Near the Hôtel de Ville is “Le Châtelet,” a name familiar enough to travellers about Paris. It is an omnibus centre, a station on the new “Metropolitan,” and its name has been given to one of the most modern theatres of Paris.
Dumas, in “Le Collier de la Reine,” makes but little use of the old Prison du Grand Châtelet, but he does not ignore it altogether, which seems to point to the fact that he has neglected very few historic buildings, or, for that matter, incidents of Paris in mediæval times, in compiling the famous D’Artagnan and Valois romances.
The Place du Châtelet is one of the most celebrated and historic open spots of Paris. The old prison was on the site of an old Cæsarian forum. The prison was destroyed in 1806, but its history for seven centuries was one of the most dramatic.
One may search for Planchet’s shop, the “Pilon d’Or,” of which Dumas writes in “The Vicomte de Bragelonne,” in the Rue des Lombards of to-day, but he will not find it, though there are a dozen boutiques in the little street which joins the present Rue St. Denis with the present Boulevard Sebastopol, which to all intents and purposes might as well have been the abode of D’Artagnan’s old servitor.
The Rue des Lombards, like Lombard Street in London, took its names from the original money-changers, who gathered here in great numbers in the twelfth century. Planchet’s little shop was devoted to the sale of green groceries, with, presumably, a sprinkling of other attendant garnishings for the table.
To-day, the most notable of the shops here, of a similar character, is the famous magasin de confiserie, “Au Fidèle Berger,” for which Guilbert, the author of “Jeune Malade,” made the original verses for the wrappers which covered the products of the house. A contemporary of the poet has said that the “enveloppe était moins bonne que la marchandaise.”
The reader may judge for himself. This is one of the verses:
“Le soleil peut s’eteindre et le ciel s’obscurcir,
J’ai vu ma Marita, je n’ai plus qu’à mourir.”
Every lover of Dumas’ romances, and all who feel as though at one time or another they had been blessed with an intimate acquaintance with that “King of Cavaliers,”—D’Artagnan,—will have a fondness for the old narrow ways in the Rue d’Arbre Sec, which remains to-day much as it always was.