She had come from Rouen, a young actress looking for work, along with her husband, a petty actor and patcher-up of plays; for whose sake she was admitted to the Théâtre du Marais. How she made use of this chance is told by a line in a letter of Madame de Sévigné, who had seen her play Atalide in "Bajazet," and pronounced "ma belle fille"—so she brevets her son's lady-love—as "the most miraculously good comédienne that I have ever seen." It was on the boards of the Hôtel de Bourgogne that she showed herself to be also the finest tragédienne of her time. She shone most in "Bajazet," and in others of Racine's plays, creating her rôles under his admiring eye and under his devoted training. He himself declaimed verse marvellously well, and had in him the making of a consummate comedian, or a preacher, as you please. La Champmeslé was not beautiful or clever, but her stature was noble, her carriage glorious, her voice bewitching, her charm irresistible. And La Fontaine sang praises of her esprit, and this was indeed fitting at his age then. She lived somewhere in this quarter, when playing in the troupe of the widow Molière at the Théâtre Guénégaud. When she retired from those boards, she found a home with her self-effacing husband in Auteuil, and there died in 1698.
The first floor in the right wing of the court of both 13 and 21 is said to be the residence of Adrienne Lecouvreur. She had appeared in 1717 at the Comédie Française, in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, and had won her place at once. The choice spirits of the court, of the great world, of the greater world of literature, were glad to meet in fellowship around her generous and joyous table. Among them she found excuse for an occasional caprice, but her deepest and most lasting passion was given to the superb adventurer, Maurice de Saxe. His quarters, when home from the wars—for which her pawned jewels furnished him forth—were only a step down Rue Bonaparte from her house, on Quai Malaquais. They were at No. 5, the most ancient mansion left on the quay, with the exception of No. 1, hid behind the wing of the Institute. He died at Chambord on November 30, 1750, and at this house, May 17, 1751, there was an auction of his effects.
There came a time when the meetings of these two needed greater secrecy, and he removed to Rue de Colombier, now named Rue Jacob. The houses on the north side of this ancient street had—and some of them still have—gardens running back to the gardens of the houses on the south side of Rue Visconti. These little gardens had, in the dividing fence, gates easily opened by night, for others besides Adrienne and Maurice, as local legend whispers. Scribe has put their story on the stage, where it is a tradition that the actress was actually poisoned by a great lady, for the sake of the fascinating lover. He stood by her bedside, with Voltaire and the physician, when she was dying in 1730, at the early age of thirty-eight, in one of the rooms on this first floor over the court. Voltaire had had no sneers, but only praise for the actress, and smiles for the woman whose kind heart had brought her to his bedside, when he was ill, where she read to him the last book out, the translation of the "Arabian Nights." He was stirred to stinging invective of the churlish priest of Saint-Sulpice, who denied her church-burial. In the same verse he commends that good man, Monsieur de Laubinière, who gave her body hasty and unhallowed interment. He came, by night, with two coaches and three men, and drove with the poor body along the river-bank, turning up Rue de Bourgogne to a spot behind the vast wood-yards that then lined the river-front. There, in a hole they dug, they hid her. The fine old mansion at No. 115 Rue de Grenelle, next to the southeast corner of Rue de Bourgogne, covers her grave. In its garret, thrown into one corner and almost forgotten, is a marble tablet, long and narrow, once set in a wall on this site, to mark the spot so long ignored—as its inscription says—where lies an actress of admirable esprit, of good heart, and of a talent sublime in its simplicity. And it recites the efforts of a true friendship, which got at last only this little bit of earth for her grave.
Yet a few years further on, the same wing on the court of this dingy old house sparkled with the splendid personality of Hippolyte Clairon, who outshines all other stars of the French stage, unless it be Rachel. Here she lived the life of one of those prodigal princesses, in whose rôles she loved to dazzle on the boards of the Comédie Française, where she first appeared in 1743. It was her public and not her private performances that shocked the sensitive Church into a threat of future terrors for her. When, in the course of a theatrical quarrel, she refused to play, she was sent to prison, being one of "His Majesty's Servants," disobedient and punishable. She preferred possible purgatory to present imprisonment, and went back to her duty.
To this house again came Voltaire, as her visitor this time, along with Diderot and Marmontel and many such men. Garrick came, too, when in Paris—came quietly, less eager to proclaim his ardent admiration for the woman than his public and professional acclamation of the actress in the theatre. Her parts all played, she left the stage when a little past forty, and, sinking slowly into age and poverty and misery, she died at the age of eighty in 1803.
All these flashing fireworks are dimmed and put to shame by the gentle glow and the steadfast flame of the wood-fire on Racine's home hearthstone. It lights up the gloomy, mean street, even as we stand here. He was, in truth, an admirable husband and father, and it is this side of the man that we prefer to regard, rather than that side turned toward other men. Of them he was, through his over-much ambition, easily jealous, and, being sensitive and suspicious as well, and given to a biting raillery, he alienated his friends. Boileau alone was too big of soul to allow any estrangement. These two were friends for almost forty years, in which not one clouded day is known. The letters between them—those from 1687 to 1698 are still preserved—show the depth of Racine's manly and delicate feeling for his friend, then "in his great solitude at Auteuil." They had been appointed royal historiographers soon after Racine's marriage in 1677, and, in that office, travelled together a good deal, in the Ghent campaign of 1678 and again with the army in other fields. They worked together on their notes later, and gathered great store of material; but the result amounted to nothing, and they were posthumously lucky in that their unfinished manuscript was finally burned by accident in 1726.
Whether with Boileau in camp, or alone in the Luxembourg campaign of 1683—Boileau being too ill to go—or at Namur in 1692, or with the King and court at Fontainebleau, Marly, Versailles, in these royal residences where he had his own rooms, wherever he was, Racine never seemed to cease thinking of his home, that home in Rue des Maçons when he first went away, and for the last seven years of his life in Rue Visconti. When absent from home he wrote to his children frequently, and when here he corresponded constantly with his son, who was with the French Embassy at The Hague. To him he gave domestic details and "trivial fond records" of what his mother was doing, of the colds of the younger ones, and of the doings of the daughter in a convent at Melun. He sends to this son two new hats and eleven and a half louis d'or, and begs him to be careful of the hats and to spend the money slowly.
Yet he was fond of court life, and, an adroit courtier, he knew how to sing royal prowess in the field and royal splendor in the palace. He had a way of carrying himself that gave seeming height to his slight stature. His noble and open expression, his fine wit, his dexterous address, his notable gifts as a reader to the King at his bedside, made him a favorite in that resplendent circle. And he was all the more unduly dejected when the Roi Soleil cooled and no longer smiled on him; he was killed when Madame de Maintenon—"Goody Scarron," "Old Piety," "the hag," "the hussy," "that old woman," are the usual pet epithets for her of delicious Duchesse d'Orléans—who had liked and had befriended him, saw the policy of showing him her cold shoulder, as she had shown it to Fénelon. From this shock, Racine, being already broken physically by age and illness, seemed unable to rally. As he sank gradually to the grave he made sedulous provision for his family, dictating, toward the last, a letter begging for a continuance of his pension to his widow, which, it is gladly noted, was afterward done. He urged, also, the claim of Boileau to royal favor: "We must not be separated," he said to his amanuensis; "begin your letter again, and let Boileau know that I have been his friend to my death."
His death came on April 21, 1699. His body lay one night in the choir of Saint-Sulpice, his parish church, and then it was carried for burial to the Abbey of Port-Royal. On the destruction of that institution, his remains were brought back to Paris, in 1711, and placed near those of Pascal, at the entrance of the lady-chapel of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. Racine's epitaph, in Latin, by Boileau, the friend of so many men who were not always friendly with one another, is cut in a stone set in the first pillar of the southern aisle of the choir.
Jean de la Fontaine began to come to Paris, making occasional excursions from his native Château-Thierry, in Champagne, toward 1654, he being then over thirty years of age. A little later, when under the protection and in the pay of the great Fouquet, his visits to the capital were more frequent and more prolonged. He commonly found lodgings on Quai des Grands-Augustins, just around the corner from young Racine, and the two men were much together during the years 1660 and 1661. La Fontaine made his home permanently in the capital after 1664, when he arrived there in the train of the Duchesse de Bouillon, born Anne Mancini, youngest and liveliest of Mazarin's many dashing nieces. Her marriage with the Duc de Bouillon had made her the feudal lady of Château-Thierry, and if she were not compelled to claim, in this case, her privilege as châtelaine over her appanage, it was because there was ampler mandate for the impressionable poet in the caprice of a wilful woman. Incidentally, in this flitting, he left behind his provincial wife. He had taken her to wife in 1647, mainly to please his father, and soon, to please her and himself, they had agreed on a separation. They met scarcely any more after his definite departure. There is a tradition that he chatted, once in a salon somewhere, with a bright young man by whom he found himself attracted, and concerning whom he made inquiry of the bystanders, who informed him that it was his son. Tradition does not record any attempt on his part to improve his acquaintance with the young stranger, or to show further interest in his welfare.