Considering that all houses in earlier times were distinguished by such symbols, even the most pious could not help being born under a sign. Calvin, the French Puritan, was even born in an inn, the “grasse hôtellerie des Quatre Nations” at Noyen in Picardy. On the other hand, merry souls seem to have preferred saints as patrons of their birthplace, for Gavarni, the ingenious cartoonist, came into the world at Paris “à l’enseigne de Sainte Opportune, Rue des Vieilles Haudriettes.”
Sometimes Fate seems to mock the highflying ambitions of a great poet, by changing the house of his birth into a common public-house, as happened in the case of Chateaubriand, “the gentilhomme né” and his birthplace in the Rue des Juifs at Saint-Malo. On the other hand, Rabelais’s birthplace in Chinon, which became a tavern after his death, should have been one from the first hour of his life; for his was like the “étrange nativité” of his hero Gargantua: “Soubdain qu’il fut né, ne cria comme les aultres enfans: ‘Mies, mies’; mais à haulte voix s’escrioit: ‘À boire, à boire, à boire!’ comme invitant tout le monde à boire.” A little poem tells us the story how his study was transformed into a wine-cellar for merry revelers:—
“Là chacun dit sa chansonette
Là le plus sage est le plus fou
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La cave s’y trouve placée
Où fut jadis le cabinet,
On n’y porte plus sa pensée
Qu’aux douceurs d’un vin frais et net.”
The oldest poetical tradition of tavern signs we find, perhaps, in the songs of Villon, who sometimes has been called the Paul Verlaine of the fifteenth century, on account of his similar vicissitudes in life. A child of the people, he is not ashamed of his low origin:—