"Twenty Years After" we find our friend, but slightly sobered by those years, in search of a good lodging and of a good table. He fell on both at the inn, "La Chevrette," kept by the pretty Flemish Madeleine, in Rue Tiquetonne. Once a path on the outer side of the ditch, north of the town-wall, named for Rogier Tiquetonne, or Quinquetonne, a rich baker of the fourteenth century, that narrow curved street is, still, as to most of its length, a village highway in the centre of Paris. Its tall-fronted houses rise on either hand almost as he saw them. Among them is the Hôtel de Picardie, and it is out of reason to doubt that d'Artagnan, in memory of Planchet—for Planchet came from Picardy—was attracted by the name and made search therein for suitable rooms. Or, it may please our fancy to believe that this inn bore then the sign of The Kid, and that the kindly hostess changed its name, later, in memory of Planchet, grown prosperous and rich.
D'Artagnan, mounting still higher in rank and income while here, went down lower in the inn; and one fine morning said to his landlady: "Madeleine, give me your apartment on the first floor. Now that I am captain of the Royal Musketeers, I must make an appearance; nevertheless, still keep my room on the fifth story for me, one never knows what may happen!"
Good Master Planchet, sometime valet, and lifelong friend of the great d'Artagnan, turned grocer, and lived over his shop at the sign of "Le Pilon d'Or," in Rue des Lombards. This had been a street of bankers and money-dealers in the outset, and it was named, to alter De Quincey's ornate reference to another Lombard Street, after the Lombards or Milanese, who affiliated an infant commerce to the matron splendors of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. When the financial centre went westward, this street was invaded by the grocers and spice-dealers, who hold it to this day. Its narrow length is still fragrant with the descendants of the spices in which Planchet traded, and of the raisins into which d'Artagnan plunged his hands so greedily.
Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hôtel de Picardie.
To those of us who go through the short and stupid Rue de la Harpe of our Paris, it is puzzling to read of its re-echoing with the ceaseless clatter of troopers riding through. But in those old days, and up to a comparatively recent date, it was one of the important arteries of circulation between the southern side of the town and the Island; the most frequented road between the Louvre and the Luxembourg, when they were both royal residences. It started from the little open place, now enlarged and boasting its fountain, where Rue Monsieur-le-Prince comes out opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, and curved down to the river-bank, and to the first Pont Saint-Michel. It was the only long, unbroken thoroughfare to the west of Rue Saint-Jacques, that street leading to Petit-Pont, and so across the Island to Notre-Dame Bridge. So Rue de la Harpe was a crowded highway, bordered by busy shops. Its western side was done wholly away with by the cutting of Boulevard Saint-Michel, and that broad boulevard has usurped the site of most of the old street; its eastern side saved only in that section along the Cluny garden.
D'Artagnan, while living on the left bank in his early days, made his way by this street to visit his flame Lady de Winter. That dangerous adventuress is domiciled by Dumas at No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, the number of the house still the same. It is a historic house, and its story is told in our Hugo pages. Dumas was one of the frequenters of Hugo's apartment there, and made use of it and its approaches in "The Three Musketeers."
When Athos came to town, in later years, it was his custom to put up at the auberge, "Au Grand Roi Charlemagne," in Rue Guénégaud; a street bearing still its old name, but the inn has gone. So, too, has gone the sign of The Fox, in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, where he found quarters for himself and his son Bragelonne, twenty years after. He brought the youth here, to the scenes of his own youth, hoping to launch him in a like career of arms.
From there, the two went, one night, across the river to a house in the Marais, known to all the footmen and sedan-chairmen of Paris, says Dumas; a house not of a great lord or of a great lady, and where was neither dancing, dining, nor card-playing; yet it was the favorite resort of the men best worth knowing in Paris. It was the abode of "le petit Scarron." About his chair, wherein he was held helpless by his paralysis, met especially the enemies of Mazarin, the witty and lewd rhymesters of the Fronde—not one of them as witty or as lewd as was the crippled host. Yet some soupçon of decency had been brought into his house by his young wife; the poor country girl of sixteen, Françoise d'Aubigné, who accepted the puny paralytic of forty and more, rather than go into a convent. After his death she became Madame de Maintenon, and later Queen of France, by her secret marriage with Louis XIV., as old and almost as decrepit as was her first husband.