Part 17
It was Sébastien Zamet who was their host in this "_palais d'amour du roi_." The son of a shoe-maker of Lucca, he had found his fortune in Paris, like so many of his countrymen in those days, and he built here "a true fairy palace, such as romances describe," says Saint-Simon. And here, walking in the garden after supper on the evening of April 9, 1599, the lovely Gabrielle was taken ill very suddenly. They carried her to the Hôtel de Sourdis and put her in the care of her aunt, with whom she had passed a portion of her girlhood in that mansion. It stood within the precincts of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, its entrance on Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, where now is the end of Rue Perrault. Here Gabrielle died, in agony, at six o'clock of the next morning; poisoned, say Sismondi, Michelet, and the rest, but by whose hand we shall never know. The Hôtel des Mousquetaires, that you will find at No. 4 of Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, was then in existence, and so, too, were many of these tall façades, with ancient, iron balconies that look down on the narrow winding street, then a crowded thoroughfare of old Paris. After Zamet's death his house was bought by the Duc de Lesdiguières, Marshal and later Constable of France, from whom it took its permanent name. We have already come here with Boileau to see the veteran _Frondeur_, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, whose last years were passed in this mansion, under the care of one niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and comforted by another niece, Madame de Sévigné.
On the quay, off on our left, the Célestins _caserne_ occupies a small portion of the immense grounds of the Célestins Monastery. It was a rich community, made so by the many gifts of kings, from Charles V. down, to "_leurs bien aimés chapelains et serviteurs en Dieu_." These pious beggars were not too proud to accept anything, and time fails to tell of the splendors of their church, which became a museum of monuments, tombs, statues, and was demolished in 1849, many of its treasures having been destroyed during the Revolution. The godly brethren are remembered in the name of the barracks and of the quay, and to some of us, it must be owned, by the delectable dish of their invention, _omelette à la Célestins_.
That long façade beyond, on Rue de Sully, belongs to the Arsenal, the building alone left, its spacious gardens now under streets and houses. We have come to its library with young Balzac, when he escaped from his grinding drudgery and his dreary garret in Rue Lesdiguières. We have driven here with Madame Récamier on the day before her death. The most winning memory of the place is that of Charles Nodier, an adorable man of genius, whose very defects were lovable, we are told by the elder Dumas, who loved him. Nodier and Charles Lamb were hissing, almost in the same year, each his own damned play. Many others besides Dumas loved Nodier--Royalists and Republicans, Classicists and Romanticists; and they crowded his _salon_ here of an evening. For this was his official residence as Librarian, occupied by him from his appointment in 1823 until his death in 1844. His historic green drawing-room, where men were friendly who fought outside, and the smaller rooms of his apartment on the first floor overlooking Boulevard Morland, have been thrown into the library, and are now its reading-rooms. They have kept their old-time panelling, carvings, mouldings, but their walls, once decorated _en grisaille_, have been toned to a uniform delicate gray-white.
This library was begun in 1785 by the Comte d'Artois, who purchased the valuable books and manuscripts of Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d'Argenson, and of the Duc de la Vallière. Rooms in the Arsenal were arranged for this collection, and it was named the "_Librairie de Monsieur_;" the Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI. and of Louis XVIII., having been the last "_Monsieur_" in France. His library has grown to be the grandest in Paris after the Bibliothèque Nationale. It contains the original archives of the Bastille--such as were saved, when so many were scattered and destroyed at its taking--and it is especially rich in dramatic literature and in manuscripts.
Here, above our heads as we stand in Rue du Petit-Musc, is the tasteful, unspoiled side wall of the Hôtel de Lavallette, formerly the Hôtel Fieubet. It was built by the younger Mansart, on the corner of Saint-Paul's grounds, for the Chancellor of Maria Theresa, Gaspard de Fieubet, and it became a gathering-place of the writers of those days. They were courted by its owner, whose name is frequent in the letters of Madame de Sévigné, and he himself turned his hand to rhyming, at odd hours. Nearly two hundred years after he had gone, his mansion was rescued from the sugar-refiners, who had degraded it to their uses, by the Lavallette who has given it his name, and who "restored" it beyond the recognition of its great architect, could he see it now. Its façade behind the little court is overloaded with carvings, buttressed by caryatides, surmounted by campaniles; it is a debauch of sculpture, an orgy of ornamentation, under which the stately lines of the original fabric are almost lost. They are quite hidden, on one side, by a modern wing that has been thrust in on the court. All this dishonor to architecture does not trouble the boys, whose big school fills the building now, and who troop about the court in their black jackets and trousers, their wide, white collars, their big, white ties, pulling on reluctant gloves, as they line up on their unwilling way to some church function.
We pass along the quay, glancing at the homelike and homely house numbered 4, whose quiet dignity behind its court is in pleasing contrast with the place just left. Here were the home and the studio of Antoine-Louis Barye, and here he died on June 25, 1875.
On the quay at the corner of Rue Saint-Paul there stood until very lately the entire and unspoiled _hôtel_ built for young Charles, Duc de La Vieuville, in the last days of the Valois men. It was an admirable specimen of the architecture of their time, as we may still assure ourselves by a glance at the wing that is left within the court entered from Rue Saint-Paul; a stone side wall toned to the glorified grayness of age, pierced by tall, slender windows of graceful proportions, and, above, the picturesque brick dormers of that period.
The last of the Valois women, Marguerite, had her home hard by here, and its story begins just on this spot. When Charles V., to round out and make entire his Saint-Paul estate, was taking in neighboring _hôtels_ and outlying bits of land, he found, here where we find the Hôtel de La Vieuville, the Paris seat of the archbishops of Sens. Their palace on this corner, and its grounds extending along the river-front and back along the east side of Rue Saint-Paul, up beyond present Rue des Lions, cut out a goodly slice from this angle of the royal domain. The King took this property, giving in exchange, to the archbishop, the feudal fortress, the Hôtel d'Éstoménil, a little farther west on the river-bank, at the meeting-place of several country roads. Those roads are now the streets named Hôtel-de-Ville, Figuier, Fauconnier, de l'Ave-Maria; and where they meet stands the Hôtel de Sens, in almost the same state, as to its walls, as when they were finished by the archbishop Tristan de Salazar. This soldier-priest had rebuilt the old structure in the last years of the fifteenth and the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and it remains an authentic and authoritative document of the domestic architecture of that period. The delicate ornamentation of its façade has suffered, some few mutilations have despoiled the fabric, its gardens are built upon, their great trees are gone, yet it stands, time-stained and weather-worn, a most impressive example of that Gothic strength and beauty whose frozen lines were just beginning to melt under the fire of the upspringing Renaissance.
The noble arch of the ogival portal is, by a touch of genius, pinched forward at its topmost point, and is there sliced away, so as to make a snub-nosed protuberance that seems to lift up the whole front. Its two high-peaked bartizan turrets are a trifle heavy, as we see them hemmed in by other buildings, but their panelling and moulding plead for pardon for any slight disproportion; and the one on the corner is perfect in situation and in effect. The few windows of the front have lost their stone-crossed mullions, some broken, some bricked up. The great dormer window above, possibly of later construction, is a prediction of the loveliness that was to come to dormers, such as we see in the roofs of Rouen's Hôtel de Ville and of the _château_ of Blois. The fine effect of the chimneys, once entirely of stone, has been marred by cheap patching. As to the rest, the oddities and irregularities of this façade are yet all in good taste and all captivating. Within the groined porch we see, across the small court, the main building meant for the archbishop's dwelling, and the solid square tower meant for defence and for watching. Its entrance-door tells, in its size and shape, the entire tale of feudal days. Away up on one angle of this tower is an imitation sentry-box, battlemented and supported by corbelled brackets. The interior of the buildings has been defaced and degraded by the base usages to which it has been subjected, yet traces are left of its past grandeur in some of the rooms and halls.
[Illustration: The Hôtel de Sens.]
These awaited in orderly and decorous silence, in their early days, the coming of their owner from the mother-church at Sens. He came along the banks of the Yonne and the Seine on his richly caparisoned mule, his foot-servants in advance, his clerkly servitors and ecclesiastics riding behind, and so he entered into this tranquil court. Years later the place was noisy enough, when the religious wars made it one of the meeting-places of the leaders of the Holy League. On the very day when Henri IV. entered Paris, the Archbishop of Sens, Cardinal de Pellevé, lay dying in this his palace, almost within hearing of the triumphant Te Deum in Notre-Dame.
The King had been allowed his divorce by his childless wife, Marguerite, and he in turn allowed her to return to Paris from her long exile in Auvergne; ordering that this _hôtel_ should be fittingly arranged for her residence, in 1605. We saw her last, a charming child, in the gardens of the Tournelles. And now she comes here, a worn wanton of nearly fifty-five, her wonted fires still smouldering under the ashes. It is between these two appearances that we like to look on her in the pages of Brantôme and on the canvas of Clouet. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, has been aptly dubbed the _valet-de-place_ of history; and yet a valet has the merit of looking out of his own eyes from his own point of view. It was for him that Marguerite wrote her "Mémoires," and to him she left them. In after days, when exiled from the court he loved, able only to lick the chops of memory, he wrote her _éloge_ in these glowing words: "If there has ever been anyone in the world perfect in beauty, it is the Queen of Navarre. All who have been, or shall be, near her, are ugly beside her. If there is a miscreant who believes not in the miracles of God, let him look upon her. Many believe that she is rather a goddess of heaven than a princess of earth, and yet perhaps no goddess was ever so lovely."
It is indeed a lovely creature, yet all of earth, whom we see in Clouet's half life-size portrait in the _château_ of Azay-le-Rideau. Her plentiful blond hair curves back above her fine brow, and her bluish-gray eyes smile out with inviting mischievousness. Yet Brantôme has to own that his goddess was easily first in the _escadron volant_ that sailed under her mother's flag, and we may guess what that meant in the court "whose vices it would be repulsive to suggest, and whose virtues were homicide and adultery."
In this Hôtel de Sens, Madame Marguerite held receptions, twice a week, of men of letters and of the arts, with whom her learning allowed her to converse on equal terms; and her kindliness allowed them to feel at ease. For "from her behavior it could never be discovered that she had once been the wife of the King." But the wayward Margot made trouble for herself that ended her stay here after a year or less. She came home from mass at the Célestins on the morning of Wednesday, April 5, 1606, and as she was helped from her coach by her newest favorite page of eighteen, he was killed by her latest discarded favorite, already twenty. She sat in one of these front windows the next day, having neither eaten nor drunk nor slept meanwhile; she looked out on the beheading of the jaunty assassin; that evening she left the Hôtel de Sens forever. For a while she stayed at her hunting-lodge at Issy, already visited by us in former pages, and then went to her last dwelling, on the southern bank in the Pré-aux-Clercs, which looked out across the river at the Louvre, where Henry was unhappy with her successor. The two women remained always friendly, and were seen together in festivities and processions, and the reigning Queen paid many a debt of the deposed Queen. To the last she rouged to the eyes, and wore a flowing wig and low frocks, albeit she had turned _dévote_, and had found a new idol in her confessor. This was young Vincent de Paul, not yet canonized, whose chaste ministrations made him adored by sinners elderly enough to repent. There she died in the spring of 1615, at the age of sixty-three, the last of the Valois name, leaving everything, mostly debts, to young Louis XIII.
Later along in the seventeenth century, when the court end of the town went to the west, and the Church dignitaries found this region too far afield, this Hôtel de Sens was sold. Its new owners and tenants were the merchants and financiers who crowded then to this quarter. They, too, soon moved farther west, and the place had many strange employments forced upon it. As early as 1692, the _messageries_ for Dijon and Lyons rented it for their town head-quarters. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the palace of the archbishops was degraded to a livery stable and a horsedealer's lair, and the ancient arms of Sens on its front and the escutcheons of Lorraine and Bourbon, prelates of the Church, were covered by a great sign, "_Maison de Roulage et de Commission_." From this court, in the words of the advertisement of that date, "_Le Courrier de la Malle de Paris à Lyons
## partit à cinq heures et demi du soir, 8 Floréal, an IV._"--which was
April 27, 1796.
[Illustration: Marguerite de Valois. (From a portrait by an unknown artist, in the Musée de Montpellier.)]
That mail-coach was stopped near Lieussart, its driver killed, and a large sum in assignats and gold carried off. For this crime one Joseph Lesurques was arrested, and was recognized by several witnesses as the robber. He had been an official in Douai, had saved money, and had gone to Paris for the education of his children. Neither his record nor his alibi sufficed to acquit him, the strongest of circumstantial evidence convicted him, and he was executed on October 30, 1796. Two years later the murderer and robber was captured in one Dubosc, who, after a daring escape and recapture, went to the guillotine. By Dubosc's conviction Lesurques was posthumously morally acquitted, but his judicial rehabilitation has never been made, albeit his broken and crazed children petitioned, courts debated, and Deputies chattered through many long years. This true story, our last reminiscence of the Hôtel de Sens, has been put on the French stage as "Le Courrier de Lyons," and on the English stage as "The Lyons Mail."
We go on to the upper end of Rue Fauconnier, and across Rue Saint-Antoine, to where begins Rue Pavée-au-Marais, a most ancient and aristocratic street, filled with grand mansions in its best days and in days not so long gone. It had taken its name as early as the middle of the fifteenth century, when, first of all the Marais streets, it was paved. It was known, unofficially and popularly, as _le petit Marais_, so closely did it crowd, within its short and select limits, the essential characteristics in architecture and atmosphere of the great Marais. Now, wofully modernized, it holds one relic only, a magnificent relic, that suggests to us, in its solitary dignity, something of the lost glories of this street.
We cross Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, a main thoroughfare of old Paris, whose odd name came from Charles, brother of Saint Louis, Count of Anjou and Provence, and King of Naples and Sicily in 1265. His fortified abode stood on the northern side of this street, at its eastern end just within the old walls. It became, in after times, the _hôtel_ and then the prison of La Force. Its entrance was over yonder, at the corner of modern Rue Malher; and opposite, on the southern corner, was the stone that served as the axeman's block for the Princess of Lamballe. Along this pavement the small Gavroche led the two smaller Thénardier boys, on his way to _his hôtel_--the plaster elephant in Place de la Bastille. A wide avenue, bordered by modern constructions, is fast taking the place of the old street and robbing it of all its character.
Where Rue Pavée meets Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, stands the Hôtel Lamoignon, formerly the Hôtel d'Angoulême. At that corner a square turret juts out from above the ground floor, overhanging the pavement, its supporting bracket cut under in shell-like curves. About the stately court, entered from Rue Pavée, rise the imposing walls, those of the wings of a little later date and a little more ornate than that of the façade. This front is pre-eminently impressive in its height, in the unusual loftiness of its floors and their windows, in the single Corinthian pilasters, tall and slender and graceful, rising from ground to cornice. They may serve us as a souvenir of Jean Bullant's work in the _château_ of Ecouen and in his portion of Chantilly. Above that cornice the dormer windows spring high under their gabled ends. Beneath them, and over the entrance porch, and on the side wall of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois--profusely decorating, but not overloading, the spacious surfaces that carry them easily--we trace without effort the unworn hunting-horns, the stags' heads, the dogs in chase, the crescent and the initial H so interlaced as to form an H and a D--all the carved emblems of Diane de France, for whom this remarkable structure was planned and built, a little after 1580, by a now unknown architect.
She was born of an Italian mother, during a stay in her country of the son of François I., who was later Henri II. On coming to the throne, in 1547, he legitimatized this daughter, then ten years of age, and gave her education and position in France. She grew up to be a good woman and a good wife to Horace Farnese, Duc de Castro, and to her second husband, François, the eldest son of the Constable Montmorenci. She spent her long life--which saw seven monarchs sitting on the French throne--doing kindly acts, not one of which meant so much for the France she loved as the reconciliation between Henri III. and Henri de Navarre; possible through her, because the sceptic Béarnais took her word for or against any written word of anyone. Dying in 1619, she left this mansion to Charles, Duc d'Angoulême, son of Charles IX. and Marie Touchet, the last of her many benefactions to him. He added these wings, and placed in that on the northern side this stately stone staircase, filling the width between the stone walls, with no hand-rail to break its sweep. Nothing is left of the former grandeur of the interior, which is given up to large industries and petty handicrafts; even the vast and lofty chambers are cut up for trade purposes by partitions and by interposed floorings.
In 1658 the Hôtel d'Angoulême became the Hôtel Lamoignon by purchase of Guillaume de Lamoignon, a wealthy President of Parliament, and in 1684 it went to his son, Chrétien-François de Lamoignon. It was a dwelling worthy of him and of his illustrious name, which it still bears. In it he received the best society of that day--represented to us by Racine, Boileau, Bourdaloue, Regnard, and others of their kidney, all honored in finding a friend in this magistrate of ability, probity, kindliness. It was to him that Boileau addressed his "Sixth Epistle," and to him, when, as Master of Requests, it was his official duty to forbid further performances of "Tartufe" after the first night, Molière submitted without rancor. Perhaps his highest honor, during a life of honors, was his refusal of an election to a _fauteuil_ in the Académie Française.
On April 13, 1763, in this building was opened the first public library of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris. One Antoine Moriau had been for many years collecting, in his apartment on this second floor, some 14,000 volumes and 200 manuscripts, all left to the town at his death in 1759. The municipality kept his rooms, and rented additional rooms on this first floor, opening them to the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
[Illustration: The Hôtel Lamoignon.]
The _concierge_ or his wife, honored by the interest shown in their splendid show-place, will conduct such curious strangers as may wish around the corner into Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and through a little gate on that street into a small back court. This is the shabby remnant of Diane's and of Lamoignon's extensive gardens, which once stretched to those of the Hôtel de La Force on the south, and eastwardly to Rue Sévigné. From this spot you may see four or five windows away up in the rear wall of the mansion, and you will be told that these are the windows of Alphonse Daudet's former apartment, wherein he wrote "Fromont jeune et Risler aîné." His large study on the top floor had two high, wide windows, from which he saw the roofs of all Paris on that side. Against the wall at one end of the room was his shelf for standing at his work, and his wife's desk was at the other end; while, between them, carrying the freshly written sheets, trotted the little boy Léon, who is now a man, wielding his own good pen. To him, in those days, the tall Flaubert and Tourgueneff were "giants" by the side of his father, and of the other friends who used to climb these many stairs to this _salon_ in the sky. Daudet has left affectionate records of the old house. His "Rois-en-exil" was written in a pavilion in the garden of Richelieu's old mansion, which stood in the northwestern corner of the then Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, where has been cut, through house and garden, the prolongation of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Rue des Vosges.