Fut chez Madame de Beauvais;
Pour de son admirable palais
Voir les merveilles étonnantes,
Et les raretés surprenantes."
The Hôtel de Beauvais.
The design of the Hôtel de Beauvais, by Antoine Lepautre, is most daring and original in its great interior oval court, embellished with pilasters that are topped with finely carved stone masks. Despite the unhallowed devotion to cleanliness which, with its whitewash, has robbed it of its former lovely bloom of age, this court remains one of the most impressive specimens of seventeenth-century domestic architecture in all Paris. From the street we pass through an ample gateway, its curved top surmounted by a great shell. The vestibule is ornamented with escutcheons, alternating with the garlanded ox-skulls of Roman-Doric decoration—mistaken by many for rams' heads, so as to make a sculptor's pun on Bellier—all admirably carved in stone. The noble staircase has Corinthian columns, and a massive stone balustrade so perfectly pierced into fine lines of intertwisted tracery as to give delicacy to it, thick and broad as it is. Cut in stone escutcheons in the ceiling of this stairway are the intertwined initials of the brand-new nobility that built it. The grand salons of the first floor have been partitioned off into small rooms for trade purposes. No character of any sort has been left to the interior.
The ground on which we tread here, while a portion of the Marais of old Paris, is not the Marais of modern Paris, as it is commonly designated. Yet this region toward the river, built on during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after the opening up of the grounds of the Hôtel Saint-Paul and the cutting of streets through them, holds enticements in architecture and in story that tempt us to turn our backs for a while on our own Marais.
Many of the streets here remain unmodernized and unspoiled, and here are hôtels as perfectly preserved as this Hôtel de Beauvais. At No. 26 Rue Geoffroy-Lasnier we stop in delight before an entrance-door superbly carved and heavy with a glorious knocker—a lion's head holding a great ring in its mouth. Above this door we read: "Hôtel de Châlons, 1625, et de Luxembourg, 1659." The small court within, diminished by modern stables on one side, retains on its other side an ancient iron fountain. The façade of the miniature hôtel giving on this court is in well-balanced stone and brick; its shapely windows are surrounded by male and female masks, and by delicate foliage twining about the monograms of the aforetime exalted owners—all elaborately carved in stone. The roof rises gracefully to its ridge, and each gable end is surmounted by a well-wrought iron finial. There is a modest garden behind, shut in and hid by the buildings about, which hide, too, the simple and attractive stateliness of that rear face of the Hôtel de Châlons. The enchanting isolation and the singular charm of this concealed corner give us the feeling that here is a bit of Bourges, gently dropped, tranquil and untroubled, into the midst of these turbulent streets.