Chapter III: Part 3

It was in the Rue Guénégaud, in the Hôtel Britannique, that Madame Roland took up her quarters in 1791. There, joyous and confident in the future, she opened her political _salon_. What a pleasure for the little Manon to show to all the Pont-Neuf neighbourhood, where her childhood had been spent, that she had become a lady and received people of mark. Brissot, Buzot, Pétion, Robespierre, Danton himself, were pleased to come, between two sittings, and talk at this amiable woman's house; and I fancy what attracted them was far more the pretty Parisian's qualities than the virtues of the austere husband, who must have been a great bore! On the 26th of March 1792, Dumouriez came to Roland's door and rang to tell him that he was appointed Minister. On the morrow, the little Manon of the Quai des Lunettes settled in triumph at the Calonne mansion. It was the way to the scaffold.

Skirting the quays, we reach the Saint-Michel Square, then the Rue Galande. In spite of recent demolitions, this old street still contains some ancient abodes; but it has lost the singular house called the _Red Castle_, or more prosaically, "the Guillotine."

In what was, during the seventeenth century, a sumptuous dwelling--the mansion, 'tis said, of Gabrielle d'Estrées--behind the huge, tall front steps at the back of the courtyard, was the dingy, smoky habitation, stinking of wine, dirt, debauch, and vice.

One had to step over the bodies of male and female drunkards to get inside the dens where such poor wretches came seeking some sort of lodging and an hour of forgetfulness. It was at once hideous and lugubrious. Amateurs of ugly sights might continue their studies hard by, on the premises of "Gaffer" Lunette, in the Rue des Anglais. The inhabitants were similar; a prison population--"bestiality in all its horror," as Mephistopheles sings in the _Damnation of Faust_. Recent building and sanitary improvements have done away with the "Red Castle."

The Rue Saint-Séverin is a picturesque medley of old houses round the ancient Gothic church--"that flora of stone"--one of the most curious perhaps in Paris; one of those that best preserve the traces of a past of art, devotion, and prayer.

The sublime artists who, in several centuries, knew how to create the forest of fine carvings with which the apse is adorned, have, alas! left but sorry successors. By the side of old painted glass windows, brought from the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, other cold, modern stained windows of loud colour have taken from Saint-Séverin's the religious, poetical mysteriousness, the inviting half-obscurity that appeal to the soul of the believer; and their crude light renders only too visible the marks of successive mutilations inflicted on this fine church. In the next street, the present clergy-house is built on the old graveyard, where, in 1641--as the erudite Monsieur de Rochegude informs us--the first operation for gravel was publicly performed on a criminal condemned to death, who, happy man, was cured, and pardoned by Louis XI. The whole of the quarter is one of the busiest in Paris. It would seem as if the vagabonds, the lewd and their lemans, the tatterdemalions of bygone centuries, had left there a direct line of descendants. People live in the street, eat scraps in low drink-shops; a smell of spirits floats in the air at the corners of the various cross-roads; bars and petty restaurants are thronged with customers. Part of the money begged or stolen in Paris is spent there.

Saint-Médard's church is quite close, with its small, dusty, quaint Square, and its round tower at the end of the Rue Monge and the corner of the Rue Mouffetard. It is a gloomy, rat-gnawed, poverty-stricken church, looking as if worn-out with age; and is blocked in by old houses covered with gaudy-coloured advertisements. It has left, far behind in the past, the days when the tomb of the Deacon Pâris in it performed its miracles, when the townsfolk and courtfolk crowded in the small graveyard, a door of which still exists, the one perhaps whereon was written the famous couplet:--

"In the King's name, forbid is God
To work a wonder on this sod."

The Rue Mouffetard passes in front of the church porch, overflowing with life and activity. A hundred petty trades are exercised in it; the house doors themselves--old eighteenth-century doors--shelter women-sellers of flowers, milk, fried potatoes, cooked mussels; children play about the middle of the road; carriage traffic is rare. Housewives gossip on their doorsteps, people live together--and in the street. The Passage des Patriarches, which opens at No. 99, was famous in days of yore. The Calvinists, who used to preach there, had bloody quarrels with the Catholics of Saint-Médard's. To-day, it is nothing but a dank, dirty, melancholy alley, inhabited by bric-à-brac dealers, old-iron sellers, and petty hucksters; and smells of rags, old lead, and cauliflower!

Maubert Square is the converging centre of these strange streets. At present, modernised and rearranged--adorned, if I may say so, with a wretched statue of Etienne Dolet, who was burnt there in 1546--the Square only vaguely resembles the "Plac' Maub'," still visible six or seven years ago, ill-famed, narrow, bordered with old steep-roofed houses, a den of vagabonds, full of suspicious lurking-corners where the police might be sure of making good hauls. Near at hand, in the Maubert Blind Alley, Sainte-Croix used to dwell; and it was in the same mysterious retreat that Madame de Brinvilliers, the sorry heroine of the Poisons drama so well told by our witty friend, F. Funck-Brentano, used to meet her accomplice and with him prepare the terrible "succession powder," composed, according to her avowal, of "vitriol, toad's venom, and rarefied arsenic," which she made use of to poison her father, her two brothers, and to try to make away with her sisters and husband.

In 1304, Dante attended, hard by, one of the numerous schools of the Rue du Fouarre; and, at the corner of the Colbert-Mansion Street, the Faculty of Medicine had its amphitheatre. This curious building is still almost intact with its ancient cupola, and would supply an admirable piece of decoration to some retrospective museum of surgery.

Not far from this spot, the Rue Maître-Albert--which up to 1844 was called the Rue Perdue--owes its present name to the Dominican Maître Albert who, in the thirteenth century, taught in the open air in Maubert Square. It contains curious houses, to-day dens for tramps, who spend the night in them. In 1819, an old negro of miserable appearance and strange manners used to go down this dark street every evening, trying his best to escape observation, and used to seek food and shelter in one of its sorry eating-houses. People pointed him out as he went, whispering that he was formerly Dubarry's black servant, Zamore, whom Louis XV. had played with; Zamore who became a power, petted and courted by noble lords, fine ladies, and princes of the Church that emulously strove to gain the favourite's good graces. Later, having been appointed a municipal officer under the Terror, he vilely, ungratefully, and in a cowardly way, betrayed his benefactress, gave her up, and cast her beneath the knife of the guillotine. At length, sinking lower and lower, Zamore came and hid himself at No. 13, on the second courtyard floor of this gloomy Rue Perdue, and died there on the 7th of February 1820.

The two churches nearest the spot are those of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonneret and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Connected with the former is a dismal little seminary, in which, under the guidance of the Abbé Dupanloup, the eminent philosopher Ernest Renan went through part of his theological studies. Every one should read in the _Souvenirs of my Childhood and Youth_ the admirable pages this marvellous writer has devoted to his stay in this studious home. "The parish, which derived its name from the field of thistles well known of the students at the Paris University in the Middle Ages, was then the centre of a rich quarter inhabited chiefly by the legal profession. The boarding-school _régime_ weighed heavily upon me. My best friend, a young man from Coutances, I think, like myself, full of enthusiasm, and of excellent heart, held himself aloof, refused to reconcile himself, and died. The Savoy students showed themselves still less acclimatisable. One of them, older than I, owned to me that, each evening, he measured with his eye the height of the three-storey dormitory above the pavement of the Rue Saint-Victor. I fell ill; apparently I was doomed. My Breton soul lost itself in an infinite melancholy. The last angelus of evening I had heard resound over our dear hills, and the last sunset I had watched over the tranquil landscape came back to my memory like sharp arrows. In the ordinary course of things I ought to have died. Perhaps it would have been better if I had...."

The artist Le Brun's mother is buried in the Saint-Charles chapel of the church of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonneret, and also Pierre de Chamousset, the inventor of the petty Postal service. Parisian ladies, bless his memory!

The church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre is set apart for the Greek ritual. Enclosed on its sides and rear by the ancient buildings of the Hôtel-Dieu, this melancholy-looking chapel is falling to ruin; a stopped-up well with meagre weeds growing from its border-stones seems to guard the door, which opens on a dirty, rubbish-strewn courtyard where a few half-starved fowls peck their scanty meal. It is a nook of poverty and suffering. The walls are damp and dingy; in these sombre yards, where a few sickly trees barely exist, all is solitude and abandon. Only three years ago, stretchers or ambulance carriages still stopped from time to time in it, and from them were taken victims of crime, disease, or accident, that had fallen in the street. Through the vast Paris, busy and indifferent, monopolised by its pleasures or its cares, one or another human wreck was brought to the Assistance Publique in this dismal Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre with its suggestive name.

To refresh ourselves after so painful a spectacle, let us come back to the lovely Parisian quays, and walk along the fair river, quivering in the daylight or in the moon's nightly rays; let us pass by the beautiful mansions of the Miramionnes, of Nesmond, of Judge Rolland, in front of the wine market--"catacombs of thirst," and pause at the old Jardin des Plantes, dear to Buffon. A touch of the charm of things past, but not entirely vanished, lingers yet!

The trees are centuries old, the ornamental hornbeams have not been altered; there are aviaries and goat-pens which are the same as when Daubigny and Charles Jacques sketched them in 1843, to illustrate the handsome work published by Curmer.

The reptiles are better housed than in our childhood; but the hippopotamus wallows in the same basin; the giraffe stretches his neck over the same enclosures, and the elephant holds through the same railings his gluttonous trunk in search of rolls.

The bear-pit has not changed; and the crowd of idlers continue to tempt the eternal "Martin" to climb up the same tree. Still to the noisy children the delightful labyrinth offers its capricious meandering; and the cedar of Lebanon (_Cedrus Libani_) [Linnæus], which tradition tells us Monsieur Jussieu brought back in his hat, has not ceased to wave its ample branches over dreamers, loungers, workers, or grisette--the grisette that comes and sits beneath its venerable shade to read the exciting magazine story which fills with sweet emotion her heart athirst for the ideal!

And, in fine, is there anything nattier than the tiny rooms of the Louis XVI. buildings? which once formed Buffon's natural history cabinet, and whose delicate grey wood carvings made such a suitable framework for the admirable butterfly collections brought from every country.

Within these finely decorated and cosy rooms there was, so to speak, an ideal assemblage of blossoms, a fairy scene of exquisite colours, an enchantment wrought by a brilliant palette.

There they were, all of them, beautiful butterflies, with their metallic lustres from India and Brazil, French butterflies of a thousand tints, both the great death's-head sphynx and the little blue creature of the meadows.

Perhaps time had powdered and somewhat dimmed the marvellous brightness of their first colouring; but it was better so. Their pristine lustre would have been too great a contrast in the quaint surroundings, and it was an extra charm to see such gems of the air thus lightly decked with the dust of the past! To-day, alas! these rooms, flowering with sculpture, are closed and forsaken; a part of their wainscoting has disappeared.... Where have decorations so pleasing gone?... Why these everlasting, culpable mutilations, which I know are a grief to Monsieur Périer, the eminent Director of the Museum? The collections of butterflies are now transferred to the vast and sumptuous central hall of the new pavilion devoted to natural history. I liked them better in the charming rooms which once contained them and suited them so well!

The water-flowers bloom, as of yore, in the same low, stifling hot-houses, near the bizarre-shaped orchids; and it was in the old amphitheatre, where so many illustrious scholars taught, that the noble artist Madame Madeleine Lemaire,--the only "woman professor" that has ever held a post at the Museum,--initiated her attentive, spell-bound audience into the divine beauty of flowers!

In all periods, artists have come and installed their light easel or their modelling-stands in front of the lions' cages, or in the Garden itself, on the grass, opposite the antelopes, hinds, walla-birds, or the goats of Thibet.

We remember, my brother and I, having, as little boys, accompanied our father, who was modelling from life the tigers and lions in the wild beasts' corridor. The odour was pungently alkaline, the heat sultry; we heard the hissing of polecats in the entrance and exit rotundas; sometimes a terrible roar, a complaint of anger, pain, or ennui, arose and shook the panes.

Most of these unfortunate animals, deprived of air and light, shut up in the horrible, narrow, stinking cages, died a lingering death of consumption. Indeed, they quickly grew familiar with those who spent whole weeks studying them; and their huge heads rubbed caressingly against the thick cage-bars, while their eyes became soft and almost tender.

Often we went, inquisitive, ferreting school-boys, to the reptiles' menagerie, an old building crumbling with age, and passed long hours peeping at the chameleons, gazing at the boa-constrictors, trying to rouse the sleepy crocodiles, which seemed to be already stuffed! What reminiscences and souvenirs in the dear old Jardin des Plantes, one of the few "Nooks and Corners of Paris" that have remained almost untouched!

On the side, the ancient house Cuvier lived in does not look very stable, and perhaps would go to pieces but for the network of plants round it: ivy, birthwort honeysuckle, lianes of all kinds caparisoned it with verdure. They are carpets, cascades of glossy green, shining together: a nosegay of leaves in a garden.

Behind the Jardin des Plantes is Salpêtrière with its walls of evil memory, the Salpêtrière of the September massacres, the Salpêtrière whence Madame de Lamotte so easily escaped after her condemnation; with its broad gardens and its ugly covered-yards surrounded by railings, where, as De Goncourt said, "Women madder than their fellows" are confined. The dome, visible from everywhere, commands, like a lighthouse of misery, all this quarter infected by the Bièvre, the poor, sacrificed river, which is now in part walled over; the oily Bièvre, streaked with tannery acids, reddened by skins of sheep recently flayed that steep in it; the Bièvre which flows miserably and sordidly, but yet so picturesquely, amidst starch factories, fellmongers' stores and other works, after traversing the tiny gardens of Gentilly and creating the illusion of a landscape in the quarter of the Fontaine-à-Mulard.

Gone is the time when this ill-starred river washed the banks of smiling meadows and reflected the willows in its clear waters. Tamed, domesticated, adapted to tasks of every sort, unceasingly used by tanners, curriers, tawers, dyers, it flows dirty and putrid! To follow it in its windings, the Rue du Moulin-des-Prés must be ascended, and entrance made into the Rue de Tolbiac. There, through a gate, it enters a dark, dismal passage, whence it will issue only to glide in a kind of sinister-looking canal between black, repulsive manufactories. Here and there, along the scanty banks, a few washerwomen have fixed their tubs on a level with the water, and sing as they dolly their linen; elsewhere, wretched urchins endeavour to catch a stray fish that might have lost its way in the mephitic stream. Then the Bièvre disappears once again and this time underground, coming to view afresh in the Rue des Gobelins. At this spot, some rare traces of a glorious past are discovered. The ancient houses have many of them remained. But how often transformed! The owners of works and of shops, after enslaving the river, have taken possession of the houses bordering it.

Offices, warehouses, leather stores have invaded the noble mansions of the sixteenth century, and the Bièvre winds, as if ashamed, through poor gardens, like it, fallen from their antique splendour.

Further on, there are more works and tanneries, black corners mean and malodorous, where thousands of rabbit-skins, hanging in mid-air, hard and dry, clash together with a noise of wood. To the very end, the unlucky river, harassed and exploited, cleans blood-stained skins, moves heavy wheels, or washes ghastly offal, amidst a smell as of barege. Finally, it runs to earth once more beneath the Hospital Boulevard, within evil-smelling, dark holes.

But before the last fall, the Bièvre passes through an astonishingly strange lane, one of the oddest in this odd quarter: the Ruelle des Gobelins. It flows as a stream of red, green, and yellow tints, between patched-up, mouldy, tumble-down houses, in an odour of ammonia. And yet, near these hovels, among the heaps of tan, beside pits in which are macerating skins of flayed animals, a gem of carving rises as it were an appeal of beauty, a vestige of past splendour. It is the sculptured remains of an adorable Louis XV. pavilion of which Monsieur de Julienne had made a hunting-box; and this lovely paradox, this blossom of stone cast among such a mass of ugliness, is not one of the least surprises of the quarter so fertile in matters for astonishment. Moreover, a few yards from this sewer, the artists of the Gobelins Manufactory have laid out their work-and-study-gardens, in which shine the purple, gold and azure of the prettiest flowers in France. These, cleverly distributed, arrange a carpet of exquisite and radiant colours athwart the surrounding district of sombre sadness.

On the confines of the town, is the Butte-aux-Cailles, a vast piece of waste land, cheerless and without charm, which, until 1863, was a sort of fresh country spot, with mills and farms on it. To-day, it is a quarter of hard labour, where numbers of rag-pickers classify the refuse of Paris. At the corner of the Ruelle des Peupliers, faggot-dealers have set up their huts; and hovels line strange streets made with the clearings of other streets.

Once, these spacious grounds were one stretch of flower gardens and market gardens watered by the Bièvre.

In a most interesting book, somewhat forgotten now, Alfred Delvau tells us much of the former history, under Louis-Philippe, of the Saint-Marceau faubourg, the Butte-aux-Cailles, the Rue Croulebarde, and also the Rue du Champ-de-l'Alouette, in which last street the "Shepherdess of Ivry" was murdered, the crime by its bizarre character producing a deep impression in the Capital in 1827. It was a public-house waiter, Honoré Ulbach, who had stabbed a girl, Aimée Millot by name; she, as a keeper of goats, was popular at Ivry. Every day, she was to be seen, with a large straw hat on her head and a book in her hand, tending her mistress's goats. The "Shepherdess of Ivry" she was called in the neighbourhood; in 1827, there were still shepherdesses in Paris!

The trial that followed excited the whole town; the crime was one of love and jealousy; the victim was nineteen; she was virtuous and a shepherdess; women "cursed the murderer, even while pitying him perhaps," wrote the newspapers of the time; and even the giraffe but recently arrived at the King's Garden was neglected for the Ivry drama.

On the 27th of July, Ulbach, who seems to have been half-mad, was condemned to death; and, at four o'clock in the evening on the 10th of September, he was executed on the Grève Square.

A Municipal Crèche, in the Rue des Gobelins, occupies, at No. 3, a fine Louis XIII. mansion, once inhabited by the Marquis of Saint-Mesme, a lieutenant-general and the husband of Elizabeth Gobelin, close to a handsome lordly-looking building which in the quarter bears the name of Queen Blanche's Mansion.

The legend attaching to the latter is false, affirms Monsieur Beaurepaire, the learned and amiable librarian of the City of Paris. "It was," he says, "simply Catherine d'Hausserville's home, where Charles VI. was nearly burnt alive during the performance of a ballet, his fancy dress having caught fire." The edifice, with its noble appearance, forms a strange contrast in this poor yet picturesque district.

Another fine mansion, in the Rue Scipio, is the one built by Scipio Sardini, in the reign of Henri III., with terra-cotta medallions, rare Parisian specimens of the exceedingly pretty decoration that pleases us so much at Florence, Pisa, and Verona. This Scipio Sardini was a peculiar man, and his story deserves to be told. Of Tuscan origin, he came to France after the death of Henri II., just when Catherine de Medici seized the reins of power. Amiable, witty, ingratiating, a great financier, clever in his enterprises, and unscrupulous, he quickly gained a preponderant position in the frivolous, dissolute, mirth-loving Court. He excelled in combining business and pleasure. An illustrious marriage seemed to him essential to people's forgetting his low origin and the rapid rise of his fortunes. He married the "fair Limeuil," one of the most seductive beauties of the Queen's flying squadron--"All of them capable of setting the whole world on fire," said Brantôme. This attractive person had been successively courted by the most noble lords of the Court before effecting the conquest of Condé, by whom she had a child. At Dijon, during one of the Queen's receptions, Mademoiselle de Limeuil was taken ill and was delivered of a boy. "It is inexplicable," writes Mézeray, "that such a prudent woman should have so miscalculated." There was a scandal; the Queen Mother was indignant; the fair Isabella was imprisoned; but Condé who was still amorous, succeeded in effecting her escape. The Protestants, however, were on the watch, and induced their leader to give up his too compromising mistress. Then it was that Scipio Sardini came forward, the richest man of the period, the King's banker, as also the nobles' and clergy's. He managed to get himself accepted; the marriage took place; and he settled in this pretty mansion that we still admire, and that is mentioned by Sauval as one of the most beautiful in Paris, amidst vineyards, orchards, and fields bordering on the Bièvre. There he lived, surrounded by luxury, works of art, books and flowers, and died there about 1609. As early as 1636, the mansion was converted into a hospital, which in 1742 was once more transformed, this time into a bakery. To-day, it is the Bakery of the City of Paris Hospitals.

Let us keep along by the Wine Market, and, before crossing to the right bank of the river, respectfully pause on the Stockade Bridge, close to the small monument erected to the famous sculptor Barye by his admirers,--to the great Barye who, misunderstood and mocked, sold up by his creditors, often came in the evening, after leaving his modest studio on the Célestins Quay, to forget his sufferings and muse in this same place before the splendid panorama of Paris crowned by the grand silhouette of the Panthéon. Here, too, is one of the City's best views.

* * * * *

Nothing is more relative than an impression felt. To certain minds in love with the Past, this or that ruin is much more affecting than the most modern palace; it is the same with streets, houses, and pavements.

An exquisite hour to call up the soul of old Paris is at twilight.

The colour peculiar to each object has melted into the general shades and tints spread by the day which is departing and the night which comes.

Delicate lace-work outlines stand out against the sky, while huge violet, black, and blue masses of atmosphere bathe whole streets in fathomless mystery. Then thought awakens, souvenirs revive and grow clear; scenes are lived through again of which these streets and houses were the silent witnesses. One hears cries of fury or of joy; drums beat, bells ring, groups pass singing 'mid these dream visions that rise again!

In order to enjoy such an experience no better spot could be chosen than the Stockade Bridge, which, with its barrier of black beams, as it were shuts off to the east Paris of the olden days.

The City slumbers in the calm of evening, the smoke curls lazily up. Afar sound bells; swallows sweep crying in the air embalmed by falling night; noises ascend vague and weird, interpreted according to the fancy of one's musings. All life seems to sleep; the soul of the past awakes. It is the hour desired.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] There is a pun here in the French impossible to render in English.

[2] Manon Lescaut.

THE RIGHT BANK OF THE RIVER

The Arsenal quarter, built over the site of the two Royal Palaces--the Saint-Paul mansion, the Tournelles palace--and the soil of the Louviers Isle, joined to the river bank in 1843, serve as a natural transition from the old to modern Paris.

Notwithstanding its warlike name, the Arsenal quarter is one of the most peaceful parts of the Capital. Centuries ago, the palaces disappeared that brought it its wealth, life and movement. On their ruins and their huge gardens, humble, tranquil streets have been made: the Rue de la Cerisaie, where Marshal Villeroy received Peter the Great in the sumptuous Zamet mansion; the Rue Charles V., where once was the elegant home of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, now at No. 12, premises in which a white-capped sister-of-charity distributes cod-liver oil and woollen socks to poor, suffering children; the Rue des Lions-Saint-Paul; the Rue Beautreillis, where Victorien Sardou was born; near there the great Balzac dwelt. "I was then living," he says in his admirable _Facino Cane_, "in a small street you probably don't know, the Rue de Lesdiguières. It commences at the Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite a fountain near the Place de la Bastille, and issues in the Rue de la Cerisaie. Love of knowledge had driven me into a garret, where I worked during the night, and spent the day in a neighbouring library, that of _Monsieur_. When it was fine, I took rare walks on the Bourdon Boulevard." This modest Rue de Lesdiguières still exists in part; on the site occupied by Nos. 8 and 10, could be seen, a few years ago, one of the containing walls of the Bastille; narrow houses have been stuck against it; and, at No. 10, it is the very wall of the old Parisian fortress which constitutes the back of the porter's lodge! What a destiny for a prison wall!

Of what was once the Arsenal only the mansion of the Grand Master is left; it is, at present, the Arsenal Library--formerly called, as Balzac says, the Library of _Monsieur_. It used to be a fine dwelling, the home of Sully, and possesses priceless books and autographs, and most valuable writings. In a coffer, covered with flower-de-luces, may be admired Saint Louis's book of hours, side by side with a fragment of his royal mantle, the blue silk of it, worn with time, being strewn with golden flower-de-luces; the old book bears this venerable inscription: "It is the psalter of Monseigneur Loys, once his mother's;" and was taken from the scattered treasures of the Sainte-Chapelle. Then there is Charles the Fifth's Bible with the King's writing on it: "This book (belongs) to me, the King of France;" and a missal, each leaf of which is framed with an incomparable garland due to the brush of the "master of flowers," a great artist whose name is unknown to us. Besides, there are rare manuscripts, marvellous bindings, unique editions, romances of chivalry, classics, poets of every age, complete in this fine palace; together with Latude's letters, the box that served for his ridiculous attempt against Madame de Pompadour; and, near them, the cross-examination of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, and the death-certificate of the Man in the Iron Mask; Henri IV.'s love-letters too, with his kisses sent to the Marchioness de Verneuil, and the documents relating to the affair of the Necklace. How many more things in addition...!

Let us add that the curators--Henri Martin, so learned and obliging, Funck-Brentano, the exquisite historian of the Bastille, the picturesque relater of all its dramas. Sheffer and Eugène Muller are not only scholars needing no praise but most courteous and genial men--and you will quite understand why the Arsenal is one of the few corners in Paris where it is delightful to go and work or to saunter about. Indeed, it is a tradition of the house. Nodier, good old Nodier, who was one of Monsieur de Bornier's predecessors and a predecessor also of J. M. de Heredia, the master who has so recently gone from us, Nodier, the admirable author of the _Trophées_, had succeeded in making the Arsenal the centre of literary and artistic Paris. Hugo, Lamartine, de Musset, Balzac, Méry, de Vigny, and Fr. Soulié used to meet there; and fine verses were said while regarding the sun glow with red flame behind the towers of Notre Dame.

"The towers of Notre Dame his name's great H composed!"

wrote Vacquerie.

Of the Bastille nothing remains except a few stones which formed the substructure of one of the old towers; and these have been carefully removed to the Célestins Quay, along the Seine, where they are visible to-day. In vain, therefore, would any one now seek for a vestige of the sombre fortress over which so many legends hovered. Latude's great shade itself would hardly locate the spot; and yet how full Paris history is of this traditional Bastille, which the people, amazed with their easy victory, could not tire of visiting after the 15th of July 1789. Such was their curiosity and such their eagerness that Soulès, the governor appointed by the Parisian municipality, was compelled to stop the visits, on the curious ground "that such damage had already been done to the fortress by visitors that more than 200,000 livres would be required to repair it." Repair the Bastille! The souvenir manuscripts of Paré tell us the fury excited by this strange pretension in Danton, sergeant of a section of the National Guard, who, with his company, was turned back by the order.

Danton had himself admitted into the presence of the unfortunate Soulès, seized him by the collar and dragged him to the Town Hall; the prohibition was removed; and Citizen Palloy was thenceforth allowed to exploit the celebrated State prison. The stones were "hewn and cut into images of the fortress and dedicated to the various departments and assemblies," or into "commemorative slabs intended to rouse people's courage." Palloy cut up the leads into medals, and made rings with the iron chains; out of the marble he manufactured games of dominoes, and had the delicate thought to offer one of these games to the young Dauphin to inspire him with "the horror of tyranny."

Dancing here

_From a coloured engraving of the eighteenth century_]

Balls were held on the site of the Bastille. Wine flowed, fiddles were scraped, and printed calicoes of that period show us the ruins of the old Parisian citadel surmounted with this inscription: "Dancing here."

The huge space left vacant by the demolition had to be filled up. Napoleon I., whose artistic conceptions were sometimes disconcerting, had constructed there, in 1811, by Alavoine, a strange sort of fountain of bizarre appearance: it was a colossal elephant, twenty-four metres high, which spouted water from its trunk. Built temporarily in plaster and mud, the elephant quickly crumbled away under the action of weather and rain; and soon became a lamentable débris surrounded with disjointed planks. The urchins of the district made it the scene of Homeric struggles; but the real familiars were the rats that had made their home inside the structure, so that, when the demolition began, regular _battues_ had to be organised with men and dogs; and, for months, these dreaded rodents infested the terrorised quarter. In 1840, the present column was erected; since then, the genius of Liberty has poised over Paris his airy foot, and Barye's fine lion watches over the repose of the victims of 1830 that are interred within the crypt of the monument.

The Rue Saint-Antoine contains certain handsome mansions: the Cossé mansion, where Quélus died; the Mayenne and Ormesson mansion, built by du Cerceau on the remains of the Saint-Paul mansion and Germain Pilon's studio; the Sully mansion, whose noble front was not long ago mutilated. Hard by, at the corner of the Rue du Figuier and the picturesque Rue de l'Hôtel de Ville, which latter used to be the Rue de la Mortellerie, stands what is left of the Sens mansion, the only specimen, together with the Cluny Museum, of what private architecture was in the fifteenth century. After being inhabited by Princes of the Church, Bishops, Cardinals, and also by Marguerite de Valois (Queen Margot), the Sens mansion fell on evil days. It became the "Diligence Office"; and from its courtyard is said to have started the famous courier whose murder was attributed to Lesurques, the unfortunate Lesurques popularised by the well-known drama performed at the Ambigu, which caused so many tears to flow.

In more recent times, the Hôtel de Sens derogated further still. It became a manufactory of sweets!

At No. 5 of the Rue du Figuier, we meet with a draw-well, the top of which is finely sculptured; the spot brings back the memory of Rabelais, the admirable Rabelais, who died quite near, in the Rue des Jardins. At No. 15, opened the sixteenth-century door through which the actors of the illustrious theatre established on the ancient site of the Jeu de Paume de la Croix-Noire, proceeded to their private stage-room. It was before this door that Molière was arrested and taken to the Châtelet, because he owed "142 livres to Antoine Fausseur, master-chandler, his purveyor of light."

Let us cross the Place de la Bastille and go down the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine. There, at No. 115, in front of an old eighteenth-century house, the Deputy Baudin was killed against a barricade, on the 3rd of December 1851. At No. 303, in the reign of Napoleon I., stood Dr. Dubuisson's private hospital, where General Malet was confined. There he hatched the prodigious plot the disconcerting history of which we intend shortly to relate. Farther on, near the Rue de Montreuil, we pass by the remains of Réveillon's wall-paper stores, pillaged on the 17th of April 1789; it was one of the preludes of the Revolution.

Last of all, at No. 70, in the Rue de Charonne, Dr. Belhomme's private hospital stood, which was used as a special prison under the Revolution. Only those were admitted who could pay and pay well. The irrefutable memoirs of Monsieur de Saint-Aulaine reveal to us a Belhomme familiar, cynical, exacting his fees and thouing Duchesses short of money who haggled with him on the question of their life. The most amiable of historians, my excellent friend G. Lenôtre, whom it is always necessary to quote when facts of the Revolutionary epoch are in question, has reconstituted the terrible and surprising story of the Belhomme institution where they laughed, danced, or even flirted under the dread eye of Fouquier-Tinville; and has related, with his habitual documentation, the bizarre liaison of the Duchess of Orléans, widow of Louis-Philippe Egalité, with Rouzet, the Conventional, buried later at Dreux under the name of the "Count de Folmon" in the Orléans family vault.

Pursuing our way and passing by the Church of Sainte Marguerite, in which Louis XVIII. was interred ... or his double, we reach the barrier of the Throne (the Throne overthrown, people said in 1793). The scaffold, which had temporarily quitted the Revolution Square, was put up here during the most terrible period of the Terror, and the "great batches" were executed upon it. In six weeks, 1300 victims perished, among them, André Chénier, the Baron de Trenck, the Abbess of Montmorency, Cécile Renaud, Madame de Sainte-Amaranthe, the poet Roucher, and many others. The bodies of these unfortunate people, stripped of their clothing, were loaded each evening on covered waggons, with their severed heads between their legs; and the horrible vehicle, dripping with blood along the road, was tipped into some pit dug at the bottom of the Picpus Convent Gardens, where still exists the cemetery of those that were executed during the Revolution.

Retracing our steps, we arrive at No. 9 of the Rue de Reuilly; here was once the Hortensia Tavern, kept in 1789 by the famous Santerre, a major in the National Guard. The house has not much changed; at present, however, it is a girls' boarding-school which occupies the large rooms where the thundering General organised those terrible descents on Paris and launched those dreadful battalions of the faubourg that terrorised even the Convention itself.

On the other side of the Place de la Bastille, in the Rue Saint-Antoine, near Saint Paul's Church, is the Charlemagne Passage, most picturesque by reason of the old souvenirs it contains and the strange population it harbours: chair-menders, mattress-carders, milk-women, open-air flower-women gather round the ruin of the charming mansion which, under Charles V., was the sumptuous abode of the provost, Hugues Aubryot.

The front, which is still remarkable and fine-looking, is an astonishing contrast to the poor, low houses that huddle round it. Fowls peck at the foot of the fifteenth-century turrets, which enclose a handsome staircase; and patched linen dries on iron wire stretched between the caryatide windows of the seventeenth century, replacing those behind which once mused the Duke d'Orléans and the Duke de Berri, as also, in 1409, Jean de Montaigu, beheaded for sorcery! who were formerly illustrious guests in this elegant dwelling.

And now, let us stop at the Vosges Square on the other side of the Bastille. It is another rare nook of our old City, which, through the centuries, has preserved its ancient character very nearly intact. The houses there, in Louis XIII. style, have not changed. The scenery has remained the same. The _Précieuses_ could take their favourite walks there; and those punctilious in honour might draw their sword, as in the time of Richelieu and the Edict-malcontents; only the public of spectators would be quite different. The fine ladies of the country hight Tender, the Cydalises and Aramynthas, the lords once living in those noble dwellings, they who, on the 16th of March 1612, were present at the tournament given by the Queen Regent, Marie de Médici, in honour of the peace concluded with Spain, or they who proceeded in grand coaches to the fair Marion de Lorme's or to Madame de Sévigné's, are to-day replaced by petty annuitants, modest shopkeepers retired from business and pensioned-off officers. Humble charwomen work at their tasks in the spots where Mazarin's nieces paused in their sedan-chairs; and the numerous Jews that live in the quarter meet there on Saturdays. It is a curious spectacle to see these men and women of strongly marked type betaking themselves to the Synagogue, which is near a partially subsisting eighteenth-century mansion still bearing delicate decorations, but at present occupied by a butcher, in the Rue du Pas-de-la-Mule. Not a few old men wear the long gaberdine, their hair in corkscrew curls, and earrings in their ears. Velvet-eyed girls coifed with bands, wonderfully handsome and peculiarly dressed, assemble there on certain religious feast-days. It is a strange evocation; 'twould seem that in these peaceful quarters biblical traditions have been preserved in some Jewish families.

The old-time animation, however, is an exception. The Vosges Square, once the Place Royale, where Richelieu lived and Fronsac, Chabannes, Marshal de Chaulnes, Rohan-Chabot, Rotrou, Dangeau, Canillac, the Prince de Talmont and Mademoiselle du Châtelet, where Madame de Sévigné was born, where the tragic actress Rachel dwelt, and Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo, is to-day completely neglected; and this delightful Paris nook, where so much wit was spent, such fine ladies rivalled in grace and elegance and so many exquisites drew their swords, is now nothing but a large, lonely garden, provincial and melancholy, frequented almost exclusively by the pupils of neighbouring boarding-schools, who play there at prisoners' base, and leap-frog, beneath the debonair shadow of Louis XIII.'s statue, with its philosophic frame of a Punch-and-Judy show and a chair-woman's stall.

In the ancient Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine (at present called the Rue de Sévigné) on the site now occupied by No. 11, formerly stood the Marais theatre, built with money provided by Beaumarchais. In 1792, the _Guilty Mother_ was performed there, for the benefit, said the play-bill, "of the first soldier who shall send citizen Beaumarchais an Austrian's ear." The modern building is a modest private-bath establishment, with a small garden in front in which grow some spindle-trees--in boxes, and which is adorned with silvered balls. The huge wall, all grim and grey, backing the slightly-built bath establishment, is the old wall of the Force Prison, where, on a post at the corner of the Rue des Balais, Madame de Lamballe was executed, where also Madame de Tallien was transferred, and Princess de Tarente was confined, the latter, the grandmother of the kind, courteous and learned Duke de la Trémoïlle, who had only to dip into his incomparable family archives to give us the most precious documents of French history, and to whom we are indebted for those picturesque and exciting "Souvenirs of Madame de Tarente," one of the most valuable narrations by an eye-witness of the Revolutionary period.

The Carnavalet mansion, Madame de Sévigné's "dear Carnavalette," is close by, as also the ancient Le Peletier-Saint-Fargeau mansion, to-day the City of Paris Library. It is a fine, large building of noble appearance, which contains wonderful books, maps, plans and manuscripts. The written history of Paris is there; and all workers know the pretty, sculpture-ornamented room of Monsieur le Vayer, the erudite, obliging Curator of these fine collections. Messieurs Poète, Beaurepaire, Jacob, Jarach and Wilhem, in the Library; Messieurs Pètre and Stirling in the History room are the wise and welcoming hosts of this admirable Parisian Library.

All this Marais quarter, indeed, contains sumptuous mansions, not one of which, alas! has been respected. All are given over to business and manufacturing. The Lamoignon mansion is occupied by glass-polishers and garden-seatmakers; the Albret mansion by a bronze lamp-dealer; those of Tallard, Maulevrier, Sauvigny, Brevannes, Epernon, &c., are still standing, but in what a state! The Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyères offers us its curious bass-relief, in painted stone, representing a knife-grinder in eighteenth-century costume. In 1748, a Madame de Pannelier kept a "wit-office" in this same street; Lalande, Sautereau, Guichard, Leclerc de Merry used to attend meetings there. They were held on Wednesdays, and were preceded by an excellent dinner. The tradition has happily been preserved in Paris.

In the Rue François-Miron, one sees a spacious, handsome mansion with circular pediment, escutcheons and garlands. It is the Beauvais mansion, built by Le Pautre in 1658.

To look at it now, old and in a dull street, one would hardly think that the coaches of Louis XIV.--King Sun--had passed under the dark vault of the entrance gate and that, from the top of the central pavilion balcony, Queen Anne of Austria, in company with the Queen of England, Cardinal Mazarin, Marshal de Turenne and other illustrious nobles, had watched her son Louis XIV. and her daughter-in-law, the new Queen Marie-Thérèse of Austria, go by as they made, through Saint-Antoine's Gate, their solemn entry into Paris on the 26th of August 1660![3]

On account of its picturesque aspect and the fine mansions it contains, the Rue Geoffroy-l'Asnier is one of the most curious in Paris. At No. 26 stands the Châlons-Luxembourg mansion, with its monumental door and wonderful knocker. At the bottom of the courtyard is an exceedingly elegant Louis XIII. pavilion in brick and stone, and of delicate proportions. The mansion was built for the second Constable of Montmorency, and though it is quite lost in this gloomy quarter, it maintains its proud bearing.

After the Revolution, this street, whence nearly all the owners of houses had emigrated, if they had not been guillotined, was completely stripped of its former splendour. Petty annuitants, small clerks, and poor people took up their abode in the abandoned buildings. Grass grew in the streets; many of the dwellings had been sold as national property; and the Rue Geoffroy-l'Asnier underwent the common fate; it became democratic.

Between this street and the neighbouring Rue des Barres, one is surprised to see a sort of fissure so narrow that two persons would find it difficult to walk abreast through it, a sort of corridor along which the wind sweeps past dilapidated, leaning houses on either side. It is the Rue Grenier-sur-l'Eau, wretched and dirty enough, but quaint, with the glorious tower of Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais in the background, rising and standing out against the sky.

The proper moment to take a look at the sinister little Rue des Barres is on a stormy night, behind the church of Saint-Gervais. It is then easy to imagine what this quiet quarter must have been like when, on the 9th of Thermidor, about eleven in the evening, 'mid torch-lights, calls to arms, the noise of the tocsin and shouts of the multitude, the dead body of Lebas was brought thither, and, on a chair, Augustin Robespierre, who had broken his thighs in leaping from one of the Town Hall windows. The dead man and the dying man were dragged to the Barres mansion transformed into a Sectional Committee Tribunal. On the morrow Lebas was buried, and Robespierre was carried before the Committee of Public Safety, who sent him to the scaffold.

The Rue des Barres descends to the Seine, near the old Town Hall Quay, where the big, flat boats laden with apples, stones, or sand take their moorings. Into it opens one of the exits of the charming Church of Saint-Gervais, whose fine painted windows, masterpieces of Pinaigrier and Jean Cousin, were almost totally destroyed twenty years ago by an explosion of dynamite. Against the church walls, in the laicised ruins of an ancient chapel, a sweet manufacturer has installed his alembics and copper pans; and it is a curious sight to see the lighted fires of this strange kitchen beneath these antique Gothic arches, between these blackened pillars still bearing traces of the candles that once burned in front of the holy images, on a ground formerly used for burying and even now concealing bones. The out-offices of the old church still remain, wonderfully picturesque, and open into the Rue François-Miron, No. 2, on the left of the entrance portal of the church, between a laundress's establishment and a furniture-remover's premises!

On one side, the little Rue de l'Hôtel-de-Ville brings us to the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, where we can admire, at No. 47, what is left of the quaint mansion of the Dutch Ambassadors, where "Monsieur Caron de Beaumarchais and Madame his spouse," as an almanac of 1787 called them, established in 1784 a Provident Institution for poor nursing mothers. Indeed, it was for the benefit of this undertaking that the fiftieth performance of the _Mariage de Figaro_ was given. Farther on, to the right, at the corner of the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, stands the pretty turret built about 1500 for Jean Hérouet; and, last of all, the fine Rohan palace, which to-day is the National Printing House. This last is a noble and spacious building which the elegant Cardinal that once lived in it took pleasure in sumptuously decorating. A masterpiece may be seen there, "the Horses of Apollo," in a wonderful bass-relief by Pierre Le Lorrain. The saloon of the Apes, by Huet, is charming, and the private room of Monsieur Christian, the witty and learned Director of the National Printing House, contains a beautiful Caffieri time-piece. Why must, alas! this fine palace be condemned soon to disappear? The Rohan mansion is to be demolished, and the State will commit the sacrilege! May the endeavours of lovers of Paris succeed in preserving for us this precious vestige of a past that each day removes farther from us!

A cabman whose astonishment must have been great was a certain George who, on the 22nd of October 1812, at half-past eleven in the evening, amid a driving rain that turned the miry soil of Saint-Peter's pudding-bag (now the Villehardouin blind alley) into a veritable bog, saw get out of his cab, near the Rue Saint-Gilles, a completely naked man, with his uniform under his arm--a soldier whom, twenty minutes before, he had picked up in the Louvre Square. This strange passenger was Corporal Rateau, proceeding to the appointment made with him by General Malet, inside Dr. Dubuisson's private hospital and asylum, 303 Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, where the latter was confined by the authorities. In his haste to put on the fine uniform of an orderly officer, which was ready for him in exchange for his own, Rateau had undressed in the cab; and up the dark staircase of the gloomy house in the gloomy street he rushed with absolutely nothing on.

The little house still exists, wretched and dingy-looking, where Malet appointed to meet his accomplices, on the third floor in the abode of the Abbé Cajamanos, an old bewildered Spanish priest who had quitted the Bicêtre asylum.

This adventure of General Malet's is both prodigious and disconcerting. For, in 1812, at the moment when Napoleon seemed to be at the summit of his power, Malet, in a sort of dungeon, with the help of five or six obscure assistants, an old priest with hardly any knowledge of French, a half-pay officer, an almost illiterate sergeant and a few other hare-brained people, had been able, even while confined, watched and suspected, to combine everything, prepare everything, so that the report of the Emperor's death might be believed--the Emperor being absent in the icy steppes of Russia, and no news arriving from him. And his calculations were justified. All the Imperial functionaries, from Savary, the head of the police, down to Frochot, the Prefect of the Seine, accepted General Malet's allegations, without testing or discussing them. Especially, all believed his fine promises; and it is hard to say where the hoaxer would have stopped if an officer, simply obeying his orders, had not refused to be gained over with fine words, and asked for proofs. Malet, being taken aback, grew impatient, and replied with a pistol-shot. Major Doucet forthwith arrested him, and the comedy ended in a tragedy.

All the more haste was made to get rid of the organisers of this plot, which had so nearly succeeded, as it was necessary to suppress as quickly as possible their awkward testimony to such cowardice, lying, and compromise.

The poor dwelling in the Villehardouin blind alley was searched by all the Paris police; papers, uniforms, cocked hats, and swords were fished out of the little well, still existing, into which they had been wildly thrown. In a few hours, Malet, Lahorie, Rateau, and Guidal were tried, condemned, and executed. The replies of the General to the Tribunal that so summarily judged him were home-thrusts. Asked (somewhat late) who were his accomplices: "All of you," he said, "if I had succeeded!"

Taken to the wall of evil memory in the plain of Grenelle, he insisted on giving the firing-order to the execution-platoon; and, as if he had been on the drill-ground, made the soldiers repeat the aiming movement, which had not been carried out with military precision. Rateau, who, as a matter of fact, had understood nothing of this strange drama, in which he had been one of the most picturesque confederates, is said to have died in crying: "Long live the Emperor!"

Between the Archives and the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, there was once a large monastery, which, in 1631, became the property of the Carmelite Billettes,--the name being derived from an ornament worn by these monks on their gowns. The Revolution suppressed the monastery; but the small cloister has come down to us with its charming proportions and its monastic cosiness. To-day, it is a Town School, and the neighbouring church is devoted to Protestant worship.

The Rue de Venise, one of the most ancient Paris streets, is not far away. It is now a low, bad-smelling lane inhabited by vagabonds of both sexes. Women, whose age it is impossible to tell, trail and traipse in front of alleys within which loom greasy, black staircases. Mended linen hangs from the windows; acrid smoke issues from between thick bars protecting old mansions now degenerated into mere dens, defended, however, by heavy doors studded with rusty nails.