Going back to Place de la Bastille, on our map, we may follow the course of the new town wall along the curve of the inner boulevards, to Porte Saint-Denis; whence it took a straight southwesterly course, parallel with present Rue Aboukir, through Place des Victoires and the Bank of France, and diagonally across the gardens of the Palais-Royal, to the gate of Saint-Honoré, nearly in the centre of our Place du Théatre-Français. It was this gate and its protecting works that were pounded by the "canons et coulevrines" of Joan of Arc, and it was this portion of the wall which was assaulted by her at the head of her men; an assault that would have succeeded, and so have given Paris to the French, had she not been struck down by a crossbow bolt, so striking panic to her followers. When you post your letters in the outside southern box of the Post-office on the corner of Avenue de l'Opéra and Place du Théâtre-Français, or when you look in at the incubating chickens in the shop window alongside, you are standing, as near as may be, on the spot where she fell wounded on September 8, 1429. Her tent was pitched, and her head-quarters fixed, on the outer slope of the Butte des Moulins, a few feet north of where now stands the apse of the Church of Saint-Roch. From Porte Saint-Honoré, the wall went direct, across present Place du Carrousel, to the round Tour de Bois on the river-shore, and from that tower a chain was swung slantwise up-stream to the Tour de Nesle on the southern bank.
This great wall, when quite finished, was an admirable example of mediæval mural masonry. Besides its round gate-towers, it was strengthened by many square towers, and was crenellated, and had frequent strong sentry-boxes and watch-towers between the battlements. On the outside was a wide, deep ditch bank-full of water. All stood intact until partly levelled by Louis XIII. in 1634, and entirely so by Louis XIV. in 1666, during which thirty years the popular pun had run: "Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant." It was about 1670 that the boulevards were laid out over the foundations of the wall, its ditch filled in, and trees planted. Two of the gates were kept, enlarged, and made into triumphal arches; and these Portes Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin stand there to-day, dingy memorials of Ludovican pride and pomposity. A century later, in 1770, every trace of wall and moat was wiped away, the driveway was partly paved, and building began; but it was not until 1830 that sidewalks were made, and that grand mansions replaced the former shabby structures. We cannot put hand on any stone of the wall itself, to-day.
Within the enceinte thus made, our Marais was at length entirely enclosed; away from its river-front, bordered by abbeys and monasteries; through its streets, walled off by palaces and mansions; and its other streets, packed with modest dwellings and shops; far back to the gardens and the vineyards, and the waste fields not yet tilled, that spread all around the inner zone of the wall. Within it, too, was brought the vast domain of the Templars, covering the space from this outer wall away south to Rue de la Verrerie, and between Rues du Temple and Vieille-du-Temple. It was partly under cultivation, partly left wild to forest and bog, this portion being known as the Marais du Temple. Farther north were the buildings—palaces, priories, chapels—all secure within their own crenellated wall, all commanded and defended by the moated and towered citadel known as the Temple.
The order had been founded early in crusading days, in the beginning of the twelfth century, by nine French gentlemen and knights, who, clad in white robes marked with a red cross, devoted themselves to the service and the safety of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Louis VII. gave them this waste land late in the same century. The small godly body, vowed to poverty and humility, grew large in numbers and appetite, great in wealth and pride. Its knights were equal with princes, its monks were bankers for kings, and all had become simply a gang of sanctimonious brigands. A Capet saw the birth of the order, a Capet thought it time to strangle it as it neared its two-hundredth birthday. Philippe IV., "le Bel," less solicitous for the genuine faith than for the good coin of the Templars, laid hands on them and on it. He got rid of them by axe and stake and in other ways approved of in that day, and parcelled out their lands; through which streets were cut later, and building begun, when this new wall put them on its safe side.
With the later history of the Temple we cannot concern ourselves, save to say that it long served as a sanctuary, later as a prison, and that its last stone was plucked away, six and a half centuries after it was laid, early in the nineteenth century. The palace of the Grand Prior stood exactly on the Rue du Temple front of the present Square du Temple. That little garden was his garden, and on its other edge, just at the junction of Rues des Archives and Perrée of to-day, rose the Tower, so famous and so infamous in prison annals.
Safely settled in his Hôtel Saint-Paul, within his own wall—Marcel quiet in his grave at last, the nobles curbed, the Jacquerie crushed—the young Dauphin, who had been weak and dissembling, and who was now grown, by long apprenticeship to his trade of royalty, into the strong, prudent, politic Charles V., known in history as Charles the Wise, made proclamation, on his accession in 1364, that this—"l'hôtel solennel des grands ébastements"—should be henceforth the royal residence. In the old Palace on the Island was held the official court; the Louvre, partly rebuilt and brightened by him, was kept for the occasional "séjour, souper, et gîte" of roving royalty. Here in "Saint-Pol" was his home, from whose windows he looked out, with keen, patient, far-sighted vision, over the Paris and the France he had quelled and tranquillized.
The Hôtel Saint-Paul was a town in itself, of many mansions, big and little, of châteaux with their parks, of farms with gardens, of orchards, fish-ponds, fowl-houses, a menagerie. Sauval goes with gusto into details of the buildings and their apartments, the decorations, furniture, and pavements; and the chronicle is appetizing of the dinners and banquets given to embassies and to honored visitors. Withal, pigeons perched on the carved balustrades, and guards lay on straw in the halls. It was a simple patriarchal life led here by Charles the Wise, and here begun by his son, Charles the Silly. A pretty, light-minded child of eleven, on his father's death, he remained a child through his dissolute and diseased early manhood, and through his later years of spasmodic madness and of intermittent reason, to his old age of permanent childishness.
While in Paris, this was his abode, and here he was left, almost a prisoner to unconcerned servants, by his shameless wife, Isabeau de Bavière. When she saw him, once in a way, he looked on her with unknowing eyes, or with knowing eyes of horror. His only companion was the low-born Odette de Champdivers, and with her he played the cards that untrue tradition claims to have been invented for him. He prowled about these halls, in filthy rags, eaten by ulcers and vermin, gnawing his food with canine greed; he ranged through these grounds, finding fellowship with the animals that were not let loose, but kept in cages. You may hunt up the stone walls of those cages—originally on pointed arches with short Romanesque pillars—and the stone foundations of the royal stables, in the yards on the southern side of Rue des Lions; a street whose name tells of these menageries, and that seems to echo with their roarings. The alleyway of cherry-trees now makes Rue de la Cerisaie, and Rue Beautreillis replaces the green tunnels of vines on trellises, where were gathered the grapes—good as are those of Thomery to-day—which produced the esteemed vin de l'hôtel Saint-Paul. Along the farther edge of its grounds, just under the old wall, ran the lane that is now Rue des Jardins; and Rue Charles V. keeps alive the memory of the founder of Saint-Paul. In all these streets, we are treading on the ground he loved.
After the wretched mad king died here in 1422, royalty came no more to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and the place ran to waste. It was no home for the new Dauphin, come to his kingdom as Charles VII., by the grace of Joan of Arc and of God. His boyish memories were of a dreary childhood, between a mad father, a devilish mother who had hated him from his birth, and princely relatives raging and wrestling over those two for the power to misgovern France. Outside the royal madhouse, Paris was a butcher-shop. Burgundians and Armagnacs were howling crazy war-cries in every street, ambuscading and assassinating at every corner, equally thirsty for blood, but both surpassed in that thirst by the butchers and horse-knackers, led by Jean Caboche and called Cabochians. All these factions, while intent solely on bloodshed, were loud-mouthed with loyalty and patriotism. They were all alike, and we may transfer to them and to their times the apt phrase of Joseph de Maistre, concerning the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew: "Quelques scélérats firent périr quelques scélérats." Almost every leader of men in those days came to his end by arms and in arms, and death by violence seemed the natural death. The town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black-death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came marching on; the while la danse Macabre whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries.
On the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Hôtel Saint-Paul, stretched the grounds of the old hôtel of Pierre d'Orgemont, Bishop of Paris. This property had come to the crown by purchase or by gift, and had been partly torn down, rebuilt, and its grounds greatly enlarged, to make a maison-de-plaisance for Charles VI. The principal building had so many and such various shaped towers and turrets that it was named the Palais des Tournelles. Viewed from a distant height, as from the tower of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo, it had the look of a set of giant chessmen. This was the place selected by the Duke of Bedford for his residence during the English occupation of Paris; and from here, after the death of his brother Henry V. of England—and heir of France, as was then claimed—he reigned as Regent for the little Henry VI. He enlarged the buildings and beautified the grounds, in which he kept many rare birds. He kept, too, the rare manuscripts brought together by Charles V. in the Louvre; and after his death in Rouen—where he had helped burn The Maid—this library was carried to England, when the English departed from France. It was ransomed with coin, and brought back to Paris, by the two grandsons of its original owner—Charles of Orleans, and his brother of Angoulême, and became the nucleus of the Royal, now the National Library.