Part 14

These tall windows, opening from floor to ceiling, were a novelty to the Parisians of that day, the fashion having only just then been set in the new Hôtel Rambouillet. Behind them, the spacious blue and yellow _salons_ were hung with Italian velvets, or with Flemish and French tapestries, interspaced with Venetian mirrors. Lebrun and his like decorated the ceilings later, and the cornices were heavily carved, and the furniture was in keeping with its surroundings. The arcades of brick, picked out with stone ribs--a trifle too low and heavy, it may be, for their symmetry with the otherwise perfect proportions of these façades--were imitated from those of Italy, to serve for shelter from sun, and for refuge from rain, to the strollers who thronged them for over a century. To tell over their names, one has merely to look down the list of the men who made themselves talked about, through the whole of Louis XIII.'s and almost to the close of Louis XIV.'s reign. Then there were the women, lovely or witty or wicked, and those others, "_entre deux âges_," for whom the Marais was noted. The creations of comedy are here, too, and Molière's Mascarille and _le Menteur_ of Corneille are as alive as their creators, under these arcades.

For this spot was not only the centre of the supreme social movement of the capital during this long period, but it was the cradle of that _bourgeois_ existence which grew absurd in its swelling resolve to grow as big as that above it. The Hôtel Rambouillet, for all its affectations, did some slight service to good literature and good morals; it rated brains and manners above rank and money; it gave at least an outside deference to decency. Molière himself, rebelling, had to yield, and his early license became restraint, at least. In the wild days of the Fronde, men and women were in earnest, and then came the days when they were in earnest only about trifles; when the "infinitely little" was of supremest importance, when shallow refinements concealed coarseness, stilted politeness covered mutual contempt, and the finest sentiments of a Joseph Surface in the _salon_ went along with unrestricted looseness outside. To seem clean was the epidemic of the time, and its chronic malady was cant, pretence, and pollution. And the _bourgeois_ imitated the noble; and, in the Place Royale and about, Molière found his _Précieuses Ridicules_. Just a little way from here, was a room full of them--that of Mlle. de Scudéry.

Go up Rue de Beauce, narrowest of Marais streets between its old house- and garden-walls, and you come to the passage that leads to the Marché des Enfants-Rouges, the market and its surrounding space taking the greater part of the site, and keeping alive the name, of the admirable charity for children originated by the good Marguerite de Navarre, sister of François I., and by him endowed at her urging. The little orphans cared for in this institution were clad all in red, and their pet popular name of "_Enfants Rouges_" soon took the place of the official title of "_Enfants de Dieu_." On the corner of this passage, you must stop to choose the abode of Mlle. de Scudéry from one of the two ancient houses there, for it is certain that she lived in one of these two, with a side door in the passage; and local legend and topographic research have failed to fix on the true one. She has told us that it stood alongside the Templars' grounds, in the midst of gardens and orchards tuneful with birds, so that the lower end of the street was called Rue des Oiseaux; and we find this narrow passage, since then close shut in with houses, still tuneful to-day, but the birds are kept in cages.

In this house Madeleine de Scudéry wrote her long and weary romance, "Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus," the most widely read and the most successful book of the day, from the money point of view. With this money she paid the debts of her brother, Georges, a dashing spendthrift with showy tastes; one of those chivalric souls, too fine to work, but not too fine to sponge on his sister and to take pay for, and put his name to, work done by her pen. Here she carried on the old business of the Hôtel Rambouillet, where she had served her apprenticeship before starting out for herself, and where she had produced the poem by which she won her _nom de Parnasse_, "Sapho." Here she was promoted to be the Tenth Muse, and sat enthroned amid her admirers, who trooped in from all about the Marais, on every Saturday for more than thirty years. As to the _causerie littéraire et galante_ of these reunions, we learn all about it, and laugh at it, in Pellisson's "Chronique du Samedi." It is impossible to burlesque it; Molière himself could not do it. He has taken entire sentences concerning the education of woman from the "Grand Cyrus," and put them into his "Femmes Savantes"; and it is simply a portrait that he drew of Madelon, as she sat in this _salon_ a year or so before he put her on the stage, awaiting the gifted authors of "La Carte du Royaume des Précieuses." And Mascarille's fatuous swagger and strident voice--as he walks the boards in Coquelin's skin--seem to come straight and uncaricatured from Pellisson's pages. When the valet's voice, quavering with complacency, shakes our midriff with his pronouncement: "We attach ourselves only to madrigals," he is making a direct quotation from the "Chronique."

Mlle. de Scudéry, while a _précieuse_ herself, was too genuine and talented and good-hearted a woman to be ridiculous. She is really an admirable example of the writing-woman of the seventeenth century, a female Mignard in her pen-portraits. Dr. Martin Lister came to pay his respects to the Tenth Muse, in this little house in 1698, and found her over ninety years old, toothless, and still talking! One might wish to have been present at this meeting, but may be content with looking on the walls that harbored a worthy woman and her queer crowd of adorers.

They came from all about the Marais, it has been said. At the time of her death, in the first year of the eighteenth century, this quarter had become the chosen abode of the real swells of Paris, and so the only possible residence for all those who wished to be so considered. Long before, a new member of the body politic had been born--the _bourgeois_--and a place had to be found for him. The leisure he had gained from bread-getting need no longer be given to head-breaking, and for his vision there was a horizon broader than that of his father, of dignity in man and comeliness in life. His first solicitude was for his habitation, which must be set free from the rude strength of the feudal fortresses in which the _noblesse_ had camped. He levelled battlements into cornices, and widened loop-holes into windows, open for sunlight and _à la belle étoile_. In this seemly home, his thoughts threw off the obstruction imposed by centuries of repression, and by the joyless dogmas of the Church. And so began that multiform process that, at last, flamed up through the frozen earth, and has been named the Renaissance.

Many of the new mansions of the _bourgeoisie_ were in Marais streets that were still walled off by the shut-in grounds of the religious bodies, whose unproductive dwellers avoided all taxation. "You see, formerly, there were monasteries all about here," says light-hearted Laigle in "Les Misérables"; "Du Breul and Sauval give the list of them and the Abbé Lebeuf. They were all around here; they swarmed; the shod, the unshod, the shaven, the bearded, the blacks, the grays, the whites, the Franciscans, the Minimi, the Capuchins, the Carmelites, the Lesser Augustins, the Greater Augustins, the Old Augustins. They littered." These belated owls, blinking in the new sunlight and fresher air, had now to find other dark walls for their flapping. The zone of abbeys, stretching from the Bastille to the Louvre, began to be cut into, and the grounds of the great _hôtels_ of the noblemen came into the market as well. There had been hardly any opening-up of this quarter, from the day when Charles V. ended his wall, to the day when Henri IV. began his Place Royale. He had planned, also, a monumental square at the top of the Templars' domain, to be called Place de France, with a grandiose entrance, from which eight wide streets, bearing the names of the great provinces of France, were to radiate, to be crossed by smaller streets named from the lesser provinces. For this scheme Sully had bought up, under cover of a broker, an immense tract in this region, just as the King's death put a sudden end to this project, along with all his other projects.

One man did much to make real the plan that had been put on paper only. This was Claude Charlot, a Languedoc peasant, who had come to the capital in wooden _sabots_, with no money, but with plenty of shrewdness and audacity. By 1618 he had managed to acquire almost the entire tract set aside by Sully, and through it he cut streets, the principal one of which is called after him, while, of those called after the provinces, some still keep their names and some have been renamed.

Even during his mapmaking of the Marais--summarily stopped by Richelieu's spoliation--this was yet a solitary and unsafe quarter, through which its honest citizens went armed against footpads by day, and by night stretched chains across the _coupe-gorges_ of its narrow streets. It continued to grow slowly through the last years of the seventeenth century, and these streets, with the Place Royale as their centre, were in time lined by the _portes-cochères_ of rich financiers, farmers-generals, and receivers of taxes, all swollen with their pickings and stealings. They adorned their dwellings with carved panels and painted ceilings, with sculptured halls and spacious stone stairways; and many of them were rich in manuscripts and rare books, and in collections of various sorts.

Of these mansions, a surprising proportion is still standing, given up to business-houses, factories, and schools; for all of which uses their capacious rooms readily lend themselves. Within these old walls, face to face with the bustling streets, shouldered by structures of yesterday, or in dignified withdrawal behind their courts, can be found actual treasures of decoration and of carving, along with invisible and intangible treasures of association. For the aspect of a street, or the atmosphere of a house, tells to the intelligent looker-on as much of its bygone inmates as of its bare masonry. And kindly fate has left such relics plentifully scattered about the Marais. In oldest Paris of the Island, and in that almost as old suburb on the southern bank, one must prowl patiently to find suggestive brick and stone. In those regions a concealed tower, or an isolated _tourelle_ on the angle of a building, makes the whole joy of a day's journey. Here, in the Marais, at every step you stumble on history and tradition and romance.

For "the little province of the Marais" was far away from the capital, and was let alone; or, rather, it was an unmolested island, washed about and not washed over by the swift tide of traffic. The stormy waves of insurrection have broken against its shores, and its pavements have never been made into barricades in any of the recurring revolutions, which have all been but interludes and later acts of the Great Revolution, in the people's endeavor to carry on and complete the main motive of that drama.

The vogue of the Marais began to fade away with the middle years of the eighteenth century, when the old _noblesse de famille_ adopted the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the new _noblesse de finance_ migrated to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the gadding multitude sought the arcades of the Palais-Cardinal, renamed Palais-Royal. A few ancient families, poor and proud, remained to burrow in their ancestral homes, and retired pensioned officials and _petits rentiers_ found a boon in the small rentals of the big apartments. All these _locataires_, preserving the old forms and keeping untarnished the old etiquette, gave an air of dignified dulness to the Marais. Their dinner-hour was at five o'clock, and after that solemn function, held in the hall hung with family portraits or with dingy tapestry, their sedate prattle, before going to bed at nine o'clock, would touch on the unhallowed Edict of Nantes and on its righteous revocation; even as in a certain London club of to-day, musty old gentlemen still lament, with subdued dismay, "the murder of the Martyr, Charles Stuart." The sole diversion of these ancient dames of the Marais was a stroll in the Place Royale, arrayed in old-time costumes, their white hair dressed high above their patrician brows.

Nowadays, under the horse-chestnuts and baby elms of its ground, school-boys from the neighboring institutions romp on the grit, and babies are wheeled about by their nurses, and on the benches sit faded old men, blinking and inarticulate. They cling to the historic name of the place, while to us of the real world it is known as Place des Vosges; this title having been given it, in honor of the province of that name, by Lucien Bonaparte, while he was Minister of the Interior. The appellation was officially adopted by the Republic of 1848, and once more, perhaps finally and for all time, by the Third Republic.

THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS

[Illustration: The Place des Vosges.]

THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS

"_Dans cet hôtel est née, le 6 Fevrier, 1626, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné_:" so reads the tablet set in that wall, which fronts on the square, of the house numbered 1 Place des Vosges, having its entrance at No. 11 Rue de Birague. There is no name more closely linked with the Marais than that of this illustrious woman. Born in this house, baptized in its parish church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, she here grew up to girlhood; she was married in Saint-Gervais, her daughter was married in Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs; and the greater portion of her life was passed within this quarter. Her father was killed in a duel a few months after her birth, at the age of seven she lost her mother, and when only twenty-five years old, she found herself a widow. After a short sojourn in the provinces with her son and daughter, she came back, in 1655, to Paris and to the Marais. She had casual and unsettled domiciles, for many years, in Rues de Thorigny, Barbette, des Francs-Bourgeois, des Lions-Saint-Paul, des Tournelles--all within our chosen district--before she settled in her home of twenty years, the Carnavalet.

It is but a step away from this tablet above us, to the corner of Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and Sévigné; the latter street, at that time, bearing its original name of Culture-Sainte-Catherine, having been opened through that portion under cultivation of the grounds of the great monastery of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers. On the corner of this new street and that of Francs-Bourgeois--then Rue Neuve-Sainte-Catherine--a piece of the convent garden was bought by Jacques de Ligneris, and thereon a house for his residence was erected. Its plans were drawn by Pierre Lescot, it was built by Jean Bullant, was decorated by Androuët du Cerceau, and its sculptures were carved by Jean Goujon. And thus these walls, on which we are looking, speak in mute laudation of four famous men. One more notable name may be added to this list--that of François Mansart. He was called in, a century or so after the completion of this mansion, for its renovation and enlargement; and, to his lasting honor, he contented himself with doing only what seemed to him to be imperatively demanded, and with attempting no "improvements" nor "restoration" of the work of his great predecessors. He knew what we have learned, that those words too often mean desecration and ruin to all historic monuments in all lands. During this interval, the building had come into the hands of Françoise de la Baume, Dame de Kernévalec, whose Breton name, corrupted to Carnavalet, has clung to it ever since. That name suggested the pun of the _carnaval_ masks, carved in stone over the arches of the wings in the court. They were done by a later hand than that of Goujon, whose last work is to be seen about that window of the Louvre, on which he was busy, when a bullet picked him off, a day or two after the night of Saint Bartholomew. The tranquil elegance of his chisel has adorned this almost perfect gateway with the graceful winged figure in its keystone. It lifts and lightens the severe dignity of the façade. And, in the court--its centre not unworthily held by the bronze statue of Louis XIV., remarkable in its exquisite details, found in the old Hôtel de Ville--we linger in joy before the graceful flowing curves and the daylight directness of the Seasons of this French Phidias. The figures on the wings are from a feebler chisel than his. Of all the crowding memories of this spot, those of the Marquise de Sévigné and of Jean Goujon are the most vivid and the most captivating. The busts of these two, one on either side, greet us at the head of the staircase leading to her apartments; she is alert and winsome, he is sedate and thoughtful and a trifle too stern for the most amiable of sculptors, as he shows himself here, rather than the staunch Huguenot, killed for his convictions.

She was fifty-one years of age by the records when she came to live here, in 1677, and half that age at heart, which she kept always young. She had been so long camping about in the Marais, that she was impatient to settle down in the ideal dwelling she had found, at last. She writes to her daughter: "_Dieu merci, nous avons l'hôtel Carnavalet. C'est une affaire admirable; nous y tiendrons tous, et nous aurons le bel air. Comme on ne peut pas tout avoir, il faut se passer des parquets, et des petites cheminées a la mode.... Pour moi, je vais vous ranger la Carnavalette, car, enfin, nous l'avons, et j'en suis fort aise._"

So she moved in, with her son and daughter, both dear to her. It was to the daughter, however, that the mother's affluence of affection flowed out, all through her life; and it may well be that this veritable passion saved her from all other passions, during the years of her long widowhood, when many a _grand parti_ fell at her feet. She looked on them all alike, with pity for their seizure, and each of them got up and walked away, unappeased. Yet hers was a rich nature, wholesome and womanly withal, and there are potentialities of emotion in the pouting lips and inviting eyes of the pretty pagan of this bust. Nor was she a prude, and her way of quoting Rabelais and listening to La Fontaine's verses would horrify us moderns of queasy stomachs. She had ready pardon for the infidelities of her husband, and later for the misdeeds of her scampish cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, "the most dangerous tongue in France."

Above all, this real woman showed a masculine strength and loyalty of friendship for men; showed it most markedly in her sympathy for those who had fallen in the world. There is no finer example in the annals of constancy than her devotion to the broken Fouquet, howbeit he may have merited breaking. The spirit of her letters, at the time of his disgrace and imprisonment, cannot be twisted into anything ignoble, as Napoleon tried to do, on reading them in the State archives. He sneeringly suggested that her sympathy with Fouquet was "_bien chaud, bien vif, bien tendre, pour de la simple amitié_." So it was, indeed; for her friendships were attachments, and warmth and tenderness pulsate in all her letters; and these qualities will, along with their unpremeditated spontaneity, keep them alive as long as letters live. What else was in her letters has been told by Nodier, when he says that they regulated and purified the language for ordinary use; and by Jules Janin, who rightly claims that, from this Carnavalet, came the purest and most perfect French hitherto heard in France.

In forming and housing the great collection of the History of Paris, to which the Musée Carnavalet is devoted, new buildings about a trim garden in the rear have been added to the original mansion, whose own rooms have been subjected to as little change as possible. Madame de Sévigné's apartment, on the first floor, is hardly altered, and her bedroom and _salon_ have been especially kept inviolate. The admirable mouldings, the curious mirrors, the old-fashioned lustre, remain as she left them, when she went to her daughter at Grignan to die. In this _salon_, and in the wide corridor leading to it, both now so silent and pensive, she received all the men of her day worth receiving; and it is here alone that we breathe the very atmosphere of this incomparable creature.

We may join the early-goers among these men, who make their way to another house, not far distant. There are temptations to stop before, and explore within, the seventeenth-century mansions all along Rues Sévigné and du Parc-Royal, but we pass on into Rue Turenne--once Rue Saint-Louis, the longest and widest and foremost in fashion of Marais streets, now merely big and bustling, with little left of its ancient glory--until we come to its No. 58, on the corner of old Rue des Douze-Portes, now named Ville-Hardouin, after the contemporary chronicler of the Fifth Crusade. This modest house at the corner has been luckily overlooked by the modern rebuilder of this quarter, who has not touched its two stories and low attic above a ground floor, its unobtrusive portal, its narrow hall, and its staircase; small and quaint, in keeping with the cripple who was carried up and down for many years. Paul Scarron lived here, in the apartment _au deuzième à droite_, dubbed the "_Hôtel de l'Impécuniosité_" by his young wife, who was the granddaughter of the Calvinist leader, Agrippa d'Aubigné, and who was to be the second wife of Louis XIV. Sitting at her scantily supplied supper-table here, the maid would whisper that a course was lacking, and that an anecdote from the hostess must fill the bill of fare instead. Goldsmith tells us, at the beginning of his "Retaliation:"

"Of old when Scarron his companions invited, Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united."

And, just here, it is curious to recall the fact that Goldsmith was busied, during the last months of his life, on a translation of Scarron's "Roman Comique," and his bethumbed copy was found on his desk, after his death.