THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION
Charlotte Corday.
(From the copy by Baudry of the only authentic portrait, painted in her prison.)
THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION
It is no part of the province of this book to reconstruct the Paris of the Revolution, nor is there room for such reconstruction, now that M. G. Lenôtre has given us his exhaustive and admirable "Paris Révolutionnaire." Despite the destruction of so much that was worth saving of that period, there yet remain many spots for our seeing. The cyclone of those years had two centres, and one of them is fairly well preserved. It is the Cour du Commerce, to which we have already come in search of the tower and wall of Philippe-Auguste. Outside that wall, close to the Porte de Buci, there had been a tennis-court, which was extended, in 1776, into a narrow passage, with small dwellings on each side. The old entrance of the tennis-court was kept for the northern entrance of the new passage, and it still remains under the large house, No. 61 Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. The southern entrance of the passage was in the western end of Rue des Cordeliers, now Rue de l'École-de-Médecine. In 1876, exactly one hundred years after the construction of this Cour du Commerce, its southern half and its southern entrance were cut away by modern Boulevard Saint-Germain, on the northern side of which a new entrance to the court was made. At the same time the houses on the northern side of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine were demolished, and replaced by the triangular space that holds the statues of Danton and Paul Broca among its trees. Those houses faced, across the street, whose narrowness is marked by the two curbstones, the houses, of the same age and the same style, that are left on the southern side of this section of the modern boulevard. One of the houses then destroyed had been inhabited by Georges-Jacques Danton. It stood over the entrance of the court, and his statue—a bronze of his own vigor and audacity—has been placed exactly on the spot of that entrance, exactly under his dwelling-place. The pediment of this entrance-door is now in the grounds of M. Victorien Sardou, at Marly-le-Roi. Danton's apartment, on the first floor above the entresol, had two salons and a bedroom looking out on Rue des Cordeliers, while the dining-room and working-room had windows on the Cour du Commerce. Here in 1792 he had his wholesome, peaceful home, with his wife and their son; and to them there sometimes came his mother, or one of his sisters, for a visit.
In the entresol below lived Camille Desmoulins and his wife in 1792. The two young women were close friends, and M. Jules Claretie has given us a pretty picture of them together, in terrified suspense on that raging August 10th. Lucile Desmoulins knew, on the next day, that the mob had at least broken the windows of the Tuileries, for someone had brought her the sponges and brushes of the Queen! And on the 12th, Danton carried his wife from here to the grand hôtel in Place Vendôme, the official residence of the new Minister of Justice. His short life in office being ended by his election to the Convention in the autumn of that year, he returned to this apartment; to which, three months after the death of his first wife in that same year, he brought a youthful bride. And here, on March 30, 1794, he was arrested. Before his own terrible tribunal his reply, to the customary formal questions as to his abode, was: "My dwelling-place will soon be in annihilation, and my name will live in the Panthéon of history." He spoke prophetically. The clouds of a century of calumny have only lately been blown away, and we can, at last, see clearly the heroic figure of this truest son of France; a "Mirabeau of the sans-culottes," a primitive man, unspoiled and strong, joyous in his strength, ardent yet steadfast, keen-eyed for shams, doing when others were talking, scornful of phrasemongers, and so genuine beside the petty schemers about him that they could not afford to let him live.
Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist Desmoulins had, in his queer and not unlovable composition, a craving for a hero and a clinging to a strong nature. His first idol was Mirabeau. That colossus had died on April 2, 1791, and Desmoulins had been one of the leaders in the historic funeral procession that filled the street and filed out from it four miles in length. Mont-Blanc was then the street's name, and for a few days it was called Rue Mirabeau, but soon took its present name, Chaussée-d'Antin, from the gardens of the Hôtel d'Antin, through which it was cut. The present No. 42, with a new front, but otherwise unchanged, is the house of Mirabeau's death, in the front room of its second floor. Mirabeau's worthy successor in Camille's worship was Danton, near whom he lived, as we have seen, and with whom he went as secretary to the Ministry of Justice. After leaving office, Camille and his wife are found in his former bachelor home in Place du Théâtre-Français, now Place de l'Odéon. The corner house there, that proclaims itself by a tablet to have been his residence, is in the wrong; and that tablet belongs by right to the house on the opposite corner, No. 2 Place de l'Odéon and No. 7 Rue Crébillon. From his end windows in this latter street, when he had lived there as a bachelor, Camille could look slantwise to the windows of an apartment at No. 22 Rue de Condé, and he looked often, attracted by a young girl at home there with her parents. There is still the balcony on the front, on which Lucile Duplessis ventured forth, a little later, to blow kisses across the street. At the religious portion of their marriage, in Saint-Sulpice on December 29, 1790, the témoins of the groom were Brisson, Pétion, Robespierre. The last-named had been Camille's schoolfellow and crony at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and remained his friend as long as it seemed worth while. The wedding party went back to this apartment—on the second floor above the entresol—for the dîner de noces. Everything on and about the table—it is still shown at Vervins, a village just beyond Laon—was in good taste, we may be sure, for Desmoulins was a dainty person, for all his tears over Marat; his desk, at which he wrote the fiery denunciations of "Le Vieux Cordelier," had room always for flowers. It was here that he was arrested, to go—not so bravely as he might—to prison, and then to execution with Danton, on April 5, 1794. His Lucile went to the scaffold on the 12th of the same month, convicted of having conspired against the Republic by wandering about the gardens of the Luxembourg, trying to get a glimpse of her husband's face behind his prison window. To us he is not more visible in this garden than he was to her, but in the garden of the Palais-Royal he leaps up, "a flame of fire," on July 12, 1789, showing the Parisians the way they went to the Bastille on the 14th.
In the same section with Danton and Desmoulins, and equally vivid with them in his individuality, we find Jean-Paul Marat. His apartment, where lived with him and his mistress, Simonne Evrard, his two sisters, Albertine and Catherine—all three at one in their devotion to his loathsome body—was in a house a little easterly from Danton's, on the same northern side of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine. It was at this house that Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday d'Armans, on July 13, 1793, presented herself as "l'ange de l'assassination," in Lamartine's swelling phrase. She had driven across the river, from the Hôtel de la Providence. In our Dumas chapter we shall try to find her unpretending inn, and shall find only its site. In the Musée Grévin, in Paris, you may see the baignoire in which Marat sat when he received Charlotte Corday and her knife—a common kitchen-knife, bought by her on the day before at a shop in the Palais-Royal. The bath is shaped like a great copper shoe, and on its narrow top, through which his head came, was a shelf for his papers.