Windows and balconies are deserted now; there is no clash of steel in the square, whose silence is in striking contrast with the sordid strife of neighboring Rue Saint-Antoine; and these stately mansions, dignified in their unimpaired old age, seem to await in patience the return of their noble occupants. There has been no change in them since, on their completion in 1630, they were regarded as the grandest in all Paris, and there is hardly any change in their surroundings. The commonplace iron railings of the square, put there at the same time with the fountains, by Louis-Philippe, were the cause of hot protest by Hugo and other residents of the quarter, who mourned the loss of the artistic rails and gateway of seventeenth-century fabrication. And Rue des Vosges has been cut through into the northern side of the square, making a thoroughfare to Boulevard Beaumarchais, such as was not planned originally. That plan provided for approach to the place only by the two streets under the two central pavilions, north and south, now named Béarn and Birague. Those two pavilions, higher than the others, were set apart for the King and Queen; and over the central window of the southern one, the King, in medallion, looks down. The stately fronts of red brick—new to Paris then—edged with light freestone, and the steep roofs of leaded blue slate, broken by great dormers reminiscent of Renaissance windows, are time-stained to a delicate tricolor; and it pleases us to fancy the first Bourbon King unconsciously anticipating the flag of the French Republic in the colors of his Place Royale.
These tall windows, opening from floor to ceiling, were a novelty to the Parisians of that day, the fashion having only just then been set in the new Hôtel Rambouillet. Behind them, the spacious blue and yellow salons were hung with Italian velvets, or with Flemish and French tapestries, interspaced with Venetian mirrors. Lebrun and his like decorated the ceilings later, and the cornices were heavily carved, and the furniture was in keeping with its surroundings. The arcades of brick, picked out with stone ribs—a trifle too low and heavy, it may be, for their symmetry with the otherwise perfect proportions of these façades—were imitated from those of Italy, to serve for shelter from sun, and for refuge from rain, to the strollers who thronged them for over a century. To tell over their names, one has merely to look down the list of the men who made themselves talked about, through the whole of Louis XIII.'s and almost to the close of Louis XIV.'s reign. Then there were the women, lovely or witty or wicked, and those others, "entre deux âges," for whom the Marais was noted. The creations of comedy are here, too, and Molière's Mascarille and le Menteur of Corneille are as alive as their creators, under these arcades.
For this spot was not only the centre of the supreme social movement of the capital during this long period, but it was the cradle of that bourgeois existence which grew absurd in its swelling resolve to grow as big as that above it. The Hôtel Rambouillet, for all its affectations, did some slight service to good literature and good morals; it rated brains and manners above rank and money; it gave at least an outside deference to decency. Molière himself, rebelling, had to yield, and his early license became restraint, at least. In the wild days of the Fronde, men and women were in earnest, and then came the days when they were in earnest only about trifles; when the "infinitely little" was of supremest importance, when shallow refinements concealed coarseness, stilted politeness covered mutual contempt, and the finest sentiments of a Joseph Surface in the salon went along with unrestricted looseness outside. To seem clean was the epidemic of the time, and its chronic malady was cant, pretence, and pollution. And the bourgeois imitated the noble; and, in the Place Royale and about, Molière found his Précieuses Ridicules. Just a little way from here, was a room full of them—that of Mlle. de Scudéry.
Go up Rue de Beauce, narrowest of Marais streets between its old house- and garden-walls, and you come to the passage that leads to the Marché des Enfants-Rouges, the market and its surrounding space taking the greater part of the site, and keeping alive the name, of the admirable charity for children originated by the good Marguerite de Navarre, sister of François I., and by him endowed at her urging. The little orphans cared for in this institution were clad all in red, and their pet popular name of "Enfants Rouges" soon took the place of the official title of "Enfants de Dieu." On the corner of this passage, you must stop to choose the abode of Mlle. de Scudéry from one of the two ancient houses there, for it is certain that she lived in one of these two, with a side door in the passage; and local legend and topographic research have failed to fix on the true one. She has told us that it stood alongside the Templars' grounds, in the midst of gardens and orchards tuneful with birds, so that the lower end of the street was called Rue des Oiseaux; and we find this narrow passage, since then close shut in with houses, still tuneful to-day, but the birds are kept in cages.
In this house Madeleine de Scudéry wrote her long and weary romance, "Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus," the most widely read and the most successful book of the day, from the money point of view. With this money she paid the debts of her brother, Georges, a dashing spendthrift with showy tastes; one of those chivalric souls, too fine to work, but not too fine to sponge on his sister and to take pay for, and put his name to, work done by her pen. Here she carried on the old business of the Hôtel Rambouillet, where she had served her apprenticeship before starting out for herself, and where she had produced the poem by which she won her nom de Parnasse, "Sapho." Here she was promoted to be the Tenth Muse, and sat enthroned amid her admirers, who trooped in from all about the Marais, on every Saturday for more than thirty years. As to the causerie littéraire et galante of these reunions, we learn all about it, and laugh at it, in Pellisson's "Chronique du Samedi." It is impossible to burlesque it; Molière himself could not do it. He has taken entire sentences concerning the education of woman from the "Grand Cyrus," and put them into his "Femmes Savantes"; and it is simply a portrait that he drew of Madelon, as she sat in this salon a year or so before he put her on the stage, awaiting the gifted authors of "La Carte du Royaume des Précieuses." And Mascarille's fatuous swagger and strident voice—as he walks the boards in Coquelin's skin—seem to come straight and uncaricatured from Pellisson's pages. When the valet's voice, quavering with complacency, shakes our midriff with his pronouncement: "We attach ourselves only to madrigals," he is making a direct quotation from the "Chronique."
Mlle. de Scudéry, while a précieuse herself, was too genuine and talented and good-hearted a woman to be ridiculous. She is really an admirable example of the writing-woman of the seventeenth century, a female Mignard in her pen-portraits. Dr. Martin Lister came to pay his respects to the Tenth Muse, in this little house in 1698, and found her over ninety years old, toothless, and still talking! One might wish to have been present at this meeting, but may be content with looking on the walls that harbored a worthy woman and her queer crowd of adorers.
They came from all about the Marais, it has been said. At the time of her death, in the first year of the eighteenth century, this quarter had become the chosen abode of the real swells of Paris, and so the only possible residence for all those who wished to be so considered. Long before, a new member of the body politic had been born—the bourgeois—and a place had to be found for him. The leisure he had gained from bread-getting need no longer be given to head-breaking, and for his vision there was a horizon broader than that of his father, of dignity in man and comeliness in life. His first solicitude was for his habitation, which must be set free from the rude strength of the feudal fortresses in which the noblesse had camped. He levelled battlements into cornices, and widened loop-holes into windows, open for sunlight and à la belle étoile. In this seemly home, his thoughts threw off the obstruction imposed by centuries of repression, and by the joyless dogmas of the Church. And so began that multiform process that, at last, flamed up through the frozen earth, and has been named the Renaissance.
Many of the new mansions of the bourgeoisie were in Marais streets that were still walled off by the shut-in grounds of the religious bodies, whose unproductive dwellers avoided all taxation. "You see, formerly, there were monasteries all about here," says light-hearted Laigle in "Les Misérables"; "Du Breul and Sauval give the list of them and the Abbé Lebeuf. They were all around here; they swarmed; the shod, the unshod, the shaven, the bearded, the blacks, the grays, the whites, the Franciscans, the Minimi, the Capuchins, the Carmelites, the Lesser Augustins, the Greater Augustins, the Old Augustins. They littered." These belated owls, blinking in the new sunlight and fresher air, had now to find other dark walls for their flapping. The zone of abbeys, stretching from the Bastille to the Louvre, began to be cut into, and the grounds of the great hôtels of the noblemen came into the market as well. There had been hardly any opening-up of this quarter, from the day when Charles V. ended his wall, to the day when Henri IV. began his Place Royale. He had planned, also, a monumental square at the top of the Templars' domain, to be called Place de France, with a grandiose entrance, from which eight wide streets, bearing the names of the great provinces of France, were to radiate, to be crossed by smaller streets named from the lesser provinces. For this scheme Sully had bought up, under cover of a broker, an immense tract in this region, just as the King's death put a sudden end to this project, along with all his other projects.
One man did much to make real the plan that had been put on paper only. This was Claude Charlot, a Languedoc peasant, who had come to the capital in wooden sabots, with no money, but with plenty of shrewdness and audacity. By 1618 he had managed to acquire almost the entire tract set aside by Sully, and through it he cut streets, the principal one of which is called after him, while, of those called after the provinces, some still keep their names and some have been renamed.
Even during his mapmaking of the Marais—summarily stopped by Richelieu's spoliation—this was yet a solitary and unsafe quarter, through which its honest citizens went armed against footpads by day, and by night stretched chains across the coupe-gorges of its narrow streets. It continued to grow slowly through the last years of the seventeenth century, and these streets, with the Place Royale as their centre, were in time lined by the portes-cochères of rich financiers, farmers-generals, and receivers of taxes, all swollen with their pickings and stealings. They adorned their dwellings with carved panels and painted ceilings, with sculptured halls and spacious stone stairways; and many of them were rich in manuscripts and rare books, and in collections of various sorts.