Et de la vertu de Caton."
Beyond most women of that time, she was really cultivated, in the best meaning of that word; far different from the meaningless Culture with a capital, of our time. She was fond of philosophy, withal, and took turns with Plato and with Montaigne; and would speculate on the problems of life either with Church dignitaries or with the epicurean Saint-Évremond. And she captivated them all, men of all sorts, beginning with her girlish years—when she dutifully obeyed her father, who preached pleasure to her, rather than her mother, who pushed her toward a convent—through all her long life of incredibly youthful heart and body, to her amazing conquests when over sixty. A portrait of her at about this age hangs in Knole House, Sevenoaks; her hair, parted down the middle and plainly drawn back in modest fashion, her alluring eyes and her ingenuous direct smile, give her the look of a girl. Richelieu was her first admirer, Voltaire was the latest. When brought to this house, where he celebrated Ninon's ninetieth birthday in verse, young Arouet was only about twelve years old, as was told in a preceding chapter. She was charmed with the youthful genius, and, dying within a few weeks, in 1706, she left him two thousand crowns for buying his beloved books.
From five until nine in the evening, Ninon was "at home" here, up to her eighty-fourth year, in 1700. Before her visitors went away, they sat down to a simple supper, served with no parade and at small expense. Many of the guests, following the fashion of Scarron's friends and of the persistent diners-out of that day, brought their own plats. We get a glimpse of the simplicity of these suppers "à tous les Despréaux et tous les Racines," and of the homely, social ways of the bourgeoisie, in Voltaire's tiresome comedy "Le Dépositaire."
We look about these rooms, in which we are standing, and wish we might have seen Boileau and Racine here; we seem to see Molière, reading his unacted and still unnamed play, and consulting his hostess as to whether "Tartufe" will do for a title; and old Corneille, forgetting to be shy and clumsy at her side; and Scarron, wheeled in his chair, quicker in his scoffing for her quick catching of the point; and La Rochefoucauld, less of a surly and egotistic poseur in her presence, content to sparkle as a boudoir Machiavelli; and Huyghens, fresh from his discovery of the moons of Saturn, finding here a heavenly body of unwonted radiance, and setting to work to write erotic verse mixed with mathematics. The great Condé himself, proud, vain, hardest-hearted of men, melts when he meets her; broken and decrepit, he climbs out from his sedan-chair—"that wonderful fortification against bad weather and the insults of the mud," says delicious Mascarille—and approaches, hat in hand, the calèche of that other aged warrior, Ninon de Lenclos.
Through No. 23 of Boulevard Beaumarchais, which occupies the site of her garden, we come out on that broad thoroughfare, passing on our right the buildings covering the gardens that once countrified this east side of Rue des Tournelles. We cannot now search among the houses there for that one inhabited by the Abbé Prévost, some time between 1730 and 1740, while he was writing his enthralling story of "Manon Lescaut." Almost at the end of the boulevard, men are sitting about tin tables on the pavement, drinking good beer, on the very site of the gate of Saint-Antoine. Just there, outside the gate, stood Lady de Winter, pointing out to her two hired assassins her pet enemy, d'Artagnan, as he rode out on the Vincennes road, on his way to the siege of Rochelle. The gate abutted on the western side of the Bastille, and its figures, carved by Jean Goujon for decorations of a later day, may be seen in the Cluny Gardens.
Traced in the pavement of Place de la Bastille and across Rue Saint-Antoine, you may follow the outlines of such portions of the walls and towers of the great prison as are not hidden under the houses at the two corners. When you ask for your number in the omnibus office of the place, you are standing in the Bastille's inner court. Across its outer eastern ditch and connected with the wall of Charles V., was thrown a projecting bastion, the tower of which stood exactly where now rises the Column of July. At the corner of Rues Saint-Antoine and Jacques-Cœur, a tablet shows the site of the gateway that gave entrance to the outer court, which led southwardly along the line of the latter small street. By this gateway the armed mob entered on July 14, 1789. Lazy Louis XVI., hard at work on locks and other trifles at Versailles—having as yet no news from Paris—writes in his diary for that day: "Rien"! That mob had found the fortress as little capable of resistance as the throne that it overturned a while later; both proved to be but baseless fabrics of an unduly dreaded terror. Indeed, it was the power behind this prison that was stormed on that day. There were plenty of prisons in Paris, as fast and as secret as was the Bastille. This was more than a prison to these people; it gloomed over their lives as its towers gloomed over their street—a mysterious and menacing defiance, a dumb and docile doer of shady deeds, a symbol of an authority feared and hated. And so these people first tore away the tool, and then disabled the hand that had held it. It was a stirring act in the drama, though a trifle melodramatic.
"Palloy le Patriote," as he styled himself, takes the centre of the stage just here, and, like all professional patriots, in all lands and all times, he makes a good thing of his patriotism. He was the contractor for demolishing the walls and for clearing the ground of the wreckage, at a handsome price; and he doubled his wage by the sale of the materials. Some of the stones went, queerly enough, to the building of Pont de la Concorde; others of them may be seen in the walls of the house on the western corner of Boulevard Poissonière and Rue Saint-Fiacre, and of other houses in the town. With the stones not fit for these uses, and with the mortar, he made numerous models of the Bastille, which were purchased by the committees and sent as souvenirs to the chief towns of the then newly created departments. One of these models is in the Musée Carnavalet. So, too, the thrifty Palloy turned the ironwork dug out into hat and shoe buckles, and the woodwork into canes and fans and tobacco-boxes; all, at last, into coin for his patriotic pocket. The gate of one of the cells was removed, and rebuilt in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie; where it may be seen by the inmates, who care nothing for a door more or less, but never by the outsider, who would like to get in for a glimpse!
To "Palloy the Patriotic" and his gang of a thousand workingmen, rides up on his white horse, one day, the first commander of the just invented and organized National Guard—Lafayette, aptly named by Mirabeau the "Cromwell-Grandison" of his nation. He looks over the busy ground, and gives orders that the men shall receive a pint of wine and a half-franc daily; but they got neither money nor wine, both doubtless "conveyed, the wise it called," on the way, by Palloy or by other "patriots." Lafayette carried away the great key of the Bastille's great entrance-door, and sent it to George Washington by Thomas Paine, when, a few years later, Paine got out of the Luxembourg prison and out of France. It is one of the cherished relics at Mount Vernon, and not one is more impressive and more appropriate in that place, since it was the success of the American revolutionists that inspirited those who opened the Bastille.
We pass along Rue Saint-Antoine, so commonplace and sordid to-day, so crowded with history and tradition. It has seen, in its short length, pageants of royalty and nobility, the hide-and-seek of romance, the blood-letting of sharp blades, the carnage of the common people, such as no other street of any other town has known. Its memories would fill a fat volume.
The little temple of Sainte-Marie on our left, as we go—a reduced imitation of Rome's Pantheon—is a design by François Mansart, and while it has his grace of line and his other qualities, it is not a notable work. Built on the site of the Hôtel de Boissy, wherein Quélus died and his lover Henry wept, it was intended for the chapel of the "Filles de la Visitation," and their name clings to it, although it has been made over to the Protestant Church. To this convent fled Mlle. Louise de la Fayette from Louis XIII.; who, ardent in the only love and the only chase known in his platonic career, visited her here until his confessor, Vincent de Paul, showed him the scandal of a King going to a nunnery. So he had to leave her, secure under the veil and the vows of the cloister. She became Sœur, and later Mère, Angélique, of the Convent of Sainte-Madeleine, founded in 1651 by Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I., which stood on the far-away heights of Chaillot, where now is the museum of the Trocadéro. There the sister and the sweetheart of Louis XIII. lived together for many years.