After the accidental killing of Henry at the hand of Montmorency in the lists of this palace, his widow urged its immediate destruction, and this was accomplished within a few years. One portion of the site became a favorite duelling-ground, and it was here—exactly in the southeastern corner of Place des Vosges, where now nursemaids play with their charges and romping schoolboys raise the dust—that was fought, on Sunday, April 27, 1578, the duel, as famous in history as in the pages of Dumas, between the three followers of the Duc de Guise and the three mignons of Henri III. Those of the six who were not left dead on the ground were borne away desperately wounded. The instigator of the duel, Quélus—"un des grands mignons du roy"—lay for over a month, slowly dying of his nineteen wounds, in the Hôtel de Boissy, hard by in Rue Saint-Antoine, which the King had had closed to traffic with chains. By his bedside Henri spent many hours every day, offering, with sobs, 100,000 francs to the surgeon who should save him.
Not far from this house of death, in Rue Saint-Antoine too, was a little house, very much alive, for it belonged to Marguerite—Navarre only in name—to which none may follow her save the favored one to whom her latest caprice has given a nocturnal meeting. She is carried there, under cover of her closed litter, whenever her mother, never her husband, shows undue solicitude concerning her erratic career.
In the same street, on the corner of Rue Sainte-Catherine, now Sévigné—where stand new stone and brick structures—was the town house of the Comte de Monsoreau. To this house, says Brantôme, Bussy d'Amboise, done with Margot, was lured by a note written by the countess, under her husband's orders and eyes, giving her lover, Bussy, his usual rendezvous during the count's absence. This time the count was at home, with a gang of his armed men; and on this corner, on the night of August 19, 1579, the gallant was duly and thoroughly done to death, not quite so dramatically as Dumas narrates it in one of his magnificent fights.
This Rue Saint-Antoine was, in those days, hardly less of a bustling thoroughfare than in our days, albeit it was then a country road, unpaved, unlighted, bordered by great gardens with great mansions within them, or small dwellings between them. Outside Porte Saint-Antoine—that gate in the town wall alongside the Bastille where now is the end of Rue de la Bastille—on the road to Vincennes, was La Roquette, a maison-de-plaisance of the Valois kings. Hence the title of the modern prisons, on the same site. It was a favorite resort of the wretched third Henry, that shameless compound of sensuality and superstition; and it was on his way there, at the end of Rue de la Roquette, that the vicious little lame Duchesse de Montpensier had plotted to waylay him, and to cut his hair down to a tonsure with the gold scissors she carried so long at her girdle for that very use. He had had two crowns, she said—of Poland and of France—and she meant to give him a third, and make a monk of him, for the sake of her scheming brother, the Duc de Guise. The plot was betrayed, just as Dumas details, by one Nicolas Poulain, a lieutenant of the Prévôt of the Île de France, in the service of the League.
Gorenflot's priory—a vast Jacobin priory—was on the same road, just beyond the Bastille. To visit him out here came Chicot, almost as vivid a creation in our affections as d'Artagnan. Once, when the fat and esurient monk was fasting, Chicot tormented him with a description of their dinner awhile ago, near Porte Montmartre, when they had teal from the marshes of the Grange Batelière—where runs now the street of that name—washed down with the best of Burgundy, la Romanée. These two dined most frequently and most amply, at "La Corne d'Abondance"—a cabaret on the east side of Rue Saint-Jacques, opposite the cloisters and the gardens of Saint-Benoît, where the boy François Villon had lived more than a century before. Either of the two shabby, aged hotels, still left at one corner of the old street may serve for Chicot's pet eating-place. His dwelling was in Rue des Augustins, now Rue des Grands-Augustins. Where that street meets the quay of the same name, is a restaurant dear to legal and medical and lay gourmets, where those two noble diners would be enchanted to dine to-day. Near Chicot's later dwelling in Rue de Bussy—now spelt "Buci"—was the inn, "The Sword of the Brave Chevalier," which served as the meeting-place of the Forty-five Guardsmen, on their arrival in Paris. You may find, in that same street, the lineal descendant of that inn, dirty and disreputable and modernized as to name, but still haunted for us by those forty-five gallant Gascon gentlemen.
The striking change of atmosphere, from the Valois court to the regency of Marie de' Medici and the reign of the two great cardinals, is shown clearly in the pages of Dumas, with his perhaps unconscious subtlety of intuition. We greet with delight the entrance into Paris of a certain raw Gascon youth mounted on his ludicrously colored steed, and we are eager to follow him to the hôtel of the Duc de Tréville in Rue du Vieux-Colombier. This street stretches now, as then, between Place de Saint-Sulpice and Place de la Croix-Rouge, but it has been widened and wholly rebuilt, and the courtyard that bustled with armed men, and every stone of de Tréville's head-quarters, have vanished.
The hôtel of his temporary enemy, Duc de La Trémouille, always full of Huguenots, the King complained, was in Rue Saint-Dominique, at No. 63, in that eastern end cut away by Boulevard Saint-Germain. This had been the Trémouille mansion for only about a century, since the original family home had been given over to Chancellor Dubourg. Built by the founder of the family, Gui de La Trémoille—as it was then spelt—the great fighter who died in 1398, that superb specimen of fourteenth-century architecture, with additions late in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth centuries, stood at the corner of Rues des Bourdonnais and de Béthisy—two of the oldest streets on the north bank—until the piercing of Rue de Rivoli in 1844 compelled its destruction. Fragments of its fine Gothic carvings are set in the wall of the court of No. 31 Rue des Bourdonnais, a building which occupies a portion of the original site. On the front of this house is an admirable iron balcony of later date. And just above, at No. 39 of this street, over the entrance gate of the remaining wing of another mediæval mansion, is a superbly carved stone mask of an old man with a once gilded beard.
It was the new Hôtel La Trémouille, on the south side of the river, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, that was nearly wrecked by de Tréville's guardsmen, running to the rescue of d'Artagnan on that morning of his duel with Bernajoux, and of his danger from the onslaught of de La Trémouille's retainers.
That duel ought to be good enough for us, but we have a hankering for the most dramatic and delightful of all duels in fiction. To get to its ground, we may follow either of the four friends, each coming his own way, each through streets changed but slightly even yet, all four coming out together at the corner of Rues de Vaugirard and Cassette; where stands an ancient wall, its moss-covered coping overshadowed by straggling trees, through whose branches shows the roof of a chapel. It is the chapel, and about it are the grounds, of the Carmes Déchaussés. A pair of these gentry, sent by Pope Paul V., had appeared in Paris in the year of the assassination of Henri IV., and drew the devout to the little chapel they built here in the fields. The order grew rapidly in numbers and in wealth, acquiring a vast extent of ground; roughly outlined now by Rues de Vaugirard, du Regard, du Cherche-Midi and Cassette. The corner-stone of the new chapel, that which we see, was laid by the Regent Marie de' Medici on July 26, 1613. Beyond its entrance, along the street, rise modern buildings; but behind the entrance in the western end of the wall, near Rue d'Assas, stands one of the original structures of the Barefooted Carmelites. This was used for a prison during the Revolution, and no spot in all Paris shows so graphic a scene of the September Massacres. Nothing of the prison has been taken away or altered. Here are the iron bars put then in the windows of the ground floor on the garden side. At the top of that stone staircase the butchers crowded about that door; out through it came their victims, to be hurled down these same steps, clinging to this same railing; along these garden walks some of them ran, and were beaten down at the foot of yonder dark wall. This garden has not been changed since then, except that a large portion was shorn away by the cutting of Rues d'Assas and de Rennes and the Boulevard Raspail.
The narrow and untravelled lane, now become Rue Cassette, and the unfrequented thoroughfare, now Rue de Vaugirard, between the monastery and the Luxembourg Gardens—which then reached thus far—met at just such a secluded spot as was sought by duellists; and this wall, intact in its antique ruggedness, saw—so far as anybody or anything saw—the brilliant fight between five of Richelieu's henchmen, led by the keen swordsman Jussac, and Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, aided by the volunteered sword of d'Artagnan; the sword he had meant to match against each one of the three, at whose side he found himself fighting in the end. And so, cemented by much young blood, was framed that goodly fellowship, of such constancy and vitality as to control kings and outwit cardinals and confound all France, as the lover of Dumas must needs believe!