Of these mansions, a surprising proportion is still standing, given up to business-houses, factories, and schools; for all of which uses their capacious rooms readily lend themselves. Within these old walls, face to face with the bustling streets, shouldered by structures of yesterday, or in dignified withdrawal behind their courts, can be found actual treasures of decoration and of carving, along with invisible and intangible treasures of association. For the aspect of a street, or the atmosphere of a house, tells to the intelligent looker-on as much of its bygone inmates as of its bare masonry. And kindly fate has left such relics plentifully scattered about the Marais. In oldest Paris of the Island, and in that almost as old suburb on the southern bank, one must prowl patiently to find suggestive brick and stone. In those regions a concealed tower, or an isolated tourelle on the angle of a building, makes the whole joy of a day's journey. Here, in the Marais, at every step you stumble on history and tradition and romance.
For "the little province of the Marais" was far away from the capital, and was let alone; or, rather, it was an unmolested island, washed about and not washed over by the swift tide of traffic. The stormy waves of insurrection have broken against its shores, and its pavements have never been made into barricades in any of the recurring revolutions, which have all been but interludes and later acts of the Great Revolution, in the people's endeavor to carry on and complete the main motive of that drama.
The vogue of the Marais began to fade away with the middle years of the eighteenth century, when the old noblesse de famille adopted the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the new noblesse de finance migrated to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the gadding multitude sought the arcades of the Palais-Cardinal, renamed Palais-Royal. A few ancient families, poor and proud, remained to burrow in their ancestral homes, and retired pensioned officials and petits rentiers found a boon in the small rentals of the big apartments. All these locataires, preserving the old forms and keeping untarnished the old etiquette, gave an air of dignified dulness to the Marais. Their dinner-hour was at five o'clock, and after that solemn function, held in the hall hung with family portraits or with dingy tapestry, their sedate prattle, before going to bed at nine o'clock, would touch on the unhallowed Edict of Nantes and on its righteous revocation; even as in a certain London club of to-day, musty old gentlemen still lament, with subdued dismay, "the murder of the Martyr, Charles Stuart." The sole diversion of these ancient dames of the Marais was a stroll in the Place Royale, arrayed in old-time costumes, their white hair dressed high above their patrician brows.
Nowadays, under the horse-chestnuts and baby elms of its ground, school-boys from the neighboring institutions romp on the grit, and babies are wheeled about by their nurses, and on the benches sit faded old men, blinking and inarticulate. They cling to the historic name of the place, while to us of the real world it is known as Place des Vosges; this title having been given it, in honor of the province of that name, by Lucien Bonaparte, while he was Minister of the Interior. The appellation was officially adopted by the Republic of 1848, and once more, perhaps finally and for all time, by the Third Republic.
THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS
The Place des Vosges.
THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS