Souper à cinq, coucher à neuf;
Fait vivre d'ans nonnante et neuf."
Montaigne owns that his dinner-hour of eleven in the morning was unduly late, but then his supper came correspondingly late, never before, and often after, six of the evening. Henri IV. dined at the same belated hour, while François I. could not wait later than nine o'clock. Once installed in the Tournelles, this young English bride of Louis's must needs, among other innovations, introduce her own country's customs into her husband's mode of life, as we are told in "la très joyeuse et plaisante histoire" of the "Loyal Serviteur," of Bayard: "His wife changed all his manner of living; he had been wont to dine at eight, and he now dined at mid-day; he had been wont to go to bed at six in the evening, and he now went to bed at midnight." Moreover, she beguiled him into supping late and heavily. So these changes, and other changes in his habits, brought him to his grave, six weeks after his marriage. His Parisians gathered in Rue Saint-Antoine, about the entrance of the Tournelles, in honest sorrow for the loss of the big and benevolent old boy, whom they looked on and loved as the Father of his People; indeed "one of the people," says Michelet, "without the soul of a king."
The Tournelles blazed out bravely for François I., the while the Hôtel Saint-Paul found itself cut up and sold off in lots by him; the two cases showing his way, all through life, of raising money by any means, squeezing his subjects, starting France's national debt as he did, all because of his puerile ambitions, his shallow levity, his selfish waste. He did his best to justify Louis XII.'s shrewd prophecy for him: "Ce grand gars-là gâtera tout." Recalling, one needy day, that he owned Saint-Paul, "un grand hôtel, fort vague et ruineux," he soon got rid of the buildings and the land for coin, reserving one large tract, along the eastern side under the wall, for the erection of an arsenal. And so, with streets cut through the old domain, no trace was left of Charles V.'s "hôtel solennel des grands ébastements." As for the Tournelles, its new master's fondness for all showy gimcrackery adorned it with furniture and fittings, and notably with the tapestries turned out so sumptuously from the factory at Tours, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, that they came into vogue for decoration, in place of wall-paintings. No need to say that the table at the Tournelles was profuse and its court resplendent. There had been few women in the court before now, and it was a garden without pretty flowers, as Brantôme puts it. Anne of Brittany had brightened it a bit for Brantôme with some few dames et demoiselles, but François crowded it with fair women, who brought music and dancing and flirting. This big and brutal dilettante—study his face in the countless portraits in the Louvre and at Azay-le-Rideau—gave little of his time to the Tournelles, however. Setting Pierre Lescot at work on the lovely western wing of his new Louvre, he rushed over the land, building and beautifying at Saint-Germain, Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Blois, Chambord, posing always as the patron and prodrome of the Renaissance in France. At least, he could say truly of himself, "On verra qu'il y a un roi en France;" but besides the throne and his pet foolishnesses, he handed down nothing worth owning to his son—that Henri II. of heavy fist and light brain, slow of thought and of speech, cold, uncongenial, commonplace. Yet the Tournelles was a cheerful home for him and for his official family, when he could get away from the exclusive holding of Diana of Poictiers and her family. His youngest daughter, Marguerite de France, has sketched, in her "Mémoires," a most winning picture of the place and of herself, a lovely maid of seven, playing about the garden or sitting on her father's knee, helping him select a suitor for her, from among the young swells at the court. That scene took place only a few days before his death.
Louis XII.
(Water color, from a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection.)
To the Tournelles comes François Rabelais, in the "Contes Drôlatiques" of Balzac, and gives to King and court that delicious sermon, worthy of Rabelais himself. He has come along Rue Saint-Antoine from his home in Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, a rural lane then, just outside Philippe-Auguste's wall, on the extreme edge of the gardens of Saint-Paul. In that paved and built-up street of to-day none of us can fix on the site of his house, and the tablet on its corner, of Quai des Célestins, tells us only that Rabelais died in a house in this street on April 9, 1553. Charles Nodier, starting out from his Librarian's rooms in the Arsenal Library, on his endless prowls about old Paris, always stopped and took off his hat in front of No. 8 of Rue des Jardins, in honor of the great French humorist. Ignorant of his reason for the selection of this site, we may be content, in imitation of this charming flâneur, to stand uncovered there, before or near the last dwelling of "le savant et ingénieux rieur," whose birthplace and whose statue at Chinon are worth a journey to see; where, too, the local wine will be found as delicate and as individual as when, sold by the elder Rabelais in the fourteenth century, it made the money that sent his famous son to the great schools of the capital. That son closed his life of congenial vagabondage, and of many métiers, in this sedate country road, where he had passed three blameless years, two of them as curé of Meudon, resigning that position in 1552. He was buried in the cemetery of old Saint-Paul, to which we shall find our way later. Modern Paris has doubtless built itself over the grave, as it certainly has over the last dwelling-place, of the narrator of the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel and the creator of Panurge.
The famous lists of the Tournelles extended along the southern edge of its grounds, just beyond the present northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, Rue de Birague being cut through almost their middle line. For more than a hundred years they had been the scene of many a tournament, and not one of them had been so crowded or so brilliant as that which began on June 28, 1559. The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, made in the previous April with England and Spain, was to be celebrated, and there were to be rejoicings over the recent marriage of Henry's sister, Marguerite, with the Duc de Savoie, and of his eldest daughter, Isabelle, with Philip II. of Spain. This girlish third wife of the Spanish King was the heroine of the Don Carlos affair, which has made so many dramas. To rejoice in royal fashion in those days, men must needs fight and ladies must look on. So it came that the King, proud of having shown himself "a sturdy and skilful cavalier" during the two days' tilting, insisted on running a course with Montgomery of the Scottish Guard, whose broken lance pierced Henri's visor through the eye into the brain. He lay unconscious in the Tournelles for eleven days, and there he died on July 10, 1559.
Those lists were never again used, the palace was never again inhabited. All the bravery of the two last courts could not hide the dry-rot of the wooden structures, and all its perfumes could not sweeten the stenches from the open drains all about. Even the hard-headed and strong-stomached Louise de Savoie, mother of François I., had sickened in the place. So "le misérable coup," that freed Catherine de' Medici from years of slighted wifehood, gave her an excuse for leaving the malodorous and unhealthful Tournelles, with her four sons and her unmarried daughter. A portion of the structures was kept by her second son, Charles IX., for his birds and dogs, until his mother got him to order its destruction by an edict dated January, 1565.