René Descartes.
(From the portrait by Franz Hals, in the Musée du Louvre.)
The Paris of the north bank has its slope, that looks across the Seine to this southern slope, and that has come to be its Scholarly Quarter. The high land away behind the lowlands stretching along the northern bank was taken early by the Romans for their villas, and then by nobles for their châteaux, and then by the bourgeoisie for their cottages. As la Ville grew, its citizens gave all their thought to honest industry and to the honest struggle for personal and municipal rights, so that none was left for literature. When its time came, the town had spread up and over these northern heights, and men of letters and of the arts were attracted by their open spaces and ample outlook. So large a colony of these workers had settled there, early in the nineteenth century, that some among them gave to their hill-side the name of "la Nouvelle Athènes." Its vogue has gone on growing, and it is crowded with the memories of dead pen-workers, and with the presence of living pen-workers. So, too, are the suburbs toward the west, and this Scholars' Quarter on the southern bank, which is barely touched on in this book, given so greatly as it is to history, archæology, architecture, and other arts. All this wide-spread district awaits the diligent pen that has given us "The Literary Landmarks of London," to give us, as completely and accurately, "The Literary Landmarks of Paris."
MOLIÈRE AND HIS FRIENDS
MOLIÈRE AND HIS FRIENDS
In the early years of the seventeenth century there stood a low, wide, timbered house on the eastern corner of Rues Saint-Honoré and des Vieilles-Étuves. To the dwellers in that crowded quarter of the Halles it was known as "la Maison des Singes," because of the carved wooden tree on its angle, in the branches of which wooden monkeys shook down wooden fruit to an old wooden monkey at its foot. This house, that dated from the thirteenth century surely, and that may have been a part of Queen Blanche's Paris, was torn down only in 1800, and a slice of its site has been cut off by Rue Sauval, the widened and renamed Rue des Vieilles-Étuves. The modern building on that corner, numbered 92 Rue Saint-Honoré, is so narrow as to have only one window on each of its three floors facing that street. Around the first story, above the butcher's shop on the entrance floor, runs a balcony with great gilt letters on its rail, that read "Maison de Molière." High up on its front wall is a small tablet, whose legend, deciphered with difficulty from the street, claims this spot for the birthplace of Molière. This is a veracious record. The exact date of the birth of the eldest son of Jacques Poquelin and Marie Cressé, his wife, is unknown, but it was presumably very early in January, 1622, for, on the fifteenth of that month, the baby was baptized "Jean Poquelin," in his father's parish church of Saint-Eustache—a new church not quite completed then. The name "Baptiste" was, seemingly, added a little later by his parents.
On this corner the boy lived for eleven years; here his mother died, ten years after his birth, and here his father soon married again; he removed, in 1633, to a house he had inherited, the ground floor of which he made his shop of upholstery and of similar stuffs, the family residing above. It was No. 3 Rue de la Tonnellerie, under the pillars of the Halles, possibly, but not certainly, on the site of the present No. 31 Rue du Pont-Neuf. In a niche, cut in the front wall of this modern building, has been placed a bust of Molière and an inscription asserting that this was his birthspot, a local legend that harms no one, and comforts at least the locataire.
Hereabout, certainly, the boy played, running forward and back across the market. On its northern side, near the public pillory, was another house owned by his father, on the old corner of Rue de la Réale, and its site is now covered by the pavement of modern Rue Rambuteau. It is pleasant to picture the lad in this ancient quarter, as we walk through those few of its streets unchanged to this day, notably that bit of Rue de la Ferronerie, so narrow that it blocked the carriage of Henri IV., a few years before, and brought him within easy reach of the knife of Ravaillac as he sprang on the wheel.
François Coppée, not yet an old man, readily recalls the square squat columns of the old Halles, and, all about, the solid houses supported by pillars like the arcades of Place des Vosges; all just as when young Poquelin played about them. Plays, as well as play, already attracted him; he loved to look at the marionettes and the queer side-shows of the outdoor fairs held about the Halles; and his grandfather, Louis Cressé, an ardent playgoer, often took him to laugh at the funny fellows who frolicked on the trestles of the Pont-Neuf, and at the rollicking farces in the Théâtre du Marais. No doubt he saw, too, the tragedies of the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and this observant boy may well have anticipated the younger Crébillon's opinion, that French tragedy of that day was the most absolute farce yet invented by the human mind. For this was a little while before the coming of Corneille with true tragedy.
This son of the King's upholsterer cared nothing for his father's trade, and not much for books. He learned, early, that his eyes were meant for seeing, and he not only saw everything, but he remembered and reflected; showing signs already of that bent which gave warrant, in later life, for Boileau's epithet, "Molière the Contemplator."