RUE DES CHANTRES, LOOKING TOWARDS THE QUAI.
John the Fearless was not troubled by the remorse experienced by his accomplice, whose repentance was for ever to be proclaimed by his votive lamp. The blow having been struck, his only thought was to guard against the consequences. Withdrawing to the Hôtel d’Artois, which afterwards took from him the name of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, he there constructed a stone room, or what was then called a donjon—not to be confounded with the English word obviously derived from it. The little fortress of John the Fearless was solidly built, for it exists even to this day. The square tower, at least eighty feet high, is indeed in perfect condition. Its walls are still crenellated, and it has lost nothing of its original physiognomy, except as regards the roof with which it has been covered in.
An old building of very different character is the house of Nicholas Flamel, at No. 50, Rue Montmorency, near the Rue Saint-Martin. Just above the ground floor a touching inscription in Gothic characters may still be read, from which it appears that “poor labouring men and women dwelling beneath the porch of this house,” said the Paternoster and the Ave Maria for the dead. This was the sole condition of the hospitality extended to them by Flamel. He had ideas on the subject of property which can never have been widely spread in any age, and which are certainly not entertained in the present day. He let out his numerous houses in such a way, that with the money gained from lodgers on the lower floors he supported lodgers without means on the upper ones. “Gens de mestier,” says Guillebert de Metz, “demouroient en bas, et du loyer qu’ils payoient estoient soutenus povres laboureurs en hault.”
Another historic house, in the very centre of what may still be looked upon as mediæval Paris, the Hôtel de Sens, stands in an open space enclosed by the Rues Figuier, de la Mortellerie, du Fauconnier, and des Barrés; in an admirable position, that is to say, and at two paces from the ancient Hôtel Saint-Paul. John the Good, after his imprisonment in London, lived there for some time as the guest of the Archbishop of Sens. Charles V. attached more[{159}] value to it, for in 1369 he purchased it, and for some time it was only an adjunct to the Hôtel Saint-Paul. Towards the middle of the fifteenth century it reverted to the Archbishop of Sens, Tristan de Salazar, who had it rebuilt in the form it still preserves, with the exception of the embellishments added by the famous Duprat, one of his successors.
PORTION OF THE FAÇADE, MUSÉE CARNAVALET.
Under Henri IV. it was the abode of La Reine Margot, as Marguerite de Valois, the king’s divorced wife, was popularly called. “Queen Venus,” as will afterwards be seen, was another of her familiar names. This legendary heroine of the Tour de Nesle had scarcely taken possession of her new mansion, in August, 1605, when a placard was affixed to her door, inscribed with a quatrain in which her licentious life was satirised. The evil reputation brought to the house by Queen Margot remained attached to it as long as she lived there. In a previous sketch of the locality the story has already been told of the tragic event which caused Queen Margot to abandon the Hôtel de Sens for ever. She had been there scarcely a year when one of her pages, whose professions of love she had accepted, finding another page preferred to him, shot his rival almost beneath the queen’s eyes. Marguerite’s cry for vengeance, her offer of her own garter to anyone who would use it to strangle the assassin, his arrest, and her vow neither to eat nor drink until he had been executed, have already been told. Two days after (or, as some authorities have it, only one) the page Vermond, who had fled but was duly captured, lost his head beneath the axe of the executioner, when Queen Margot fainted away, and, on recovering herself, left the place for ever.