Rue Hautefeuille, a Survivor of the Scholars' Quarter.
Nothing of Rue du Fouarre, as it was known to Rabelais and Dante, is left but its name in the broadened curtailment of this most ancient street. That name comes from the old French word meaning "forage," and was given to it at the time when the wealthier students bought near there and brought into it the trusses of hay and straw, which they spread on the floor for seats during the lectures, the reader himself being seated on a rude dais at the end of the hall. The forage market is still held, not far away, in Place Maubert. And the churches of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and of Saint-Séverin are unchanged, except by age, since those days when their bells were the only timekeepers for lecturers and lectured; giving signal, throughout the day, for the divisions of the classes, until vespers told that the working-day was done. The schools opened with the early mass at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, then the chapel adjoining the Hôtel-Dieu, now an exquisite relic of simple twelfth-century Gothic. Still older had been Saint-Séverin, a chapel of the earliest years of the monarchy, destroyed by the Normans when they camped just here in 866, besieging the island city and making their onslaught on the wooden tower that guarded the abutment of the Petit-Pont on the mainland. The twelve heroes, who held that tower against the Norman horde, are commemorated by the tablet in the wall of Place du Petit-Pont. Saint-Séverin was rebuilt in the thirteenth century, and its vast burial-ground on the south covered by the buildings and the street of la Parcheminerie. So that of the University seen by Dante, we can be sure only of the body of Saint-Séverin—its tower was built in 1347—and of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, and the buildings that are glued to it.
The Interior of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.
Dante's bronze figure looks pensively down from the terrace of the Collége de France on all the noise and the newness of modern Rue des Écoles. The date of his short stay in Paris cannot be fixed, but it was certainly after his exile from Florence, therefore not earlier than 1302, and probably not later than 1310, his own years being a little less, or a little more, than forty. There can be no doubt as to his having visited Paris, for Boccaccio, his admirer and biographer, records the fact; told him perhaps by the elder Boccaccio, who lived in the capital—where his famous son was born—and who probably met the expatriated poet there. And in the tenth canto of "Paradiso," we find these words in Longfellow's translation:
"It is the light eternal of Sigieri,
Who, reading lectures in the street of straw,
Did syllogize individious verities."
This closing line, meaning that Sigier of Brabant had the courage to speak truths that were unpopular, explains why he was Dante's favorite lecturer. In Balzac's pretty fragment of romance, in which the great Frenchman makes so vivid the presence of the great Italian, the home of the latter is in one of the small houses on the extreme eastern end of the City Island—such as the modest dwelling in which died Boileau-Despréaux, four centuries later. From there, Balzac has Dante ferried over to Quai de la Tournelle, and so stroll to his lectures. But Dante's home was really in that same street of straw, to which he had come from his quarters away south on the banks of the Bièvre, too far away from the schools. He had taken up his abode in that rural suburb, on first coming to Paris, as did many men of letters, of that time and of later times, who were drawn to the pleasant, quiet country without the walls.