A few steps farther, and we come to Rue Beautreillis; its pavement and its houses on both sides, nearly as far as Rue Charles V., covering the Cemetery of old Saint-Paul; which extended westerly toward Passage Saint-Pierre, wherein we may find the stone walls, now roofed in with wood, of the charniers. There had been a suburban cemetery outside the old wall, which was brought within city limits by the new wall, and served as the burial-ground of the prisoners who died in the Bastille. It did not so serve, as is commonly asserted, for the skeletons found in chains in the cells, when the prison was opened by righteous violence, because no such skeletons were found. "The Man in the Iron Mask" was buried in this ground, close alongside the grave of Rabelais, dug exactly one hundred and fifty years earlier. Pass through the two courts that lie in the rear of No. 17 Rue Beautreillis, and you will find yourself in a large waste garden, in one corner of which the persuasive concierge points out the grave of the "Masque-de-Fer." It may well be that she is not misled by topographical pride, for this ground was certainly a portion of the old burial-ground, and not impossibly that portion where Rabelais and "Marchioly" were laid near together. This is the prisoner's name on the Bastille's burial-register, and not far from his real name. For we know, as surely as we shall ever know, that this prisoner of State was the Count Ercolo Antonio Mattioli, Secretary of State of Charles IV., Duke of Mantua. The count had agreed to betray his trust and to sell his master's fortress of Casali to the French representative; with this in their possession, Pignerol belonging already to France, Louis XIV. and Louvois would dominate all upper Italy. Mattioli took his pay, and betrayed his paymaster; the scheme miscarried, and the schemer deserved another sort of reward. His open arrest, or execution, or any public punishment, meant exposure and scandal to the Crown and the Minister and the Ambassador of France. So he was secretly kidnapped, and became "The Man in the Iron Mask." At his death, in 1703, his face was mutilated, lest there might be recognition, even then; the walls of his cell were scraped and painted, to obliterate any marks he might have put on them; his linen and clothing and furniture were burned. Had Voltaire suspected the results of modern research, he would not have put forth his theory, in the second edition of his "Questions sur l'Encyclopédie," that this prisoner was an elder brother of Louis XIV. Yet, but for Voltaire's error, we should have lost those delightful pages of Dumas, wherein Aramis carries off from the Bastille this elder brother and rightful heir to the crown, leaving Louis XIV. in the cell, and at last replaces his puppets in their original positions.
This Cemetery of Saint-Paul, dating back to Dagobert, when the burial-grounds on the Island had become overpeopled, had its own small chapel of the same name, which had fallen out of use and into ruin. Charles V., bringing it within his enclosure of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, rebuilt and enlarged it and made it the church of the royal parish. All the daughters and the sons of France were thenceforth baptized here, and it became the favorite church of the nobility. After Louis XI.'s time, and the desertion of this quarter by royalty, the little church lost its vogue. In 1794 it was appropriated and sold as National Domain, and torn down soon after. Its site is covered by the buildings on and behind the eastern side of Rue Saint-Paul, opposite the space between Passage Saint-Paul and Rue Eginhard. This is the small street selected by Alphonse Daudet for the shop of his brocanteur Leemans, to which comes the fascinating Sephora, of "Les Rois en Exil." Daudet has overdone it in going so far for his local color; the street is a noisome alley, entered by an archway from Rue Saint-Paul, holding only two or three obscene junk-shops.
And now, passing the flamboyant Italian façade—a meretricious imitation of the front of Saint-Gervais—of the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, which has absorbed the name of old Saint-Paul, we reach at last the ample space where the two streets of Rivoli and of Saint-Antoine meet and so make one broad, unbroken thoroughfare through the length of the town, from the place where the Bastille was to the place now named Concorde. This grand highway has existed only since the middle of the nineteenth century. The Consulate and the First Empire had cut Rue de Rivoli along the upper edge of the Tuileries Gardens as far easterly as Rue de Rohan; from there it was prolonged, taking the line of some of the old, narrow streets and piercing through solid masses of ancient buildings, in the last years of Louis-Philippe; and was carried from the Hôtel de Ville to this point by the Second Empire. All through earlier days, the route, common and royal, from the Louvre and the Tuileries to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, the Tournelles, the Bastille, and the Arsenal, was by way of narrow Rue Saint-Honoré and its narrower continuation, Rue de la Ferronerie, thence around by Rue Saint-Denis into Rue des Lombards, and so along Rues de la Verrerie and Roi-de-Sicile to the old gate of Saint-Antoine, that stood just behind us here at the end of Rue Malher. Outside that gate was the country road leading to Vincennes, which was transformed into the city street, known to us as Rue Saint-Antoine, through the protection given by Charles V.'s new wall and by his Bastille. There had been, long before, a Rue Saint-Antoine, and it curves away here on our left, and is called Rue François-Miron, so named in honor of that Prévôt des Marchands in Henri IV.'s time, who merits remembrance as an honest, high-minded, capable administrator of his weighty office.
Thus this street of old Saint-Antoine was the thoroughfare—at first from the entrance into the town by the old gate of Saint-Antoine, and afterward from the new street of Saint-Antoine and its entrance gate farther east—to the open space behind the Hôtel de Ville, alongside Saint-Gervais, and so to the bridges and the Palace on the Island. It was a street "marvellously rich" in shops, having no rival except in Rue Saint-Denis. Its shopkeepers shouted, from their doors or from the pavement in front, the merits of their wares to the throng swarming always along. Their wares were worthy of the city that, with its fast-growing population, equalled Venice herself in wealth, display, and splendor, if we may trust the word of an exultant scribbling citizen of the Paris of Charles V.
So, too, it was the grand highway for royal entries, for troops, for ambassadors with their trains, for any parade that demanded display and attracted spectators. Such an array came along here on August 26, 1660, when young Louis XIV. brought into his town his young bride, Maria Theresa of Spain, each of them being just twenty-two years old. It was the showiest pageant and the longest procession yet seen in Paris, taking ten or twelve hours to pass. The bride—a slight, pretty, girlish figure, in white satin and pearls, and a violet mantle of velvet—leaned back on the crimson velvet of her huge gilded chariot; at her right on horseback was the King, in cloth-of-gold and black lace, his collars and ruffles of white point. In the resplendent retinue nothing so blazed as the superb empty coach of the Cardinal-Minister Mazarin, its panels painted by Lebrun, drawn by the famous mules and escorted by the Mousquetaires. Less than a year later Mazarin was carried through Paris in his hearse, caring no more for mules or any tomfoolery.
The procession had entered the town under Claude Perrault's triumphal arch at the end of the Vincennes Avenue, and through Porte Saint-Antoine, cleaned up and sculptured afresh for this day, and so by new Rue Saint-Antoine, along this present Rue François-Miron. It was packed with spectators, among whom was La Fontaine, who sent a long rhymed description of the show to his patron, Fouquet, not omitting mention of the cardinal's mules. These, too, were spoken of with fitting praise in a letter written to a friend by young Madame Scarron—to be a widow, within a few weeks—who was also in the throng. Years after, she confessed to the credulous King that on that day she had first seen him and first loved him, and that she had never ceased to love him since! We may not consider the Duchess of Orleans unduly prejudiced when she refers to Madame de Maintenon as "that hussy."
At No. 88 Rue François-Miron you may see an excellent balcony of that period, solidly and richly wrought in iron, supported by captivating stone dragons of fantastic design. There were similar balconies on the front of the great mansion at No. 68—which was then No. 62—but of these only a small one is still left over the portal. They were all crowded with a most select mob of the elect on the day of this procession. There was Anne of Austria, in her black mantle, looking down on her son, her thoughts turning back to her own bridal procession over the same route, and her own youthful blond beauty of forty-five years before. By her side sat Henrietta of France, widow of Charles I., and her daughter, Henrietta Anne of England. The girl may have gazed with curiosity on the over-dressed fop riding at the bride's left wheel. This was Philippe d'Orléans, who was to be her husband, and was, through his complacent creatures, to poison her within ten years from this day. In another balcony sat Mazarin, too ill to take part in the procession.
The hostess of these great ladies was one Catherine Bellier, wife of Pierre de Beauvais; and this house is the Hôtel de Beauvais. The husband had been a pedlar or a shopkeeper, and had amassed sufficient wealth from ribbons to enable him to buy his title. The wife had served as first femme-de-chambre to Anne of Austria, and had so learned many secrets of that queer court, of its Queen-Mother, and of her Cardinal. In that court there was no more unscrupulous creature than this Catherine Bellier. The deliciously outspoken Duchess of Orleans—the second wife of that Philippe we have just seen—describes this woman as one-eyed and hideous, of profligate life, and apt in all intrigue. To the day of her death she loved to appear in flamboyant costumes at the court, where she was treated with distinction because of what she knew. Anne of Austria gave her the stone for the construction of this hôtel, and she used to visit her waiting-woman and confidente here. A popular verse of the day ran:
"Mercredi notre auguste Reine,
Cette charmante Souveraine,