The printing-office of Marat's "L'Ami du Peuple," succeeded in 1792 by his "Journal de la République Française," was in that noisiest corner of Paris, the Cour du Commerce. It was in that end of the long building of two low stories and attic, numbered 6 and 8, now occupied by a lithographer. After Marat's death, and that of his journal, the widow Brissot opened a modest stationer's shop and reading-room in the former printing-office, we are told by M. Sardou. It is an error that places the printing-office at the present No. 1 of the court, in the building which extended then through to No. 7 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie. These two lots do, indeed, join in their rear, but Marat has no association with either. In Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, certainly, the "Friend of the People" had storage room in the cellar and an office on an upper floor, but it was in one of the tall houses on the western side of the street, just north of the old theatre.
The only claim to our attention of No. 1 Cour du Commerce—a squalid tavern which aspires to the title of "La Maison Boileau"—comes from the presence of Sainte-Beuve. The great critic is said to have rented a room, under his pen-name of "Joseph Delorme," for a long time in this then cleanly hôtel-garni, for the ostensible purpose of working in quiet, free from the importunate solicitors of all sorts who intruded on his home in Rue du Mont-Parnasse, No. 11.
Marat's death was frantically lamented by the rabble, that was quite unable to recognize the man's undeniable abilities and attainments, and that had made him its idolized leader because of his atrocious taste in saying in print exactly what he meant. They carried his body to the nave of the church, and later to its temporary tomb in the garden, of the Cordeliers, a step from his house. In the intervals of smiling hours spent in watching heads fall into the basket, in new Place de la Révolution, they crowded here to weep about his bedraped and beflowered bier. The remains were then placed, with due honors, in the Panthéon. Then, within two years, the same voices that had glorified him shrieked that his body and his memory should be swept into the sewer. It was the voice of the people—the voice of Deity, in all ages and in all lands, it is noisily asserted.
When the Franciscan monks, who were called Cordeliers because of their knotted cord about the waist, came to Paris early in the thirteenth century, they were given a goodly tract of ground just within the Saint-Germain gate, stretching, in rough outlines, from Rues Antoine-Dubois and Monsieur-le-Prince nearly to Boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel. The church they built there was consecrated by the sainted Louis IX. in 1262, and when burned, in 1580, was rebuilt mainly by the accursed Henri III. New chapels and cloisters were added in 1672, and there were many other structures pertaining to the order within these boundaries. Of all these, only the Refectory remains to our day. The site of the church, once the largest in Paris, is covered by Place de l'École-de-Médecine and by a portion of the school; something of the shape and some of the stones of the old cloisters are preserved in the arched court of the Clinique; bits of the old walls separate the new laboratories, and another bit, with its strong, bull-nosed moulding, may be seen in the grounds of the water-works behind No. 11 Rue Racine, this street having been cut through the monks' precincts, so separating the Infirmary, to which this wall belonged, and that stretched nearly to the rear walls of Lycée Saint-Louis, from the greater portion of "Le Grand Couvent de l'Observance de Saint François."
Turn in at the gateway in the corner of Place de l'École-de-Médecine, and the Refectory stands before you, a venerable fabric of Anne of Brittany's building, with sixteenth and seventeenth century adornments, all in admirable preservation. The great hall, filled with the valuable collection of the Musée Dupuytren, attracts us as a relic of ancient architecture, and as the last existing witness of the Revolutionary nights of the Cordeliers Club. That club had its hall just across the garden alongside the Refectory, in one of the buildings of the cloisters, which, with the church, had been given over to various uses and industries. Hence the name of the club, enrolled under the leadership of Danton, on whom the men of his section looked as the incarnation of the Revolution. To him Robespierre and his republic were shams, and to his club the club of the Jacobins was at first distinctly reactionary. It took but little time, in those fast-moving days, for the Cordeliers, in their turn, to be suspected for their unpatriotic moderation!
The Refectory of the Cordeliers.
We must not leave our Cour du Commerce, without a glance at the small building on the northern corner of its entrance from Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie. It was here that the first guillotine was set up for experiments on sheep, by Dr. Antoine Louis, Secretary of the Academy of Surgeons, and the head of a committee appointed by the National Assembly on October 6, 1791. On that day a clause in the new penal code made death by decapitation the only method of execution, and the committee had powers to construct the apparatus, which was to supersede Sanson's sword. It was not a new invention, for the mediæval executioners of Germany and Scotland had toyed with "the Maiden," but for centuries she had lost her vogue. On December 1, 1789, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had tried to impress on the Assembly the need of humane modes of execution, and had dwelt on the comfort of decapitation by his apparatus until he was laughed down. That grim body could find mirth only in a really funny subject like the cutting off of heads! After two years and more, the machine, perfected by Dr. Louis, and popularly known as "La Louisette," was tried on a malefactor in the Place de Grève on April 25, 1792. Three days later the little lady received her official title, "La Guillotine."
Dr. Guillotin had made his model and his experiments at his residence, still standing, with no external changes, at No. 21 Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs. It was already a most ancient mansion when he came here to live, and perhaps to remain until his death—in bed—in 1814. It had been known as the Hôtel de Bretagne, and it is rich in personal history. To its shelter came Catherine de Lorraine, the young widow of the Duc de Montpensier, the "lame little devil" whom Henri III. longed to burn alive, for her abuse of him after the murder of her brother Guise. Within its walls, Anne of Austria's treasurer, the rich and vulgar Bertrand de la Bazinière—whom we have met on Quai Malaquais—hoarded the plunder which he would not, or dared not, spend. Louis XIV. gave him, later, lodgings in the Bastille, in that tower named Bazinière always after. In this same Hôtel de Bretagne, Henrietta of France, widowed queen of England, made her temporary home in the winter of 1661, near her daughter, lately installed as "Madame," wife of the King's brother, in the Palais-Royal. Returning from England in 1665, this unhappy queen went to the last refuge of her troubled life in the convent she had founded on the heights of Chaillot. From that farther window of the first story on the right of the court, the Comte de Maulevrier, Colbert's nephew, threw himself down to his death on the pavement on Good Friday, 1706. In time the stately mansion became a hôtel-garni, was appropriated as National Domain in the Revolution, and sold in a lottery.