The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume 2 (of 2)

by Benjamin Ellis Martin; Charlotte M. Martin

For, when Jean II., "le Bon," was sent to his long captivity in England from the field of Poictiers, won by the Black Prince in 1356, it was the first Dauphin France had had, known later as Charles V., who acted as Regent in his father's absence. He was a sickly and a studious youth, easily alarmed by the violence of these guilds, now making one more savage assault on royal prerogatives, in a desperate stroke to secure the right of the townsmen to rule their town. The Dauphin was afraid of being trapped in the Louvre, and he took refuge in the old Palace of the City. To him forces his way, one day, the boisterous Marcel at the head of three thousand armed and howling men, kills two of the royal marshals in the Presence, and places his own cap of the town colors, red and blue—these were combined with the Bourbon white to make the Tricolor, centuries later—on the head of the terrified Dauphin, either to protect him, or in insolent token of this new recruit to the faction. As soon as might be, the Dauphin got away from his revolted citizens, and came back to his town only when strong enough to hold it against them. Nor would he then trust himself to a permanent residence in the Island-Palace, and it was allowed to fall into disrepair through several successive reigns. Louis XII. made partial restorations, and occasionally sojourned in his palace "in mid-stream," that made him think of his Loire. Parliament already owned the building then, by gift from Charles VII., and since then it has always been known as the Palais de Justice. The returned Dauphin took up his abode in the Hôtel d'Étampes, in the quarter of Saint-Paul, outside Philippe-Auguste's wall; and, by successive purchases, secured other neighboring hôtels and their grounds. This spacious enceinte, within its own walls, stretched from behind the gardens of the Archbishop of Sens, on the river front, and from the grounds of the Célestins, just east of them, on Port Saint-Paul—where the Dauphin's new estate had a grand portal and entrance-way from the quay and the river—away back to Rue Saint-Antoine on the north; and from just outside the old wall, eastwardly to the open country. This domain, and the suburbs that had grown beyond that old wall, toward the north, now came to be embraced within a new enclosure. On the southern side of the river there seemed no need for any enlargement of the old enclosure.

This wall, known in history as the wall of Charles V., was partly quite new, partly an extension or a strengthening of a wall begun by Marcel in 1356; under the pretext of "works of defence of the kingdom against the English," and carried on in offence of his royal master. But before he had finished it, he came to his own end, opportunely for everyone but himself. It is midnight of July 31, 1358, and he is hastening, in darkness and stealth, to open his own gate of Saint-Antoine for the entrance of the combined forces of the English and of Charles the Bad, of Navarre. In Froissart's words: "The same night that this should have been done, God inspired certain burgesses of the city ... who, by divine inspiration, as it ought to be supposed, were informed that Paris should be that night destroyed." So they armed and made their way to Porte Saint-Antoine, "and there they found the provost of merchants with the keys of the gates in his hands;" and their leader, John Maillart, asked, "Stephen, what do you here at this hour?" When Stephen told John not to meddle, John told Stephen: "By God, you're not here for any good, at this hour, and I'll prove it to you." And so, as his notion of proof, "he gave with an axe on Stephen's head, that he fell down to the earth—and yet he was his gossip." Thus died Stephen Marcel, the martyr of devotion to the liberties of his fellow-citizens, in the eyes of many. To others of us, he is the original of the modern patriot of another land, who thanked God that he had a country—to sell; and his ignoble death seems to be the just execution of a traitor. It is due to him to own that he was a strong man, genuine and pitiless in his convictions, and might have merited well of his town and his country, but that the good in him was poisoned by his rapacity for power, and polluted by personal hatred of the Dauphin. His naked body, before being thrown into the Seine, lay exposed for days in front of the Convent of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, whose grounds stretched from without the old wall, eastwardly along the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine. Through them was cut our present Rue Sévigné, and it was on the spot made now by the corner of that street and Rue Saint-Antoine, half way between the old gate and the new gate just built by Marcel, that the crowd gathered to gaze on his corpse.

Froissart rightly claims, referring to Marcel's projected wall with his customary delightful enthusiasm, that it was "a great deed to furnish an arm, and to close with defence, such a city as Paris. Surely it was the best deed that ever any provost did there, for else it had been, after divers times, overrun and robbed by divers occasions." It was a greater deed that was now done by Charles V., and his Provost of Paris, Hugues Aubriot; and their new wall is well worth a little journey along its line, easily traced on our Paris map.

We have already made a visit to Quai des Célestins, and have read the tablet that marks the place where played Molière and his troupe, in 1645; and the other tablet that shows the site of Philippe-Auguste's Barbeau tower, constructed toward 1200, and taking its name from the great Abbey of Barbeau, whose extensive grounds bordered the river-bank here. From this huge tower and its gateway, kept intact as the starting-point at this end, the new wall turned at a right angle to the fast crumbling old wall, and went eastwardly along the shore; which they now banked up and planted with elms. That shore-line is now Boulevard Morland—named from that brave colonel of chasseurs who was killed at Austerlitz—and the land in front, as far as Quai Henri IV., was anciently the little Île des Javiaux, renamed Île Louvier in the seventeenth century, when it served as a vast woodyard for the town. The slight arm of the river that cut it off has been filled in, and the island is now one with the mainland. At the corner of Boulevard Bourdon—which records the name of a colonel of dragoons, who fell at Austerlitz—the new wall turned, and followed what is now the middle line of that boulevard to the present Place de la Bastille. Here was the two-round-towered gateway built by Marcel, and called, as were called all those gateways, Bastilia—a word of mediæval Latin, meaning a small fortress, such as was formed by each of these gates with its flanking towers. There were many of them opening into and guarding the town, that of Saint-Denis being the only other one of the size of this of Saint-Antoine; which was enlarged into the massive fortress known to us as the Bastille.

Of all the wretched memories of the accursed old prison, we shall awaken only one; that of Hugues Aubriot, its builder and its first tenant. Made Provost of Paris by Charles V.—who, after his hapless experience with Marcel, when Dauphin, would have no more Provost of Merchants—Aubriot had many enemies among the guilds and among the clerics. He was frank and outspoken of speech, humane to the priest-despoiled and mob-harried Jews, for whom he had, like his royal master, toleration if not sympathy, and to whom he returned their children, caught and christened by force. So, on the very day of the burial of his royal master, in September, 1380, Aubriot was arrested for heresy, and soon sent to his own Bastille of Saint-Antoine, "pour faire pénitence perpétuelle, au pain de tristesse, et à l'eau de douleur." The Church sentence gives a poetic touch to prosaic bread and water. Aubriot fed only a short time on these delicacies, for he was rescued by the mob that, for the moment, idolized him, and led in triumph to his home. That home, from which he speedily fled out of Paris in terror of his rescuers, was given by Charles V. to this good servant, and we may stop, just here, to look on what is left of it.

The Hôtel du Prévôt.

Under an arch at No. 102 Rue Saint-Antoine, we enter Passage Charlemagne, and go through an outer into an inner court. In its northwestern corner is a tower containing an old-time spiral staircase. This is the only visible vestige of the palace of the Provost of Paris, its unseen portions being buried under, or incorporated with, the structures of the Lycée Charlemagne, just behind us toward the east. The boundary railing, between this college and the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, is exactly on the line of Philippe-Auguste's wall. From the inner or city side of that wall, the provost's palace, with its grounds, stretched to Rue Prévôt, then Rue Percée; that name still legible in the carved lettering on its corner with Rue Charlemagne. In that street, behind us as we stand here, is the southern entrance of his grounds, whose northern line was on Rue Saint-Antoine. This tower before us has been sadly modernized and newly painted, but its fabric is intact, with its original, square, wide-silled openings at each of the three landing-places of the old staircase. These openings are within a tall, slender arch, a timid attempt at the ogival, whose bolder growth we shall see presently in the Hôtel de Sens.

Above this arch a superimposed story, its window cut in line with the others below, has taken the place of the battlements. On either side the tower joins a building obviously later than it in date, although it has been claimed that all three structures are fifteenth-century work. The high arch and the other decorations of the tower are undoubtedly of that time, but they are, as undoubtedly, applied over the small stones of a much more ancient fabric. This conviction is reinforced by the sentiment that makes us see Charles the Wise come into this court, with his good Aubriot, enter that low door, and climb that staircase, looking out through those windows as he mounts. In the year of that King's death there was born a future owner of this tower and its palace. This was Pierre de Giac, a charming specimen of the gang that helped John of Burgundy and Louis of Orleans in their ruin of France—the only job in which they were ever at one. Pierre de Giac, after betraying both sides, fell into the strong clutch of the Duke of Richmond, by whom, after torture, he was tied in a bag and flung into the Seine. His crony, Louis d'Orléans, had possession of this property in the closing years of the fourteenth century, when he instituted the order of the Porc-Épic in honor of the baptism of his eldest son, Charles the Poet. The family emblem which gave its name to this order, gave it also to this hôtel, to which it still clings.