When la veuve Scarron, reincarnated in Madame de Maintenon, was living in the grand establishment at Vaugirard, provided by the King for his two children, she is said, by local tradition, to have had her private apartment in the Marais, near where we stand. It was on the first floor of the small and shabby house at No. 7 bis Rue du Perche, and you are shown a ceiling in an upper room, that is claimed to have been painted for the great lady. It is in four sunken squares, wherein pose the four Seasons, in conventional attitudes and unconventional raiment.
Let us stop here on the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, where it meets the end of a little street with the big name of des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, given to it by the great hospital and monastery that occupied these grounds, through which this street was afterward cut, when Philippe-Auguste gathered them just within the safe-keeping of his wall. Just without that wall lay the Hôtel Barbette, in the midst of its own wide lands. On this corner, we stand just on the line of the wall, and look across Rue des Francs-Bourgeois into a court, once the Alleé aux Arbalétriers, over whose entrance is a tablet, recording the murder of Louis d'Orléans, near that spot—a scene sketched in our first chapter. That maze of courts, crowded close with ancient wooden structures, tempts us to search within it for vestiges of the outbuildings of the Hôtel Barbette. And it is worth while exploring the interior of the corner house, if only for its mediæval staircase. Coming out by the courts opening into Rue Vieille-du-Temple, we take a few steps to where it meets the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and we stand on the exact site of the Porte Barbette of the old wall.
There, on the northeastern corner of the two streets, stands a most ancient building well worth our regard. On the angle, reaching from just above its ground floor to the cornice, is hung a five-sided tourelle of singular beauty. Its heavy supporting bracket is deeply and handsomely corbelled out, and at each angle is a slim colonette, delicately carved. The division line between its two stories is defined by a fine moulding. In the first story is cut a small ogival window, under a prettily crocketed head and a flat finial. This window is iron grated, and its grim visage is softened by a flowering plant set within. The panels of the lower story are plain, and those above are decorated with a lace-like pattern, graceful and elegant, whose lines and curves carry one's eye to the cornice. The plain façade of the house in Rue Vieille-du-Temple has been degraded by modern windows, while that in the other street remains most impressive, with its gabled end. All in all, no such delightful specimen of fifteenth-century Gothic as this Barbette turret can be found in our Marais.
The Tourelle of the Hôtel Barbette.
Yet turret and structure are not, as is often stated, any portion of the original Hôtel Barbette. That was built, at the end of the thirteenth century, by Étienne Barbette, a man of wealth and importance, the Provost of Paris under Philippe "le Bel," and his Master of the Mint. The vast enclosure of his grandiose hôtel covered all the ground, from the old wall northward to the line of the present Rues de la Perle and du Parc-Royal; and eastwardly from this Rue Vieille-du-Temple to the gardens of Saint-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, near where now runs Rue Sévigné. This ample domain sufficed for the menus plaisirs of this lucky man, and was merely his petit séjour. Under that blameless guise it served as the abode, a little more than a century later, when rebuilt after the mob had wrecked it, of Isabeau de Bavière, official wife of mad Charles VI. Leaving him to the neglect of servants and to the companionship of Odette, the Queen escaped boredom here, by her dinners and suppers, balls and fêtes; here she invented, or first introduced, the masquerades that were soon the rage of Polite Society. She amused herself with other games, too; such as statecraft, in partnership with her husband's younger brother, Louis d'Orléans. It was from the Barbette that she mismanaged the kingdom, ground down the people with intolerable taxes, pushed the marriage of her daughter Catherine with Henry V. of England, plotted the shameful Treaty of Troyes, which made France an appanage of the English crown, and gave Paris to English troops.
After her husband's death, cast aside by Burgundy and England, she found a drearier refuge in the Hôtel Saint-Paul than that to which she had condemned him there. In its corners she hid while Joan the Maid was undoing the evil work done by this shameless woman, and was bringing back to Paris the son hated by this shameless mother. All through those years she wept and moaned, witnesses have reported; left alone, as she was, with the memories of her lusts and her treasons, with the wreckage of the animal beauty, for which, and for no other quality, she had been selected as the royal consort. Seven days after she learned of the signing of the Treaty of Arras she died, "et son corps fut tant méprisé," says Brantôme, that it was thrown into a boat at the water-gate of Saint-Paul, and, after an unseemly service in Notre-Dame, was sent by night down the Seine to Saint-Denis, "ainsi ni plus ni moins qu'une simple demoiselle!"
Partly destroyed by fire and partly rebuilt, we find the Hôtel Barbette, after another hundred years and more, in the hands of the Comte de Brézé, Seneschal of Normandy. Aged, ugly, crippled, as we see him in Hugo's verse, he is pleasantly remembered for the lovely widow he left for Henri II., and for his lovely tomb left, for our joy, in the cathedral of Rouen. When his widow, Diane de Saint-Vallier, became Diane de Poictiers, Duchesse de Valentinois—an elderly siren of thirty-seven, who was yet "fort aymée et servie d'un des grands rois et valeureux du monde"—she wore always her widow's white and black, and kept to the last that whiteness of skin and purity of complexion that came, she claimed, from her only cosmetic, soap and water. Her coldness of heart had much to do with it, to our thinking. Brantôme saw her when she had come to sixty-two, and was struck by her freshness, "sans se farder," as of thirty. He adds, with his ever-green susceptibility: "C'est dommage que la terre couvre ce beau corps." This property had gone, on her husband's death, in 1561, to his and her two daughters; who profited by its vast extent and by the example set by François I. in similar jobs, to open streets through it, and divide it into parcels for selling. Those streets were named Barbette and Trois-Pavilions, the latter now renamed Elzévir. And if any remnant exists of the second Hôtel Barbette of Diane de Poictiers, it is this corner house and its lovely turret.
By way of this corner, the body of Louis d'Orléans was carried to the Church of the Blancs-Manteaux, in the street of that name just behind us. It lay till morning in the nave, and about the bier gathered royalty and nobility, all through the long November night. The church is gone, and so, too, is his chapel in the Church of the Célestins; and the monument, erected there by Louis XII. to his murdered grandfather and his martyred grandmother, has been placed in the Cathedral of Saint-Denis. The site of the Church of the Blancs-Manteaux is covered by the great central establishment of the Mont de Piété; its grounds are entirely built over; the street that took the name of the monastery, once a perilous coupe-gorge, has grown to be, not respectable, but characterless. We must be content with the phantoms of Saint Louis's white-mantled monks, strolling in their cloisters; later, grown fat and scampish, haunting the low cabarets of this mal-famed street, and rehearsing, within their own precincts, those frenzied mysteries of the mediæval stage, that led to the disbandment and the driving-out of the debauched order.