Part 11

The trumpery tumults of 1832--in hopeless revolt against the Orleans monarchy and in impotent adventure for the republic--give occasion for grandiose barricade-building and for melodramatic combats. Hugo takes us, with Marius and his fellow-students, to that labyrinth of narrowest lanes, twisting about high bluffs of houses, that was then to be found between the churches of Saint-Leu and Saint-Eustache. It was a most characteristic corner of mediæval Paris, and it has, only recently and not yet entirely, been cut away by Rue Rambuteau, and built over by the business structures around the Halles. The street of la Grande-Truanderie is for the most part respectabilized, that of la Chanverie is reformed quite out of life, and la Petite-Truanderie alone remains narrow and malodorous. But "_Corinthe_" has been carted clean away. This was the notorious tavern, of two-storied stone, in front of which Enjolras defended his barricade, within which Grantaire emptied his last bottle, and in whose upper room these two stood up against the wall to be shot. Grantaire was doubtless sketched from his illustrious precursor and prototype, the poet, Mathurin Régnier, who tippled and slept at a table of this squalid drinking-den during many years, until the year 1615, when debauchery killed him too young. His colossal and abused body carried the soul, original, virile, and fiery, which he has put into his verse, although he has over-polished it a bit. When this tavern--in the fields near the open markets--was his favorite resort, it bore the sign and name, "_Pot-aux-Roses_"; it was dedicated later "_Au Raisin de Corinthe_"; and this was soon popularly shortened to "_Corinthe_." Forty years after his death, another true poet was born in the tall house that rose alongside this tavern, its windows looking out over the waste lands of the Marais, as Jean-François Regnard says in his verse. Like young Poquelin, thirty years before, this boy played about the Halles; then he went away to strange adventures in foreign lands with pirates and with ladies; and came home here to write comedies, that have the gayety and sparkle, yet not the depth, of those of Molière. Indeed, Voltaire asserts that he who is not pleased with Regnard is not fit to admire Molière. The seventeenth-century mansion, in which he was born, befitted the position of his father, a rich city merchant, and it has luckily escaped demolition, albeit brought down to base uses, as you shall see on looking at No. 108 Rue Rambuteau. And if you hurry to this neighborhood, you may yet find some few reminders of the scenes of 1832. In Rue de la Petite-Truanderie is just such a tavern as was "_Corinthe_," in its worst days. Its huge square pillars will hardly hold up, much longer, the aged stone walls. Just here is the dark corner where Valjean set Javert free; and in Rue Mondétour, at that end not yet shortened and straightened into a semblance of respectability, you may see a small sewer-mouth, direct descendant of the grated hole, down which Valjean crawled, with Marius on his back, to begin that almost incredible march through the tortuous sewers to their outlet on the Seine, under Cours-la-Reine. He came out on a spit of sand, "not very far distant from the house brought to Paris in 1824," says Hugo, who should have said 1826. His reference is to the house popularly named "_la maison de François Ier_." It was built by that monarch, at Moret on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, for his beloved sister, Marguerite de Navarre, it is believed. It was removed, stone by stone, and re-erected on its present site in Cours-la-Reine, where it is a delight to the lover of French Renaissance.

Hugo was one of the earliest, among the exiles of the Empire that ended worthily in the shame of Sedan, to be welcomed by the new Republic on his hastening to Paris. There he remained through _l'Année Terrible_ of the Prussian siege, with his friend Paul Meurice, a hale veteran of letters, still in the youth of age in 1899. Paris being once more opened, Hugo went to and fro between Brussels and Guernsey and his own country for awhile. In 1873 he had quarters in the Villa Montmorenci at Auteuil, we learn by a letter from him dated there. In 1874 he settled in an apartment at No. 66 Rue de La Rochefoucauld, an airy spot at the summit of the slope upward toward Montmartre. Here he remained a year, and in 1875 removed a little farther along this same slope, to No. 21 Rue de Clichy, on the corner of Rue d'Athènes. His apartment on the third floor was bright and sunny, having windows quite around the corner on both streets, and here he lived for four years. Much of the last two years was taken up by his new duties as Senator, so that scant leisure was left him for literary labor; and it was in this house that he sadly told a favorite comrade that the works he had dreamed of writing were infinitely more numerous than those he had found time to write. Driven from here by the unremitting invasion of friends, admirers, strangers, men and women from all quarters of the globe, bent on a sight of or an autograph from the only Hugo, he took refuge in Avenue d'Eylau, away off at the other end of the town, where only real friendship would take the trouble to follow him. He made this last removal in 1880. This final home was as modest as any of his childhood homes, and had just such a garden as theirs. Here he passed five happy years, with cherished companionship within, and all about him "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends."

[Illustration: Victor Hugo. (From the portrait by Bonnat.)]

As a tribute to him, Avenue d'Eylau has become Avenue Victor-Hugo, and his two-story-and-attic house--not one bit grander than the cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, in which began his literary fame--remains unchanged under its new number 124, only its side garden having been built over, the garden in the rear being left unspoiled. At No. 140 of the avenue, the residence of M. Lockroy, is preserved the original death-mask of the poet, taken by the sculptor, M. Dalou. It is a most striking portrait, and one wishes that copies might be permitted.

Here he died in 1885, and from here his body was carried by France to the Panthéon, there to be placed among all her other glories by a grateful country. Despite the ostentation of the pauper's hearse decreed by this rich man, no more solemn and imposing spectacle has been seen by eyes that have looked on many pageants, civil and military, in many lands; even more impressive in the attitude of the closely packed concourse--hushed, motionless, with bared heads--that gazed all through that hot May day at the slow-moving _cortège_, than in that magnificent retinue, escorting to his grave "The Sublime Child," grown gray in the service of his country's letters.

THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS

THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS

The prehistoric savages, who settled, for safety from onslaught, on the largest of the islands in the Seine, known to us as Île de la Cité; the rabble of Gaulish fisherfolk, who came to camp here in after-years; the little tribe of Parisii who later builded a fortified hamlet on this sure ground, and bridged it with the mainland: all these, looking, through the centuries, northwardly across the transparent and unsullied stream, saw the flat river-bank opposite, over beyond it a ring of low wooded hills, and between these, on either hand, broad expanses of marsh, morass, and forest. That which stretched to their right is our Marais. In it the veteran Camulogenus, captaining the Parisii, hoped to mire down the Roman soldiers, once already stuck in the mud along the Bièvre on the southern bank of the Seine. But it is Labienus, that ablest of Cæsar's lieutenants, who "marches with four legions to Lutetia. (This is the fortress of the Parisii, situated on an island in the river Seine.)" And Labienus knows the country as well as his trade, and skirts around the Marais, and crosses the Seine at Auteuil to the solid ground he has chosen on the plains of Grenelle. There he wins battle in the year 52 B.C., and drives the Gauls in disorder to the high ground on which the Panthéon now stands, and the Luxembourg Gardens lie. The Romans, in possession of the island, rebuild the bridges, cut away by the Parisii, and restore the town partly burned by them; a palace for the resident Governors arises on the extreme western end of the island; and new defences are constructed for the Gallo-Roman Lutetia. Four centuries later, it was called his "dear and well-beloved Lutetia" by Julian, and from that conviction he was never apostate. He loved it for its soft air, its fair river, its honest wines coming from its own vineyards. On the slope of its southern suburb stood out the massive walls of the baths that bear his name; and his gardens, planted with vines, reached to the river. Where he swam, we go dry-shod, when we saunter through the Cluny; and we may sit, a little farther south, in Rue de Navarre just off Rue Monge, in the stone seats of the Roman arena, a perfect bit of loyal preservation of Lutetia.

The Romans meant to make their new town an important centre, and those impassioned road-builders began to bring to it the highways, in the making of which, and by means of which, they were easily masters of their world. The Gauls had trodden footpaths through the forests and over the marshes, and of these, the two most trodden on the northern bank started from near the end of their only bridge, now replaced by Pont Notre-Dame. That which went northerly to the southeastern corner of the Halles of our Paris, there split into two branches; the one, named the Voie des Provinces Maritimes, followed nearly the line of present Rue Montmartre, and went, by way of Pontoise, to the northwestern coast of Gaul; the other, named the Voie des Provinces du Nord, ran from the Halles on a line between Rues Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, about where now Boulevard Sebastopol stretches. It was the high road to Saint-Denis, Senlis, Soissons, and so away to the north. The other main pathway turned toward the east, just above the bridge-end, and went nearly parallel with the river-bank, along the line of present Rue Saint-Antoine. This road, to Sens and Meaux and thence eastwardly, was known as the Voie des Provinces de l'Est, and later in life as the Voie Royale.

This pathway was diked by the Romans, and when sufficiently raised, it was paved with stones. Even then it was often submerged, and the marsh over which it went made more marshy, by frequent floods of the swollen Seine, overwashing its slight banks; and by the ceaseless streams that carried down through this bowl the waters of the encircling slopes of Montmartre, Belleville, Chaumont, Ménilmontant. In our stroll through the Marais, you will walk above one of these streams, serving as a sewer to-day, and along the bank of still another, turned into the Gare de l'Arsenal.

On the two sides of this raised road, bit by bit the bog was planted; foot by foot the swamp was reclaimed; gardens were cultivated, farms were tilled, flocks were fed; herdsmen's huts dotted the plain; on the higher spots farmers' houses peeped from among the trees; and on the slopes above, all around from Chaillot to Charonne, shone the white walls of the villas--walls of marble from Italy--of great officials and of wealthy traders. The Church came along this road from its central seat at Sens, and, keen of eye, picked out choice sites for chapels, convents, monasteries. Little by little the entire Marais was levelled up as the surrounding hills were levelled down; yet keeping so well its forests, that it gave good hiding for eight years to Saint-Denis dodging Valerian's pursuit, until that day of the saint's long and winding walk down the street of his name, his head carried in his hands. This northern suburb grew more gradually, at first, than its southern sister, whose sunny breast had enticements for gardeners and for vine-growers. It was a strong man who woke the Marais to unwonted life, and by his wall, encircling and securing it, Philippe-Auguste quickened its sluggish suburban pulse into urban animation. The northern settlements became _la Ville_, the island being _la Cité_, and the southern suburb _l'Université_.

There was a beach or strand--_la grève_--near the middle of this northern bank, at which were moored and unloaded the boats bringing to the town light merchandise, such as grain, meats, stuffs, and fabrics. All heavy goods--timber, stone, metals--came to the Port Saint-Paul, in front of Quai des Célestins; still there under its old name, but its old business long since gone to the bustling Port de Grenelle. On the Grève gathered men out of place, wandering about while waiting for work; whence comes the modern meaning of _grève_--a strike, when men get out of place and are not anxious for a job. Here on the Grève, as their common ground, met the men who carried goods by water from up and down stream, and the men who carried goods by land, to and from the provinces. They were strong and turbulent men, and they made two mighty guilds, and these two, combined with other guilds, formed an all-powerful confraternity. In the course of years, there came to its head, as _Prévôt des Marchands_, that demigod of democracy, the notable Étienne Marcel. He had his home, while living, on Place de Grève, and in the river, when dead; to-day, in bronze he bestrides his bronze horse between those two dwelling-places, facing the strand he ruled and the city he tried to rule. It is he--none more worthy--who shall marshal us on our way to the Marais.

For, when Jean II., "_le Bon_," was sent to his long captivity in England from the field of Poictiers, won by the Black Prince in 1356, it was the first Dauphin France had had, known later as Charles V., who acted as Regent in his father's absence. He was a sickly and a studious youth, easily alarmed by the violence of these guilds, now making one more savage assault on royal prerogatives, in a desperate stroke to secure the right of the townsmen to rule their town. The Dauphin was afraid of being trapped in the Louvre, and he took refuge in the old Palace of the City. To him forces his way, one day, the boisterous Marcel at the head of three thousand armed and howling men, kills two of the royal marshals in the Presence, and places his own cap of the town colors, red and blue--these were combined with the Bourbon white to make the Tricolor, centuries later--on the head of the terrified Dauphin, either to protect him, or in insolent token of this new recruit to the faction. As soon as might be, the Dauphin got away from his revolted citizens, and came back to his town only when strong enough to hold it against them. Nor would he then trust himself to a permanent residence in the Island-Palace, and it was allowed to fall into disrepair through several successive reigns. Louis XII. made

## partial restorations, and occasionally sojourned in his palace "in

mid-stream," that made him think of his Loire. Parliament already owned the building then, by gift from Charles VII., and since then it has always been known as the Palais de Justice. The returned Dauphin took up his abode in the Hôtel d'Étampes, in the quarter of Saint-Paul, outside Philippe-Auguste's wall; and, by successive purchases, secured other neighboring _hôtels_ and their grounds. This spacious _enceinte_, within its own walls, stretched from behind the gardens of the Archbishop of Sens, on the river front, and from the grounds of the Célestins, just east of them, on Port Saint-Paul--where the Dauphin's new estate had a grand portal and entrance-way from the quay and the river--away back to Rue Saint-Antoine on the north; and from just outside the old wall, eastwardly to the open country. This domain, and the suburbs that had grown beyond that old wall, toward the north, now came to be embraced within a new enclosure. On the southern side of the river there seemed no need for any enlargement of the old enclosure.

This wall, known in history as the wall of Charles V., was partly quite new, partly an extension or a strengthening of a wall begun by Marcel in 1356; under the pretext of "works of defence of the kingdom against the English," and carried on in offence of his royal master. But before he had finished it, he came to his own end, opportunely for everyone but himself. It is midnight of July 31, 1358, and he is hastening, in darkness and stealth, to open his own gate of Saint-Antoine for the entrance of the combined forces of the English and of Charles the Bad, of Navarre. In Froissart's words: "The same night that this should have been done, God inspired certain burgesses of the city ... who, by divine inspiration, as it ought to be supposed, were informed that Paris should be that night destroyed." So they armed and made their way to Porte Saint-Antoine, "and there they found the provost of merchants with the keys of the gates in his hands;" and their leader, John Maillart, asked, "Stephen, what do you here at this hour?" When Stephen told John not to meddle, John told Stephen: "By God, you're not here for any good, at this hour, and I'll prove it to you." And so, as his notion of proof, "he gave with an axe on Stephen's head, that he fell down to the earth--and yet he was his gossip." Thus died Stephen Marcel, the martyr of devotion to the liberties of his fellow-citizens, in the eyes of many. To others of us, he is the original of the modern patriot of another land, who thanked God that he had a country--to sell; and his ignoble death seems to be the just execution of a traitor. It is due to him to own that he was a strong man, genuine and pitiless in his convictions, and might have merited well of his town and his country, but that the good in him was poisoned by his rapacity for power, and polluted by personal hatred of the Dauphin. His naked body, before being thrown into the Seine, lay exposed for days in front of the Convent of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, whose grounds stretched from without the old wall, eastwardly along the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine. Through them was cut our present Rue Sévigné, and it was on the spot made now by the corner of that street and Rue Saint-Antoine, half way between the old gate and the new gate just built by Marcel, that the crowd gathered to gaze on his corpse.

Froissart rightly claims, referring to Marcel's projected wall with his customary delightful enthusiasm, that it was "a great deed to furnish an arm, and to close with defence, such a city as Paris. Surely it was the best deed that ever any provost did there, for else it had been, after divers times, overrun and robbed by divers occasions." It was a greater deed that was now done by Charles V., and his Provost of Paris, Hugues Aubriot; and their new wall is well worth a little journey along its line, easily traced on our Paris map.

We have already made a visit to Quai des Célestins, and have read the tablet that marks the place where played Molière and his troupe, in 1645; and the other tablet that shows the site of Philippe-Auguste's Barbeau tower, constructed toward 1200, and taking its name from the great Abbey of Barbeau, whose extensive grounds bordered the river-bank here. From this huge tower and its gateway, kept intact as the starting-point at this end, the new wall turned at a right angle to the fast crumbling old wall, and went eastwardly along the shore; which they now banked up and planted with elms. That shore-line is now Boulevard Morland--named from that brave colonel of chasseurs who was killed at Austerlitz--and the land in front, as far as Quai Henri IV., was anciently the little Île des Javiaux, renamed Île Louvier in the seventeenth century, when it served as a vast woodyard for the town. The slight arm of the river that cut it off has been filled in, and the island is now one with the mainland. At the corner of Boulevard Bourdon--which records the name of a colonel of dragoons, who fell at Austerlitz--the new wall turned, and followed what is now the middle line of that boulevard to the present Place de la Bastille. Here was the two-round-towered gateway built by Marcel, and called, as were called all those gateways, _Bastilia_--a word of mediæval Latin, meaning a small fortress, such as was formed by each of these gates with its flanking towers. There were many of them opening into and guarding the town, that of Saint-Denis being the only other one of the size of this of Saint-Antoine; which was enlarged into the massive fortress known to us as the Bastille.

Of all the wretched memories of the accursed old prison, we shall awaken only one; that of Hugues Aubriot, its builder and its first tenant. Made Provost of Paris by Charles V.--who, after his hapless experience with Marcel, when Dauphin, would have no more Provost of Merchants--Aubriot had many enemies among the guilds and among the clerics. He was frank and outspoken of speech, humane to the priest-despoiled and mob-harried Jews, for whom he had, like his royal master, toleration if not sympathy, and to whom he returned their children, caught and christened by force. So, on the very day of the burial of his royal master, in September, 1380, Aubriot was arrested for heresy, and soon sent to his own Bastille of Saint-Antoine, "_pour faire pénitence perpétuelle, au pain de tristesse, et à l'eau de douleur_." The Church sentence gives a poetic touch to prosaic bread and water. Aubriot fed only a short time on these delicacies, for he was rescued by the mob that, for the moment, idolized him, and led in triumph to his home. That home, from which he speedily fled out of Paris in terror of his rescuers, was given by Charles V. to this good servant, and we may stop, just here, to look on what is left of it.

[Illustration: The Hôtel du Prévôt.]