The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de Brinvilliers.
The painter Lebrun was one of the great crowd that gathered to see her go by, and he made a drawing, which you may see in the gallery of Old French Designs in the Louvre. She half sits, half reclines, in her tumbril, clad in a gown, its cowl drawn forward; her head is thrown back; her thick chestnut hair brushed away from her face; her eyes are wide and her mouth drawn with terror; her face is round, her lips are thick; in her folded hands she holds a cross, and she stares straight before her without seeing. At one side is the profile of a woman, very lean and ugly, her expression full of horror as she bends forward to gaze.
Turning from this street down through Rue Beautreillis, we pass the end of Rue des Lions, on whose southern side we have already found remains of the Hôtel des Lions du Roi. On its northern side is a row of plaster-fronted houses, commonplace and shabby. In one of those garrets there was living, shortly after 1830, a poor family of Jews named Félix, lately arrived from the Canton Aarau in Switzerland. Their two little girls went about the streets, singing and picking up coppers. One day in the Place Royale, among those who stopped to listen was a kindly eyed gentleman, who handed to the younger and thinner of the two pinched children a piece of silver. "That is Victor Hugo," said a woman in the crowd, as he went his way to his home in the corner. That small singer was Élisa Rachel Félix, known to us as the great Rachel.
Years after, when the world had given all that it could give to Rachel, she returned, from a voyage to Egypt in search of health, to the Place Royale to die. "It is on the way to Père-Lachaise," she said, when, in 1857, she moved into the immense and superbly furnished apartment on the first floor of No. 9, where her friends, she thought, would have ample room for her burial service. It is only a step in space from this garret to that palace. There, within a few months—although her death came at the country-seat of Victorien Sardou's father, whom she was visiting—that service was held, and from there her body was borne to Père-Lachaise.
Going down Rue du Petit-Musc, we reach the Quai des Célestins, and here on our left is the beginning of broad Boulevard Henri IV., cutting away, in its diagonal course through the grounds of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, much history and romance. Nothing is left of the gardens of the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, whose site is marked by a tablet on the corner of the street of that name, at No. 10 Rue de la Cerisaie. This tablet tells us that the hôtel was the residence of the Czar Peter the Great in 1717; the guest, during his short sojourn in Paris, of the Maréchal de Villeroy, its owner then. We prefer to go back from that visit over a hundred years to a more attractive presence in this house. This was Gabrielle d'Estrées, beloved of Henry, who—for his fondness for her and their two fine boys—would have made her his wife, and have made them his legitimate successors, if he could have had his way.
It was Sébastien Zamet who was their host in this "palais d'amour du roi." The son of a shoe-maker of Lucca, he had found his fortune in Paris, like so many of his countrymen in those days, and he built here "a true fairy palace, such as romances describe," says Saint-Simon. And here, walking in the garden after supper on the evening of April 9, 1599, the lovely Gabrielle was taken ill very suddenly. They carried her to the Hôtel de Sourdis and put her in the care of her aunt, with whom she had passed a portion of her girlhood in that mansion. It stood within the precincts of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, its entrance on Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, where now is the end of Rue Perrault. Here Gabrielle died, in agony, at six o'clock of the next morning; poisoned, say Sismondi, Michelet, and the rest, but by whose hand we shall never know. The Hôtel des Mousquetaires, that you will find at No. 4 of Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, was then in existence, and so, too, were many of these tall façades, with ancient, iron balconies that look down on the narrow winding street, then a crowded thoroughfare of old Paris. After Zamet's death his house was bought by the Duc de Lesdiguières, Marshal and later Constable of France, from whom it took its permanent name. We have already come here with Boileau to see the veteran Frondeur, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, whose last years were passed in this mansion, under the care of one niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and comforted by another niece, Madame de Sévigné.
On the quay, off on our left, the Célestins caserne occupies a small portion of the immense grounds of the Célestins Monastery. It was a rich community, made so by the many gifts of kings, from Charles V. down, to "leurs bien aimés chapelains et serviteurs en Dieu." These pious beggars were not too proud to accept anything, and time fails to tell of the splendors of their church, which became a museum of monuments, tombs, statues, and was demolished in 1849, many of its treasures having been destroyed during the Revolution. The godly brethren are remembered in the name of the barracks and of the quay, and to some of us, it must be owned, by the delectable dish of their invention, omelette à la Célestins.
That long façade beyond, on Rue de Sully, belongs to the Arsenal, the building alone left, its spacious gardens now under streets and houses. We have come to its library with young Balzac, when he escaped from his grinding drudgery and his dreary garret in Rue Lesdiguières. We have driven here with Madame Récamier on the day before her death. The most winning memory of the place is that of Charles Nodier, an adorable man of genius, whose very defects were lovable, we are told by the elder Dumas, who loved him. Nodier and Charles Lamb were hissing, almost in the same year, each his own damned play. Many others besides Dumas loved Nodier—Royalists and Republicans, Classicists and Romanticists; and they crowded his salon here of an evening. For this was his official residence as Librarian, occupied by him from his appointment in 1823 until his death in 1844. His historic green drawing-room, where men were friendly who fought outside, and the smaller rooms of his apartment on the first floor overlooking Boulevard Morland, have been thrown into the library, and are now its reading-rooms. They have kept their old-time panelling, carvings, mouldings, but their walls, once decorated en grisaille, have been toned to a uniform delicate gray-white.
This library was begun in 1785 by the Comte d'Artois, who purchased the valuable books and manuscripts of Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d'Argenson, and of the Duc de la Vallière. Rooms in the Arsenal were arranged for this collection, and it was named the "Librairie de Monsieur;" the Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI. and of Louis XVIII., having been the last "Monsieur" in France. His library has grown to be the grandest in Paris after the Bibliothèque Nationale. It contains the original archives of the Bastille—such as were saved, when so many were scattered and destroyed at its taking—and it is especially rich in dramatic literature and in manuscripts.