Once more in Paris, and for awhile at the Feuillantines, we find the devoted mother settling herself and her sons, on the last day of the year 1813, in a roomy old building of the time of Louis XV., in Rue du Cherche-Midi. Her rooms were on the ground floor, as usual, with easy access to the health-giving garden, and the boys slept above. There was a court in front, in which, during the occupation of Paris by the Allies, were quartered a Prussian officer and forty of his men; to the disgust of the mother, and to the joy of her boys, captivated by soldierly gewgaws. The site of court and house and garden is covered by a grim military prison, in which history has been made in the closing years of the nineteenth century.
On the other side of the street, at the corner of Rue du Regard, was and is the Hôtel de Toulouse, a seventeenth-century structure, named for its former occupant, the Comte de Toulouse, son of Madame de Montespan. It was used as a prison early in the nineteenth century, and since then it has been the seat of the Conseil-de-Guerre; famous, or infamous, in our day, as the head-quarters of the Court-Martial. The wide façade on the court has no distinction, nor has the "Tribunal of Military Justice" on the first floor; to which we mount by the broad staircase at the left of the entrance-door. Above are the living-rooms of the commandant, who was a Monsieur Foucher at that time, with whose family, the Hugo family, already acquainted, formed now a lasting friendship. It was this intimacy that made their home here the brightest spot in Hugo's boyish horizon.
The Hôtel de Toulouse.
When Napoleon's return from Elba brought his old officers back to their allegiance, General Hugo hurried to Paris, and, before hurrying away again, placed his boys in a boarding-school—the Abbaye Cordier, in Rue Sainte-Marguerite. This was a gloomy little street, dingy with the smoke of the smiths' forges that filled it, elbowed in among equally narrow ways between the prison of the Abbaye—then standing where now runs the roadway of modern Boulevard Saint-Germain—and the Cour du Dragon. This superb relic of ancient Paris has been left untouched, and the carved dragon above its great arched entrance looks down, out of the past, on modern Rue de Rennes. Rue Sainte-Marguerite has been less lucky, for such small section of it, as remained after the cutting of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue de Rennes, is mainly rebuilt, and renamed Rue Gozlin.
A little later, Victor was advanced to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the college of many another Frenchman who became famous in after life, notably of Molière. These two youths saw the same buildings of the Lycée and studied in the same rooms; for it was demolished and rebuilt only under the Second Empire. It stood—and the new structure stands—in Rue Saint-Jacques, behind the Collége de France. It was something of a stretch for youthful legs by the roundabout way between college and home, but he plodded sturdily along, that solemn lad, taking himself and all he did as seriously then as when he became a Peer of France, and the self-elected Leader of a Cause.
In 1818 Madame Hugo and her boys came to a new home on the third floor of No. 18 Rue des Petits-Augustins, in a wing of that old abbaye of the Augustin fathers, which had given its name to the street, now Rue Bonaparte. The entrance court, on that street, of the École des Beaux-Arts, covers the site of this wing, and the school has replaced the rest of the monastery, saving, within its modern walls, only the chapel built by Queen Marguerite. In the old court and the old buildings behind, at that time, were stored tombs of French kings and historic monuments and historic bones, removed from their original grounds, as has been told in our Molière chapter, to save them from mutilation at the hands of the Revolutionary Patriots. On this queer assemblage the boys' room looked down; their mother, from her front windows, looked down on the remains of the vast gardens of the Hôtel de La Rochefoucauld, once a portion of the grounds of Marguerite, that stretched to the north of Rue Visconti, between Rues de Seine and Bonaparte. The view, so far below, could not compensate Madame Hugo for the loss of her own garden, which meant sun and air and health. She drooped and fell ill, and her only solace was the devotion of her son Victor. Whenever she was able to go out, they spent their evenings with the Foucher family, at the Hôtel de Toulouse. While the boys sat silent, listening to the talk of their elders, Victor's eyes were busy, and they taught him that Adèle Foucher was good to look upon. These two children walked, open-eyed, into love, as simply and as naturally as did Cosette and Marius; and after a brief period of storm and stress, their marriage came in due time, and they began their long and happy life together.
This Hugo home in Rue des Petits-Augustins, rising right in front of all who came along Rue des Beaux-Arts, was a familiar sight to a young Englishman, about ten years after this time. His name was William Makepeace Thackeray, and he was lodging in this latter street among other students of the Latin Quarter, and trying to make a passable artist with the material given him by nature for the making of an unsurpassable author. His way lay in front of the old abbaye, each time he went to or from the schools, or his modest restaurant. Thirion was the host of this cheap feeding-place, esteemed by art students, on the northern side of old Rue des Boucheries; of which this side and some of its buildings have been saved, while the street itself has been carried away in the wider stream of Boulevard Saint-Germain. There, at No. 160, to-day, you will find the same restaurant, under the same name on the sign, and the same rooms, swarming with students as during Thackeray's days in Paris.
In 1821, at the end of her term of three years in the abbaye, Madame Hugo took her sons and her furniture directly up Rue Bonaparte and turned into Rue des Mézières, and in its No. 10 they were soon settled in a ground floor with its garden. The great new building at No. 8 stands on the site of house and court and garden. There is left, of their day there, only the two-storied cottage on the western end of No. 6 Rue des Mézières—then No. 8—which preserves the image of the Hugo cottage, and brings back the aspect of the street as they saw it, countrified with just such cottages.