Chapter IV: Part 4

It is hideous, yet quaint, as indeed all this quarter, which is made up besides of the Rue Pierre-au-Lard, the Rue Brise-Miche, and the Rue Taille-Pain; not forgetting Saint-Merri's cloister, the name being that of the old church whose tocsin so often sounded the alarm during the riots in the reign of Louis-Philippe.

At the least popular excitement, this inextricable labyrinth of small streets used to bristle with barricades. At the crossing of the Rue Saint-Martin and the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher was raised the terrible barricade defended by Jeanne and his intrepid companions. Following on the burial of General Lamarque, who died while pressing to his lips the sword offered to him by the Bonapartist officers of the Hundred Days, an immense revolutionary movement had galvanized Paris. The old soldiers of the Empire, the survivors of the Terror and those of 1830, allied in their common hatred of Louis-Philippe's government, had joined the malcontents of all parties and the members of the then numerous secret societies. In the evening of the 5th of June 1832, the centre of Paris was covered with barricades; and both troops and National Guard had been obliged to reconquer, one by one, the positions that had been lost. Slaughter had been going on the whole night. When the dawn of the 6th of June tinged the house-roofs with pink, the large Saint-Merri barricade was seen to be holding out; its defenders, a handful of heroic men, had sworn to bury themselves under its ruins. Already they had repulsed ten furious assaults; now they were awaiting death; and the loud tones of the Saint-Merri tocsin, unceasingly sounding above their heads, seemed to be tolling their funeral knell! Part of the Paris army had to be utilised to vanquish these dauntless insurgents. Firing went on from windows, cellars, the pavement. Round the barricades, dead bodies of National Guards and soldiers, riddled with balls, crushed beneath blocks of stone hurled from roof-tops, testified to the frightful savagery of this intestine struggle. For long afterwards, the ground was red with blood! What numbers of balls and bullets, what quantities of grapeshot all these old house-fronts have received in the haphazard of riots, frequent during the reign of Louis-Philippe.

The drums no sooner beat than the citizens armed and hurried to defend order ... or to attack it; anxious women, cowering behind closed shutters, watched for the biers.

Things resumed their ordinary course immediately the disorder was over; the insurgent hobnobbed with the honest National Guard whom he had aimed his gun at on the day before. Sometimes, however, grudges remained.

My parents knew an old woman, living in the Rue Saint-Merri, who, for forty years after 1836, never passed without trembling by the door of the tenant underneath her flat. As people were surprised at this persistent apprehension, she said: "If you only knew what happened to me!" and she related that, one evening when there was a riot and her husband had been absent all day firing in the ranks of the National Guard, she was in the house alone, mad with anxiety; suddenly, at the corner of the street, she saw a stretcher appear, covered with sacking, which the bearers deposited at her door. Was it her husband that they were bringing home dead? She rushed out, raised the edge of the cover and recognised in the person lying with smashed jaw, haggard eyes, bleeding from a ball in the cheek, the tenant underneath: "Ah, what a good thing!" she cried; "it's you, Monsieur Vitry!"

Since that day Monsieur Vitry had given her the cold shoulder.

In the reign of Charles VI., under pretext of purifying the quarter--the pretext and the Vicar of Saint-Merri's complaint being only too well grounded--these "hot streets" were cleared of the majority of low, lewd people who had taken up their domicile in them. But, if morality had its claims, business also had its interests; and the worthy shopkeepers of the neighbourhood, deeming these of more importance than decency, energetically protested against the measure so prejudicial to their petty commerce. They gained the day, and, on the 21st of January 1388, Parliament reversed the Provost's decision, the result being that the merry band returned in triumph to their old haunts, celebrating the event with feasting and banqueting.

In his _Chronicle of the Streets_, our learned friend, Beaurepaire, librarian of the City of Paris, asserts that the Rue Pirouette, near Saint-Eustace's Church, owes its singular name to the "Market Stocks that stood at this spot. It was an octagonal tower with lofty ogival windows, in the centre of which was an iron wheel pierced with holes for the head and arms of vagabonds, murderers, panders, and blasphemers, who were exposed thus to public derision. On three consecutive market-days, for two hours each day, they were fastened in the stocks and turned every half-hour in a different direction. In other words, they were forced to 'pirouette,' whence the name of the street."

After doing penance there, in the olden times, malefactors betake themselves thither to-day to sup. The "Guardian Angel," a thieves' restaurant, exhibits its signboard almost at the corner of the street: in it rogues laugh, drink and sing, and hatch their morrow's exploits. The Staff of the army of vice make it their meeting-place. It is the fashionable resort, a sort of burglars' "Maxim-restaurant," where Paris hooligans deem it elegant to appear. Casque-d'or and his pals reign there, and the scoundrel who has just committed an evil deed is certain to secure good lodging within, and all else he requires. But it is not only knights of the blood-letting industry who inhabit this noble dwelling; other lords come there to eat snails and drink champagne: suspicious-looking young men with plastered hair, who noisily spend their money gained by blackmailing or some other reprehensible action. The place is a disgrace to the Capital. The landlord affirms that there are honest folk among his customers. The thing is possible--anyway, they must find themselves in very bad company.

Quite close, almost next door, at No. 5, is the "Helmet Courtyard," which gives us a striking impression of what ancient dwellings were. It was, in fact, once a sumptuous fourteenth-century mansion; to-day, it is only a hand-cart repository, where shafts point up to the old ceilings with their projecting beams, shafts shiny with use, and a fishmonger's warehouse, in which Burgundy snails, and cooked or raw lobsters are sold. The nook is a quaint one, and the quarter also, with its remains of the Rue de la Grande-Truanderie, where, on the 10th of May 1797, one of the ancestors of Communism, Baboeuf, was arrested.

Not far away used to be the Rue de la Tonnellerie, where Molière lived. This street disappeared when the Rue Turbigo was cut.

In the Central Market quarter, where every one works, where each shop offers to Paris gourmands the best victuals, the freshest vegetables, the daintiest fruits, where, every night, long files of market gardeners' carts bring in loads of provisions of all sorts, each street has, so to speak, its speciality. Housewives know where to find their poultry, crayfish, cheese, or oranges. All the little streets, skirting the Halles, are full of astonishing shops contrived in door-corners, or cellar-corners, all of which for generations have been kept by worthy husbandmen, petty dealers, hucksters, or basket-hawkers, having their own line, their own customers. In the curious Rue Montorgueil, old abodes that amaze one are still to be found; for instance, between Nos. 64 and 72, the ancient Golden Compass Inn, which was the calling place for so many generations of carriers. Its double entrance, blocked up with small butchers', tripe-dealers', and poulterers' stalls, opens on a huge yard, where fowls peck on heaps of golden dung, where ducks quack, and goats bleat under the eyes of some thirty horses, peaceful tenants of the ground floor, with their inquisitive heads thrust over the half-doors, through the low windows or open air-holes. At the back, beneath the spacious shed, the carriages and carts are put up, 'midst a healthy country smell of verdure and hay; and it really is a curious sight to see such a silent nook, with its farmyard, at the back of the noisy, populous, crowded street, full of workmen, pedlars, and shouts or cries of bubbling life and movement.

What is left of the Rue Quincampoix, behind the old Tower of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, emphasises the strangeness of this neighbourhood, in which the exterior, though renewed, has been partly preserved, but which has been more modified and transformed as regards inhabitants and customs than perhaps any other quarter. It was, in fact, in the Rue Quincampoix that the famous Law established his offices of the Mississippi Bank. There, all Paris suffered the fever of speculation. The madness was general. For months nothing but folly and ruin reigned. All gambled--duchess, priest, philosopher and courtier, shopkeeper and ballet-actress, peer and lackey, excise-farmer and his clerk. In order to profit by proximity to the celebrated stock-jobber, each shop, room and cellar even, rented at foolishly high prices, was turned into a gaming establishment; and the case is quoted of a cobbler who hired for a hundred livres a day his stall stinking with wax and old leather; the gold mania had broken down all distinctions. And then the fatal crisis came, the panic, the crash. In the Rue Quincampoix one saw none but despairing faces. Every day there was a series of murders, suicides, attacks of lunacy. On one single occasion, twenty-seven bodies of suicides or murdered people were fished out of the river at the nets of Saint-Cloud. To speculate still, money at any price was needed. Highway robbery was practised, and the footpads were of all classes of society. One of these, the young Count de Horn, a relative of the Regent, and already notorious through his follies, hired two rascals of his own kind, enticed a rich young stock-jobber into an inn of the Rue de Venise, stabbed him and took his money. The scandal was enormous! Both Court and City lost their heads. Would justice at last act and severity be shown? There was a good deal of intriguing and excitement; but, finally, the Lieutenant for criminal affairs, acting on the orders of the Regent, arrested the Count de Horn, on the 22nd of March 1720; and, four days after, the latter was broken on the wheel and executed in the centre of the Grève Square, amidst the applause of all Paris.

The Rue Quincampoix likewise contains some few old mansions now inhabited by certain "medical specialists," cheese-dealers, eau-de-seltz makers, &c. At Nos. 58, 28, 14, 15, and, notably, at No. 10, are seen remnants of forged iron, broken balconies, chipped grotesque masks of stone.... But the whole is tumbling to pieces, and to ruin, and only by a strong effort of the imagination can one reconstitute, out of these wretched fragments, the life of luxury, fever and stock-jobbing that once filled this old street, now foul with chemical smells and rancid odours of fried potatoes.

Collé's prophecy has been fulfilled: "One no longer belongs to Paris when one belongs to the Marais!"

Trade has laid hold of the fine mansions of yore; druggists have set up their distilleries in them, toy-makers sell their puppets in them, and the hawker with his Paris article is the monarch that governs them.

The population at present is poor, laborious, yet intelligent and active; and the contrast between it and the transformed dwellings wherein it dwells is not without interest and grace. A visit to the Archives, Marais and Saint-Merri quarters is certainly something no one should omit.

The picturesque line of central boulevards extends from the Bastille to the Madeleine Church. There Paris life may be studied under the most varied aspects, as well as the most elegant.

To speak of there being a general characterisation of the boulevards would be hardly correct, inasmuch as each of them has its special physiognomy.

The Beaumarchais Boulevard has an atmosphere of middle-class tranquillity about it. Nothing has survived of the fine mansion, surmounted with a feather-shaped weather-cock and flag, which was built there by the author of the _Mariage de Figaro_, nor yet of the famous gardens, once the wonder of Paris, which could only be visited with a special card signed by Beaumarchais himself and given but to few. Yet some one of our own generation has known them, and penetrated into what for a while remained of the gorgeous abode; and that some one is Victorien Sardou. Did he have a presentiment that, in talent and wit, he would one day be the successor of the Beaumarchais whose property he thus intruded on? Anyway, in 1839, Victorien Sardou, aged seven, was living with his parents in the Place de la Bastille. With his little companions he used to play at ball or with hoop round the elephant and the canal banks. At the entrance to the Beaumarchais Boulevard of to-day some long, worm-eaten palisades bordered a piece of waste ground. On the palisades were hung halfpenny pictures of actors, actresses, and soldiers; and no one was fonder of looking at them than the little Sardou.

One day, while enjoying his open-air picture-gallery, he caught a glimpse of a huge garden through the interstice between two of the palings. "What was this garden?" "Suppose he entered!" So he and another urchin of his own age wrenched away a paling with the sticks of their hoops, and in a delight of terror slipped into the unknown domain. What an amazement! They found themselves in a Sleeping Beauty's realm. Weeds, lianes, branches, trees had grown over everything. It was a flora and fauna of the virgin forests; rabbits, birds and butterflies were its denizens; and Robinson Crusoe was not more surprised in exploring his island than these two youngsters in wandering about this jungle.

Sardou vaguely remembers there being a ruined pavilion and some tumble-down old walls; what he recollects better are the banks, ditches, and slopes where he and his companion had such delightful escapades; and nothing is more interesting than to hear this witty and charming talker relate his stories of the bygone Paris which he regrets so much and remembers so well.

The old dwellings have disappeared. A single one still exists at the corner of the Rue Saint-Claude, No. 1. It is the celebrated abode in which the talented charlatan, Cagliostro, installed his furnaces, his crucibles, his alembics, his transformation machines, all the weird utensils that served for his magic sittings.

The house has not been much altered. It remains, as always, strange, enigmatical, mysterious, with its staircases constructed in the body of the walls, its secret corridors, its mechanical ceilings, its cellars of many exits. The greatest lords, the noblest dames frequented this abode. Cardinal de Rohan was a familiar guest. The report ran that gold was made there, and that Cagliostro, the great Copht, had discovered the secret of the philosopher's stone! He offered, continued the legend, repasts of thirteen covers at which the guests were enabled to call up the dead, which was why Montesquieu, Choiseul, Voltaire and Diderot had taken part at Cagliostro's last supper.

All that made a stir; there were murmurs; the thing was proclaimed a scandal. Louis XVI. shrugged his shoulders and Marie Antoinette forbade any one to "speak to her of this charlatan." But every one tried to obtain entrance into the "divine sorcerer's house," and Lorenza, his wife, was obliged to open a class of magic for the benefit of the ladies of the upper circles.

Then came the affair of the necklace. Cagliostro, being compromised with Cardinal de Rohan and Madame de Lamotte, was arrested and thrown into the Bastille; and it was not until ten months later, on the 1st of June 1787, that he was able to return to the house in the Rue Saint-Claude, escorted by a crowd of eight to ten thousand persons, blocking the Boulevard, the courtyard of the house and the staircases. He was cheered, embraced, carried in triumph. This grand day was a climax. A few hours after it, a King's order banished him from France, and the house was shut up. Only in 1805 were its doors reopened for the sale of the furniture; and the sight must have been a curious one! In 1855, the building was repaired; the leaves of the entrance gate were changed; those to-day opening into the Rue Saint-Claude came from the ancient buildings of the Temple; so that the gates of Louis XVI.'s prison give access now to the mansion where Cagliostro once performed his marvels.

In the Filles-du-Calvaire Boulevard stands the Winter Circus, still unchanged, with its Icarian Games and its equilibrists, its smiling horse-women who for so many years have leaped through the same paper-filled hoops and made the same pleased bow to the worshipping crowd. But, if the spectacle is not much varied, the public of youngsters is constantly renewed, and the laughs we heard in our childhood still welcome the same clowns' grimaces. Only Monsieur Loyal is no longer there, the admirable, imposing Monsieur Loyal, tight-buttoned in his fine blue coat, who, with such noble gesture and slashing whip, restrained the mocking clown's quips and quirks or the shyings of the mare Rigolette exhibited at liberty.

Would any one now believe that for more than a century the Temple Boulevard was the centre of Paris gaiety? A charming engraving by Saint-Aubin shows us it joyous, smart, and full of life. Coaches, cabs, and other vehicles pass and repass; grand ladies and fashionably dressed women rival with each other in grace, manners and toilet, the latter of the strangest names; and the draughtsman Briou can write below a fashion engraving of the period: "The provoking Julia reposing on the Boulevard, while awaiting a stroke of good fortune; she is in morning gown with a Diana hat that flying hearts adorn." At Alexander's Cafè Royal, there is supper and dancing; people crowd to listen to Nicolet's patter; and a circle of hearers surround Fanchon, the hurdy-gurdy player. On the same Boulevard, Curtius sets up his luxuriously arranged wax-work saloons; and, later, the parades of Bobèche and Galimafré will be the joy of Paris; for a long time, the fair will continue.

The Ambigu, the Historic Theatre, the Gaiety, the Funambules, the Olympic Circus, the Little-Lazari, the Délassements Comiques,--ten theatres or so will add to the excitement with their strange, nervous, grandiloquent, noisy companies of actors. The gay apprentices, at all times fond of plays, will cheer as they go by the heroes of all these dramas and melodramas, so numerous that popular slang had nicknamed as Crime Boulevard the thoroughfare where, at twelve each evening, so much blood flowed on the boards of these theatres. There were Madame Dorval, Mademoiselle George, Mademoiselle Déjazet, Messieurs Bocage, Mélingue, Bouffé, Dumaine, Saint-Ernest, Boutin, Colbrun, Lesueur, Deburau--the ideal Pierrot--and also Gobert, so like Napoleon I., as was Taillade, who, thin and nervous, was incarnating Bonaparte. It was the period when the Bonapartist epopee turned people's heads to such an extent that the poor comedian Briand, who, in one of the many Napoleon plays, was acting the ungrateful part of Sir Hudson Lowe, said: "I shall never have a similar success. Yesterday, I was waited for at the theatre door and thrown into the Château-d'Eau canal basin!"

All the quarter waxed enthusiastic about its favourite actors, espoused their quarrels, repeated their witticisms or their adventures: Frédéric Lemaitre especially, a tragic, dare-devil, drinking, extravagant yet talented artist, decking himself in private life, as well as on the stage, in the frayed-out plumes of Don Cæsar de Bazan, had his own story. People went into ecstasies over his amours with Clarisse Miroy, interwoven with thrashings and fond tenderness. On the day after one of these noisy quarrels, Frédéric is said to have rung at his lady-love's door, which was opened by Clarisse's mother. The good dame, frightened at the brutal actor's appearance, raised her arm instinctively as if to ward off a blow.... "I beat you, I!" thundered Frédéric in Richard d'Arlington's tones, "I beat you! Why?... Do I love you?"

The Historic Theatre subsequently became the Lyric Theatre, and the wonderful Madame Miolan-Carvalho, the queen of song, was there to create, with her magnificent art, _Faust_, _Mireille_, _Jeannette's Wedding_, _Queen Topaz_, &c. About 1861, the celebrated composer Massenet, yet a pupil at the Conservatory and on the point of obtaining his Rome prize, discharged in the theatre orchestra the duties of kettle-drummer, for the modest salary of forty-five francs a month.

Others to perform there were the Davenport brothers and the conjurer Robin, with their amusing séances of hypnotism and white magic. On this always-to-be-remembered Temple Boulevard were to be met the various fashionable authors: Dennery, Théodore Barrière, Victor Séjour, Paul Féval, Gounod, Berlioz, A. Adam, Clapisson, Saint-Georges, the Cogniard brothers, Clairville; and the great Dumas used to pass in triumph, shaking hands with everybody as he went. The coffee-houses had to turn customers away; orange-sellers made fortunes, while boys sold checks, conveyed nosegays to pretty actresses, and hailed cabs. People called to each other, shouted, disputed, laughed above all, under the indulgent eye of the police and to the noise of liquorice-water-seller's bell: it was the golden age!

In 1862, a regrettable decision of Baron Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine, suppressed this bit of Paris, so lively and gay; and, on the ruins of all these theatres, which brought money and mirth to the quarter, were built Prince Eugène's barracks, the ugly Hôtel Moderne, and the wretched monument of the Republic Square. Of all this fine, artistic past nothing is left except the tiny Déjazet Theatre, at the corner of the Vendôme Passage, and the Turkish Coffee-house; the latter different far from what it was when Bailly depicted it under the Directory. Elegant dames, the Merveilleuses, the Incroyables used to frequent it for the purpose of nibbling an ice or sipping little pots of cream, while listening to cithern concerts. Young Savoyards made their marmots dance in presence of "sensitive souls," and thrifty burgesses of the quarter took their family to get an idea of the high Parisian life which made the Turkish Coffee-house one of its favourite meeting-places.

Restaurants were numerous, being souvenirs of coffee-houses formerly renowned, like the Godet and Yon cafés. There one found singing and dancing, and, now and again, plotting. It was at the Burgundy Vintage Restaurant in the Temple faubourg, the ordinary rendezvous of Paris wedding-breakfasts or National Guard love-feasts, that--on the 9th of May 1831, at the end of a banquet given to celebrate the acquittal of Guinard, Cavaignac, and the Garnier brothers, charged with plotting against the State--Évariste Gallois, with a knife in his hand, proposed in three words this threatening toast: "To Louis-Philippe!"

The great Flaubert lived on the Temple Boulevard at No. 42. There, on Sundays, he gathered his disciples at noisy lunches--Zola, Goncourt, Daudet, de Maupassant, Huysmans, Céard, George Pouchet--a few yards away from a building of tragic fame. No. 50, in fact, was the wretched house whose third-story Venetian blinds concealed Fieschi and the twenty-five pistol barrels loaded with bullets which constituted his infernal machine. A train of powder passed over twenty-five lights. The discharge of grapeshot to be vomited by this dreadful instrument of death was terrible. The grocer Morey, who had helped to prepare the monstrous crime, had even taken the useful precaution to damage four of the gun-barrels, whose explosion was to suppress Fieschi himself.

Pépin, another accomplice, had been careful to walk his horse several times past the fatal window; and from behind the Venetian blinds, Fieschi, who was an excellent shot, had been able at his ease to regulate the aim of his horrible slaughtering-machine. It was intended that Louis-Philippe, who had ten times escaped the assassin's hand, should, on this occasion, be struck by it. The conspirators, however, had not calculated that the King, when reviewing the National Guard, would avoid the middle of the Boulevard, which sloped down towards the sides for draining purposes, and would keep to the lower portions, along which the troops were stationed. The rain of bullets therefore passed over the King's head, touching only the top of his cocked-hat, and mowed down women, children, officers and other spectators that were on the King's left. It was a frightful butchery; the Boulevard streamed with blood. More than forty victims lay on the road, among them being the glorious Marshal Mortier, who expired on one of the marble tables in the Turkish Coffee-house, whither the dead and wounded had been transported. Fieschi, who was wounded, was arrested in the backyard of the next house, while trying to fly through the Rue des Fossés-du-Temple. On the 19th of February 1836, he ascended the scaffold with his accomplices, Pépin and Morey.

At the corner of the Temple Boulevard, to the right, in front of the first house in the Voltaire Boulevard, the barricade was raised where Delescluze was killed in May 1871. At this spot, formerly stood the Gaiety Theatre; while the Lyric Theatre opened its doors on the present site of the Metropolitan railway station in the Republic Square.

The Saint-Martin Boulevard, where Paul de Kock took up his abode, in order to study from his windows, which were on the first story, near the Porte Saint-Martin, the seething life of the Capital, now has no animation except in the evening. Four theatres--the Folies-Dramatiques, the Ambigu, the Porte Saint-Martin, and the Renaissance--add life and movement to it then; and nothing is more amusing than the hour following the end of the performances. The coffee-houses fill with visitors, cigarettes are lighted, newspaper-vendors shout the latest news; people hustle, and touts run after carriages, in which one sees a rapidly passing vision of pretty women in light-coloured dresses and opera-cloaks. Afterwards issue the actors, with blue chins and turned-up collars, and often looking cross. Last of all, come the handsome actresses, who quickly step into their brougham, inside which may frequently be seen, dimly outlined behind the red point of a cigarette, the form of an expectant friend.

Near the Porte Saint-Denis, at the entrance to the narrow Rue de Cléry, there was formerly a rise in the road, which was the scene of a tragic occurrence. There, on the 21st of January 1793, the intrepid De Batz had appointed to meet a few companions. It was determined that a forlorn hope should be led with a view to snatch Louis XVI. from the shame of the guillotine. The plan was to force the line of soldiers, to overpower the escort surrounding the carriage, and to carry off the King.

But, already, on the day before, the Committee of Public Safety had been warned "by a well-known private individual," say the police reports, of the mad plot that was in preparation, and every necessary precaution was taken. During the night all the persons denounced in the warning as suspicious were placed under arrest. De Batz, who thought to find a hundred and fifty confederates at the meeting-place, only found seven. Notwithstanding their small number, they did not hesitate, and rushed at the horses' heads. The Guards cut them down. Three were killed. De Batz managed to escape.

This strange, winding Rue de Cléry, whose thin edge stands out so curiously against the sky, was the scene of another drama. The father of André and Marie-Joseph Chénier lived at No. 97. There, on the 7th of Thermidor, he was anxiously waiting for the liberation of his son André, who for long months had been a prisoner at Saint-Lazare. The poor man had foolishly taken it into his head to appeal to Collot d'Herbois' heart(!) and to ask him to free his son. Collot d'Herbois had once been an actor; and now, on another sort of stage, revenged himself for having been hissed. He had not forgotten the lines in which André Chénier had satirised him in such masterly fashion, but he did not know in what prison his enemy was confined. Marie-Joseph, the brother, himself an object of suspicion, had been able to lengthen out the proceedings and to keep as a secret the place where André was confined. At this supreme hour of the Terror, it was the only possible chance Collot d'Herbois had to satisfy his vengeance; and the information thus unadvisedly but innocently given by the prisoner's father was utilised by the revengeful actor. "To-morrow," Collot assured the unhappy father, "your son shall quit Saint-Lazare." He kept his word; and, on the 7th of Thermidor, just at the hour when the guest was so impatiently expected, André got into the cart to go to the scaffold, erected that day at the barrier of the Throne Square.

Round about the picturesque Rue de Cléry, the quarter is an odd medley of little streets, lanes, and alleys: the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Recouvrance, the Rue Sainte-Foy, the Rue des Petits-Carreaux, the Rue de la Lune, in which last Balzac lodged his Lucien de Rubempré watching over Coralie's dead body, and composing libertine songs, in order to gain the money required for his mistress's funeral.

In these tortuous, sombre, narrow streets it is easy to reconstitute the physiognomy of the older Paris; ancient dwellings are still numerous enough; but, as in the Marais, are given over to petty trade and industry. After the Egyptian campaign, the Consulate cut a certain number of new streets bearing the names of victories: the Rues de Damiette, d'Aboukir, du Nil. On the site of the Cairo Square, once stood the mansion of the Temple Knights, or Knights Templars. A portion of an old Gothic Chapel, in which were preserved the helmet and armour of Jacques Molay, founder and Grand Master of the Order, was used in 1835 as a meeting-place by surviving adepts of this rite; and Rosa Bonheur's father, who was a Knight Templar, had his daughter baptized there beneath an "arch of steel" made by the crossed swords of the Order, clad in white tunics, with a red cross embroidered on their breasts, booted in deer-skin, and coifed with a white cloth square cap surmounted by three feathers--one yellow, one black, and one white!

A delightful picture by Dagnan, which is now in the Carnavalet Museum, shows us the Poissonnière Boulevard in 1834. Most of the houses remain to-day; but, alas! the tall, thick-foliaged trees that made the Boulevard a sort of park avenue have long since disappeared. That lover of Paris, Victorien Sardou, who was born in it, and who is cheered, loved, and honoured in it, very well remembers seeing the trees as they used to be, and his long saunterings in front of the Gymnase Theatre. Did he foresee the successes he was to gain with _les Ganaches_, _les Vieux Garçons_, _les Bons Villageois_, _Andréa_, _Féréol_, _Séraphine_, _Fernande_, &c.?

Further on, we come across the ancient Variety Theatre, whose antique front speaks of a glorious past; Duvert, Lauzanne, Bayard, Scribe, Meilhac, Ludovic Halévy, and, above all, Offenbach, whose haunting music bewitched Paris for twenty years.

Ludovic Halévy, who was a charming chronicler of Paris life, has left us an interesting sketch of the Montmartre Boulevard towards 1810: "The Variety actors had been obliged to quit the Montansier hall; their vaudevilles had more success than the tragedies at the Théâtre Français. The Emperor made a decree depriving them of the Palais-Royal premises; but they were allowed to move to new premises on the Montmartre Boulevard!... A frightful quarter for a theatre!... It was almost in the country; not one of the large houses existed which you see there! Nothing but little single-story shops, wretched wooden stalls, and the two small panoramas of Monsieur Boulogne.... No foot-pavements, a road simply of beaten earth between two rows of tall trees.... A few old cabs and carriages passed now and again.... In fine, the country.... It was the country!!.."

With the Variety Theatre began what was called, without epithet, _The Boulevard_. For idlers, saunterers, wits, clubmen, writers, journalists, under the second Empire, it was a sort of sacred ground. Grammont-Caderousse, the Prince of Orange, Khalil-Bey, Paul Demidoff, Aurélien Scholl, Roqueplan, Aubryet, Jules Lecomte, Auguste Villemot were kings there. The Café Anglais, the Maison Dorée, Tortoni's were frequented by the fashionables of society and literature. The gas flared, champagne corks flew, and one had only to open pianos for them to play automatically the Evohe of _Orpheus in Hades_! An apropos witticism stopped a quarrel. The princes of intelligence held their own with princes of the blood or of money; as, for instance, on the day when, at Tortoni's, the Duke de Grammont-Caderousse flung a packet of goose-quills in the face of Paul Mahalin, who, the day before, in a small newspaper had severely animadverted on the diva S----, she being under the Duke's protection.

"From Mademoiselle S----," said the Duke.

Making his grandest bow, Mahalin retorted: "I was aware, Monsieur, that Mademoiselle S---- feathered her lovers, but I did not dare hope it was for my benefit."

Since the dark days of 1870, the elegant Boulevard has become more democratic. The old dwellings themselves have changed their uses; and electro-plate is sold in the beautiful pavilion built by Marshal de Saxe--after the Hanoverian wars--at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue Louis-le-Grand. In the eighteenth century, some one took it into his head to decorate with flowers the roofs of the houses in the vicinity of this fine mansion; so that it was possible to dine merrily--under the shade of hornbeams--while watching the windmills of Montmartre turn in the distance. The example has been imitated in our own times--people cried that it was an innovation; this is only another error; there is nothing new under the sun. What is done is merely a modification, and generally the alteration is for the worse! Tortoni's flight of steps has disappeared. Taverns, with their onion soup and their sourcrout and sausage, replace the aristocratic restaurants of yore. The features are different; but still it is a Paris nook, really gay, amusing, and original. A walk in it is delightful, though nothing, alas! can be said to vividly recall the past, since the terrible fire of 1887 destroyed the Comic Opera of our fathers; the Opera of Grétry, Dalayrac, Méhul, Boïeldieu, and Hérold; the Opera whose façade does not open on the boulevard, according to the desire formally expressed in 1782 to Heurtier, the architect, by the King's Comedians refusing to be confused with the "Boulevard Comedians"; the Opéra-Comique where, every evening, in the spacious _foyer_ adorned with busts of dead musical celebrities and composers that had contributed to the theatre's fame, the habitués met whose attendance was a protest against modern music: Auber, Adam, Clapisson, Bazin, Maillard; later, and with another æsthetic doctrine, G. Bizet, Léo Delibes, V. Massé, J. Massenet, Carvalho, Meilhac, Halévy, and old Dupin, the last an astonishing centenarian who, one evening, with rancorous eye looked at Hérold's bust and grumbled: "How that urchin used to rile me!" In presence of the general bewilderment he explained: "I was his school companion, in 1806, at Saint-Louis' College!" we were then in May 1885! This was the obstinately reactionary Dupin who once drew from a contradictor the threatening retort: "We missed you in '93. When the next Revolution comes, we'll take good care not to!"

The amiable chats, the agreeable meetings which brought together so many witty people, clever talkers, artists, men of the world, those of the Comic Opera _foyer_, of the Grand Opera, or the Comédie Française are now hardly anything but a memory. Not that the practice itself is abolished. Art gatherings are quite as frequent and as well attended; but they have emigrated,--many of them to Montmartre, to the "Butte Sacrée," the holy mound, "the teat of the world," yelled the astonishing Salis in his _Chat Noir_ patter; and truly the spot is one of the Capital's curiosities.

Gay, industrious, cynical, flippant, and yet religious, this composite quarter offers the most singular mingling of poets, painters, sculptors, lemonade-makers and pilgrims. On the Clichy and Batignolles Boulevards, the revolving lights of the Moulin Rouge illuminate a population of rakes, dandies, artists, lemans and bullies. Each wine-shop--and there are many--harbours one or several poets, more or less comic, but always railers and _rosses_,[4] as the witty Fursy says, one of the best performers in these "music-boxes." In these latter the great ones of the earth, politicians, ministers, are unmercifully berhymed, as also the events of the day; a minister's latest speech, Pelletan's elegance, Le Bargy's cravats, Santos-Dumont's ascent, the Pope's latest Encyclical letter, the automobile tax, the divorce of the moment, the King of Spain's recent visit, or that of the Prince of Bulgaria, all put into couplets.

Montmartre is the Capital's pot-house; it is all good-humoured laughter and chaff. People enjoy themselves at night and work in the day, for it has always been a favourite abode for artists of every kind: Henri Monnier, the Duchess d'Abrantès, Madame Haudebourg-Lescot, Mademoiselle Mars, Horace Vernet, Berlioz, Ch. Jacque, Reyer, Victor Massé, Vollon, Manet, André Gill, Steinlen, Guillemet, Willette, Jules Jouy, Mac-Nab, Xanrof, Maurice Donnay. Their memory there is alive and respected, the legend of their prowess is preserved. It is Montmartre's _Iliad_.

A few yards from these noisy streets, the "Butte" begins, on which, at the close of the 1871 siege, the Parisians had hoisted the National Guards' cannons. In vain the Government tried to regain possession of them; and the rest is known:--the resistance, the troops disbanded, Generals Clement Thomas and Lecomte arrested, dragged into a small house in the Rue des Rosiers and shot against a garden wall.

Part of the wall still stands; and though the house has disappeared in which this tragedy of the 18th of March was played, a little of the garden itself remains, behind the modern buildings of the _Abri Saint-Joseph_, vast sheds used as refectories by the crowds of pilgrims attracted to the basilica of the Sacré-Coeur.

Indeed, all this quarter is melancholy-looking, silent, quaint, and monastic. Chaplet, scapulary, candle, missal, and pious picture-dealers have their shops in it. The spot is a sort of religious fair; even the streets have liturgical names: Saint-Eleuthère, Saint-Rustique, near the Rue Girardon, and the Calvary cemetery, overlooked by the awkward outlines of the old Galette Windmill, the ordinary rendezvous for idlers, boulevard inquisitives, artists' models, lemans and bullies of the neighbourhood. The ancient Montmartre, with its picturesqueness, is again met with in the Rue Saint-Vincent, in the Rue des Saules containing the "Lively Rabbit" tavern, and in the Rue de la Fontaine-du-But, sordid streets, bordered with sorry habitations whose windows are hung with linen drying, and which seem at each story to harbour a different poverty; strange streets, running for the most part between a crumbling old house and a hoarding mossy with rain and covered with inscriptions. As a matter of fact, these palisades serve as an outlet for the confidences of the "pals" and their "gals" of the quarter. Amorous effusions may be read side by side with threats, and the great ones of the earth are sometimes severely dealt with. The epithet is always a bitter one. It savours of debauch, vice and crime.

And yet, in this corner of Paris, which modern embellishments will soon have made unrecognisable, bits of admirable scenery are to be met with, exquisite lanes of verdure, birds, tame pigeons, whistling blackbirds; and one might fancy one's self far away in some peaceful country-place, if, at the end of all these streets, were not seen the huge violet-coloured mass of the Capital, in fairy panorama, an ocean of stone, whence heave, like masts, the bell-towers of palaces, the turrets, belfries and steeples of churches, with domes, roofs and gardens--an incomparable vision of art, grandeur and beauty.

The great Balzac informs us that César Birotteau was ruined by speculations he engaged in on the "waste ground round about the Madeleine church." He lost in them the profits realised by his "Eau Carminative" and by the "Double Pâte des Sultanes." His "Rose Queen" perfumery was swallowed up in them....

And, however, César Birotteau was right in his reasoning. To-day, the Madeleine building ground is the highest quoted in Paris.

In 1802, the surface was occupied by foundation works and scaffolding, showing the pillars of the church so long since commenced and still in the building.

There took place the charming episode depicted by Duplessis-Bertaux, under the pleasing title: "Ingenuous Benevolence" (an historic fact of the 5th Messidor, anno X.). A long notice, beneath the picture, tells us that Pradère, Persuis, Elleviou and "his spouse," walking one evening along the Magdalene Boulevard, met a blind street-singer, who "by the strains of his piano was soliciting public charity." The receipts were wretched; so our kind artists improvised a little open-air concert and remedied the ill-fortune of the poor fellow. After delightfully singing, Madame Elleviou, her husband and Pradère made a collection, and poured the proceeds, thirty-six francs, into the blind man's hands trembling with emotion!

Along the Rue Royale, we reach the Champs-Elysées, after stopping for a moment at the "Cité Berryer," a strange alley in which once stood the hotel of the King's Musketeers. It is a sort of poor market lost in this rich quarter.

Then comes the Place de la Concorde, the finest Square in the world, with its unrivalled perspectives of the Champs Elysées, the Seine, the Tuileries, the Garde-Meuble, the Crillon mansion, and the charming house of Grimod de la Reynière, to-day the Cercle de l'Union artistique, at the corner of the Rue de "la Bonne Morue"--at present the Rue Boissy d'Anglas--in front of which still stood, until the second Empire, one of the corner pavilions erected by Gabriel. What souvenirs! the raising of Louis the Fifteenth's statue; the festivities in honour of the Dauphin's marriage to Marie Antoinette, so tragically terminated by a catastrophe--the crowd that had come to witness the fireworks being crushed in the moat--which was the beginning of the hatred against the "Austrian woman"; the reviews of the Swiss Guards; the military charges of Lambesc; the people's storming of the swing-bridge, the gates forced, the ditches crossed, and then the sinister scaffold, smoking in front of the statue to Liberty, and the Conventionals terrified, stopping before they entered their hall and taking a close look at the death which, each day, hovered over them. "Yesterday, as I was proceeding to the Assembly with Pénières," writes Dulaure in his Memoirs, "we perceived, as we passed through the Revolution Square, preparations being made for an execution. 'Let us pause,' my colleague said to me; 'let us accustom ourselves to the sight. Perhaps we shall soon need to make proof of our courage by calmly ascending this scaffold. Let us familiarise ourselves with the punishment.'"

Severed heads were exhibited by the executioner at the four corners of the huge Square: Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Hérault de Séchelles, Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland, Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and Robespierre. A dreadful pell-mell, a disastrous butchery; the ground was red with blood. Then followed the soldiers of the Empire, singing as they defiled, on entering the Tuileries to cheer their triumphant Emperor at his return from some victorious campaign.

A white head, big golden epaulets, a blue ribbon: such was the appearance of Louis XVIII., impotent, with paralysed legs, who, in his carriage surrounded with body-guards, galloped through the Square at full speed.

It was at the corner of this Place de la Concorde that, on the 28th of February 1848, Louis-Philippe, broken and vanquished, got into the humble cab that proved to be the hearse of the Monarchy.

Napoleon III., with his blue dreamy eyes, used to cross it nearly every day, driving his phaeton; and the boy, whom the Parisians of that time called "the little Prince," would show his pretty fair head of hair at the window of the "berline" escorted by the household troops.

The gates of the Tuileries were again to open, on the 4th of September 1870, under the pressure of the invaders; and, during the siege of Paris, artillery were to camp in the vast ruined garden. Finally, the palace of the kings of France was to disappear in a cloud of fire, 'midst the last convulsions of the expiring Commune; and, to-day, a poor fellow, in a shabby sun-faded cloak and wearing an old felt hat, spends his time distributing bread and grain to the Paris pigeons and sparrows, on the very spot where once stood the rostrum of the Convention, some yards from the place where the four hoofs of the Emperor Napoleon's white horse pranced, as his rider reviewed the Guard, before flying his victorious eagles towards Moscow, Madrid, Rome, Vienna, or Berlin!

The Champs Elysées are of almost modern creation. A decade ago, the fine avenues surrounding the Arc de l'Etoile--the Avenue Kléber, the Avenue Wagram, the Avenue Niel, the Avenue de l'Alma--offered most picturesque contrasts; beside a sumptuous mansion, subsisted wretched little houses, remains of old hovels that once were scattered all over this luxurious quarter, where now nothing recalls the waste pieces of land, dangerous even to cross, of sixty years ago. Under the Directory, Madame Tallien's cottage (Notre Dame de Thermidor, she was called) to which the Incroyables and the Merveilleuses dared not go without escort, was situated as far up as the Avenue Montaigne. Dancing-gardens and open-air bars occupied the space now filled by restaurants and cafés-concerts. An engraving by Carle Vernet shows us a Cossack encampment round a humble, country-looking inn. Now the Le Doyen restaurant stands there!

Under Louis-Philippe, the Champs-Elysées were at length altered: side avenues were laid out, the main avenue was widened; and Emile Augier used to relate that, in the hollow of one of the trees numbered for trimming (No. 116, I believe), the ticket porter belonging to the Gymnase Theatre deposited the one intended for Balzac at the time of the rehearsals of _Mercadet_. The great novelist, in order to escape from his numerous creditors, was lodging at this period in the Rue Beaujon, under the name of Madame Dupont, widow. Gozlan, who ultimately discovered his illustrious friend's address, added on the envelopes he sent to him--"née Balzac."

The curious Memoirs of the Abbé de Salamon, a Papal internuncio, give us a striking picture of the Bois de Boulogne under the Revolution: a sort of forest, or jungle, in which those took refuge who, being suspected, were tracked by the Committees and the police, and to whom the precious citizens' card had been refused. "I continually remained in the thickest part of the Bois de Boulogne," he says. "It seemed to me that each person I met read on my face that I was outlawed and was hastening to deliver me to the headsman. I took up my abode in the loneliest place of the wood. I lit a fire with a tinder-box and some twigs, and cooked my vegetables; my soup was excellent.... Later I discovered another fairly convenient spot, on the side of the Bagatelle Villa, quite near to the Pyramid and not far from Madrid.

"One night, I was wakened in the middle of my dreams by the piercing cries of two women, who drew back terrified on beholding me through the darkness of night.

"It was a mother and her daughter, who also were flying from an arrest-warrant. I called to them: 'Keep silence, whoever you are! You have nothing to fear.' They asked me what I was doing in the wood so late: 'The same thing as you no doubt are doing yourselves,' I answered."

Subsequently it became the ordinary meeting-place for duellists. Already, in the time of Louis XV., some ladies, the Marchioness de Nesles and the Countess de Polignac, had exchanged pistol shots in it on account of the Duke de Richelieu. Under the Revolution, in 1790, Cazalès and Barnave went there to settle a political quarrel: "I should be sorry to kill you," exclaimed Cazalès; "but you annoy us considerably, and I want to keep you away from the rostrum for a while." "I am more generous," retorted Barnave; "I wish merely to touch you; for you are the only orator on your side, whereas on mine my absence would not even be perceived." Afterwards it was Elleviou and Monsieur de Bieville; General Foy and Monsieur de Corday; Marshal Soult and Colonel Briqueville; Benjamin Constant and Forbin des Essarts; with this peculiarity in the last duel that the two adversaries fought at ten yards' distance, sitting in two armchairs, which were not even grazed! And how many others!...

Under Louis-Philippe, the Duke d'Orléans, the Duke de Nemours, Lord Seymour, the Duke de Fitz-James, Ernest Le Roy--the Jockey Club at its formation--organised races there. The stakes were modest; most often, a few bottles of champagne were gained and lost. Then fashion took hold of the thing. More importance was attached to racing; and, to-day, it is the great Parisian event--in festivities. As early as 1850, the Hippodrome of the Eylau Square revived the souvenir of Antiquity's favourite chariot-races.

The Bois de Boulogne became the rendezvous of society. There, was displayed the luxury of the Second Empire. Its trees and avenues formed an exquisite framework to elegance and worldly show. In the _Curèe_, Emile Zola was able to write: "It was four o'clock and the Bois awoke from its afternoon sultriness. Along the Empress' Avenue, clouds of dust were flying; and, afar, lawns of verdure could be seen, with the hills of Saint-Cloud and Suresnes beyond, crowned with the grey of Mont Valerien. The sun, aloft on the horizon, sailed in an effulgence of golden light that filled the depths of the foliage, flamed the top branches, and transformed this ocean of leaves into an ocean of luminousness.... The varnished panels of the carriages, the flashing of the copper and steel mountings, the bright colours of the dresses streamed together with the horses' regular trot, and cast on the background of the Bois a broad, moving band, a beam from the welkin, lengthening as it followed the curves of the road. The waved roundness of the sunshades radiated like metal moons."

The sight has not changed. It is the same triumphal defile, which each day gathers within these select surroundings the most elegant women in Paris, fashionable horsemen, vibrating autocars with their _chauffeurs_, clubmen as well as artists and workmen, who come to enjoy the fair spectacle, this feast of the eyes, this unique scenery: the Bois de Boulogne, the Avenue du Bois, the Champs Elysées.

From the top of the Arc de Triomphe, 'mid the twilight of May, the vision is a magic one; it is from the terraces of the portico erected to the glory of the Grand Army that a view is obtained of the sumptuous quarters of modern Paris.

Some sixty years ago, Balzac showed his hero dreaming on the hill of Père-Lachaise, and contemplating, as it lay in the valley, the Monster he intended to tame. To-day Rastignac would have to mount the Arc de Triomphe, if he wished to threaten Paris. Thence, he might launch his famous defiance: "It is a struggle between us now!" for, if the aspect of things has altered, the impression made by the immense City is still and ever the same: an impression of weight, of imperious conflict, of hard victory. In verity, no one disembarks without a sort of anguish in this great Paris,--Paris, so redoubtable to the valiant that attempt its conquest and so prodigal to the fortunate ones that have known how to win its favour.

GEORGES CAIN.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Successive landlords have more or less spoilt this fine dwelling. The grand staircase is almost the only part intact, and it is a marvel. The carving is by Martin Desjardins, and the oval courtyard retains some of its ancient grace.

[4] A word here meaning ultra-naturalistic, broadly satirical.

WORKS QUOTED OR CONSULTED

_History of and Researches into the Antiquities of the City of Paris_.
By H. SAUVAL (1724).
_History of the City and Diocese of Paris_. By the ABBÉ LEBEUF (1883).
_Tableau of Paris_. By MERCIER (1782).
_History of Paris_. By DULAURE (1825).
_Tableau of Paris_. By TEXIER (1850).
_Paris Demolished_. By E. FOURNIER (1855).
_Enigma of the Streets of Paris_. By E. FOURNIER (1860).
_Chronicle of the Streets of Paris_. By E. FOURNIER (1864).
_Paris throughout the Ages_. By E. FOURNIER (1875).
_My Old Paris_. By E. DRUMONT (1879).
_Paris_. By AUGUSTE VITU (1889).
_Paris (History of the Twenty Arrondissements or Quarters)_. By
LABÉDOLLIÈRE.
_Revolutionary Paris_. By LENÔTRE (1895).
_Old Papers, Old Houses_. (1900).
_The Bièvre and Saint-Séverin_. By HUYSMANS (1898).
_The Chronicle of the Streets_. By BEAUREPAIRE (1900).
_Paris-Atlas_. By F. BOURNON.
_New Itinerary Guide to Paris_. By CH. NORMAND.
_Through Old Paris_. By the MARQUIS DE ROCHEGRUDE (1903).
_Minutes of the Municipal Commission of Old Paris_ (from 1898).

End of Project Gutenberg's Nooks and Corners of Old Paris, by Georges Cain