Here, above our heads as we stand in Rue du Petit-Musc, is the tasteful, unspoiled side wall of the Hôtel de Lavallette, formerly the Hôtel Fieubet. It was built by the younger Mansart, on the corner of Saint-Paul's grounds, for the Chancellor of Maria Theresa, Gaspard de Fieubet, and it became a gathering-place of the writers of those days. They were courted by its owner, whose name is frequent in the letters of Madame de Sévigné, and he himself turned his hand to rhyming, at odd hours. Nearly two hundred years after he had gone, his mansion was rescued from the sugar-refiners, who had degraded it to their uses, by the Lavallette who has given it his name, and who "restored" it beyond the recognition of its great architect, could he see it now. Its façade behind the little court is overloaded with carvings, buttressed by caryatides, surmounted by campaniles; it is a debauch of sculpture, an orgy of ornamentation, under which the stately lines of the original fabric are almost lost. They are quite hidden, on one side, by a modern wing that has been thrust in on the court. All this dishonor to architecture does not trouble the boys, whose big school fills the building now, and who troop about the court in their black jackets and trousers, their wide, white collars, their big, white ties, pulling on reluctant gloves, as they line up on their unwilling way to some church function.
We pass along the quay, glancing at the homelike and homely house numbered 4, whose quiet dignity behind its court is in pleasing contrast with the place just left. Here were the home and the studio of Antoine-Louis Barye, and here he died on June 25, 1875.
On the quay at the corner of Rue Saint-Paul there stood until very lately the entire and unspoiled hôtel built for young Charles, Duc de La Vieuville, in the last days of the Valois men. It was an admirable specimen of the architecture of their time, as we may still assure ourselves by a glance at the wing that is left within the court entered from Rue Saint-Paul; a stone side wall toned to the glorified grayness of age, pierced by tall, slender windows of graceful proportions, and, above, the picturesque brick dormers of that period.
The last of the Valois women, Marguerite, had her home hard by here, and its story begins just on this spot. When Charles V., to round out and make entire his Saint-Paul estate, was taking in neighboring hôtels and outlying bits of land, he found, here where we find the Hôtel de La Vieuville, the Paris seat of the archbishops of Sens. Their palace on this corner, and its grounds extending along the river-front and back along the east side of Rue Saint-Paul, up beyond present Rue des Lions, cut out a goodly slice from this angle of the royal domain. The King took this property, giving in exchange, to the archbishop, the feudal fortress, the Hôtel d'Éstoménil, a little farther west on the river-bank, at the meeting-place of several country roads. Those roads are now the streets named Hôtel-de-Ville, Figuier, Fauconnier, de l'Ave-Maria; and where they meet stands the Hôtel de Sens, in almost the same state, as to its walls, as when they were finished by the archbishop Tristan de Salazar. This soldier-priest had rebuilt the old structure in the last years of the fifteenth and the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and it remains an authentic and authoritative document of the domestic architecture of that period. The delicate ornamentation of its façade has suffered, some few mutilations have despoiled the fabric, its gardens are built upon, their great trees are gone, yet it stands, time-stained and weather-worn, a most impressive example of that Gothic strength and beauty whose frozen lines were just beginning to melt under the fire of the upspringing Renaissance.
The noble arch of the ogival portal is, by a touch of genius, pinched forward at its topmost point, and is there sliced away, so as to make a snub-nosed protuberance that seems to lift up the whole front. Its two high-peaked bartizan turrets are a trifle heavy, as we see them hemmed in by other buildings, but their panelling and moulding plead for pardon for any slight disproportion; and the one on the corner is perfect in situation and in effect. The few windows of the front have lost their stone-crossed mullions, some broken, some bricked up. The great dormer window above, possibly of later construction, is a prediction of the loveliness that was to come to dormers, such as we see in the roofs of Rouen's Hôtel de Ville and of the château of Blois. The fine effect of the chimneys, once entirely of stone, has been marred by cheap patching. As to the rest, the oddities and irregularities of this façade are yet all in good taste and all captivating. Within the groined porch we see, across the small court, the main building meant for the archbishop's dwelling, and the solid square tower meant for defence and for watching. Its entrance-door tells, in its size and shape, the entire tale of feudal days. Away up on one angle of this tower is an imitation sentry-box, battlemented and supported by corbelled brackets. The interior of the buildings has been defaced and degraded by the base usages to which it has been subjected, yet traces are left of its past grandeur in some of the rooms and halls.
The Hôtel de Sens.
These awaited in orderly and decorous silence, in their early days, the coming of their owner from the mother-church at Sens. He came along the banks of the Yonne and the Seine on his richly caparisoned mule, his foot-servants in advance, his clerkly servitors and ecclesiastics riding behind, and so he entered into this tranquil court. Years later the place was noisy enough, when the religious wars made it one of the meeting-places of the leaders of the Holy League. On the very day when Henri IV. entered Paris, the Archbishop of Sens, Cardinal de Pellevé, lay dying in this his palace, almost within hearing of the triumphant Te Deum in Notre-Dame.
The King had been allowed his divorce by his childless wife, Marguerite, and he in turn allowed her to return to Paris from her long exile in Auvergne; ordering that this hôtel should be fittingly arranged for her residence, in 1605. We saw her last, a charming child, in the gardens of the Tournelles. And now she comes here, a worn wanton of nearly fifty-five, her wonted fires still smouldering under the ashes. It is between these two appearances that we like to look on her in the pages of Brantôme and on the canvas of Clouet. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, has been aptly dubbed the valet-de-place of history; and yet a valet has the merit of looking out of his own eyes from his own point of view. It was for him that Marguerite wrote her "Mémoires," and to him she left them. In after days, when exiled from the court he loved, able only to lick the chops of memory, he wrote her éloge in these glowing words: "If there has ever been anyone in the world perfect in beauty, it is the Queen of Navarre. All who have been, or shall be, near her, are ugly beside her. If there is a miscreant who believes not in the miracles of God, let him look upon her. Many believe that she is rather a goddess of heaven than a princess of earth, and yet perhaps no goddess was ever so lovely."