Part 12

Under an arch at No. 102 Rue Saint-Antoine, we enter Passage Charlemagne, and go through an outer into an inner court. In its northwestern corner is a tower containing an old-time spiral staircase. This is the only visible vestige of the palace of the Provost of Paris, its unseen portions being buried under, or incorporated with, the structures of the Lycée Charlemagne, just behind us toward the east. The boundary railing, between this college and the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, is exactly on the line of Philippe-Auguste's wall. From the inner or city side of that wall, the provost's palace, with its grounds, stretched to Rue Prévôt, then Rue Percée; that name still legible in the carved lettering on its corner with Rue Charlemagne. In that street, behind us as we stand here, is the southern entrance of his grounds, whose northern line was on Rue Saint-Antoine. This tower before us has been sadly modernized and newly painted, but its fabric is intact, with its original, square, wide-silled openings at each of the three landing-places of the old staircase. These openings are within a tall, slender arch, a timid attempt at the ogival, whose bolder growth we shall see presently in the Hôtel de Sens.

Above this arch a superimposed story, its window cut in line with the others below, has taken the place of the battlements. On either side the tower joins a building obviously later than it in date, although it has been claimed that all three structures are fifteenth-century work. The high arch and the other decorations of the tower are undoubtedly of that time, but they are, as undoubtedly, applied over the small stones of a much more ancient fabric. This conviction is reinforced by the sentiment that makes us see Charles the Wise come into this court, with his good Aubriot, enter that low door, and climb that staircase, looking out through those windows as he mounts. In the year of that King's death there was born a future owner of this tower and its palace. This was Pierre de Giac, a charming specimen of the gang that helped John of Burgundy and Louis of Orleans in their ruin of France--the only job in which they were ever at one. Pierre de Giac, after betraying both sides, fell into the strong clutch of the Duke of Richmond, by whom, after torture, he was tied in a bag and flung into the Seine. His crony, Louis d'Orléans, had possession of this property in the closing years of the fourteenth century, when he instituted the order of the _Porc-Épic_ in honor of the baptism of his eldest son, Charles the Poet. The family emblem which gave its name to this order, gave it also to this _hôtel_, to which it still clings.

Going back to Place de la Bastille, on our map, we may follow the course of the new town wall along the curve of the inner boulevards, to Porte Saint-Denis; whence it took a straight southwesterly course, parallel with present Rue Aboukir, through Place des Victoires and the Bank of France, and diagonally across the gardens of the Palais-Royal, to the gate of Saint-Honoré, nearly in the centre of our Place du Théatre-Français. It was this gate and its protecting works that were pounded by the "_canons et coulevrines_" of Joan of Arc, and it was this portion of the wall which was assaulted by her at the head of her men; an assault that would have succeeded, and so have given Paris to the French, had she not been struck down by a crossbow bolt, so striking panic to her followers. When you post your letters in the outside southern box of the Post-office on the corner of Avenue de l'Opéra and Place du Théâtre-Français, or when you look in at the incubating chickens in the shop window alongside, you are standing, as near as may be, on the spot where she fell wounded on September 8, 1429. Her tent was pitched, and her head-quarters fixed, on the outer slope of the Butte des Moulins, a few feet north of where now stands the apse of the Church of Saint-Roch. From Porte Saint-Honoré, the wall went direct, across present Place du Carrousel, to the round Tour de Bois on the river-shore, and from that tower a chain was swung slantwise up-stream to the Tour de Nesle on the southern bank.

This great wall, when quite finished, was an admirable example of mediæval mural masonry. Besides its round gate-towers, it was strengthened by many square towers, and was crenellated, and had frequent strong sentry-boxes and watch-towers between the battlements. On the outside was a wide, deep ditch bank-full of water. All stood intact until partly levelled by Louis XIII. in 1634, and entirely so by Louis XIV. in 1666, during which thirty years the popular pun had run: "_Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant._" It was about 1670 that the boulevards were laid out over the foundations of the wall, its ditch filled in, and trees planted. Two of the gates were kept, enlarged, and made into triumphal arches; and these Portes Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin stand there to-day, dingy memorials of Ludovican pride and pomposity. A century later, in 1770, every trace of wall and moat was wiped away, the driveway was partly paved, and building began; but it was not until 1830 that sidewalks were made, and that grand mansions replaced the former shabby structures. We cannot put hand on any stone of the wall itself, to-day.

Within the _enceinte_ thus made, our Marais was at length entirely enclosed; away from its river-front, bordered by abbeys and monasteries; through its streets, walled off by palaces and mansions; and its other streets, packed with modest dwellings and shops; far back to the gardens and the vineyards, and the waste fields not yet tilled, that spread all around the inner zone of the wall. Within it, too, was brought the vast domain of the Templars, covering the space from this outer wall away south to Rue de la Verrerie, and between Rues du Temple and Vieille-du-Temple. It was partly under cultivation,

## partly left wild to forest and bog, this portion being known as the

Marais du Temple. Farther north were the buildings--palaces, priories, chapels--all secure within their own crenellated wall, all commanded and defended by the moated and towered citadel known as the Temple.

The order had been founded early in crusading days, in the beginning of the twelfth century, by nine French gentlemen and knights, who, clad in white robes marked with a red cross, devoted themselves to the service and the safety of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Louis VII. gave them this waste land late in the same century. The small godly body, vowed to poverty and humility, grew large in numbers and appetite, great in wealth and pride. Its knights were equal with princes, its monks were bankers for kings, and all had become simply a gang of sanctimonious brigands. A Capet saw the birth of the order, a Capet thought it time to strangle it as it neared its two-hundredth birthday. Philippe IV., "_le Bel_," less solicitous for the genuine faith than for the good coin of the Templars, laid hands on them and on it. He got rid of them by axe and stake and in other ways approved of in that day, and parcelled out their lands; through which streets were cut later, and building begun, when this new wall put them on its safe side.

With the later history of the Temple we cannot concern ourselves, save to say that it long served as a sanctuary, later as a prison, and that its last stone was plucked away, six and a half centuries after it was laid, early in the nineteenth century. The palace of the Grand Prior stood exactly on the Rue du Temple front of the present Square du Temple. That little garden was his garden, and on its other edge, just at the junction of Rues des Archives and Perrée of to-day, rose the Tower, so famous and so infamous in prison annals.

Safely settled in his Hôtel Saint-Paul, within his own wall--Marcel quiet in his grave at last, the nobles curbed, the Jacquerie crushed--the young Dauphin, who had been weak and dissembling, and who was now grown, by long apprenticeship to his trade of royalty, into the strong, prudent, politic Charles V., known in history as Charles the Wise, made proclamation, on his accession in 1364, that this--"_l'hôtel solennel des grands ébastements_"--should be henceforth the royal residence. In the old Palace on the Island was held the official court; the Louvre, partly rebuilt and brightened by him, was kept for the occasional "_séjour, souper, et gîte_" of roving royalty. Here in "Saint-Pol" was his home, from whose windows he looked out, with keen, patient, far-sighted vision, over the Paris and the France he had quelled and tranquillized.

The Hôtel Saint-Paul was a town in itself, of many mansions, big and little, of _châteaux_ with their parks, of farms with gardens, of orchards, fish-ponds, fowl-houses, a menagerie. Sauval goes with gusto into details of the buildings and their apartments, the decorations, furniture, and pavements; and the chronicle is appetizing of the dinners and banquets given to embassies and to honored visitors. Withal, pigeons perched on the carved balustrades, and guards lay on straw in the halls. It was a simple patriarchal life led here by Charles the Wise, and here begun by his son, Charles the Silly. A pretty, light-minded child of eleven, on his father's death, he remained a child through his dissolute and diseased early manhood, and through his later years of spasmodic madness and of intermittent reason, to his old age of permanent childishness.

While in Paris, this was his abode, and here he was left, almost a prisoner to unconcerned servants, by his shameless wife, Isabeau de Bavière. When she saw him, once in a way, he looked on her with unknowing eyes, or with knowing eyes of horror. His only companion was the low-born Odette de Champdivers, and with her he played the cards that untrue tradition claims to have been invented for him. He prowled about these halls, in filthy rags, eaten by ulcers and vermin, gnawing his food with canine greed; he ranged through these grounds, finding fellowship with the animals that were not let loose, but kept in cages. You may hunt up the stone walls of those cages--originally on pointed arches with short Romanesque pillars--and the stone foundations of the royal stables, in the yards on the southern side of Rue des Lions; a street whose name tells of these menageries, and that seems to echo with their roarings. The alleyway of cherry-trees now makes Rue de la Cerisaie, and Rue Beautreillis replaces the green tunnels of vines on trellises, where were gathered the grapes--good as are those of Thomery to-day--which produced the esteemed _vin de l'hôtel Saint-Paul_. Along the farther edge of its grounds, just under the old wall, ran the lane that is now Rue des Jardins; and Rue Charles V. keeps alive the memory of the founder of Saint-Paul. In all these streets, we are treading on the ground he loved.

After the wretched mad king died here in 1422, royalty came no more to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and the place ran to waste. It was no home for the new Dauphin, come to his kingdom as Charles VII., by the grace of Joan of Arc and of God. His boyish memories were of a dreary childhood, between a mad father, a devilish mother who had hated him from his birth, and princely relatives raging and wrestling over those two for the power to misgovern France. Outside the royal madhouse, Paris was a butcher-shop. Burgundians and Armagnacs were howling crazy war-cries in every street, ambuscading and assassinating at every corner, equally thirsty for blood, but both surpassed in that thirst by the butchers and horse-knackers, led by Jean Caboche and called Cabochians. All these factions, while intent solely on bloodshed, were loud-mouthed with loyalty and patriotism. They were all alike, and we may transfer to them and to their times the apt phrase of Joseph de Maistre, concerning the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew: "_Quelques scélérats firent périr quelques scélérats._" Almost every leader of men in those days came to his end by arms and in arms, and death by violence seemed the natural death. The town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black-death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came marching on; the while _la danse Macabre_ whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries.

On the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Hôtel Saint-Paul, stretched the grounds of the old _hôtel_ of Pierre d'Orgemont, Bishop of Paris. This property had come to the crown by purchase or by gift, and had been partly torn down, rebuilt, and its grounds greatly enlarged, to make a _maison-de-plaisance_ for Charles VI. The principal building had so many and such various shaped towers and turrets that it was named the Palais des Tournelles. Viewed from a distant height, as from the tower of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo, it had the look of a set of giant chessmen. This was the place selected by the Duke of Bedford for his residence during the English occupation of Paris; and from here, after the death of his brother Henry V. of England--and heir of France, as was then claimed--he reigned as Regent for the little Henry VI. He enlarged the buildings and beautified the grounds, in which he kept many rare birds. He kept, too, the rare manuscripts brought together by Charles V. in the Louvre; and after his death in Rouen--where he had helped burn The Maid--this library was carried to England, when the English departed from France. It was ransomed with coin, and brought back to Paris, by the two grandsons of its original owner--Charles of Orleans, and his brother of Angoulême, and became the nucleus of the Royal, now the National Library.

So, when the sentries in English uniforms had gone from the gates, and the archers in Lincoln green were seen no more in the streets, Charles VII. came back, made King of France by The Maid who had found him King of Bourges, and whom he let the English burn for her pains. He entered Paris in November, 1437, nearly twenty years after he had been carried out from the town in the arms of Tanneguy Duchâtel. That quick-witted provost, discovering that the Burgundians had got into the town by the betrayed Porte de Buci, on the night of Saturday, May 28, 1418, had hastened to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, had wrapped the sleeping boy in his bedclothes, and had carried him up Rue Saint-Antoine to the Bastille, and out into the country on the following day, and so to Melun, where the King's son was safe.

During this first short stay of three weeks, the listless and sluggish young King grew as fond as had been the Duke of Bedford of the walled-in grounds of the Tournelles. They were very extensive, covering the space bounded by present Rues Saint-Antoine, Saint-Gilles, Turenne, and Boulevard Beaumarchais. Within this vast enclosure were many buildings and outbuildings, and in the words of Sauval: "_Ce n'étoit que galeries et jardins de tous côtés, sans parler des chapelles._"

And henceforth, for more than a hundred years, the Tournelles, "_pour la beauté et commodité du dit lieu_," was the favored abode of royalty, when royalty favored Paris with infrequent visits. The sombre shapes of Louis XI. and his ignoble comrades darkened its precincts, at times. When he made his entry, already narrated, into the town after his coronation at Rheims, he passed the night of August 31, 1461, in the old Island-Palace, and on the following day he installed himself in "_son hôtel des Tournelles, près la Bastille de Saint-Antoine_." Here he received, in September, 1467, a visit from his second wife, Charlotte de Savoie, who came up the river from Rouen. She was met, below the Island, by a boatful of choristers, who "sang psalms and anthems after a most heavenly and melodious manner." She landed on the Island, performed her devotions at Notre-Dame, and took boat to the water-gate of Quai des Célestins opposite, and thence made her way on a white palfrey to the Tournelles. The King's physician, Dr. Coictier--most skilled in bleeding, in all possible ways, his royal patient--had an astrological tower in the grounds, and in the centre was a maze named "_Le Jardin Dædalus_." About these grounds Louis prowled, seldom going beyond them, and then only by night, and with one trusted gossip. Indeed, he was less like the King of France here in his palace than anywhere else; camping rather than residing, with a small retinue of old Brabant servitors, and a larder filled mostly with cold victuals, says Michelet. It was Loches occasionally, and Plessis-les-Tours habitually, that had the pleasure of harboring the "universal spider"; in them both he spun his webs, and waited gloating, and found "many cockroaches under the King's hearthstone," as the saying went. And at last he died, triumphant and wretched, at Plessis-les-Tours.

"_Le Petit Roi_," Charles VIII., hardly knew Paris; and when he entered the town on February 8, 1492, with his young wife, Anne of Brittany, who had been crowned at Saint-Denis the day before, the populace was not agreeably impressed by his short stature, his bad figure, his heavy head, his big nose, his thick lips always open, and his great, blank, staring eyes. He was in curious contrast with the bride--pretty, sprightly, vivacious, and "very knowing," wrote home the Venetian Ambassador, Zaccaria Contarini. The gentle, weakly King--so strange a scion of Louis XI.--made his home in Touraine. On the terrace of Amboise, where he was born, we all know the little door, leading to the old Haquelebac Gallery, against which he struck his head as he started down to look on a game of tennis. There, on April 7, 1498, in a sordid and filthy chamber, a remnant of the old _château_ he was just then rebuilding, he lay for hours until his death, so carrying out the curse of Savonarola, who had threatened him with the anger of God, if he failed to return to Italy with his army to cleanse the unclean Church with the sword.

[Illustration: Anne de Bretagne. (From a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection.)]

"_Le bon Roi Louis, Père du Peuple, est mort_," is the doleful pronouncement of the _crieurs du corps_, starting out from the Tournelles before dawn of New Year's day, 1515. The kindly old fellow has died in the night, a martyr to a young wife and to her fashionable hours. All his life long, Louis had been subject to the fancies of women, to his undoing. We meet him first, the young and ardent Duc d'Orléans, the best horseman and swordsman in the court, riding out from Plessis with the brave Dunois--both grandsons, with different bars, of the murdered Louis d'Orléans--to snatch the girl Isabelle from the escort of Quentin Durward. The duke has already taken the eye of the capable Anne, eldest daughter of Louis XI., as Brantôme is quick to note. Getting no return for her passion, the fury of a woman scorned, backed by her father's malign humor, marries the handsome prince to her younger sister, Jeanne--ugly and deformed and uncharming. Freed by divorce from this childless union, on taking the throne, Louis hastens to marry his former flame, Anne of Brittany, now the widow of Charles VIII. This lady, fair in person and fairer in her duchy, lively and not unlearned, a blameless yet imperious spouse, gave him many happy years. The personal court he allowed "_sa Bretonne_" outshone his own court, and glorified the gloomy Tournelles. For all his clinging to her, she was taken from him when only thirty-seven years of age; refusing to live, when she found, for the first time, that her self-will was not allowed its own way. She would have her daughter, Claude, marry Charles of Austria, Emperor-to-be, and the powers in France would not have it, because they were unwilling that Brittany should go, with its heiress, into foreign hands. A marriage was arranged between Claude and the young Duc d'Angoulême, who was to become François I., so keeping the rich duchy for France. After Anne's death, her widower made a third venture, and yet, the chronicler plaintively assures us, he had no need of a new wife. This was Mary, sister of Henry VIII. of England, who was glad to get her out of his country; and she was as glad to return as soon as, on finding herself a widow, she could become the wife of her first love, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. And so these two were the grandparents of Lady Jane Grey.

Now the customary hour for dining in those days was from five to ten in the morning, changing a little with the seasons. A French "Poor Richard" of the period says:

"_Lever à cinq, diner à neuf, Souper à cinq, coucher à neuf; Fait vivre d'ans nonnante et neuf._"

Montaigne owns that his dinner-hour of eleven in the morning was unduly late, but then his supper came correspondingly late, never before, and often after, six of the evening. Henri IV. dined at the same belated hour, while François I. could not wait later than nine o'clock. Once installed in the Tournelles, this young English bride of Louis's must needs, among other innovations, introduce her own country's customs into her husband's mode of life, as we are told in "_la très joyeuse et plaisante histoire_" of the "Loyal Serviteur," of Bayard: "His wife changed all his manner of living; he had been wont to dine at eight, and he now dined at mid-day; he had been wont to go to bed at six in the evening, and he now went to bed at midnight." Moreover, she beguiled him into supping late and heavily. So these changes, and other changes in his habits, brought him to his grave, six weeks after his marriage. His Parisians gathered in Rue Saint-Antoine, about the entrance of the Tournelles, in honest sorrow for the loss of the big and benevolent old boy, whom they looked on and loved as the Father of his People; indeed "one of the people," says Michelet, "without the soul of a king."