STARTING once more from the Place Saint-Sulpice, and proceeding by the Rue Bonaparte across the Rue Jacob to the Rue des Petits Augustins, we come to the ancient Rue des Marais, a narrow street opened in 1540 between the Rue des Petits Augustins and the Rue de Seine. It is now called the Rue Visconti, and contains at least one house which is worth a moment’s attention—the Hôtel de Ranes, No. 21. Here Nicholas d’Argouges, Marquis de Ranes, who built the house, was killed in 1678. Jean Racine came to live in the building as lodger in 1692; and here was born in that same year the last of his children,[{175}] Louis Racine, author of that much-esteemed poem, “La Réligion.” It was here, too, that the immortal author of “Phèdre” expired on the 21st of April, 1699. Other theatrical associations are connected with this house.
Here, moreover, Adrienne Lecouvreur, the celebrated actress, died on the 20th of March, 1730, and, the last rites of the Church being refused, was carried away the same night in a hackney-coach by Voltaire and a friend of Marshal Saxe who had always been devoted to her. She was buried on the banks of the Seine at a point beyond the Palais Bourbon, which it is no longer possible to discover. The place was marked at the time by a simple memorial, which from malice or through neglect and the natural ravages of time, was destined soon to disappear.
Later on this same house was inhabited by Mdlle. Clairon, who only quitted it when she resigned her engagement at the Comédie Française.
At No. 17 in this interesting Rue Visconti existed in 1825 the printing-office founded by Honoré de Balzac. But the greatest novelist of France met with no greater success as a printer than the greatest novelist of England obtained as a publisher. Balzac, like Scott, contracted debts in his business enterprise which weighed heavily upon him and, compelling him to the severest literary labour, shortened his existence. It was to pay his debts that Balzac condemned himself to that perpetual work, those prolonged night-watches, which developed in him, robust as he was in his early days, the germs of that hypertrophy of the heart from which he died. In the street of Les Petits Augustins stood a convent, founded in the midst of a garden to fulfil a vow made by Queen Margaret at the Château d’Usson.
The convent was turned by the Constituent Assembly in 1790 into a depòt for monuments and ruins of monuments whose preservation was desirable in the interest of history or of art. Alexandre Lenoir, who had proposed the formation of this museum, was appointed its superintendent. In carrying out his seemingly peaceful work he found himself on one occasion in danger of his life, for some madman wounded him with a bayonet as he was protecting by main force the monument of Cardinal de Richelieu which a number of fanatics wished to destroy. The precious collection brought together by Lenoir was inaugurated in 1795 under the title of the National Museum of French Monuments.
An imperial decree of the 24th of February, 1811, ordered the creation of a School of Fine Arts, which was to contain common rooms for the lectures and separate studios for the different professors with their pupils. By order of the restored Louis XVIII., in April, 1816, the School of Fine Arts, with which no progress had been made under Napoleon, was to be completed. Then, however, it occurred to the king that it would be unbecoming to turn out from what had been considered their last resting-place so many statues, busts, tombs, and other monuments. Churches were now requested to claim the ornaments of which, under the Revolution, they had been despoiled, the different communes to take back the arms and other insignia which had been torn by fanatical revolutionists from their walls, while the great historic families were assured that they were now at liberty to resume possession of their ancestral sepulchres. But these permissions and appeals were for the most part in vain. Meanwhile the mausoleums of the kings and princes of France were removed to Saint-Denis, while many other monuments were placed in the museums of Paris and Versailles.
It was now possible to proceed with the School of Fine Arts, and the first stone of the building was laid on the 3rd of May, 1820. The original plan, drawn up by the architect Debret, was much amplified, under the reign of Louis Philippe, by M. Dauban, who finished it in 1838—at least in its essential parts. New buildings were added under the Second Empire between the years 1860 and 1862. The National Special School of Fine Arts (such is its official title) furnishes instruction in drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and every kind of engraving to French students aged not less than fifteen nor more than thirty, and even to foreigners who have obtained due authorisation from the Ministry of Fine Arts.
SAINT-SULPICE.