Just beyond the Boulevards de la Madeleine and des Capucines, which show the line of the rampart levelled by Louis XIV., and along the course of its outer moat, a new street had started up at the end of the eighteenth century, and was completed in the early years of the nineteenth century. It began at present Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and ended at the Church of the Madeleine, then in course of construction; it was built up in the best style of that period, and it was named Rue Basse-du-Rempart. That untouched section, to the west of Rue Caumartin, shows us the admirable architecture of the early Empire in the stately fronts, that shrink back behind the boulevard in stony-faced protest against its turmoil. Eastwardly from Rue Caumartin, the northern side of Boulevard des Capucines has trampled out nearly the whole of the old street. The stones of Place de l'Opéra lie on the site of the modest house, at 18 Rue Basse-du-Rempart, taken by M. Récamier after his first business reverses, and occupied by him during his wife's exile; and the florist's shop, under the Grand Hôtel, is on the spot of their stately residence at No. 32 of the same street, after her return and until 1820. In that year, his fortune regained, he moved farther west in the same street to a more sumptuous home at No. 48. This house has been happily saved for us, and is now numbered 18 of Boulevard des Capucines; one of the three structures of the old street, which stand back from the line of modern frontage, and lower than the level of modern paving. The present No. 16 is the Récamier coach-entrance, and the huge stabling in the rear is built on the Récamier gardens. Their house preserves its wrought-iron balconies, and within is the circular staircase mentioned in her "Mémoires." Down these stairs, for the last time, she came in 1827, leaving M. Récamier to his disastrous speculations, which had at last swallowed up her own fortune, and drove to the Abbaye-aux-Bois. There was her home until her death in 1849.
The venerable mass of the convent is in sight behind the railed-in court at No. 16 Rue de Sèvres. One portion that we see was built in 1640 for the "Annonciades," and from them bought by Anne of Austria, in 1654, for the sisterhood of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, who had been driven from their convent near Compiègne by the civil wars of the Fronde. That wing which was burned in 1661 was speedily rebuilt, and forms part of the structure before us. Convents had then, and have still, rooms and apartments which are let or sold to lone spinsters and widows, and to "decayed gentlewomen who have seen better days." This Abbaye-aux-Bois, during the Bourbon Restoration, "when the sky had no horizon," was a favorite retreat for fashionable dévotes, mending their reputations by a temporary retirement. The life there is pleasantly described in the early letters of Mary Clarke—later Madame Julius Mohl—who lived there with her mother. M. Bernard, the father of Madame Récamier, had bought one of its grandest apartments for his daughter, after the first bankruptcy of her husband. When she came here it was occupied, and she rented a shabby upper floor for two or three years, and then went down to her own apartment on the first floor, to which she added another in the rear of the same floor. It is in the western wing, of modern construction, with windows on Rue de Sèvres, and on the terrace that overlooks the garden, now shorn of a goodly slice by Boulevard Raspail. We know all about this salon, famous for twenty years, the roll of whose frequenters holds every illustrious name in France during that period, as well as those of many charlatans and bores.
The Abbaye-aux-Bois.
It is reported that Madame Récamier and Châteaubriand met first, in the earliest years of the century, at the receptions of Madame de Staël. Whenever they met to become mutually attracted, this attraction grew in him until it became the dominant sentiment of his life. With all his elevation of soul and his breadth of mind, he had no depth of feeling. "I have a head, good, clear, cold," he wrote; "and a heart that goes jog-trot for three-and-one-half quarters of humanity." The other one-eighth was Madame Récamier, and she outcounted all the rest of the world in stirring such heart as he had. "You have transformed my nature," he tried to make her believe, and he may have believed it himself. Sick with conceit as he was, spoiled by flattery, morbid from introspection, her companionship lifted him out of his melancholy and raised him into serenity. As for her, so long as Madame de Staël lived, she had no other affection to spare for anyone, and perhaps this incomparable creature never gave to Châteaubriand more than homage to her hero, tenderness to the isolated man, and medicine to a mind diseased. He may well have written, toward the last: "I know nothing more beautiful nor more good than you."
The "chemin des vaches" of the sixteenth century became a country road by the passage of the drays that carted stone, from the Vaugirard quarries to the ferry on the southern shore, for the building of the Tuileries. The Pont Royal of Mansart has taken the place of the wooden bridge built above that ferry, and the ferry has given the name to that road, now Rue du Bac. Along its line, on both sides, seigneurs and priests took land and built thereon. There are yet, behind the huge stone blocks of houses, immense tracts of grounds and of woodland, unsuspected by the wayfarer through the narrow, noisy street. One of the most extensive of these open spaces is owned by the Seminary of the Missions Étrangères, whose church is near the corner of Rue de Babylone. For two bishops, who had charge here in the time of Louis XIV., were erected two houses, exactly alike without and within, and these are now numbered 118 and 120 Rue du Bac. In the latter in the apartment on the ground floor, M. and Mme. de Châteaubriand installed themselves in 1838; having left their cottage and its domain in Rue d'Enfer, to the needy priests there. Here, in an angle of the front court, are the low stone steps that mount to their apartment.
Portal of Châteaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac.