind and body, and thus she held, almost unaware, the widest dominion of any woman of her day. The Duchess of Devonshire put it daintily: "First she's good, next she's spirituelle, and after that, she's beautiful." And so, as we come to know her, we learn infinite respect for the woman, who "with an unequalled influence over the hearts and wills of men, scorned to ask a favor, and endured poverty and ... exile, which fell with tenfold severity on one so beloved and admired, without sacrifice of dignity and independence."

Madame Récamier.
(From the portrait by Gros.)

Comparative poverty, hurried by the Emperor, came in 1806, and the town house and the château were sold, along with her plate and jewels. In 1811 she was exiled from Paris on the pretext that her salon was a centre of Royalist conspiracy, and she passed the years until the Restoration in the south of France, in Italy, and in Switzerland with her beloved Madame de Staël.

Just beyond the Boulevards de la Madeleine and des Capucines, which show the line of the rampart levelled by Louis XIV., and along the course of its outer moat, a new street had started up at the end of the eighteenth century, and was completed in the early years of the nineteenth century. It began at present Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and ended at the Church of the Madeleine, then in course of construction; it was built up in the best style of that period, and it was named Rue Basse-du-Rempart. That untouched section, to the west of Rue Caumartin, shows us the admirable architecture of the early Empire in the stately fronts, that shrink back behind the boulevard in stony-faced protest against its turmoil. Eastwardly from Rue Caumartin, the northern side of Boulevard des Capucines has trampled out nearly the whole of the old street. The stones of Place de l'Opéra lie on the site of the modest house, at 18 Rue Basse-du-Rempart, taken by M. Récamier after his first business reverses, and occupied by him during his wife's exile; and the florist's shop, under the Grand Hôtel, is on the spot of their stately residence at No. 32 of the same street, after her return and until 1820. In that year, his fortune regained, he moved farther west in the same street to a more sumptuous home at No. 48. This house has been happily saved for us, and is now numbered 18 of Boulevard des Capucines; one of the three structures of the old street, which stand back from the line of modern frontage, and lower than the level of modern paving. The present No. 16 is the Récamier coach-entrance, and the huge stabling in the rear is built on the Récamier gardens. Their house preserves its wrought-iron balconies, and within is the circular staircase mentioned in her "Mémoires." Down these stairs, for the last time, she came in 1827, leaving M. Récamier to his disastrous speculations, which had at last swallowed up her own fortune, and drove to the Abbaye-aux-Bois. There was her home until her death in 1849.

The venerable mass of the convent is in sight behind the railed-in court at No. 16 Rue de Sèvres. One portion that we see was built in 1640 for the "Annonciades," and from them bought by Anne of Austria, in 1654, for the sisterhood of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, who had been driven from their convent near Compiègne by the civil wars of the Fronde. That wing which was burned in 1661 was speedily rebuilt, and forms part of the structure before us. Convents had then, and have still, rooms and apartments which are let or sold to lone spinsters and widows, and to "decayed gentlewomen who have seen better days." This Abbaye-aux-Bois, during the Bourbon Restoration, "when the sky had no horizon," was a favorite retreat for fashionable dévotes, mending their reputations by a temporary retirement. The life there is pleasantly described in the early letters of Mary Clarke—later Madame Julius Mohl—who lived there with her mother. M. Bernard, the father of Madame Récamier, had bought one of its grandest apartments for his daughter, after the first bankruptcy of her husband. When she came here it was occupied, and she rented a shabby upper floor for two or three years, and then went down to her own apartment on the first floor, to which she added another in the rear of the same floor. It is in the western wing, of modern construction, with windows on Rue de Sèvres, and on the terrace that overlooks the garden, now shorn of a goodly slice by Boulevard Raspail. We know all about this salon, famous for twenty years, the roll of whose frequenters holds every illustrious name in France during that period, as well as those of many charlatans and bores.

The Abbaye-aux-Bois.

It is reported that Madame Récamier and Châteaubriand met first, in the earliest years of the century, at the receptions of Madame de Staël. Whenever they met to become mutually attracted, this attraction grew in him until it became the dominant sentiment of his life. With all his elevation of soul and his breadth of mind, he had no depth of feeling. "I have a head, good, clear, cold," he wrote; "and a heart that goes jog-trot for three-and-one-half quarters of humanity." The other one-eighth was Madame Récamier, and she outcounted all the rest of the world in stirring such heart as he had. "You have transformed my nature," he tried to make her believe, and he may have believed it himself. Sick with conceit as he was, spoiled by flattery, morbid from introspection, her companionship lifted him out of his melancholy and raised him into serenity. As for her, so long as Madame de Staël lived, she had no other affection to spare for anyone, and perhaps this incomparable creature never gave to Châteaubriand more than homage to her hero, tenderness to the isolated man, and medicine to a mind diseased. He may well have written, toward the last: "I know nothing more beautiful nor more good than you."

The "chemin des vaches" of the sixteenth century became a country road by the passage of the drays that carted stone, from the Vaugirard quarries to the ferry on the southern shore, for the building of the Tuileries. The Pont Royal of Mansart has taken the place of the wooden bridge built above that ferry, and the ferry has given the name to that road, now Rue du Bac. Along its line, on both sides, seigneurs and priests took land and built thereon. There are yet, behind the huge stone blocks of houses, immense tracts of grounds and of woodland, unsuspected by the wayfarer through the narrow, noisy street. One of the most extensive of these open spaces is owned by the Seminary of the Missions Étrangères, whose church is near the corner of Rue de Babylone. For two bishops, who had charge here in the time of Louis XIV., were erected two houses, exactly alike without and within, and these are now numbered 118 and 120 Rue du Bac. In the latter in the apartment on the ground floor, M. and Mme. de Châteaubriand installed themselves in 1838; having left their cottage and its domain in Rue d'Enfer, to the needy priests there. Here, in an angle of the front court, are the low stone steps that mount to their apartment.

Portal of Châteaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac.

Its dining-room and a chapel, arranged by them, gave on this court. The chapel has been thrown into, and made one with, the dining-room, but this is the only alteration since their time. His bedroom, and that of his wife—with her huge bird-cages behind—and the salon between the two rooms, looked out on their garden, and beyond it on the vast grounds of the Missions Étrangères. The enchanting seclusion was dear to him in these last years, during which his only work was the completion and touching-up of his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." Select extracts from the manuscript were sometimes read by him to the group that assembled in the drawing-room at the abbaye, between four and six o'clock of every afternoon. The hostess sat on one side of the fireplace, her form grown so fragile that it seemed transparent for the gentle spirit shining out, like a radiant light within a rich vase. Châteaubriand "pontificated" in his arm-chair opposite, toying with the household cat, the while he tried to listen to the lesser men; "a giant bored by, and smiling pitifully down on, a dwarf world," is Amiel's phrase. When Châteaubriand spoke or read, it was with sonorous tones, and with attitude and gesture of a certain stateliness. He was always an artist in all details. His costume was simple and elegant. Short of stature, he made himself shorter by his way of sinking his head—"an Olympian head," says Lamartine—between his shoulders. Under his thick-clustering locks rose a noble forehead, power shone from his eyes, pride curled his lips—too often—and his expression gave assurance of a glacial reserve.

The day came when he found himself too feeble for the short walk between his house and the abbaye. Then his friend came to him. She and Madame de Châteaubriand had been sufficiently friendly, but that good lady gave her days to her prayer-books, and to reading her husband's books; which she never understood, albeit she had the finest mind of any woman he had known, he always asserted. She died in the winter of 1846-47, and her body was carried to the Infirmary, the care of which had been the occupation and the happiness of her later years. Jacques Récamier, when in mortal illness in 1830, had been brought to his wife's rooms in the abbaye, at her request and by special favor of the Mother Superior, and there he had died.

And now, Châteaubriand offered marriage to Madame Récamier, and she refused what she might have accepted, could it have come a few years earlier. "But, at our age," she asked, "who can question our intimacy, or prevent me taking care of you?" She was prevented only by the cataract that slowly blinded her, and she sat by his bedside, helpless, while Madame Mohl—who had remained Mary Clarke until the summer of 1847—wrote his necessary letters. That sympathizing woman, one of the few congenial to him, had only to come down from the apartment she had taken on the third floor of this house, overlooking the gardens; the apartment which she and her learned husband, Julius Mohl, made the social successor of the Récamier salon, through many years. Châteaubriand's death took place on July 4, 1848. He had lived to see the Orleans throne, which he hated, overthrown as he had foretold by the republic, which he did not love. His faithful lady stood by his deathbed, with Béranger, equally faithful to old friends, old customs, and old clothes, clad as we see him in his statue of Square du Temple.

Châteaubriand's funeral service, attended by all that was best in France, was solemnized in the Church of the Missions Étrangères, next door, and his body was laid in a rock of the harbor of Saint-Malo. Madame Récamier went back to her now desolate rooms. On May 10, 1849, she drove over to the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, on a visit to her niece, whose husband, M. Lenormant, was its librarian and had his apartment there. That night she died in that building, in a sudden seizure of cholera.