During the Revolution, while the Café de la Régence, which faces the present Comédie Française, was the pet resort of the royalist writers, this Café Procope was the gathering-place of the Republican penmen; and they draped its walls in black, and wore mourning for three days, when word came across the water in 1790 of the death of Benjamin Franklin, the complete incarnation to them of true republicanism. Toward the unlamented end of the Second Empire, a small group of young American students was to be found, of an evening, in the Café Procope, harmlessly mirthful over their beer. After a while, they were content to sit night after night in silence, all ears for the monologue at a neighboring table; a copious and resistless outburst of argument and invective, sprinkled with Gallic anecdote and with gros mots, and broken by Rabelaisian laughter, from a magnificent voice and an ample virility. They were told that the speaker was one Léon Gambetta, an obscure barrister, already under the suspicion of the police of the "lurking jail-bird," whom he helped drive from France, within a few years.
The old house is to-day only a pallid spectre of its aforetime red-blooded self, and is nourished by nothing more solid than these uncompact memories. Loving them and all his Paris, its kindly proprietor tries to revitalize its inanimate atmosphere by his "Soirées littéraires et musicales." In a room upstairs "ancient poems, ancient music, old-time song," are listened to by unprinted poets, unplayed dramatists, unhung painters. Some of them read their still unpublished works. The patron enjoys it all, and the waiters are the most depressed in all Paris.
Denis Diderot gives the effect in his work, as Gambetta did in the flesh, of a living force of nature. When, at that same table, Diderot opened the long-locked gate, the full and impetuous outflow swept all before it, submerged and breathless. In his personality, as vivid as that of Mirabeau, we see a fiery soul, a stormy nature, a daring thinker, a prodigious worker. His head seemed encyclopædic to Grimm, his life-long friend; and Rousseau, first friend and later enemy, asserted that in centuries to come that head would be regarded with the reverence given to the heads of Plato and of Aristotle. Voltaire could imagine no one subject beyond the reach of Diderot's activity. Arsène Houssaye names him "the last man of the day of dreaming in religion and royalty, the first man of the day of the Revolution." And John Morley, looking at him from a greater distance than any of these, and with keener eyes, ranks him higher as a thinker than either Rousseau or Voltaire. As thinker, essayist, critic, cyclopædist, Diderot is indeed the most striking figure of the eighteenth century. Rugged, uncouth, headlong, we see him, "en redingote de peluche grise éreintée," in the philosophers' alley of the Luxembourg garden, strolling with more energy than others give to striding. Striking and strong he is in the exquisite bust by Houdon in the Louvre, yet with a refinement of expression and a delicacy of poise of the head that are very winning. This effect might have been gained by a Fragonard working in the solid.
Here, under the trees where meet Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rues de Rennes and Bonaparte, it is the student whom we see in bronze, leaning forward in his chair, a quill pen in hand, his worn face bent and intent. This spot was selected for the statue because just there Diderot resided for many years. His house was at No. 12 Rue Taranne, on the corner of Rue Saint-Benoît, and it was torn down when the former street was widened into the new boulevard. Here, young Diderot, refusing to return to the paternal home at Lancres, when he left the Collége d'Harcourt—the school of Boileau and Racine—lived in a squalid room, during his early days of uncongenial toil in a lawyer's office and of all sorts of penwork that paid poorly—translations, sermons, catalogues, advertisements. Here he was hungry and cold and unhappy; here, in 1743, he married the pretty sewing-girl who lived in this same house with her mother, and who became a devoted and faithful wife to a trying husband. For her he had the only clean love of his not-too-clean life. From this garret he poured forth prose, his chosen form of expression, when poetry was the only vogue, and it is by his persistence, perhaps, that prose has come to the throne in France. And it was while living here that he originated the art-criticism of his country; clear and thorough, discriminating and enthusiastic. Earlier notices of pictures had been as casual as the shows themselves; begun in 1673, under Colbert's protection and the younger Mansart's direction, in a small pavilion on the site of the present Théâtre Français, having one entrance in Rue de Richelieu, another in the garden, into which the pictures often overflowed. When Diderot wrote his notices for Grimm, the exhibitions had permanent shelter in the halls of the Louvre. In 1746, still in this house, he published his "Philosophic Thoughts" and other essays that were at first attributed to Voltaire, and that at last sent the real author to Vincennes. There he was kept for three maddening months by an outraged "Strumpetocracy" and a spiteful Sorbonne, on its last legs of persecution for opinion. You may go to this prison by the same road his escort took, now named Boulevard Diderot, with unconscious topographic humor.
To visit "great Diderot in durance," Grimm and Rousseau came by this road; stopping, before taking the Avenue de Vincennes, at a farm-house on the edge of Place du Trône—now, Place de la Nation—where the sentimentalist quenched his thirst with milk. That was the day when Rousseau picked up the paradox, from Diderot, which he elaborated into his famous essay, showing the superiority of the savage man over the civilized man. There is as slight trace to be found of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Paris of to-day as in the minds of the men of to-day. We see him first, in 1745, at the Hôtel Saint-Quentin of our Balzac chapter, carrying from there the uncomely servant, Thérèse le Vasseur. After this he appears fitfully in Paris through many years. In 1772 he is in Rue Plâtrière—a street now widened and named for him—on the fourth floor of a wretched house opposite the present Post-office. There he was found by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre—as thin-skinned and touchy as Rousseau, yet somehow the two kept friendly—with his repulsive Thérèse, whom he had made his wife in 1768. This preacher of the holiness of the domestic affections had sent their five children to the foundling hospital, according to his own statement, which is our only reason for doubting that he did it. Bernardin found him, clad in an overcoat and a white bonnet, copying music; of which Rousseau knew nothing, except by the intuition of genius. For those who wish, there are the pilgrimages to the Hermitage at Montmorenci, occupied by him in 1756, and nearly forty years later by a man equally attractive, Maximilien Robespierre; and to Ermenonville, the spot of Rousseau's death in 1778. It is easier to stroll to the Panthéon, where, on one side, is a statue of the author of "Le Contrat Social" and "Émile," which gives him a dignity that was not his in life. This tribute from the French nation was decreed by the National Convention of 15 Brumaire, An II, and erected by the National Assembly in 1791. Durable as its bronze this tribute was meant to be, at the time when he was deified by the nation; since then, his body and his memory have been "cast to the dogs; a deep-minded, even noble, yet wofully misarranged mortal." While acknowledging his impress on his generation as an interpreter of moral and religious sentiment, and without denying the claim of his admirers, that he is the father of modern democracy, we may own, too, to a plentiful lack of liking for the man.
Released and returned to his wife in Rue Taranne, Diderot lost no time in beginning again that toil which was his life. With all his other work—"Letters on the Blind, for the use of those who can see," dramas now forgotten, an obscene novel that paid the debts of his mistress—he began and carried out his Encyclopædia. "No sinecure is it!" says Carlyle: "penetrating into all subjects and sciences, waiting and rummaging in all libraries, laboratories; nay, for many years fearlessly diving into all manner of workshops, unscrewing stocking-looms, and even working thereon (that the department of 'Arts and Trades' might be perfect); then seeking out contributors, and flattering them, quickening their laziness, getting payment for them, quarrelling with bookseller and printer, bearing all miscalculations, misfortunes, misdoings of so many fallible men on his single back." On top of all, he had to bear the spasmodic persecution of the Government instigated by the Church. The patient, gentle d'Alembert, with his serenity, his clearness, and his method, helped Diderot more than all the others. And so grew, in John Morley's words, "that mountain of volumes, reared by the endeavor of stout hands and faithful," which, having done its work for truth and humanity, is now a deserted ruin.
As he brought it to an end after thirty years of labor, Diderot found himself grown old and worn, and the busiest brain and hand in France began to flag. By now, he stood next in succession to the King, Voltaire. Yet, for all the countless good pages he has written, it has been truly said that he did not write one great book. Other urgent creditors, besides old age, harassed him, and he had to sell his collection of books. They were bought by the Empress Catharine of Russia, at a handsome value, and she handsomely allowed him to retain them for her, and furthermore paid him a salary for their care. Grimm urged on her, in one of his gossiping feuilles, that have given material for so much personal history, the propriety of housing her library and its librarian properly, and this was done in the grand mansion now No. 39 Rue de Richelieu. We have come to this street with Molière and with Mignard, and there are other memories along this lower length, to which a chapter could be given. We can awaken only those that now belong to No. 50. Here lived a couple named Poisson, and on March 19, 1741, they gave in marriage to Charles Guillaume le Normand their daughter Jeanne-Antoinette, a girl of fifteen. That blossom ripened and rottened into La Pompadour. The house is quite unchanged since that day. In a large rear room on its first floor, in the year 1899, future chroniclers will be glad to note that Moncure D. Conway made an abbreviation of his noble life of Thomas Paine for its French translation. His working-room was in the midst of the scenes of Paine's Paris stay, but not one of them can be fixed with certainty.
The house numbered 39 of this street is occupied by the "Maison Sterlin," a factory of artistic metal-work in locks and bolts and fastenings for doors and windows. It is an attractive museum of fine iron and steel workmanship, ancient and modern. There, in a case, is preserved the superbly elaborate key of Corneille's birth-house in Rouen. The brothers Bricard have had the reverent good taste to retain the late seventeenth-century interior of their establishment, and you may mount by the easy stairs, with their fine wrought-iron rail, to Diderot's dining-room on the first floor, its panelling unaltered since his death there, on July 31, 1784. He had enjoyed, for only twelve days, the grandest residence and the greatest ease his life had known. They had been made busy days, of course, spent in arranging his books and pictures. Sitting here, eating hastily, he died suddenly and quietly, his elbows on the table. On August 1st his body was buried in the parish church of Saint-Roch, and the tablet marking the spot is near that commemorating Corneille, who had been brought there exactly one hundred years before.
This church is eloquent with the presence of these two, with the voice of Bossuet—"the Bible transfused into a man," in Lamartine's phrase—and with the ping of Bonaparte's bullets on its porch; yet there is a presence within, less clamorous but not less impressive than any of these. In the fourth chapel, on your left as you enter, is a bronze bust of a man, up to which a boy and a girl look from the two corners of the pedestal. This is the monument of Charles Michel, Abbé de l'Épée, placed above his grave in the chapel where he held services at times, and the boy and girl stand for the countless deaf-and-dumb children to whom he gave speech and hearing. The son of a royal architect, with every prospect of preferment in the Church, with some success as a winning preacher, his liberal views turned him from this career. His interest in two deaf-mute sisters led him to his life-work. There were others in England, and there was the good Pereira in Spain, who had studied and invented before him, but it is to this gentle-hearted Frenchman that the world of the deaf and dumb owes most for its rescue from its inborn bondage. He gave to them all he had, and all he was; for their sake he went ill-clad always, cold in winter, hungry often. He had but little private aid, and no official aid at all. He alone, with his modest income, and with the little house left him by his father, started his school of instruction for deaf-mutes in 1760.
The house was at No. 14 Rue des Moulins, a retired street leading north from Rue Saint-Honoré, and so named because near its line were the mills of the Butte de Saint-Roch—where we are to find the head-quarters of Joan the Maid. One of these mills may be seen to-day, re-erected and in perfect preservation, at Crony-sur-Ourcq, near Meaux, and above its doorway is the image of the patron-saint, to whom the mill was dedicated in the fifteenth century. This quarter of the town had become, during the reign of Louis XIV., the centre of a select suburb of small, elegant mansions, tenanted by many illustrious men. On the rear of his lot the good abbé built a small chapel, and in it and in the house he passed nearly thirty years of self-sacrifice, ended only by his death on December 23, 1789. When the Avenue de l'Opéra was cut in 1877-8, his street was shortened and his establishment was razed. At the nearest available spot, on the wall of No. 23 Rue Thérèse, two tablets have been placed, the one that fixes the site, the other recording the decree of the Constituent Assembly of July, 1789, by which the Abbé de l'Épée was placed on the roll of those French citizens who merit well the recognition of humanity and of his country. And, in 1791, amid all its troubled labors, the Assembly founded the Institution National des Sourds-Muets of Paris, on the base of his humble school. The big and beneficent institution is in Rue Saint-Jacques, at its intersection with the street named in his honor. And it is an honor to the Parisians that they thus keep alive the memory of their great men, so that, in a walk through their streets, we run down a catalogue of all who are memorable in French history. In the vast court-yard, at that corner, under a glorious elm-tree, is a colossal statue of the abbé, standing with a youth to whom he talks with his fingers. It is the work of a deaf-mute, Félix Martin, well named, for he is most happy in this work.