The neighbouring house was once the Magny restaurant, at which those celebrated dinners were given that Goncourt speaks of so often in his Memoirs, dinners shared by Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Georges Sand, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Gavarni, and many others.
Not far away, and connecting the Rue Mazarine—where Molière and his company played—with the Rue de Seine, let us go through the Passage du Pont-Neuf, occupying the site of the ancient entrance to the theatre, and being the scene of Zola's terrible novel Thérèse Raquin.
It is a typical nook—sordid, dingy, and malodorous, but strangely attractive, with its fried-potato sellers and Italian modellers. The shops in it seem to belong to another century; some months back, one only was frequented by customers, that of a drawing-paper dealer. The artist, Bonnat, told us he had bought his "Ingres paper" there, when he was a pupil at the School of Fine Arts, of which to-day he is the eminent head. The shop had not altered for sixty years, and the saleswoman asserted that the "stomping-rags she sold were exactly similar to those used by Monsieur Flandrin." In front of us is the Institute, and it is impossible to walk along the interminable black-looking wall enclosing it, on the side of the Rue Mazarine, without thinking of the painful paragraph in the preface of the Fils Naturel, wherein the younger Dumas, speaking of his childhood, recalls the souvenir of the return from the first performance, at the Odéon, of Charles VI. chez ses grands vassaux, on the 20th of October 1831.
The evening had been a stormy one, and the success of the play was doubtful. Consequently, a continuation of their poverty was to be expected. Alexandre Dumas had heavy burdens to support—his mother, a household, a child. He had to live himself and to keep his family on the meagre salary his situation under the Duke d'Orléans procured him. It was not of his talents but of his star that he doubted; and the younger Dumas always remembered his father's broad shadow cast by the moon on the dark, gloomy wall of the Institute, and himself timidly guessing at his father's anxieties and endeavouring, with his little eight-year-old legs, to follow and keep up with the studies of the good-natured giant.
THE RUE DES PRÊTRES-SAINT-SÉVERIN IN 1866
Drawn by A. Maignan
It was in the Rue Guénégaud, in the Hôtel Britannique, that Madame Roland took up her quarters in 1791. There, joyous and confident in the future, she opened her political salon. What a pleasure for the little Manon to show to all the Pont-Neuf neighbourhood, where her childhood had been spent, that she had become a lady and received people of mark. Brissot, Buzot, Pétion, Robespierre, Danton himself, were pleased to come, between two sittings, and talk at this amiable woman's house; and I fancy what attracted them was far more the pretty Parisian's qualities than the virtues of the austere husband, who must have been a great bore! On the 26th of March 1792, Dumouriez came to Roland's door and rang to tell him that he was appointed Minister. On the morrow, the little Manon of the Quai des Lunettes settled in triumph at the Calonne mansion. It was the way to the scaffold.
Skirting the quays, we reach the Saint-Michel Square, then the Rue Galande. In spite of recent demolitions, this old street still contains some ancient abodes; but it has lost the singular house called the Red Castle, or more prosaically, "the Guillotine."