"Dans cet hôtel est née, le 6 Fevrier, 1626, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné:" so reads the tablet set in that wall, which fronts on the square, of the house numbered 1 Place des Vosges, having its entrance at No. 11 Rue de Birague. There is no name more closely linked with the Marais than that of this illustrious woman. Born in this house, baptized in its parish church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, she here grew up to girlhood; she was married in Saint-Gervais, her daughter was married in Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs; and the greater portion of her life was passed within this quarter. Her father was killed in a duel a few months after her birth, at the age of seven she lost her mother, and when only twenty-five years old, she found herself a widow. After a short sojourn in the provinces with her son and daughter, she came back, in 1655, to Paris and to the Marais. She had casual and unsettled domiciles, for many years, in Rues de Thorigny, Barbette, des Francs-Bourgeois, des Lions-Saint-Paul, des Tournelles—all within our chosen district—before she settled in her home of twenty years, the Carnavalet.
It is but a step away from this tablet above us, to the corner of Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and Sévigné; the latter street, at that time, bearing its original name of Culture-Sainte-Catherine, having been opened through that portion under cultivation of the grounds of the great monastery of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers. On the corner of this new street and that of Francs-Bourgeois—then Rue Neuve-Sainte-Catherine—a piece of the convent garden was bought by Jacques de Ligneris, and thereon a house for his residence was erected. Its plans were drawn by Pierre Lescot, it was built by Jean Bullant, was decorated by Androuët du Cerceau, and its sculptures were carved by Jean Goujon. And thus these walls, on which we are looking, speak in mute laudation of four famous men. One more notable name may be added to this list—that of François Mansart. He was called in, a century or so after the completion of this mansion, for its renovation and enlargement; and, to his lasting honor, he contented himself with doing only what seemed to him to be imperatively demanded, and with attempting no "improvements" nor "restoration" of the work of his great predecessors. He knew what we have learned, that those words too often mean desecration and ruin to all historic monuments in all lands. During this interval, the building had come into the hands of Françoise de la Baume, Dame de Kernévalec, whose Breton name, corrupted to Carnavalet, has clung to it ever since. That name suggested the pun of the carnaval masks, carved in stone over the arches of the wings in the court. They were done by a later hand than that of Goujon, whose last work is to be seen about that window of the Louvre, on which he was busy, when a bullet picked him off, a day or two after the night of Saint Bartholomew. The tranquil elegance of his chisel has adorned this almost perfect gateway with the graceful winged figure in its keystone. It lifts and lightens the severe dignity of the façade. And, in the court—its centre not unworthily held by the bronze statue of Louis XIV., remarkable in its exquisite details, found in the old Hôtel de Ville—we linger in joy before the graceful flowing curves and the daylight directness of the Seasons of this French Phidias. The figures on the wings are from a feebler chisel than his. Of all the crowding memories of this spot, those of the Marquise de Sévigné and of Jean Goujon are the most vivid and the most captivating. The busts of these two, one on either side, greet us at the head of the staircase leading to her apartments; she is alert and winsome, he is sedate and thoughtful and a trifle too stern for the most amiable of sculptors, as he shows himself here, rather than the staunch Huguenot, killed for his convictions.
She was fifty-one years of age by the records when she came to live here, in 1677, and half that age at heart, which she kept always young. She had been so long camping about in the Marais, that she was impatient to settle down in the ideal dwelling she had found, at last. She writes to her daughter: "Dieu merci, nous avons l'hôtel Carnavalet. C'est une affaire admirable; nous y tiendrons tous, et nous aurons le bel air. Comme on ne peut pas tout avoir, il faut se passer des parquets, et des petites cheminées a la mode.... Pour moi, je vais vous ranger la Carnavalette, car, enfin, nous l'avons, et j'en suis fort aise."
So she moved in, with her son and daughter, both dear to her. It was to the daughter, however, that the mother's affluence of affection flowed out, all through her life; and it may well be that this veritable passion saved her from all other passions, during the years of her long widowhood, when many a grand parti fell at her feet. She looked on them all alike, with pity for their seizure, and each of them got up and walked away, unappeased. Yet hers was a rich nature, wholesome and womanly withal, and there are potentialities of emotion in the pouting lips and inviting eyes of the pretty pagan of this bust. Nor was she a prude, and her way of quoting Rabelais and listening to La Fontaine's verses would horrify us moderns of queasy stomachs. She had ready pardon for the infidelities of her husband, and later for the misdeeds of her scampish cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, "the most dangerous tongue in France."
Above all, this real woman showed a masculine strength and loyalty of friendship for men; showed it most markedly in her sympathy for those who had fallen in the world. There is no finer example in the annals of constancy than her devotion to the broken Fouquet, howbeit he may have merited breaking. The spirit of her letters, at the time of his disgrace and imprisonment, cannot be twisted into anything ignoble, as Napoleon tried to do, on reading them in the State archives. He sneeringly suggested that her sympathy with Fouquet was "bien chaud, bien vif, bien tendre, pour de la simple amitié." So it was, indeed; for her friendships were attachments, and warmth and tenderness pulsate in all her letters; and these qualities will, along with their unpremeditated spontaneity, keep them alive as long as letters live. What else was in her letters has been told by Nodier, when he says that they regulated and purified the language for ordinary use; and by Jules Janin, who rightly claims that, from this Carnavalet, came the purest and most perfect French hitherto heard in France.
In forming and housing the great collection of the History of Paris, to which the Musée Carnavalet is devoted, new buildings about a trim garden in the rear have been added to the original mansion, whose own rooms have been subjected to as little change as possible. Madame de Sévigné's apartment, on the first floor, is hardly altered, and her bedroom and salon have been especially kept inviolate. The admirable mouldings, the curious mirrors, the old-fashioned lustre, remain as she left them, when she went to her daughter at Grignan to die. In this salon, and in the wide corridor leading to it, both now so silent and pensive, she received all the men of her day worth receiving; and it is here alone that we breathe the very atmosphere of this incomparable creature.
We may join the early-goers among these men, who make their way to another house, not far distant. There are temptations to stop before, and explore within, the seventeenth-century mansions all along Rues Sévigné and du Parc-Royal, but we pass on into Rue Turenne—once Rue Saint-Louis, the longest and widest and foremost in fashion of Marais streets, now merely big and bustling, with little left of its ancient glory—until we come to its No. 58, on the corner of old Rue des Douze-Portes, now named Ville-Hardouin, after the contemporary chronicler of the Fifth Crusade. This modest house at the corner has been luckily overlooked by the modern rebuilder of this quarter, who has not touched its two stories and low attic above a ground floor, its unobtrusive portal, its narrow hall, and its staircase; small and quaint, in keeping with the cripple who was carried up and down for many years. Paul Scarron lived here, in the apartment au deuzième à droite, dubbed the "Hôtel de l'Impécuniosité" by his young wife, who was the granddaughter of the Calvinist leader, Agrippa d'Aubigné, and who was to be the second wife of Louis XIV. Sitting at her scantily supplied supper-table here, the maid would whisper that a course was lacking, and that an anecdote from the hostess must fill the bill of fare instead. Goldsmith tells us, at the beginning of his "Retaliation:"
"Of old when Scarron his companions invited,
Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united."
And, just here, it is curious to recall the fact that Goldsmith was busied, during the last months of his life, on a translation of Scarron's "Roman Comique," and his bethumbed copy was found on his desk, after his death.