[BOOK III]
[CHAPTER I]
The Arsenal—Nodier's house—The master's profile—The congress of bibliophiles—The three candles—Debureau—Mademoiselle Mars and Merlin—Nodier's family—His friends—In which houses I am at my best—The salon of the Arsenal—Nodier as a teller of tales—The ball and the warming-pan
I promised I would return to Nodier, and I will keep my word. After the service Nodier rendered me by opening the doors of the Théâtre-Français to me, I went to thank him. Nodier did better for me on my second visit than he did on the first—he opened the doors of the Arsenal to me. And, lest my readers should be frightened at the word, and think that I mean a collection of arms, a museum of artillery, let me hasten to add that the doors of the Arsenal were the doors of Charles Nodier's house. Everybody knows the large, gloomy-looking building called the Arsenal, in a line with the quai des Célestins, at the back of the rue de Morland, looking over the river. This was where Nodier lived. In these unpretentious Memoirs it would take us too far afield to relate how, once upon a time, when Paris was preparing for war, this heavy building was raised upon a piece of ground called the Champ-au-Plâtre; how, when the heavy-looking building was raised, François I. had the cannon cast there which did much unlucky work at Pavia; how, requiring a plot of ground, he borrowed a farm from his good town of Paris, promising to return it; how, having borrowed this first farm, he borrowed a second from it, and a third; how, in short, on the principle of the axiom "What is good to take is good to keep," he kept the three borrowed farms—we will relate these matters when, at the end of our impressions of Europe, Asia and Africa, we set about putting down our impressions of rambles in Paris. These farms, together with the great building of which we have spoken, were used to store cannon and powder. One day, in the reign of Henri II., a spark, coming from nobody knew where,—who knows whence terrible fires spring!—set fire to the powder-magazine and exploded it. Paris shook as Naples and Catana shake when Vesuvius or Etna are in a state of eruption; the fish perished in the river; at the unexpected concussion the neighbouring houses swayed and then collapsed one upon another. Melun, a dozen leagues off, shuddered at the noise of the explosion; thirty persons blown into the air by this volcano fell down in fragments, a hundred and fifty were wounded and, unacquainted with the cause of the accident, attributed it to the Protestants, against whom they were not slow to pick a grievance. It will be readily understood that the buildings erected by François I. and the three farms of the city of Paris disappeared in this commotion. Charles IX., who was a great hand at building, and was responsible for the sculpturing in the Louvre and the carving of the fountain of the Innocents, paid a visit to the ruins with his architect. He designed the plan of a new building, began the fresh erection and, as he was both a great artist and a great poet, it is probable that he would have made a good piece of work of it. But Queen Catherine of Medici, having already got rid of one son, was not sorry to be rid of Charles IX., after the fashion of François II., in order to hasten the coming of Henri III. In case this accusation against Catherine de Medici should strike our readers as rather too strong, who may prefer to look upon the death of Charles IX. as the judgment of God (an act which, indeed, might quite possibly go hand in hand with the poisoning of Charles IX. by his mother), we will here reproduce a dialogue recorded by Bassompierre; it is short, but instructive.
"Sire," Bassompierre said to King Louis XIII., who was seated in the embrasure of a window of the old Louvre, fiercely blowing a horn,—"sire, you ought not to blow with all your strength like that; you are weak in the lungs, and the same thing might happen to you as happened to King Charles IX."
"My dear Bassompierre," Louis XIII. replied, "King Charles IX. did not die from blowing his horn too long and too frequently; he died from being so imprudent as to become reconciled to his mother, after he had had the prudence to quarrel with Catherine of Medici."
Let us return to the Arsenal, and to another king who was so imprudent as to quarrel with his wife—or, rather, with the House of Austria to which she belonged—to Henri IV. He it was, in fact, who finished the Arsenal and laid out the beautiful garden, which we can still see in pictures of the period of Louis XIII. He gave it to Sully, wherein to carry on his ministry of finance; and here it was that the parsimonious minister amassed the millions with which Henri III. intended to carry on his war with Flanders, when the poignard of Ravaillac put an end to that strange dream of the seventeenth century, which was to become a reality in the nineteenth, namely, the union of the seven elective republics and of the six hereditary monarchies, under one supreme head, established under the title of the Congrès de la Paix.