The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume 2 (of 2)

by Benjamin Ellis Martin; Charlotte M. Martin

THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS

The Place des Vosges.

THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS

"Dans cet hôtel est née, le 6 Fevrier, 1626, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné:" so reads the tablet set in that wall, which fronts on the square, of the house numbered 1 Place des Vosges, having its entrance at No. 11 Rue de Birague. There is no name more closely linked with the Marais than that of this illustrious woman. Born in this house, baptized in its parish church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, she here grew up to girlhood; she was married in Saint-Gervais, her daughter was married in Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs; and the greater portion of her life was passed within this quarter. Her father was killed in a duel a few months after her birth, at the age of seven she lost her mother, and when only twenty-five years old, she found herself a widow. After a short sojourn in the provinces with her son and daughter, she came back, in 1655, to Paris and to the Marais. She had casual and unsettled domiciles, for many years, in Rues de Thorigny, Barbette, des Francs-Bourgeois, des Lions-Saint-Paul, des Tournelles—all within our chosen district—before she settled in her home of twenty years, the Carnavalet.

It is but a step away from this tablet above us, to the corner of Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and Sévigné; the latter street, at that time, bearing its original name of Culture-Sainte-Catherine, having been opened through that portion under cultivation of the grounds of the great monastery of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers. On the corner of this new street and that of Francs-Bourgeois—then Rue Neuve-Sainte-Catherine—a piece of the convent garden was bought by Jacques de Ligneris, and thereon a house for his residence was erected. Its plans were drawn by Pierre Lescot, it was built by Jean Bullant, was decorated by Androuët du Cerceau, and its sculptures were carved by Jean Goujon. And thus these walls, on which we are looking, speak in mute laudation of four famous men. One more notable name may be added to this list—that of François Mansart. He was called in, a century or so after the completion of this mansion, for its renovation and enlargement; and, to his lasting honor, he contented himself with doing only what seemed to him to be imperatively demanded, and with attempting no "improvements" nor "restoration" of the work of his great predecessors. He knew what we have learned, that those words too often mean desecration and ruin to all historic monuments in all lands. During this interval, the building had come into the hands of Françoise de la Baume, Dame de Kernévalec, whose Breton name, corrupted to Carnavalet, has clung to it ever since. That name suggested the pun of the carnaval masks, carved in stone over the arches of the wings in the court. They were done by a later hand than that of Goujon, whose last work is to be seen about that window of the Louvre, on which he was busy, when a bullet picked him off, a day or two after the night of Saint Bartholomew. The tranquil elegance of his chisel has adorned this almost perfect gateway with the graceful winged figure in its keystone. It lifts and lightens the severe dignity of the façade. And, in the court—its centre not unworthily held by the bronze statue of Louis XIV., remarkable in its exquisite details, found in the old Hôtel de Ville—we linger in joy before the graceful flowing curves and the daylight directness of the Seasons of this French Phidias. The figures on the wings are from a feebler chisel than his. Of all the crowding memories of this spot, those of the Marquise de Sévigné and of Jean Goujon are the most vivid and the most captivating. The busts of these two, one on either side, greet us at the head of the staircase leading to her apartments; she is alert and winsome, he is sedate and thoughtful and a trifle too stern for the most amiable of sculptors, as he shows himself here, rather than the staunch Huguenot, killed for his convictions.

She was fifty-one years of age by the records when she came to live here, in 1677, and half that age at heart, which she kept always young. She had been so long camping about in the Marais, that she was impatient to settle down in the ideal dwelling she had found, at last. She writes to her daughter: "Dieu merci, nous avons l'hôtel Carnavalet. C'est une affaire admirable; nous y tiendrons tous, et nous aurons le bel air. Comme on ne peut pas tout avoir, il faut se passer des parquets, et des petites cheminées a la mode.... Pour moi, je vais vous ranger la Carnavalette, car, enfin, nous l'avons, et j'en suis fort aise."

So she moved in, with her son and daughter, both dear to her. It was to the daughter, however, that the mother's affluence of affection flowed out, all through her life; and it may well be that this veritable passion saved her from all other passions, during the years of her long widowhood, when many a grand parti fell at her feet. She looked on them all alike, with pity for their seizure, and each of them got up and walked away, unappeased. Yet hers was a rich nature, wholesome and womanly withal, and there are potentialities of emotion in the pouting lips and inviting eyes of the pretty pagan of this bust. Nor was she a prude, and her way of quoting Rabelais and listening to La Fontaine's verses would horrify us moderns of queasy stomachs. She had ready pardon for the infidelities of her husband, and later for the misdeeds of her scampish cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, "the most dangerous tongue in France."

Above all, this real woman showed a masculine strength and loyalty of friendship for men; showed it most markedly in her sympathy for those who had fallen in the world. There is no finer example in the annals of constancy than her devotion to the broken Fouquet, howbeit he may have merited breaking. The spirit of her letters, at the time of his disgrace and imprisonment, cannot be twisted into anything ignoble, as Napoleon tried to do, on reading them in the State archives. He sneeringly suggested that her sympathy with Fouquet was "bien chaud, bien vif, bien tendre, pour de la simple amitié." So it was, indeed; for her friendships were attachments, and warmth and tenderness pulsate in all her letters; and these qualities will, along with their unpremeditated spontaneity, keep them alive as long as letters live. What else was in her letters has been told by Nodier, when he says that they regulated and purified the language for ordinary use; and by Jules Janin, who rightly claims that, from this Carnavalet, came the purest and most perfect French hitherto heard in France.

In forming and housing the great collection of the History of Paris, to which the Musée Carnavalet is devoted, new buildings about a trim garden in the rear have been added to the original mansion, whose own rooms have been subjected to as little change as possible. Madame de Sévigné's apartment, on the first floor, is hardly altered, and her bedroom and salon have been especially kept inviolate. The admirable mouldings, the curious mirrors, the old-fashioned lustre, remain as she left them, when she went to her daughter at Grignan to die. In this salon, and in the wide corridor leading to it, both now so silent and pensive, she received all the men of her day worth receiving; and it is here alone that we breathe the very atmosphere of this incomparable creature.

We may join the early-goers among these men, who make their way to another house, not far distant. There are temptations to stop before, and explore within, the seventeenth-century mansions all along Rues Sévigné and du Parc-Royal, but we pass on into Rue Turenne—once Rue Saint-Louis, the longest and widest and foremost in fashion of Marais streets, now merely big and bustling, with little left of its ancient glory—until we come to its No. 58, on the corner of old Rue des Douze-Portes, now named Ville-Hardouin, after the contemporary chronicler of the Fifth Crusade. This modest house at the corner has been luckily overlooked by the modern rebuilder of this quarter, who has not touched its two stories and low attic above a ground floor, its unobtrusive portal, its narrow hall, and its staircase; small and quaint, in keeping with the cripple who was carried up and down for many years. Paul Scarron lived here, in the apartment au deuzième à droite, dubbed the "Hôtel de l'Impécuniosité" by his young wife, who was the granddaughter of the Calvinist leader, Agrippa d'Aubigné, and who was to be the second wife of Louis XIV. Sitting at her scantily supplied supper-table here, the maid would whisper that a course was lacking, and that an anecdote from the hostess must fill the bill of fare instead. Goldsmith tells us, at the beginning of his "Retaliation:"

"Of old when Scarron his companions invited,

Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united."

And, just here, it is curious to recall the fact that Goldsmith was busied, during the last months of his life, on a translation of Scarron's "Roman Comique," and his bethumbed copy was found on his desk, after his death.

Scarron was always poor and always importunate, and yet he was "a pleasant prodigy never before seen," he says of himself; rightfully claiming that he was able "to sport with misery and jest in pain." Paralyzed and still a prey to incurable torments, immovable in his armchair except for his nimble fingers, he drove his pen merrily to the making of comedies, tales, pamphlets, and the verse that, like him, was impishly awry with mockery, as if chattered by "a wilderness of monkeys." Letters, too, he wrote in this house, that give us striking glimpses of the man and of his time. In them we discover that "most terribly" was the sanctified slang then for the modern abomination "awfully." Appeals for money make up much of his correspondence, but there is never a hint of a loan in the charming letters to the "belle ange en deuil," Madame de Sévigné; in which he always assures her that she is a dangerous person, and that those who look on her without due care, grow sick upon it immediately, and are not long-lived. Mlle. de Lenclos was a favorite of his, too, and that "charmant objet, belle Ninon," came to sit for hours beside his invalid-chair. She made friends with the young wife, too, but complained that she was "trop gauche" to learn gallantry, and was "vertueuse par faiblesse." The large-minded lady frankly owns: "J'aurais voulu l'en guérir, mais elle craignait trop Dieu." For all that, the friendship then formed between the two women was never broken, and when the widow Scarron came to position and power she offered a place at court to her elder friend; an offer that was refused, for the old lady never grew old enough to change her mode of life. And there is little doubt that the younger woman often looked back with longing to those wretched days that were so happy. She said once, seeing the carp dying of surfeit in the Versailles pond: "Elles regrettent leur bourbe," suggesting that, like them, she suffered from satiety.

Years before his marriage, Scarron had lived with his sister in this same little street of "Twelve Doors," and had grown very fond of the "beau quartier des Marests." He asks: "Who can stay long from the Place Royale?" When he returned to Paris in 1654—having married in 1652, and having made a long stay in Touraine—he came back to his beloved Marais, and took a three-years' lease of this apartment. At its termination the lease was probably renewed, for it is a time-honored tradition that makes this old house the place of his death, on October 14, 1660.

Between fifty and one hundred years later—the exact date is not to be got at—the garret above was crowded with the pet dogs and cats and birds of Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, who lived in filth among them, seldom eating, never washing, always smoking. The big blond dramatist had fallen a victim to poverty and melancholy, after a short career of success on those boards which he stained with the blood of many violent deaths. He had said that, since Corneille had taken heaven for his own and Racine had seized upon earth, he could place his scenes only in hell. He was rescued, and taken from this garret, by the pension obtained through La Pompadour. That great lady was not prompted by any comprehension of the sombre power of his tragedy, but by a desire to wreak her spite against Voltaire by the exaltation of a rival.

Scarron's widow was left in poor case, with only her husband's small pension for support, and this was stopped by Colbert on the death of Anne of Austria, in 1666. That Queen-Mother had endowed an institution for poor girls and sick women, and with these "Hospitalières de la Place Royale," Madame Scarron found shelter, having sold all that she owned. In 1669 she was put in charge of the first child of the King and Madame de Montespan, and we know all the rest, to the secret marriage in 1685. Such of the buildings of the "Hospitalières" as are left now form part of the Hôpital Andral, and their old roofs and dormers and chimneys take our eye above the low wall as we turn into Rue des Tournelles. In this street is the hospital's main entrance, and through its gate we look across the garden, that stretches back to the former entrance in Impasse de Béarn; now opened only to carry out for burial the bodies of those dying in the hospital.

The line of walls along Rue des Tournelles was broken by only a few isolated houses, when François Mansart selected a site here, and put thereon his own dwelling, unpretending as the man himself, in contrast with the grand mansions he had planned for his noble and wealthy clients. This is his modest entrance-court, at No. 28 Rue des Tournelles, and behind it is the simple façade of his hôtel. This building probably formed his entire frontage, or it may have been the corps-de-logis of a more extensive structure, whose two wings reached out toward the street at Nos. 26 and 30. This number 28, whether the central or the entire body of the building, remains in perfect preservation. At Mansart's death, in 1666, it came, along with most of his property, to his sister's son, whom he had adopted, and trained to be the architect known as Jules Hardouin Mansart. He gained position and pay in the royal employ, more by this adoptive name than by his abilities. As Superintendent of Buildings under Louis XIV. he is responsible for most of the horrors of the palace of Versailles, yet the dome of the Invalides proves him to have been capable of less meretricious work.

On taking possession of his uncle's mansion, he had, as sole tenant of his spacious and inviting first floor, Mlle. Anne Lenclos, popularly christened Ninon de Lenclos, then fifty years of age. Her dwelling is the end and object of this short walk, and together with the house from which we started, and the one at which we stopped, it gives us a complete picture of the social doings of the Marais at that period. We are allowed to enter among the men with whom we have come, and we will go in, let us say, with young de Sévigné, who finds his way here frequently, from his pied-à-terre in his mother's house, as his father and his grandfather had found their way to Ninon's abode. Under the stone balcony on the court-front we step up into a goodly hall, from which rises a stone staircase, its outer end finely carved, its steps well worn by many visitors through the years. An admirable medallion looks down from the wall as we mount, and in the rooms above we find carved panels and decorated ceilings, many of them done by Lebrun and Mignard, probably for the fair tenant. They are so carefully kept that canvas covers such of them as are feared to be "trop lestes" for modern eyes, in the modest words of the ancient concierge. Mansart put an excellent façade on his garden-front, and its coupled Ionic columns, and balconies of wrought-iron railings, are all there unmutilated. But the garden, then stretching to Boulevard Beaumarchais, is now hidden under the shops that front on that boulevard.

To these rooms and this garden thronged the same men whom we have seen in the Sévigné and Scudéry salons, and these reunions were as decorous as those, and perhaps somewhat more cheerful and more natural in tone. For, while Ninon had the honor of being enrolled in the "Grand Dictionnaire des Précieuses," published in 1661, and while she had been presented at the Hôtel de Rambouillet at the early age of seventeen, she had none of the pretensions nor the ridiculosities of "Les Femmes Savantes." She was absolutely genuine, not ashamed to be natural, quite ready to laugh or to cry with her friends. These friends, drawn to her less by her beauty than by her charm, were held always by her sunny amiability, her quick sympathies, her frank camaraderie. She was the Clarisse of Mlle. de Scudéry's "Clélie;" an enjouée aimable, who never denied herself the indulgence of any caprice of head or of heart. Yet, as she laughingly confessed, while she thanked God every night for the good wits given her, she prayed every morning for better protection against the follies of her heart. It is a faithful portrait that is given in the verse of her day:

"L'indulgente et sage Nature

A formé l'âme de Ninon,

De la volupté d'Épicure,

Et de la vertu de Caton."

Beyond most women of that time, she was really cultivated, in the best meaning of that word; far different from the meaningless Culture with a capital, of our time. She was fond of philosophy, withal, and took turns with Plato and with Montaigne; and would speculate on the problems of life either with Church dignitaries or with the epicurean Saint-Évremond. And she captivated them all, men of all sorts, beginning with her girlish years—when she dutifully obeyed her father, who preached pleasure to her, rather than her mother, who pushed her toward a convent—through all her long life of incredibly youthful heart and body, to her amazing conquests when over sixty. A portrait of her at about this age hangs in Knole House, Sevenoaks; her hair, parted down the middle and plainly drawn back in modest fashion, her alluring eyes and her ingenuous direct smile, give her the look of a girl. Richelieu was her first admirer, Voltaire was the latest. When brought to this house, where he celebrated Ninon's ninetieth birthday in verse, young Arouet was only about twelve years old, as was told in a preceding chapter. She was charmed with the youthful genius, and, dying within a few weeks, in 1706, she left him two thousand crowns for buying his beloved books.

From five until nine in the evening, Ninon was "at home" here, up to her eighty-fourth year, in 1700. Before her visitors went away, they sat down to a simple supper, served with no parade and at small expense. Many of the guests, following the fashion of Scarron's friends and of the persistent diners-out of that day, brought their own plats. We get a glimpse of the simplicity of these suppers "à tous les Despréaux et tous les Racines," and of the homely, social ways of the bourgeoisie, in Voltaire's tiresome comedy "Le Dépositaire."

We look about these rooms, in which we are standing, and wish we might have seen Boileau and Racine here; we seem to see Molière, reading his unacted and still unnamed play, and consulting his hostess as to whether "Tartufe" will do for a title; and old Corneille, forgetting to be shy and clumsy at her side; and Scarron, wheeled in his chair, quicker in his scoffing for her quick catching of the point; and La Rochefoucauld, less of a surly and egotistic poseur in her presence, content to sparkle as a boudoir Machiavelli; and Huyghens, fresh from his discovery of the moons of Saturn, finding here a heavenly body of unwonted radiance, and setting to work to write erotic verse mixed with mathematics. The great Condé himself, proud, vain, hardest-hearted of men, melts when he meets her; broken and decrepit, he climbs out from his sedan-chair—"that wonderful fortification against bad weather and the insults of the mud," says delicious Mascarille—and approaches, hat in hand, the calèche of that other aged warrior, Ninon de Lenclos.

Through No. 23 of Boulevard Beaumarchais, which occupies the site of her garden, we come out on that broad thoroughfare, passing on our right the buildings covering the gardens that once countrified this east side of Rue des Tournelles. We cannot now search among the houses there for that one inhabited by the Abbé Prévost, some time between 1730 and 1740, while he was writing his enthralling story of "Manon Lescaut." Almost at the end of the boulevard, men are sitting about tin tables on the pavement, drinking good beer, on the very site of the gate of Saint-Antoine. Just there, outside the gate, stood Lady de Winter, pointing out to her two hired assassins her pet enemy, d'Artagnan, as he rode out on the Vincennes road, on his way to the siege of Rochelle. The gate abutted on the western side of the Bastille, and its figures, carved by Jean Goujon for decorations of a later day, may be seen in the Cluny Gardens.

Traced in the pavement of Place de la Bastille and across Rue Saint-Antoine, you may follow the outlines of such portions of the walls and towers of the great prison as are not hidden under the houses at the two corners. When you ask for your number in the omnibus office of the place, you are standing in the Bastille's inner court. Across its outer eastern ditch and connected with the wall of Charles V., was thrown a projecting bastion, the tower of which stood exactly where now rises the Column of July. At the corner of Rues Saint-Antoine and Jacques-Cœur, a tablet shows the site of the gateway that gave entrance to the outer court, which led southwardly along the line of the latter small street. By this gateway the armed mob entered on July 14, 1789. Lazy Louis XVI., hard at work on locks and other trifles at Versailles—having as yet no news from Paris—writes in his diary for that day: "Rien"! That mob had found the fortress as little capable of resistance as the throne that it overturned a while later; both proved to be but baseless fabrics of an unduly dreaded terror. Indeed, it was the power behind this prison that was stormed on that day. There were plenty of prisons in Paris, as fast and as secret as was the Bastille. This was more than a prison to these people; it gloomed over their lives as its towers gloomed over their street—a mysterious and menacing defiance, a dumb and docile doer of shady deeds, a symbol of an authority feared and hated. And so these people first tore away the tool, and then disabled the hand that had held it. It was a stirring act in the drama, though a trifle melodramatic.

"Palloy le Patriote," as he styled himself, takes the centre of the stage just here, and, like all professional patriots, in all lands and all times, he makes a good thing of his patriotism. He was the contractor for demolishing the walls and for clearing the ground of the wreckage, at a handsome price; and he doubled his wage by the sale of the materials. Some of the stones went, queerly enough, to the building of Pont de la Concorde; others of them may be seen in the walls of the house on the western corner of Boulevard Poissonière and Rue Saint-Fiacre, and of other houses in the town. With the stones not fit for these uses, and with the mortar, he made numerous models of the Bastille, which were purchased by the committees and sent as souvenirs to the chief towns of the then newly created departments. One of these models is in the Musée Carnavalet. So, too, the thrifty Palloy turned the ironwork dug out into hat and shoe buckles, and the woodwork into canes and fans and tobacco-boxes; all, at last, into coin for his patriotic pocket. The gate of one of the cells was removed, and rebuilt in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie; where it may be seen by the inmates, who care nothing for a door more or less, but never by the outsider, who would like to get in for a glimpse!

To "Palloy the Patriotic" and his gang of a thousand workingmen, rides up on his white horse, one day, the first commander of the just invented and organized National Guard—Lafayette, aptly named by Mirabeau the "Cromwell-Grandison" of his nation. He looks over the busy ground, and gives orders that the men shall receive a pint of wine and a half-franc daily; but they got neither money nor wine, both doubtless "conveyed, the wise it called," on the way, by Palloy or by other "patriots." Lafayette carried away the great key of the Bastille's great entrance-door, and sent it to George Washington by Thomas Paine, when, a few years later, Paine got out of the Luxembourg prison and out of France. It is one of the cherished relics at Mount Vernon, and not one is more impressive and more appropriate in that place, since it was the success of the American revolutionists that inspirited those who opened the Bastille.

We pass along Rue Saint-Antoine, so commonplace and sordid to-day, so crowded with history and tradition. It has seen, in its short length, pageants of royalty and nobility, the hide-and-seek of romance, the blood-letting of sharp blades, the carnage of the common people, such as no other street of any other town has known. Its memories would fill a fat volume.

The little temple of Sainte-Marie on our left, as we go—a reduced imitation of Rome's Pantheon—is a design by François Mansart, and while it has his grace of line and his other qualities, it is not a notable work. Built on the site of the Hôtel de Boissy, wherein Quélus died and his lover Henry wept, it was intended for the chapel of the "Filles de la Visitation," and their name clings to it, although it has been made over to the Protestant Church. To this convent fled Mlle. Louise de la Fayette from Louis XIII.; who, ardent in the only love and the only chase known in his platonic career, visited her here until his confessor, Vincent de Paul, showed him the scandal of a King going to a nunnery. So he had to leave her, secure under the veil and the vows of the cloister. She became Sœur, and later Mère, Angélique, of the Convent of Sainte-Madeleine, founded in 1651 by Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I., which stood on the far-away heights of Chaillot, where now is the museum of the Trocadéro. There the sister and the sweetheart of Louis XIII. lived together for many years.

A few steps farther, and we come to Rue Beautreillis; its pavement and its houses on both sides, nearly as far as Rue Charles V., covering the Cemetery of old Saint-Paul; which extended westerly toward Passage Saint-Pierre, wherein we may find the stone walls, now roofed in with wood, of the charniers. There had been a suburban cemetery outside the old wall, which was brought within city limits by the new wall, and served as the burial-ground of the prisoners who died in the Bastille. It did not so serve, as is commonly asserted, for the skeletons found in chains in the cells, when the prison was opened by righteous violence, because no such skeletons were found. "The Man in the Iron Mask" was buried in this ground, close alongside the grave of Rabelais, dug exactly one hundred and fifty years earlier. Pass through the two courts that lie in the rear of No. 17 Rue Beautreillis, and you will find yourself in a large waste garden, in one corner of which the persuasive concierge points out the grave of the "Masque-de-Fer." It may well be that she is not misled by topographical pride, for this ground was certainly a portion of the old burial-ground, and not impossibly that portion where Rabelais and "Marchioly" were laid near together. This is the prisoner's name on the Bastille's burial-register, and not far from his real name. For we know, as surely as we shall ever know, that this prisoner of State was the Count Ercolo Antonio Mattioli, Secretary of State of Charles IV., Duke of Mantua. The count had agreed to betray his trust and to sell his master's fortress of Casali to the French representative; with this in their possession, Pignerol belonging already to France, Louis XIV. and Louvois would dominate all upper Italy. Mattioli took his pay, and betrayed his paymaster; the scheme miscarried, and the schemer deserved another sort of reward. His open arrest, or execution, or any public punishment, meant exposure and scandal to the Crown and the Minister and the Ambassador of France. So he was secretly kidnapped, and became "The Man in the Iron Mask." At his death, in 1703, his face was mutilated, lest there might be recognition, even then; the walls of his cell were scraped and painted, to obliterate any marks he might have put on them; his linen and clothing and furniture were burned. Had Voltaire suspected the results of modern research, he would not have put forth his theory, in the second edition of his "Questions sur l'Encyclopédie," that this prisoner was an elder brother of Louis XIV. Yet, but for Voltaire's error, we should have lost those delightful pages of Dumas, wherein Aramis carries off from the Bastille this elder brother and rightful heir to the crown, leaving Louis XIV. in the cell, and at last replaces his puppets in their original positions.

This Cemetery of Saint-Paul, dating back to Dagobert, when the burial-grounds on the Island had become overpeopled, had its own small chapel of the same name, which had fallen out of use and into ruin. Charles V., bringing it within his enclosure of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, rebuilt and enlarged it and made it the church of the royal parish. All the daughters and the sons of France were thenceforth baptized here, and it became the favorite church of the nobility. After Louis XI.'s time, and the desertion of this quarter by royalty, the little church lost its vogue. In 1794 it was appropriated and sold as National Domain, and torn down soon after. Its site is covered by the buildings on and behind the eastern side of Rue Saint-Paul, opposite the space between Passage Saint-Paul and Rue Eginhard. This is the small street selected by Alphonse Daudet for the shop of his brocanteur Leemans, to which comes the fascinating Sephora, of "Les Rois en Exil." Daudet has overdone it in going so far for his local color; the street is a noisome alley, entered by an archway from Rue Saint-Paul, holding only two or three obscene junk-shops.

And now, passing the flamboyant Italian façade—a meretricious imitation of the front of Saint-Gervais—of the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, which has absorbed the name of old Saint-Paul, we reach at last the ample space where the two streets of Rivoli and of Saint-Antoine meet and so make one broad, unbroken thoroughfare through the length of the town, from the place where the Bastille was to the place now named Concorde. This grand highway has existed only since the middle of the nineteenth century. The Consulate and the First Empire had cut Rue de Rivoli along the upper edge of the Tuileries Gardens as far easterly as Rue de Rohan; from there it was prolonged, taking the line of some of the old, narrow streets and piercing through solid masses of ancient buildings, in the last years of Louis-Philippe; and was carried from the Hôtel de Ville to this point by the Second Empire. All through earlier days, the route, common and royal, from the Louvre and the Tuileries to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, the Tournelles, the Bastille, and the Arsenal, was by way of narrow Rue Saint-Honoré and its narrower continuation, Rue de la Ferronerie, thence around by Rue Saint-Denis into Rue des Lombards, and so along Rues de la Verrerie and Roi-de-Sicile to the old gate of Saint-Antoine, that stood just behind us here at the end of Rue Malher. Outside that gate was the country road leading to Vincennes, which was transformed into the city street, known to us as Rue Saint-Antoine, through the protection given by Charles V.'s new wall and by his Bastille. There had been, long before, a Rue Saint-Antoine, and it curves away here on our left, and is called Rue François-Miron, so named in honor of that Prévôt des Marchands in Henri IV.'s time, who merits remembrance as an honest, high-minded, capable administrator of his weighty office.

Thus this street of old Saint-Antoine was the thoroughfare—at first from the entrance into the town by the old gate of Saint-Antoine, and afterward from the new street of Saint-Antoine and its entrance gate farther east—to the open space behind the Hôtel de Ville, alongside Saint-Gervais, and so to the bridges and the Palace on the Island. It was a street "marvellously rich" in shops, having no rival except in Rue Saint-Denis. Its shopkeepers shouted, from their doors or from the pavement in front, the merits of their wares to the throng swarming always along. Their wares were worthy of the city that, with its fast-growing population, equalled Venice herself in wealth, display, and splendor, if we may trust the word of an exultant scribbling citizen of the Paris of Charles V.

So, too, it was the grand highway for royal entries, for troops, for ambassadors with their trains, for any parade that demanded display and attracted spectators. Such an array came along here on August 26, 1660, when young Louis XIV. brought into his town his young bride, Maria Theresa of Spain, each of them being just twenty-two years old. It was the showiest pageant and the longest procession yet seen in Paris, taking ten or twelve hours to pass. The bride—a slight, pretty, girlish figure, in white satin and pearls, and a violet mantle of velvet—leaned back on the crimson velvet of her huge gilded chariot; at her right on horseback was the King, in cloth-of-gold and black lace, his collars and ruffles of white point. In the resplendent retinue nothing so blazed as the superb empty coach of the Cardinal-Minister Mazarin, its panels painted by Lebrun, drawn by the famous mules and escorted by the Mousquetaires. Less than a year later Mazarin was carried through Paris in his hearse, caring no more for mules or any tomfoolery.

The procession had entered the town under Claude Perrault's triumphal arch at the end of the Vincennes Avenue, and through Porte Saint-Antoine, cleaned up and sculptured afresh for this day, and so by new Rue Saint-Antoine, along this present Rue François-Miron. It was packed with spectators, among whom was La Fontaine, who sent a long rhymed description of the show to his patron, Fouquet, not omitting mention of the cardinal's mules. These, too, were spoken of with fitting praise in a letter written to a friend by young Madame Scarron—to be a widow, within a few weeks—who was also in the throng. Years after, she confessed to the credulous King that on that day she had first seen him and first loved him, and that she had never ceased to love him since! We may not consider the Duchess of Orleans unduly prejudiced when she refers to Madame de Maintenon as "that hussy."

At No. 88 Rue François-Miron you may see an excellent balcony of that period, solidly and richly wrought in iron, supported by captivating stone dragons of fantastic design. There were similar balconies on the front of the great mansion at No. 68—which was then No. 62—but of these only a small one is still left over the portal. They were all crowded with a most select mob of the elect on the day of this procession. There was Anne of Austria, in her black mantle, looking down on her son, her thoughts turning back to her own bridal procession over the same route, and her own youthful blond beauty of forty-five years before. By her side sat Henrietta of France, widow of Charles I., and her daughter, Henrietta Anne of England. The girl may have gazed with curiosity on the over-dressed fop riding at the bride's left wheel. This was Philippe d'Orléans, who was to be her husband, and was, through his complacent creatures, to poison her within ten years from this day. In another balcony sat Mazarin, too ill to take part in the procession.

The hostess of these great ladies was one Catherine Bellier, wife of Pierre de Beauvais; and this house is the Hôtel de Beauvais. The husband had been a pedlar or a shopkeeper, and had amassed sufficient wealth from ribbons to enable him to buy his title. The wife had served as first femme-de-chambre to Anne of Austria, and had so learned many secrets of that queer court, of its Queen-Mother, and of her Cardinal. In that court there was no more unscrupulous creature than this Catherine Bellier. The deliciously outspoken Duchess of Orleans—the second wife of that Philippe we have just seen—describes this woman as one-eyed and hideous, of profligate life, and apt in all intrigue. To the day of her death she loved to appear in flamboyant costumes at the court, where she was treated with distinction because of what she knew. Anne of Austria gave her the stone for the construction of this hôtel, and she used to visit her waiting-woman and confidente here. A popular verse of the day ran:

"Mercredi notre auguste Reine,

Cette charmante Souveraine,

Fut chez Madame de Beauvais;

Pour de son admirable palais

Voir les merveilles étonnantes,

Et les raretés surprenantes."

The Hôtel de Beauvais.

The design of the Hôtel de Beauvais, by Antoine Lepautre, is most daring and original in its great interior oval court, embellished with pilasters that are topped with finely carved stone masks. Despite the unhallowed devotion to cleanliness which, with its whitewash, has robbed it of its former lovely bloom of age, this court remains one of the most impressive specimens of seventeenth-century domestic architecture in all Paris. From the street we pass through an ample gateway, its curved top surmounted by a great shell. The vestibule is ornamented with escutcheons, alternating with the garlanded ox-skulls of Roman-Doric decoration—mistaken by many for rams' heads, so as to make a sculptor's pun on Bellier—all admirably carved in stone. The noble staircase has Corinthian columns, and a massive stone balustrade so perfectly pierced into fine lines of intertwisted tracery as to give delicacy to it, thick and broad as it is. Cut in stone escutcheons in the ceiling of this stairway are the intertwined initials of the brand-new nobility that built it. The grand salons of the first floor have been partitioned off into small rooms for trade purposes. No character of any sort has been left to the interior.

The ground on which we tread here, while a portion of the Marais of old Paris, is not the Marais of modern Paris, as it is commonly designated. Yet this region toward the river, built on during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after the opening up of the grounds of the Hôtel Saint-Paul and the cutting of streets through them, holds enticements in architecture and in story that tempt us to turn our backs for a while on our own Marais.

Many of the streets here remain unmodernized and unspoiled, and here are hôtels as perfectly preserved as this Hôtel de Beauvais. At No. 26 Rue Geoffroy-Lasnier we stop in delight before an entrance-door superbly carved and heavy with a glorious knocker—a lion's head holding a great ring in its mouth. Above this door we read: "Hôtel de Châlons, 1625, et de Luxembourg, 1659." The small court within, diminished by modern stables on one side, retains on its other side an ancient iron fountain. The façade of the miniature hôtel giving on this court is in well-balanced stone and brick; its shapely windows are surrounded by male and female masks, and by delicate foliage twining about the monograms of the aforetime exalted owners—all elaborately carved in stone. The roof rises gracefully to its ridge, and each gable end is surmounted by a well-wrought iron finial. There is a modest garden behind, shut in and hid by the buildings about, which hide, too, the simple and attractive stateliness of that rear face of the Hôtel de Châlons. The enchanting isolation and the singular charm of this concealed corner give us the feeling that here is a bit of Bourges, gently dropped, tranquil and untroubled, into the midst of these turbulent streets.

A little farther along, at No. 32 in this street of Geoffroy-Lasnier, behind a commonplace house-front and a commonplace court, you shall find a staircase, with an iron rail below and a wooden rail above, that make a most uncommon and interesting picture.

Turning into Rue de Jouy, an altogether delightful old-time street, we pass through a monumental gateway at No. 7 into a symmetrical court. Facing us is the Hôtel d'Aumont, and it tells us more than is told by any structure hereabout of the merits of François Mansart. This front of two stories and of his own roof is faultless in proportion and dainty in adornment. He has given it the stamp of the stately days of the Grand Monarch by the four œils-de-bœuf above the perfect cornice of the second floor, two on either side of the central window. In the two corners of the court, at each angle of the building, are round-fronted stone perrons, broad and low and inviting. That on our left gives entrance to a small hall, the staircase in which carries an exquisite wrought-iron rail that lifts and lightens the stone steps. By them we mount to the chambers of the first floor, small as was the custom then, with one grand central reception-room, excellent in its proportions, its vaulted ceiling curiously carved in relief. All these rooms are, by the good taste and generous spirit of the owners of the property, kept in perfect condition, the furniture is of the period, and the painting—done by Lebrun a century later than the ceiling on which it is placed—is fresh and untarnished.

Mansart's commission for this construction came from that Duc d'Aumont who was Maréchal of France and Governor of Paris under Louis XIII. A descendant of the early fighters of old France, he seems to have been one of those favorites of fortune who, in the phrase of Beaumarchais, give themselves only the trouble to be born. At the age of ten he began his career as a colonel of cavalry, and continued it through a long line of lucky promotions in place and pay. Dying in 1704, he left this hôtel packed with furniture, paintings, bibelots, and curios, and its stables filled with the carriages he had invented; an amazing collection, requiring months for its sale by his heirs.

The hôtel is now occupied by the Pharmacie Centrale of France, to whose officials is due our gratitude for their rare and scrupulous respect for this delightful relic. Over its spacious gardens behind they have erected their immense laboratories and offices, which we may enter under the great vaulted porch at No. 21 Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyères. That once narrowest of the streets of old Paris, as quaint as its name, given it by the branch of the Hyères nunnery having its seat here, has become a broad and bustling thoroughfare. The plain rear elevation of the hôtel can be seen here from the little corner of the garden that is still kept, and kept green by the choice plants of the company. In it is a capital bust of Dorvault, physician, author, founder of the Pharmacie Centrale. This may be the very bit of garden noticed by Dr. Martin Lister, an English traveller in France at the close of the seventeenth century. He dined with the Duc d'Aumont, and records that, opening from the dining-room, was a greenhouse through which his noble host led him into the garden.

Along through the rocky ravine that bears the name of Charlemagne, and does him no honor, we pass, by way of Rue Saint-Paul, into the short street that started in life as Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul, and has now taken the name of Charles V. Here, among the ancient fronts, we are attracted by that which is numbered 12, low and wide, with two floors and dormers above. Through its entrance-door, capped by a well-carved mask that smiles stonily down on us, we may enter the court by the courtesy of the sister, who smiles sweetly. This building is occupied by the girls' school of a sisterhood, whose youthful communiantes happen to be forming in procession for a function to-day. They flutter about in innocent white, in unconscious contrast with the great lady and great criminal whom we have come to see. For this was the Hôtel d'Aubray, and its most distinguished tenant was the Marquise de Brinvilliers.

Let us look about the court and the little garden behind, both embraced by the two wings of the structure. That wing on our right, with round arches and a round tower at its end, is evidently of the original fabric and intended for stabling. This wing on our left, now extended by a new chapel, was, when built, meant to contain only this staircase, whose wide and broad stone steps and well-wrought iron balustrade mount gradually about a spacious central well. Here, resting on the bench at its foot, we may recall what is known about the strange and monstrous woman who once lived here.

She was Marie-Madeleine Dreux d'Aubray, and her father was an officer of Louis XIV., appointed Civil Lieutenant of the Châtelet Prison. He married her in 1651, when she was twenty-one, to the wealthy and dissolute Marquis de Brinvilliers, who was not a model husband. She was nothing loath, with her inborn instincts, to follow the example set by him. Among her lovers, a certain Gaudin de Sainte-Croix was much talked of; so much so that the lady's father, more powerful than her husband, and doubtless more outraged by the shameless publicity of the liaison, had Sainte-Croix taken from his daughter's carriage, as they rode together, and put into the Bastille. There his cell-mate was an Italian known only as Exili, a past-master in poisons, who boasted that he had brought to death at least one hundred and fifty men and women in Rome alone. He taught his trade to Sainte-Croix, who proved to be an apt pupil, and who continued his studies after his release. He took rooms with an apothecary in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and fitted up a laboratory. There his Marquise visited him, and was taught in her turn the use of his potions, among which the "manna of Saint-Nicholas" became her favorite.

For she took pains and showed conscience in her experiments, mainly on the patients in the hospitals, wherein she was a constant charitable worker. Thus she soon learned to dispense her poisoned wafers with scientific slowness and precision. But she was anxious that her charity should begin at home. Her father failed gradually with some obscure and unaccountable malady, and died in torment; and she nursed him tenderly to the end. There were too many in her family for her comfort, and her relatives outside had been too solicitous about her; so some sickened and some died off, she caring for all and lamenting each death. She had a sister, a Carmelite nun, who was never blinded by the round, girlish face, appealing blue eyes, and beguiling ways that bewitched so many. This woman guarded her own life and watched over others of the family. The attempts made by the marchioness on her husband's life were caused to fail, it is believed, by the attenuation of the poisons mixed for her by Sainte-Croix, who doubtless feared that he must marry the widow if he allowed her to become a widow. He himself was found dead, in 1672, in his laboratory, poisoned by the fumes of his devilish brews, through the breaking of the glass mask worn at his work. The official search among his effects discovered a casket, addressed to the marchioness at this dwelling; being opened, its contents were found to be her own ardent love-letters to him, a document detailing the doses and periods for the proper administration of the poisons, and a choice assortment of preparations of opium, antimony, sulphur. There was also a water-like liquid, unknown to chemists, which was found to kill animals instantaneously, leaving no lesions of any organ that could be traced by science. Sainte-Croix's servant made a disclosure, and the marchioness, hearing of his arrest and the finding of her package, made "confession by avoidance" by a flight to England. She slipped down these stairs, out through that doorway, and took coach around the corner for a northern port.

Colbert's brother was then Ambassador at the court of Saint James, and between them her capture was planned; she got wind of it, and fled to Liège, where she felt sure of safety in a convent. To her appears, after a while, a handsome and susceptible young abbé, who allows himself to be corrupted, and arranges for an elopement to a more congenial refuge for lovers. She climbs gayly into his carriage, his men surround it, and she is driven across the frontier into France and to the Bastille. The abbé was Desgrais, an eager police officer detailed for this duty. He returned to her room in the convent, and found scattered sheets of paper containing notes that began a confession. This confession she was forced to complete and confirm by the torture by water—repugnant to her coquetry, because it would spoil her figure; "toute mignonne et toute gracieuse," had said an adorer of her early days. She showed courage at the last, Madame de Sévigné states, in the letters that were full of the trial and execution. She was burned, having first been beheaded. "Her poor little body was thrown, after her execution, into a good large fire, and her ashes blown about by the wind; so that we may be breathing her," Sévigné writes. This took place late in the afternoon of July 16, 1676—she was just over forty-five years of age—on Place de Grève, to which she was carted in a tumbril, having stopped on the way in front of Notre-Dame, and there, on her knees on the stones—her feet bare, a rope around her neck, a consecrated lighted taper in her uplifted hand—made to confess afresh.

The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de Brinvilliers.

The painter Lebrun was one of the great crowd that gathered to see her go by, and he made a drawing, which you may see in the gallery of Old French Designs in the Louvre. She half sits, half reclines, in her tumbril, clad in a gown, its cowl drawn forward; her head is thrown back; her thick chestnut hair brushed away from her face; her eyes are wide and her mouth drawn with terror; her face is round, her lips are thick; in her folded hands she holds a cross, and she stares straight before her without seeing. At one side is the profile of a woman, very lean and ugly, her expression full of horror as she bends forward to gaze.

Turning from this street down through Rue Beautreillis, we pass the end of Rue des Lions, on whose southern side we have already found remains of the Hôtel des Lions du Roi. On its northern side is a row of plaster-fronted houses, commonplace and shabby. In one of those garrets there was living, shortly after 1830, a poor family of Jews named Félix, lately arrived from the Canton Aarau in Switzerland. Their two little girls went about the streets, singing and picking up coppers. One day in the Place Royale, among those who stopped to listen was a kindly eyed gentleman, who handed to the younger and thinner of the two pinched children a piece of silver. "That is Victor Hugo," said a woman in the crowd, as he went his way to his home in the corner. That small singer was Élisa Rachel Félix, known to us as the great Rachel.

Years after, when the world had given all that it could give to Rachel, she returned, from a voyage to Egypt in search of health, to the Place Royale to die. "It is on the way to Père-Lachaise," she said, when, in 1857, she moved into the immense and superbly furnished apartment on the first floor of No. 9, where her friends, she thought, would have ample room for her burial service. It is only a step in space from this garret to that palace. There, within a few months—although her death came at the country-seat of Victorien Sardou's father, whom she was visiting—that service was held, and from there her body was borne to Père-Lachaise.

Going down Rue du Petit-Musc, we reach the Quai des Célestins, and here on our left is the beginning of broad Boulevard Henri IV., cutting away, in its diagonal course through the grounds of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, much history and romance. Nothing is left of the gardens of the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, whose site is marked by a tablet on the corner of the street of that name, at No. 10 Rue de la Cerisaie. This tablet tells us that the hôtel was the residence of the Czar Peter the Great in 1717; the guest, during his short sojourn in Paris, of the Maréchal de Villeroy, its owner then. We prefer to go back from that visit over a hundred years to a more attractive presence in this house. This was Gabrielle d'Estrées, beloved of Henry, who—for his fondness for her and their two fine boys—would have made her his wife, and have made them his legitimate successors, if he could have had his way.

It was Sébastien Zamet who was their host in this "palais d'amour du roi." The son of a shoe-maker of Lucca, he had found his fortune in Paris, like so many of his countrymen in those days, and he built here "a true fairy palace, such as romances describe," says Saint-Simon. And here, walking in the garden after supper on the evening of April 9, 1599, the lovely Gabrielle was taken ill very suddenly. They carried her to the Hôtel de Sourdis and put her in the care of her aunt, with whom she had passed a portion of her girlhood in that mansion. It stood within the precincts of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, its entrance on Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, where now is the end of Rue Perrault. Here Gabrielle died, in agony, at six o'clock of the next morning; poisoned, say Sismondi, Michelet, and the rest, but by whose hand we shall never know. The Hôtel des Mousquetaires, that you will find at No. 4 of Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, was then in existence, and so, too, were many of these tall façades, with ancient, iron balconies that look down on the narrow winding street, then a crowded thoroughfare of old Paris. After Zamet's death his house was bought by the Duc de Lesdiguières, Marshal and later Constable of France, from whom it took its permanent name. We have already come here with Boileau to see the veteran Frondeur, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, whose last years were passed in this mansion, under the care of one niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and comforted by another niece, Madame de Sévigné.

On the quay, off on our left, the Célestins caserne occupies a small portion of the immense grounds of the Célestins Monastery. It was a rich community, made so by the many gifts of kings, from Charles V. down, to "leurs bien aimés chapelains et serviteurs en Dieu." These pious beggars were not too proud to accept anything, and time fails to tell of the splendors of their church, which became a museum of monuments, tombs, statues, and was demolished in 1849, many of its treasures having been destroyed during the Revolution. The godly brethren are remembered in the name of the barracks and of the quay, and to some of us, it must be owned, by the delectable dish of their invention, omelette à la Célestins.

That long façade beyond, on Rue de Sully, belongs to the Arsenal, the building alone left, its spacious gardens now under streets and houses. We have come to its library with young Balzac, when he escaped from his grinding drudgery and his dreary garret in Rue Lesdiguières. We have driven here with Madame Récamier on the day before her death. The most winning memory of the place is that of Charles Nodier, an adorable man of genius, whose very defects were lovable, we are told by the elder Dumas, who loved him. Nodier and Charles Lamb were hissing, almost in the same year, each his own damned play. Many others besides Dumas loved Nodier—Royalists and Republicans, Classicists and Romanticists; and they crowded his salon here of an evening. For this was his official residence as Librarian, occupied by him from his appointment in 1823 until his death in 1844. His historic green drawing-room, where men were friendly who fought outside, and the smaller rooms of his apartment on the first floor overlooking Boulevard Morland, have been thrown into the library, and are now its reading-rooms. They have kept their old-time panelling, carvings, mouldings, but their walls, once decorated en grisaille, have been toned to a uniform delicate gray-white.

This library was begun in 1785 by the Comte d'Artois, who purchased the valuable books and manuscripts of Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d'Argenson, and of the Duc de la Vallière. Rooms in the Arsenal were arranged for this collection, and it was named the "Librairie de Monsieur;" the Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI. and of Louis XVIII., having been the last "Monsieur" in France. His library has grown to be the grandest in Paris after the Bibliothèque Nationale. It contains the original archives of the Bastille—such as were saved, when so many were scattered and destroyed at its taking—and it is especially rich in dramatic literature and in manuscripts.

Here, above our heads as we stand in Rue du Petit-Musc, is the tasteful, unspoiled side wall of the Hôtel de Lavallette, formerly the Hôtel Fieubet. It was built by the younger Mansart, on the corner of Saint-Paul's grounds, for the Chancellor of Maria Theresa, Gaspard de Fieubet, and it became a gathering-place of the writers of those days. They were courted by its owner, whose name is frequent in the letters of Madame de Sévigné, and he himself turned his hand to rhyming, at odd hours. Nearly two hundred years after he had gone, his mansion was rescued from the sugar-refiners, who had degraded it to their uses, by the Lavallette who has given it his name, and who "restored" it beyond the recognition of its great architect, could he see it now. Its façade behind the little court is overloaded with carvings, buttressed by caryatides, surmounted by campaniles; it is a debauch of sculpture, an orgy of ornamentation, under which the stately lines of the original fabric are almost lost. They are quite hidden, on one side, by a modern wing that has been thrust in on the court. All this dishonor to architecture does not trouble the boys, whose big school fills the building now, and who troop about the court in their black jackets and trousers, their wide, white collars, their big, white ties, pulling on reluctant gloves, as they line up on their unwilling way to some church function.

We pass along the quay, glancing at the homelike and homely house numbered 4, whose quiet dignity behind its court is in pleasing contrast with the place just left. Here were the home and the studio of Antoine-Louis Barye, and here he died on June 25, 1875.

On the quay at the corner of Rue Saint-Paul there stood until very lately the entire and unspoiled hôtel built for young Charles, Duc de La Vieuville, in the last days of the Valois men. It was an admirable specimen of the architecture of their time, as we may still assure ourselves by a glance at the wing that is left within the court entered from Rue Saint-Paul; a stone side wall toned to the glorified grayness of age, pierced by tall, slender windows of graceful proportions, and, above, the picturesque brick dormers of that period.

The last of the Valois women, Marguerite, had her home hard by here, and its story begins just on this spot. When Charles V., to round out and make entire his Saint-Paul estate, was taking in neighboring hôtels and outlying bits of land, he found, here where we find the Hôtel de La Vieuville, the Paris seat of the archbishops of Sens. Their palace on this corner, and its grounds extending along the river-front and back along the east side of Rue Saint-Paul, up beyond present Rue des Lions, cut out a goodly slice from this angle of the royal domain. The King took this property, giving in exchange, to the archbishop, the feudal fortress, the Hôtel d'Éstoménil, a little farther west on the river-bank, at the meeting-place of several country roads. Those roads are now the streets named Hôtel-de-Ville, Figuier, Fauconnier, de l'Ave-Maria; and where they meet stands the Hôtel de Sens, in almost the same state, as to its walls, as when they were finished by the archbishop Tristan de Salazar. This soldier-priest had rebuilt the old structure in the last years of the fifteenth and the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and it remains an authentic and authoritative document of the domestic architecture of that period. The delicate ornamentation of its façade has suffered, some few mutilations have despoiled the fabric, its gardens are built upon, their great trees are gone, yet it stands, time-stained and weather-worn, a most impressive example of that Gothic strength and beauty whose frozen lines were just beginning to melt under the fire of the upspringing Renaissance.

The noble arch of the ogival portal is, by a touch of genius, pinched forward at its topmost point, and is there sliced away, so as to make a snub-nosed protuberance that seems to lift up the whole front. Its two high-peaked bartizan turrets are a trifle heavy, as we see them hemmed in by other buildings, but their panelling and moulding plead for pardon for any slight disproportion; and the one on the corner is perfect in situation and in effect. The few windows of the front have lost their stone-crossed mullions, some broken, some bricked up. The great dormer window above, possibly of later construction, is a prediction of the loveliness that was to come to dormers, such as we see in the roofs of Rouen's Hôtel de Ville and of the château of Blois. The fine effect of the chimneys, once entirely of stone, has been marred by cheap patching. As to the rest, the oddities and irregularities of this façade are yet all in good taste and all captivating. Within the groined porch we see, across the small court, the main building meant for the archbishop's dwelling, and the solid square tower meant for defence and for watching. Its entrance-door tells, in its size and shape, the entire tale of feudal days. Away up on one angle of this tower is an imitation sentry-box, battlemented and supported by corbelled brackets. The interior of the buildings has been defaced and degraded by the base usages to which it has been subjected, yet traces are left of its past grandeur in some of the rooms and halls.

The Hôtel de Sens.

These awaited in orderly and decorous silence, in their early days, the coming of their owner from the mother-church at Sens. He came along the banks of the Yonne and the Seine on his richly caparisoned mule, his foot-servants in advance, his clerkly servitors and ecclesiastics riding behind, and so he entered into this tranquil court. Years later the place was noisy enough, when the religious wars made it one of the meeting-places of the leaders of the Holy League. On the very day when Henri IV. entered Paris, the Archbishop of Sens, Cardinal de Pellevé, lay dying in this his palace, almost within hearing of the triumphant Te Deum in Notre-Dame.

The King had been allowed his divorce by his childless wife, Marguerite, and he in turn allowed her to return to Paris from her long exile in Auvergne; ordering that this hôtel should be fittingly arranged for her residence, in 1605. We saw her last, a charming child, in the gardens of the Tournelles. And now she comes here, a worn wanton of nearly fifty-five, her wonted fires still smouldering under the ashes. It is between these two appearances that we like to look on her in the pages of Brantôme and on the canvas of Clouet. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, has been aptly dubbed the valet-de-place of history; and yet a valet has the merit of looking out of his own eyes from his own point of view. It was for him that Marguerite wrote her "Mémoires," and to him she left them. In after days, when exiled from the court he loved, able only to lick the chops of memory, he wrote her éloge in these glowing words: "If there has ever been anyone in the world perfect in beauty, it is the Queen of Navarre. All who have been, or shall be, near her, are ugly beside her. If there is a miscreant who believes not in the miracles of God, let him look upon her. Many believe that she is rather a goddess of heaven than a princess of earth, and yet perhaps no goddess was ever so lovely."

It is indeed a lovely creature, yet all of earth, whom we see in Clouet's half life-size portrait in the château of Azay-le-Rideau. Her plentiful blond hair curves back above her fine brow, and her bluish-gray eyes smile out with inviting mischievousness. Yet Brantôme has to own that his goddess was easily first in the escadron volant that sailed under her mother's flag, and we may guess what that meant in the court "whose vices it would be repulsive to suggest, and whose virtues were homicide and adultery."

In this Hôtel de Sens, Madame Marguerite held receptions, twice a week, of men of letters and of the arts, with whom her learning allowed her to converse on equal terms; and her kindliness allowed them to feel at ease. For "from her behavior it could never be discovered that she had once been the wife of the King." But the wayward Margot made trouble for herself that ended her stay here after a year or less. She came home from mass at the Célestins on the morning of Wednesday, April 5, 1606, and as she was helped from her coach by her newest favorite page of eighteen, he was killed by her latest discarded favorite, already twenty. She sat in one of these front windows the next day, having neither eaten nor drunk nor slept meanwhile; she looked out on the beheading of the jaunty assassin; that evening she left the Hôtel de Sens forever. For a while she stayed at her hunting-lodge at Issy, already visited by us in former pages, and then went to her last dwelling, on the southern bank in the Pré-aux-Clercs, which looked out across the river at the Louvre, where Henry was unhappy with her successor. The two women remained always friendly, and were seen together in festivities and processions, and the reigning Queen paid many a debt of the deposed Queen. To the last she rouged to the eyes, and wore a flowing wig and low frocks, albeit she had turned dévote, and had found a new idol in her confessor. This was young Vincent de Paul, not yet canonized, whose chaste ministrations made him adored by sinners elderly enough to repent. There she died in the spring of 1615, at the age of sixty-three, the last of the Valois name, leaving everything, mostly debts, to young Louis XIII.

Later along in the seventeenth century, when the court end of the town went to the west, and the Church dignitaries found this region too far afield, this Hôtel de Sens was sold. Its new owners and tenants were the merchants and financiers who crowded then to this quarter. They, too, soon moved farther west, and the place had many strange employments forced upon it. As early as 1692, the messageries for Dijon and Lyons rented it for their town head-quarters. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the palace of the archbishops was degraded to a livery stable and a horsedealer's lair, and the ancient arms of Sens on its front and the escutcheons of Lorraine and Bourbon, prelates of the Church, were covered by a great sign, "Maison de Roulage et de Commission." From this court, in the words of the advertisement of that date, "Le Courrier de la Malle de Paris à Lyons partit à cinq heures et demi du soir, 8 Floréal, an IV."—which was April 27, 1796.

Marguerite de Valois.
(From a portrait by an unknown artist, in the Musée de Montpellier.)

That mail-coach was stopped near Lieussart, its driver killed, and a large sum in assignats and gold carried off. For this crime one Joseph Lesurques was arrested, and was recognized by several witnesses as the robber. He had been an official in Douai, had saved money, and had gone to Paris for the education of his children. Neither his record nor his alibi sufficed to acquit him, the strongest of circumstantial evidence convicted him, and he was executed on October 30, 1796. Two years later the murderer and robber was captured in one Dubosc, who, after a daring escape and recapture, went to the guillotine. By Dubosc's conviction Lesurques was posthumously morally acquitted, but his judicial rehabilitation has never been made, albeit his broken and crazed children petitioned, courts debated, and Deputies chattered through many long years. This true story, our last reminiscence of the Hôtel de Sens, has been put on the French stage as "Le Courrier de Lyons," and on the English stage as "The Lyons Mail."

We go on to the upper end of Rue Fauconnier, and across Rue Saint-Antoine, to where begins Rue Pavée-au-Marais, a most ancient and aristocratic street, filled with grand mansions in its best days and in days not so long gone. It had taken its name as early as the middle of the fifteenth century, when, first of all the Marais streets, it was paved. It was known, unofficially and popularly, as le petit Marais, so closely did it crowd, within its short and select limits, the essential characteristics in architecture and atmosphere of the great Marais. Now, wofully modernized, it holds one relic only, a magnificent relic, that suggests to us, in its solitary dignity, something of the lost glories of this street.

We cross Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, a main thoroughfare of old Paris, whose odd name came from Charles, brother of Saint Louis, Count of Anjou and Provence, and King of Naples and Sicily in 1265. His fortified abode stood on the northern side of this street, at its eastern end just within the old walls. It became, in after times, the hôtel and then the prison of La Force. Its entrance was over yonder, at the corner of modern Rue Malher; and opposite, on the southern corner, was the stone that served as the axeman's block for the Princess of Lamballe. Along this pavement the small Gavroche led the two smaller Thénardier boys, on his way to his hôtel—the plaster elephant in Place de la Bastille. A wide avenue, bordered by modern constructions, is fast taking the place of the old street and robbing it of all its character.

Where Rue Pavée meets Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, stands the Hôtel Lamoignon, formerly the Hôtel d'Angoulême. At that corner a square turret juts out from above the ground floor, overhanging the pavement, its supporting bracket cut under in shell-like curves. About the stately court, entered from Rue Pavée, rise the imposing walls, those of the wings of a little later date and a little more ornate than that of the façade. This front is pre-eminently impressive in its height, in the unusual loftiness of its floors and their windows, in the single Corinthian pilasters, tall and slender and graceful, rising from ground to cornice. They may serve us as a souvenir of Jean Bullant's work in the château of Ecouen and in his portion of Chantilly. Above that cornice the dormer windows spring high under their gabled ends. Beneath them, and over the entrance porch, and on the side wall of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois—profusely decorating, but not overloading, the spacious surfaces that carry them easily—we trace without effort the unworn hunting-horns, the stags' heads, the dogs in chase, the crescent and the initial H so interlaced as to form an H and a D—all the carved emblems of Diane de France, for whom this remarkable structure was planned and built, a little after 1580, by a now unknown architect.

She was born of an Italian mother, during a stay in her country of the son of François I., who was later Henri II. On coming to the throne, in 1547, he legitimatized this daughter, then ten years of age, and gave her education and position in France. She grew up to be a good woman and a good wife to Horace Farnese, Duc de Castro, and to her second husband, François, the eldest son of the Constable Montmorenci. She spent her long life—which saw seven monarchs sitting on the French throne—doing kindly acts, not one of which meant so much for the France she loved as the reconciliation between Henri III. and Henri de Navarre; possible through her, because the sceptic Béarnais took her word for or against any written word of anyone. Dying in 1619, she left this mansion to Charles, Duc d'Angoulême, son of Charles IX. and Marie Touchet, the last of her many benefactions to him. He added these wings, and placed in that on the northern side this stately stone staircase, filling the width between the stone walls, with no hand-rail to break its sweep. Nothing is left of the former grandeur of the interior, which is given up to large industries and petty handicrafts; even the vast and lofty chambers are cut up for trade purposes by partitions and by interposed floorings.

In 1658 the Hôtel d'Angoulême became the Hôtel Lamoignon by purchase of Guillaume de Lamoignon, a wealthy President of Parliament, and in 1684 it went to his son, Chrétien-François de Lamoignon. It was a dwelling worthy of him and of his illustrious name, which it still bears. In it he received the best society of that day—represented to us by Racine, Boileau, Bourdaloue, Regnard, and others of their kidney, all honored in finding a friend in this magistrate of ability, probity, kindliness. It was to him that Boileau addressed his "Sixth Epistle," and to him, when, as Master of Requests, it was his official duty to forbid further performances of "Tartufe" after the first night, Molière submitted without rancor. Perhaps his highest honor, during a life of honors, was his refusal of an election to a fauteuil in the Académie Française.

On April 13, 1763, in this building was opened the first public library of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris. One Antoine Moriau had been for many years collecting, in his apartment on this second floor, some 14,000 volumes and 200 manuscripts, all left to the town at his death in 1759. The municipality kept his rooms, and rented additional rooms on this first floor, opening them to the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The Hôtel Lamoignon.

The concierge or his wife, honored by the interest shown in their splendid show-place, will conduct such curious strangers as may wish around the corner into Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and through a little gate on that street into a small back court. This is the shabby remnant of Diane's and of Lamoignon's extensive gardens, which once stretched to those of the Hôtel de La Force on the south, and eastwardly to Rue Sévigné. From this spot you may see four or five windows away up in the rear wall of the mansion, and you will be told that these are the windows of Alphonse Daudet's former apartment, wherein he wrote "Fromont jeune et Risler aîné." His large study on the top floor had two high, wide windows, from which he saw the roofs of all Paris on that side. Against the wall at one end of the room was his shelf for standing at his work, and his wife's desk was at the other end; while, between them, carrying the freshly written sheets, trotted the little boy Léon, who is now a man, wielding his own good pen. To him, in those days, the tall Flaubert and Tourgueneff were "giants" by the side of his father, and of the other friends who used to climb these many stairs to this salon in the sky. Daudet has left affectionate records of the old house. His "Rois-en-exil" was written in a pavilion in the garden of Richelieu's old mansion, which stood in the northwestern corner of the then Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, where has been cut, through house and garden, the prolongation of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Rue des Vosges.

The gentle artist, "handsome as a Hindoo god" in those days, says M. Claretie, brought from his beloved Midi a longing for space and air and quiet, and all his abodes in the city were high above the street, with ample breathing-space and unbroken horizon. His earliest Paris home was at the very top of the furnished Hôtel du Senat, still at No. 7 Rue de Tournon. This was the wretched room to which he came back, early one morning, from his first swell reception, his only dress-suit drenched with the wet snow through which he had waded, owning no overcoat. Then, for a while, he occupied an entresol in No. 4 Place de l'Odéon, in "la maison A. Laissus," one of the unaltered houses of that historic place. His last home was on the third floor of No. 31 Rue Bellechasse, in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and one of its delightful old gardens lay beneath his windows, giving him the greenness and the tranquillity so dear to him.

The name of Madame Daudet may not be omitted from this record of the illustrious women of the Marais, although now, in the maturity of her distinction and elegance, she adorns another quarter of Paris. She has made for herself an honored place among French women of letters, and she helped her husband to his own place by her critical powers and her sympathetic appreciation. She both tranquillized and stimulated him through his earlier years of robust strength, and the later invalidism that was yet filled with labor. Her son, who carried the father's sheets across the room to her for approval or correction, has dedicated his "Alphonse Daudet" to his mother, "who aided and encouraged her husband alike in the hours of discouragement and of hopefulness."

There are bits and fragments of vanished antiquity—portals, windows, balconies, brackets, pitifully sundered from the grandeur they stand for and suggest—scattered all about this portion of the Marais. Much of this bygone grandeur was to be found in Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, a street that had been a country road just outside the wall of Philippe-Auguste, and, with the crumbling of the wall, had been speedily built up with stately mansions. One of these, with a fund for its support, was willed, in 1415, to the Grand Prior of France, in trust for such burghers as were freed from all taxation by reason of their extreme poverty. So it came that these francs bourgeois gave their name to the street. Here at No. 30 is a quaint low front, mostly taken up by a spacious entrance-porch, decorated with finely cut dragons; here at No. 31 is the superb portal of the Hôtel Jeanne d'Albret; all that is left of the noble residence of that niece of François I. who married the Duc de Clèves in 1541. It is more than a century from that date before this hôtel holds any history for us, when it became tenanted by César Phébus d'Albret, Marshal of France; a rich and frolicsome Gascon, a friend of Scarron, an especial friend of young Madame Scarron. It was he who killed the Marquis de Sévigné in a duel. The Duchesse d'Albret was an eminently proper person, a bit of a précieuse, and her salon here was a flimsy copy of that of the Hôtel Rambouillet. Scarron's widow, poor and by no means unfriended, found a temporary home in this house, after a short stay with her life-long friend, Mlle. de Lenclos, before taking rooms in the convent, where we have seen her.

When la veuve Scarron, reincarnated in Madame de Maintenon, was living in the grand establishment at Vaugirard, provided by the King for his two children, she is said, by local tradition, to have had her private apartment in the Marais, near where we stand. It was on the first floor of the small and shabby house at No. 7 bis Rue du Perche, and you are shown a ceiling in an upper room, that is claimed to have been painted for the great lady. It is in four sunken squares, wherein pose the four Seasons, in conventional attitudes and unconventional raiment.

Let us stop here on the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, where it meets the end of a little street with the big name of des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, given to it by the great hospital and monastery that occupied these grounds, through which this street was afterward cut, when Philippe-Auguste gathered them just within the safe-keeping of his wall. Just without that wall lay the Hôtel Barbette, in the midst of its own wide lands. On this corner, we stand just on the line of the wall, and look across Rue des Francs-Bourgeois into a court, once the Alleé aux Arbalétriers, over whose entrance is a tablet, recording the murder of Louis d'Orléans, near that spot—a scene sketched in our first chapter. That maze of courts, crowded close with ancient wooden structures, tempts us to search within it for vestiges of the outbuildings of the Hôtel Barbette. And it is worth while exploring the interior of the corner house, if only for its mediæval staircase. Coming out by the courts opening into Rue Vieille-du-Temple, we take a few steps to where it meets the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and we stand on the exact site of the Porte Barbette of the old wall.

There, on the northeastern corner of the two streets, stands a most ancient building well worth our regard. On the angle, reaching from just above its ground floor to the cornice, is hung a five-sided tourelle of singular beauty. Its heavy supporting bracket is deeply and handsomely corbelled out, and at each angle is a slim colonette, delicately carved. The division line between its two stories is defined by a fine moulding. In the first story is cut a small ogival window, under a prettily crocketed head and a flat finial. This window is iron grated, and its grim visage is softened by a flowering plant set within. The panels of the lower story are plain, and those above are decorated with a lace-like pattern, graceful and elegant, whose lines and curves carry one's eye to the cornice. The plain façade of the house in Rue Vieille-du-Temple has been degraded by modern windows, while that in the other street remains most impressive, with its gabled end. All in all, no such delightful specimen of fifteenth-century Gothic as this Barbette turret can be found in our Marais.

The Tourelle of the Hôtel Barbette.

Yet turret and structure are not, as is often stated, any portion of the original Hôtel Barbette. That was built, at the end of the thirteenth century, by Étienne Barbette, a man of wealth and importance, the Provost of Paris under Philippe "le Bel," and his Master of the Mint. The vast enclosure of his grandiose hôtel covered all the ground, from the old wall northward to the line of the present Rues de la Perle and du Parc-Royal; and eastwardly from this Rue Vieille-du-Temple to the gardens of Saint-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, near where now runs Rue Sévigné. This ample domain sufficed for the menus plaisirs of this lucky man, and was merely his petit séjour. Under that blameless guise it served as the abode, a little more than a century later, when rebuilt after the mob had wrecked it, of Isabeau de Bavière, official wife of mad Charles VI. Leaving him to the neglect of servants and to the companionship of Odette, the Queen escaped boredom here, by her dinners and suppers, balls and fêtes; here she invented, or first introduced, the masquerades that were soon the rage of Polite Society. She amused herself with other games, too; such as statecraft, in partnership with her husband's younger brother, Louis d'Orléans. It was from the Barbette that she mismanaged the kingdom, ground down the people with intolerable taxes, pushed the marriage of her daughter Catherine with Henry V. of England, plotted the shameful Treaty of Troyes, which made France an appanage of the English crown, and gave Paris to English troops.

After her husband's death, cast aside by Burgundy and England, she found a drearier refuge in the Hôtel Saint-Paul than that to which she had condemned him there. In its corners she hid while Joan the Maid was undoing the evil work done by this shameless woman, and was bringing back to Paris the son hated by this shameless mother. All through those years she wept and moaned, witnesses have reported; left alone, as she was, with the memories of her lusts and her treasons, with the wreckage of the animal beauty, for which, and for no other quality, she had been selected as the royal consort. Seven days after she learned of the signing of the Treaty of Arras she died, "et son corps fut tant méprisé," says Brantôme, that it was thrown into a boat at the water-gate of Saint-Paul, and, after an unseemly service in Notre-Dame, was sent by night down the Seine to Saint-Denis, "ainsi ni plus ni moins qu'une simple demoiselle!"

Partly destroyed by fire and partly rebuilt, we find the Hôtel Barbette, after another hundred years and more, in the hands of the Comte de Brézé, Seneschal of Normandy. Aged, ugly, crippled, as we see him in Hugo's verse, he is pleasantly remembered for the lovely widow he left for Henri II., and for his lovely tomb left, for our joy, in the cathedral of Rouen. When his widow, Diane de Saint-Vallier, became Diane de Poictiers, Duchesse de Valentinois—an elderly siren of thirty-seven, who was yet "fort aymée et servie d'un des grands rois et valeureux du monde"—she wore always her widow's white and black, and kept to the last that whiteness of skin and purity of complexion that came, she claimed, from her only cosmetic, soap and water. Her coldness of heart had much to do with it, to our thinking. Brantôme saw her when she had come to sixty-two, and was struck by her freshness, "sans se farder," as of thirty. He adds, with his ever-green susceptibility: "C'est dommage que la terre couvre ce beau corps." This property had gone, on her husband's death, in 1561, to his and her two daughters; who profited by its vast extent and by the example set by François I. in similar jobs, to open streets through it, and divide it into parcels for selling. Those streets were named Barbette and Trois-Pavilions, the latter now renamed Elzévir. And if any remnant exists of the second Hôtel Barbette of Diane de Poictiers, it is this corner house and its lovely turret.

By way of this corner, the body of Louis d'Orléans was carried to the Church of the Blancs-Manteaux, in the street of that name just behind us. It lay till morning in the nave, and about the bier gathered royalty and nobility, all through the long November night. The church is gone, and so, too, is his chapel in the Church of the Célestins; and the monument, erected there by Louis XII. to his murdered grandfather and his martyred grandmother, has been placed in the Cathedral of Saint-Denis. The site of the Church of the Blancs-Manteaux is covered by the great central establishment of the Mont de Piété; its grounds are entirely built over; the street that took the name of the monastery, once a perilous coupe-gorge, has grown to be, not respectable, but characterless. We must be content with the phantoms of Saint Louis's white-mantled monks, strolling in their cloisters; later, grown fat and scampish, haunting the low cabarets of this mal-famed street, and rehearsing, within their own precincts, those frenzied mysteries of the mediæval stage, that led to the disbandment and the driving-out of the debauched order.

A step to the south from this street, along Rue Vieille-du-Temple, brings us to the massive entrance-doors of No. 47. Their outer surfaces are richly carved with masks and with figures; on their inner side is an excellent bas-relief representing Romulus and Remus found by the shepherd, when the wolf is giving them suck. About the court, diminutive and dainty, the walls of the small hôtel are adorned with tasteful sculptures, and laden with dials, two of the sun and two of the moon. These anomalous adornments came here through the caprice of a Director of the Royal Observatory, who once occupied the house and who wreaked his scientific humor in this odd fashion. This is the Hôtel de Hollande, a rebuilt remnant of the large mediæval mansion of Maréchal de Rieux. The street just in front of his hôtel, some authorities insist, was the scene of the assassination of the Duc d'Orléans. Reconstructed early in the seventeenth century, the carvings, sculptures, and decorations of this elegant little hôtel are excellent examples of late Renaissance. Unluckily, the bas-reliefs and paintings of the interior may no longer be seen. Beyond this outer court is a smaller court, containing an attractive structure of a later date.

This Hôtel de Hollande has borne that name since, in the reign of Louis XIV., it was the seat of the embassy representing Holland at his court. This being officially Dutch soil, at that time, we may see Racine coming through this entrance-doorway, in full wig and court costume; coming to present his son for introductions at The Hague, where the young man is to be a member of the French Embassy. We have seen the letters sent to him there by his thrifty father. There is another bit of history for us here. It was in this house that the firm "Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie" started in business in 1776, with a capital of 3,000,000 francs. The firm was composed of Caron de Beaumarchais, with the governments of France and Spain for his silent partners; the former putting in 2,000,000 francs, and the latter the other million. The business of this house—and it did a lively business while it lasted—was to supply, secretly and unknown to the English officials in Paris, arms and equipments to the American colonies.

Anne de Montmorenci, the great constable of France, in alliance, against the Huguenots, with the Guises, his near neighbors in the Marais, outfought Condé and Coligny at Saint-Denis in 1567, and died, of the wounds he got in that battle, "in his own hôtel in Rue Saint-Avoie." So says the chronicle, and it tells us further that his was the grandest mansion in the town, with most extensive grounds; far surpassing in size and magnificence the Hôtels Lamoignon and Carnavalet. It was sufficiently spacious for the large-minded John Law, who established his bank in the building two centuries later. When the crash came, and he sought more modest quarters, the State took the building for its bureaux. Now, no stone of the structure can be found, the street from which it had entrance—Saint-Avoie—is merged in that portion of Rue du Temple which crosses Rue Rambuteau, and this broad thoroughfare sweeps over the site of Montmorenci's palace and his gardens.

Turning from Rue Rambuteau into Rue du Temple, we are face to face, at No. 71, with a monumental gateway, richly carved, giving entrance to an ample court. The stately walls surrounding this court have suffered much from time, and more from man. The old façade of this wing on our left is hidden behind a paltry new frontage for shops, and on the roof of the central body before us a contemptible top story has been put. The face of the original lofty attic, above the cornice, carried pilasters in continuation of those below, and these have been brutally mutilated by a line of low windows just over the cornice. For all that, there is a majesty in the stately arcades of these lower stories, and in the unspoiled lower walls, up which climb graceful Corinthian pilasters from ground to cornice. They are similar to those of the Hôtel Lamoignon, built before this Hôtel de Saint-Aignan was transformed from a former structure by de Muet, who doubtless admired, perhaps unconsciously imitated, the best features of the earlier architecture. He has put, in this almost intact right wing, just such a stone staircase, of easy grade and no hand-rail, as that we have seen in the residence built for Diane de France.

There is hardly any history to detain us here, and the great names that once resounded in this court make only far-away echoes now. Claude de Mesme, Comte d'Avaux, a diplomat of the seventeenth century, built this hôtel. At his death, it came to the Duc de Saint-Aignan, a royal Purveyor at the head of Louis XIV.'s Council of Finance. He was a relative of Madame de Scudéry, wife of the Georges whom we have met in his sister's salon. Through his wife's influence with Saint-Aignan, Georges was presented to the King, and succeeded in obtaining a pension—useful to supplement such of his sister's earnings as came in his way. His merits, for which the royal bounty was granted, seem to have been of so momentous a literary character as to be pronounced equal to those of Corneille!

When Olivier de Clisson—Constable of France after the death of his comrade-in-arms, the mighty Duguesclin—brought back Charles VI. victorious to Paris, after crushing the revolt in Ghent under Philip van Artavelde, he found the Marais du Temple fast being reclaimed and built upon. At one corner of the Templars' former wood-yard, on a street to be named du Chaume, now merged in the southern end of Rue des Archives, opposite the end of Rue de Braque, was the fortress-home of his wife, Marguerite de Rohan, within the family enclosure. Here de Clisson made his head-quarters, giving his name to the hôtel. Its entrance, an ogival portal sunk beneath two impressive round turrets, built of different sizes through some vagary, still remains; a most impressive relic, imbedded in more recent walls.

The Gateway of the Hôtel de Clisson.

It was de Clisson, who, quite without his consent, gave the King one of the several shocks which culminated in his madness. King and Constable had supped together in the royal apartment of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and the Constable went on his way home. Lighted by the main facts of the affair, we may easily track him. After crossing Rue Saint-Antoine and passing through one of the narrow lanes to Rue Neuve-Sainte-Catherine—now the eastern end of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois—he should have kept along this street to this new home of his. Perhaps the old soldier was not quite sure of his way, so soon after supper and the plentiful petit vin de l'hôtel Saint-Paul, for he found himself beyond his corner, up in Rue Sainte-Catherine, now Rue Sévigné; and there, in front of a baker's shop opposite the spot where now is the Carnavalet, he was set upon by a band of men led by Pierre de Craon, a crony of Louis d'Orléans. They left the tough old warrior in the baker's doorway, bleeding from many wounds, but not quite killed. The King was summoned, came hastily in scanty clothing, and it was long before he recovered from his affright. When he had rallied, he started out to punish the assailant of his favorite captain, and it was on his way to Brittany, with whose duke de Craon had taken refuge, that the King received the final blow to his reason.

The history of the Hôtel de Clisson would weary us, were it told in detail. We may jump to the year 1553, when it came to Anne d'Est, wife of François de Lorraine, Duc de Guise. He and his family were beginning to feel and to show their growing power, and he found these walls not wide enough for his swelling consequence. He bought the Hôtels de Laval and de la Roche-Guyon, whose grounds adjoined his own; so adding to his estate, while others, following the example of François I., were cutting up and selling their Paris lands. Soon the Hôtel de Guise was made up of several mansions, rebuilt and run together, within one enclosure, bounded by Rues de Paradis (now the western end of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois), du Chaume (now des Archives), des Quatre-Fils, and Vieille-du-Temple. The heirs of the last Guise, who died in 1671, sold this property at the end of the seventeenth century, and it came into the grasping hands of Madame de Soubise; bought with the savings of the French peasants, squeezed from them by Louis XIV.'s farmers of taxes, and by him poured into the lap of this lady, one of the many ladies so turning an honest penny. Her complaisant husband, François de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, began to tear down much of the old work, and to replace it by new work, in 1706. For thirty years he kept the most skilful artists and artisans of that day employed on the place within and without; and he left the Hotel de Soubise much as we find it now. To him we owe this striking cour d'honneur, square with curved ends, and framed in a colonnade of coupled columns, that leads a covered gallery from the grand entrance around to the portal of the main building. This is his façade of three stories, with pediment, its columns both composite and Corinthian. For general effect this court has no parallel in Paris.

A light elegant staircase, its ceiling delicately painted, leads to the first floor, whose rooms retain some of their mouldings, their wood-carvings, their decorated doorways and ceilings. Gone, however, are the tapestries, "the most beautiful in the world and most esteemed in Christendom, after those of the Vatican," Sauval assures us.

Vast and magnificent as was this palace, it did not suffice for the son of this prince, the Cardinal Armand Gaston de Rohan, Bishop of Strasburg, who, says Sauval, "was, in his prosperity, very insolent and blinded." On the site of the demolished Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon he built for himself the Palais Cardinal, now commonly known as the Hôtel de Strasbourg. The library, great and precious, which he there collected, together with his hôtel and his blind insolence, came to his grand-nephew, the Cardinal de Rohan of the Diamond Necklace, the last cardinal of a family of cardinals.

At his death, in 1803, desertion and emptiness came to the Hôtel de Strasbourg, as they had already come to the Hôtel de Soubise. The huge size of the buildings rendered them unfit for private residences. At length they were taken for the State by the Emperor, at the urging of Daunou, Director of the Archives of France. By the decree of March 6, 1808, those archives took for their own the Hôtel de Soubise, and the Hôtel de Strasbourg was given to the Imprimerie Impériale. No after-revolution nor any change of rulers has troubled them. As their contents grew, new structures have been added, over the gardens and on the street behind, all done in good taste, all suggesting the uses for which they are meant. The Imprimerie, entered from Rue Vieille-du-Temple, through a court containing a statue of Gutenberg, does the work for the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, for the Ministers and for the Institute. Its Bulletin des Lois, issued to all the Communes of France, carries to completion the mission meant for it when it was begun by Louis XIII., Hugo asserts.

The archives of France must be studied and may not be described. This amazing collection of manuscripts, charters, diplomas, letters, and autographs begins with the earliest day of writing and of records in France, and comes down through all the centuries. It is a spot for unhurried and unhindered browsing during long summer days.

Just in this region is to be seen, better than anywhere, an aspect of the Marais not yet seen in our historic strolling. It is the Marais of to-day and of every day, the work-a-day Marais, whose heart is here in this street of the Temple and the old street of the Temple. In them, and in the streets that cross them, are numerous mansions of a bygone time, with little to say to us in architecture, nothing at all to say to us in history or letters. Side by side with them are tall buildings and huge blocks of modern construction; new and old held and possessed by factories, warehouses, show-rooms; their upper portions given over to strange handicrafts, strangely met together. The making of syphon-tops is next door on the same floor to the wiring of feathers, as Daudet discovered. These narrow streets between the buildings, and these walled-in courts within them, are hushed all through the working-hours, save for the ceaseless muffled rumble of the machinery, and the unbroken low murmur of the human toilers, both intent on their tasks.

Suddenly at noon, these streets are all astir with an industrial, unarmed mob, and the whole quarter is given over to an insurrection, peaceful and unoffending. These workers are making their way to restaurant or rôtisserie or cabaret; some of them saunter along, taking their breakfast "sur le pouce." The men, in stained blouses, are alert, earnest, and self-respecting; the girls, direct of gaze, frank of manner, shrill of voice, wear enwrapping aprons, that fall from neck to ankle, and their hair, the glory of the French working-woman who goes hatless, is dressed with an artless art that would not dishonor a drawing-room. We can carry away with us, from these last scenes, no more captivating memory than this of the most modern woman of our Marais.