Chapter VI: Part 6

Racine, eighteen years his junior, looked up to La Fontaine as a critic, a counsellor, and a friend, from their early days together in 1660, through long years of intimacy, until he stood beside La Fontaine's bed in his last illness. He even took an odd pleasure in finding that he and La Fontaine's deserted country wife had sprung from the same provincial stock. Molière first met La Fontaine at Vaux, the more than royal residence of Fouquet, at the time of the royal visit in 1661. La Fontaine wrote a graceful bit of verse in praise of the author of "Les Fâcheux," played for the first time before King and court during these festivities, and the two men, absolutely opposed in essential qualities, were fast friends from that time on. "They make fun of the _bonhomme_," said the ungrudging player once, "and our clever fellows think they can efface him; but he'll efface us all yet."

It is needless to say that La Fontaine was beloved by Boileau, the all-loving. That kindly ascetic was moved to attempt the amendment of his friend's laxity of life, and to this blameless end dragged him to prayers sometimes, where La Fontaine was bored and would take up any book at hand to beguile the time. In this way he made acquaintance with the Apocrypha, and became intensely interested in Baruch, and asked Boileau if he knew Baruch, and urged him to read Baruch, as a hitherto undiscovered genius. During his last illness, he told the attendant priest that he had been reading the New Testament, and that he regarded it as a good, a very good book.

In truth, his soul was the soul of a child, and, childlike, he lived in a world of his own--a world peopled with the animals and the plants and the inanimate objects, made alive by him and almost human. He loved them all, and painted them with swift, telling strokes of his facile pen. The acute Taine points out that the brute creations of this poet are prototypes of every class and every profession of his country and his time. His dumb favorites attracted him especially by their unspoiled simplicity, for he loathed the artificial existence of his fellow-creatures. With "a sullen irony and a desperate resignation" he let himself be led into society, and he was bored beyond bearing by its high-heeled decorum. It is said that he cherished, all his life long, a speechless exasperation with the King, that incarnation of pomposity and pretence to his untamed Gallic spirit. Yet this malcontent had to put on the livery of his fellow-flunkies, and his dedication, to the Dauphin, of his "Fables," is as fulsome and servile as any specimen of sycophancy of that toad-eating age.

Yet, able to make trees and stones talk, he himself could not talk, La Bruyère tells us; coloring his portraiture strongly, as was his way, and rendering La Fontaine much too heavy and dull, with none of the skill in description with his tongue that he had with his pen. He may be likened to Goldsmith, who "wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll." Madame de Sablière said to him: "_Mon bon ami, que vous seriez bête, si vous n'aviez pas tant d'esprit!_" Louis Racine, owning to the lovable nature of the man, has to own, too, that he gave poor account of himself in society, and adds that his sisters, who in their youth had seen the poet frequently at their father's table in Rue Visconti, recalled him only as a man untidy in dress and stupid in talk. He gave this impression mainly because he was forever dreaming, even in company, and so seemed distant and dull; but, when drawn out of his dreams, no man could be more animated and more delightful.

So he was found by congenial men, and so especially by approving women. These took to him on the spot, women of beauty and of wit, and women commonplace enough. To them all his prattle was captivating, devoid as it was of the grossness so conspicuous in his poems. He depended on women in every way all through his life; they catered to his daily needs, and they provided for his higher wants; they helped him in his money troubles, they helped him in all his troubles. And he requited each one's care with a genuine affection, not only at the time, but for all time, in the record he has left of his gratitude and his devotion to these ministering women. His verse is an unconscious chronicle of his loves, his caprices, his inconstancies, and his loyalties. Nor did a woman need to be clever and cultivated to be bewitched by his inborn, simple sweetness. A matter-of-fact nurse, hired to attend him during an illness which came near being fatal, said to the attending priest: "Surely, God could not have the courage to damn a man like that."

This memory he has left is brought pleasantly home to the passer-by in Rue de Grenelle by the sign of a hotel, a quiet clerical house, frequented by churchmen and church-loving provincials visiting Paris. The sign bears the name "_Au bon La Fontaine_," in striking proof of the permanent place in the common heart won by this lovable man.

He was content to drift through life, his days spent, as he put it in his epitaph on "Jean," one-half in doing nothing, the other half in sleeping. He had no library or study or workroom, like other pen-workers; he lived out of doors in the open air, and wandered vaguely, tasting blameless epicurean delights. Some of us seem to see, always in going along Cours la Reine, that quaint figure, comical and pathetic, as he was seen by the Duchesse de Bouillon on a rainy morning, when she drove to Versailles. He was standing under a tree on this wooded water-side, and on her return on that rainy evening he was standing under the same tree. He had dreamed away the long day there, not knowing or not caring that he was wet. He explained, once when he came late--inexcusably late--to a dinner, that he had been watching a procession of ants in a field, and had found that it was a funeral; he had accompanied the _cortége_ to the grave in the garden, and had then escorted the bereaved family back to its home, as bound by courtesy.

This genuine poet, of dry, sly humor and of unequalled suppleness of phrase, was by nature a gentle, wild creature, and by habit a docile, domesticated pet, attaching himself to any amiable woman who was willing to give him a warm corner in her heart and her house. And how such women looked on him was prettily and wittily put by one of them: "He isn't a man, he is a _fablier_"--a natural product of her own sudden inspiration--"who blossoms out into fables as a tree blossoms out with leaves."

* * * * *

NICOLAS BOILEAU began his acquaintance with Molière by his tribute of four dainty verses to the author of "L'École des Femmes," and the friendship thus formed was broken only by the death of Molière, to whose memory Boileau inserted his magnificent lines in the "Epître à Monsieur Racine." It was Boileau who criticised the early verse of young Racine, so justly and so gently, that the two men were drawn together in an amity that was never marred. It was Boileau who, after nearly forty years of finding him out by the distrustful Racine, was acknowledged to be "noble and full of friendship." It was Boileau who sang without cessation praises of Racine to Louis XIV., and who startled the nimble mediocrity of his majesty's mind by the assertion that Molière was the rarest genius of the Grand Monarch's reign and realm. It was Boileau who made, in his fondness for La Fontaine, the unhappy and hopeless attempt to reform his friend's loose living, and in so doing nearly led to the undoing of La Fontaine's goodwill for him. It was Boileau, prompted by compassion for Corneille's impoverished old age, who offered to surrender his own pension in favor of the distressed veteran of letters. It was Boileau who found Patru forced to sell his cherished books that he might get food, and it was Boileau who bought them, on condition that Patru should keep them and look after them for their new owner. It was Boileau who tried to work a miracle in his comrade Chapelle by weaning him from his wine-bibbing; and when Chapelle found the lecture dry, and would listen to it only over a bottle or two, it was Boileau who came out of the _cabaret_ the tipsier of the pair. It was Boileau who was known to every man who knew him at all--and he was known to many men of merit and demerit--as a loyal, sincere, helpful, unselfish friend. It was of Boileau that a perplexed woman in the great throng at his burial said, in the hearing of young Louis Racine: "He seems to have lots of friends, and yet somebody told me that he wrote bad things about everybody."

Those friends could have explained the puzzle. They mourned the indulgent comrade who was doubled with the stern satirist. The man, so rigid in morals and austere of life, was tolerant to the foibles of his friends, tender in their troubles, open-handed for their needs. The writer, so exacting in his standard and severe in his judgment, was cruel only with his pen. Trained critic in verse, rather than inspired poet, Boileau had an enthusiasm for good work in others equal to his intolerance of bad. He loathed the powdered and perfumed _minauderies_ of the drawing-room poetasters, and he loved the swift and sure stroke of Molière's "_rare et fameux esprit_." It was in frank admiration that he demanded of his friend: "_Enseigne-moi où tu trouves la rime!_" For this impeccable artist in words, who has left his profession of faith in the power of a word in its right place, had to reset and recast, file and polish, to get the perfection he craved. And so this bountiful admirer was easily an unsparing censor. Sincere in letters as in life, he insisted on equal sincerity from his fellow-workers, and would not let them spare their toil or scamp their stint. He watched and warned them; his reproof and his approval brought out better work from them; and he may well be entitled the Police President of Parnassus of his country and his day.

Boileau's sturdy uprightness of spine stood him in good stead in that great court where all men grew sleek and servile, and where no pen-worker seemed able to escape becoming a courtier. His caustic audacity salted his sycophancy and made him a man apart from the herd of flatterers. His thrust was so suave, as well as sharp, that the spoiled monarch himself accepted admonition from that courageous cleverness. "I am having search made in every direction for Monsieur Arnauld," said Louis, when eager in his pursuit of the Jansenists. "Your Majesty is always fortunate; you will not find him," was Boileau's quick retort, received with a smile by the King. When money was needed for Dr. Perrault's new eastern façade of the Louvre and for its other alterations, the King naturally economized in the incomes of other men. The pensions of literary men--in many instances the sole source of their livelihood--were allowed to lapse; that of Boileau was continued by an order that his name should be entered on the Louvre pay-roll as "an architect paid for mason's work." His mordant reply to the questioning pay-clerk was: "Yes, I am a mason." His masonry in the stately fabric of French literature stands unmarred to-day; coldly correct, it may be, yet elegant, faultless, consummate.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was long believed to have been born in the country and to have played in the fields as a child, and so to have got his added name _des préaux_; but it is now made certain that the house of his birth, in 1636, was in Rue de Jérusalem, a street that led to the Sainte-Chapelle, from about the middle of the present Quai des Orfèvres. The only field he knew lay at the foot of his father's garden at Crosne, where the lad was sometimes taken. Fields and gardens had never anything to say to this born cockney, and there is not a sniff of real country air in all his verse. The street of his birth was one of the narrow, dark streets of oldest Paris, on Île de la Cité; and the house, tall and thin, had its gable end on the court of the old Palais de Justice. The earliest air breathed by this baby was charged with satire, it would seem. For the room of his birth had been occupied, nearly half a century earlier, by Jacques Gillot, the brilliant canon of Sainte-Chapelle. In this room assembled in secret that clever band of talkers and writers, who planned and wrote "La Ménippée"; the first really telling piece of French political satire, so telling, in its unbridled buffoonery, that it gave spirit to the arms that shattered the League, and helped to put Henry of Navarre on the throne of France.

After his father's death, young Nicolas kept his home with his elder brother Jérôme, who had succeeded to the paternal mansion, and who gave the boy a sort of watch-tower, built above the garrets, in which he could hardly stand upright. The house, the court, the old palace, were long since swept away, and with them went all the melodramatic stage-setting of Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris" and Sue's "Mystères de Paris." Only the Sainte-Chapelle is left of the scenes of Boileau's early years.

He was sent for a while to Collége d'Harcourt, where young Racine came a little later, and was then put to the study of law, the family trade; passing by way of Beauvais College to the Sorbonne. He is known to have pleaded in but one case, and then with credit to himself. Still the law did not please him, any more than did the dry theology and the pedantic philosophy that he listened to on the benches of the Sorbonne. He was enamoured early of poetry and romance, and soon affianced himself to the Muse. This was his only betrothal, and he made no other marriage. He was born an old bachelor, and he soon sought bachelor quarters, driven by the children's racket from his nephew's house--also in the Cour du Palais--where he had found a home. This nephew and this house were well known to Voltaire when a boy, as he tells us in his "Épître à Boileau":

"_Chez ton neveu Dongois je passai mon enfance,
Bon bourgeois, qui se crut un homme d'importance._"

It is first in the year 1664 that we can place with certainty Boileau's residence in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, in that small apartment which fills a larger place in the annals of literary life than any domicile of that day, perhaps of any day. It was the gathering-place of that illustrious quartette--

"The goodliest fellowship of famous knights
Whereof this world holds record."

Molière comes from his rooms in Rue Saint-Honoré, or from his theatre; crossing the Seine by the Pont-Neuf, and passing along Rues Dauphine and de Bucy, and through the Marché Saint-Germain; moody from domestic dissensions, heavy-hearted with the recent loss of his first-born. Once among his friends, he listens, as he always listened, talking but little. La Fontaine saunters from the Hôtel de Bouillon, by way of Rue des Petits-Augustins--now Rue Bonaparte--and of tortuous courts now straightened into streets. Sitting at table, he is yet in his own land of dreams, until, stirred from his musing, his fine eyes brighten, and he chatters with a curious blending of simplicity and _finesse_. Racine steps in from his lodging in Rue de Grenelle, hard by; the youngest of the four, he, unlike those other two, is seldom silent, and gives full play to his ironical raillery. Next above him in age is the host; shrewd, brusque, incisive of speech and manner. So he shows in Girardon's admirable bust in the Louvre. The enormous wig then worn cannot becloud the bright alertness of his expression, or over-weigh the full lips that could sneer and the square chin, so resolute. These comrades talked of all sorts of things, and read to one another what each had written since they last met; read it for the sake of honest criticism from the rest, and with no other thought. For never were four men so absolutely without pose, without any pretence of earnestness, while immensely in earnest all the time. In "Les Amours de Psyché," La Fontaine assures us that they did not absolutely banish all serious discourse, but that they took care not to have too much of it, and preferred the darts of fun and nonsense that were feathered with friendly counsel. Best of all, his fable makes plain that there were no cliques nor cabals, no envy nor malice, among the men that made this worshipful band.

Their table served rather to sit around than to eat from, for their suppers were simple, and the flowing bowl was passed only when boisterous Chapelle or other _bon-vivant_ dropped in. For others were invited at times, men of the world, the court, and the camp. And Boileau was the common centre of these excentric stars, and when each, in his own special atmosphere of coolness, swayed from the others' vicinage, Boileau alone let no alienation come between him and any one of them. For each, he was what Racine had found him, "the best friend and the best man in the world."

The house was near a noted _cabaret_, to which they sometimes resorted, at the Saint-Sulpice end of the street. The _cabaretier_ was the illustrious Cresnet, made immortal in Boileau's verse. For the poet was no prude, and enjoyed the pleasures of the table so far as his health permitted; and, a trained gastronomic artist, he knew how to order a choicely harmonized repast. His street is widened, his house is gone, and no one can fix the spot. Yet the turmoil of that crowded thoroughfare of to-day is deadened for us by the mute voices of these men.

We have noted Boileau's camp-following with Racine, in their rôles of royal historiographers--in 1678 and later--but he was not strong enough for these excursions, even though they were made a picnic for the court. He was never at home on a horse, and yet out of place in the mud, and he could not enjoy the laughter he caused in either attitude, before or after he was thrown; laughter that is recorded in the letters of Madame de Sévigné.

It was probably because of Molière's taking a country place at Auteuil that Boileau began to make frequent excursions to that quiet suburb about 1667, and went to live in his tiny cottage there in 1685. "He had acquired it," to use his biographer's words, "partly by his Majesty's munificence, and partly by his own careful economy," so that he was opulent, for a poet. His purchase papers were made out by the notary Arouet--Voltaire's father--who drew up Boileau's pension papers in 1692, and who did much notarial work for the Boileau family. The cottage stood exactly on the ground now covered by the rear wing of the Hydropathic Establishment, at No. 12 Rue Boileau, Auteuil. Here he spent the spring and summer months of many a year, always alone, but with a hand-shake and a smile for his many visitors, men of birth as well as men of brains. Hither Voltaire certainly came, when a lad living with Dongois, for he says, in his pleasant rhymed epistle to Boileau:

"_Je vis le jardinier de ta maison d'Auteuil._"

To this same "_laborieux valet_," to this same

"_Antoine, gouverneur de mon jardin d'Auteuil_,"

Boileau wrote his letter in verse in 1695. The widow Racine came, too, for frequent outings with her children, who loved the garden and adored Boileau, for the peaches he picked for them and the ninepins he played with them. Louis Racine, a sort of pupil of his, says that the old poet was nearly as skilful at this game as in versifying, and usually knocked over the entire nine with one ball. And when he went to town, no warmer welcome met the crusty old bachelor than in Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, still the dwelling-place of Racine's family.

In great mansions, too, he had long been cordially received. He was a visitor at that of Madame de Guénégaud, which has given its site to the Hôtel de la Monnaie, and its name to the street alongside. He was fond of meeting kindred spirits and kindly hosts in the _hôtel_ of the great Condé and his younger brother Conti. He was one of the select set that sat about the table of Lamoignon, every Monday, at his home in the Marais, to be visited by us later. And whenever old Cardinal Retz came to town, Boileau hastened to the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, of which no stone stands in the street of its name. Here the white-headed, worn-out old fighter, compelled to live in retirement, after the storms and scandals of his active life, was made at home by his admirable niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and here he was encircled by admiring men and women. Here, writes Madame de Sévigné, his other niece, who came often to sit with him, Boileau presented to Retz early copies of "Le Lutrin," and of "L'Ars Poétique."

Boileau could not live in the country in winter, and even in summer he had to go often into town to get the care of his trusted physician. For he was an invalid from boyhood, and all his life an uncomplaining sufferer. But he hurried back, whenever permitted, to the pure air and the congenial solitude of his small cottage, where three faithful servants cared for him; not as would have cared the wife, whom he ought to have had, all his friends said, and so, too, he thought sometimes. He grew lonely as life lengthened, and as he saw his cronies passing away, fast and faster, old Corneille being the last of them to go.

His winters in the great city were spent in lodgings on the island, in the cloisters of Notre-Dame. Their quiet had always attracted him, as he avows in the verse that quivers with his nervous irritability, caused by the noises of the noisiest of towns. He cries, "Does one go to bed to be kept awake?" Indeed, he had rooms in the cloisters as early as 1683, keeping them for town quarters, in the official residence of l'Abbé de Dreux, his old friend, a canon of Notre-Dame. To this address Racine sent him a letter as late as 1687. The ecclesiastical settlement within the cathedral cloisters, and its only remaining cottage, have been spoken of in an earlier chapter. The cloisters themselves survive only in the name of the street that has been cut through their former site.

In 1699 we find Boileau living with his confessor, the Abbé Lenoir, also a canon of the cathedral, who had the privilege of residing within the cloisters. This house stood exactly where now is the southern edge of the fountain behind Notre-Dame, above Le Terrain and the Seine. His rooms were on the first floor, his bed in an alcove, and his windows looked out on the terrace over the river, as we learn by the amiable accuracy of the lawyer who drew up his will. Here Boileau lived through painful years of breaking bodily health, but with unbroken faculties. He yearned for his old home at Auteuil, and yet he was too feeble to go so far. He had sold his cottage to a friend, under the condition that a room should be reserved always for his use. That use never came. One day toward the end, he summoned up strength to drive to the beloved place; but all was changed, he changed most of all, and he hurried home to his lonely quarters, where death found him at ten o'clock in the morning of March 2, 1711.

His devoted servants were requited for years of faithful service by handsome legacies, then the relatives were provided for, and no friend was forgotten. The remainder of his fortune went to the "_pauvres honteux_" of six small parishes in the City. A vast and reverent concourse of mourners of every rank followed his coffin to its first resting-place. This was in the lower chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle, as he had ordered; the church of his baptism, and of the burial of his mother and father. By a strange chance, his grave had been dug under that very reading-desk which had suggested to him the subject of his most striking production, the heroic-comic poem "Le Lutrin." Early in the Revolution his remains were removed, to save them from fortuitous profanation by the "Patriots," to the Museum of French Monuments established in the convent of the Petits-Augustins, in the street of that name, now Rue Bonaparte. In 1819 his bones were finally placed in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where, in the chapel of Saint-Peter and Saint-Paul, they are at rest behind a black marble tablet carved with a ponderous Latin inscription.

FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS

FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS

"_Dans la cour du Palais, je naquis ton voisin_," wrote Voltaire to Boileau, in one of those familiar rhymed letters that soften the austere rhetoric of the French verse of that day. The place of Voltaire's birth, nearly sixty years after that of Boileau, was in the same Street of Jerusalem, at its corner with the Street of Nazareth, and it was only thus as a baby that he came ever in touch with the Holy Land. On November 22, 1694, the day after his birth, he was carried across the river to Saint-André-des-Arts--no one knows why his baptism was not in the island church of the parish--and there christened François-Marie Arouet. His earlier years were passed in the house of Boileau's nephew Dongois, whose airs of importance did not escape the keen infant eyes, as we have seen in the same letter in verse in our preceding chapter. Then he was sent to Lycée Louis-le-Grand, whither we have gone with young Poquelin, seventy years earlier. The college stands in its new stone on its old site in widened Rue Saint-Jacques.

We hear of no break in the tranquil course of young Arouet's studies, beyond the historic scene of his presentation to Mlle. Ninon de Lenclos at her home in the Marais, to which we shall go in a later chapter. This was in 1706, when she owned to ninety years of age at least, and she was flattered by the visit of the youth of twelve, and by the verse he wrote for her birthday. Dying in that year, she left a handsome sum to her juvenile admirer, to be spent for books. So, "_secondé de Ninon, dont je fus légataire_," the lad was strengthened in his inclination for the career of literature he had already planned for himself, and in his disinclination for the legal career planned for him by his father. The elder Arouet was a flourishing notary--among his clients was the Boileau family--who considered his own the only profession really respectable. He placed his boy, the college days being done, with one Maître Alain, whose office was near Place Maubert, between Rues de la Bucherie and Galande, a quarter crowded then with notaries and advocates, now all swept into limbo. But young Arouet spent too many of his days and nights with the congenial comrades that met in the Temple; "an advanced and dangerous" troop of swells and wits and pen-workers, light-heartedly bent on fun, amid the general gloom brought by Marlborough's victories, and by Madame de Maintenon's persistence in making Paris pious. Father Arouet sent his son away to The Hague; the first of his many journeys, enforced and voluntary. When allowed to return in 1715, he lost no time in hunting up his old associates; and soon, stronger hands than those of his father settled him in the Bastille, in punishment for verse, not written by him, satirizing the Regent and his daughter, Duchesse de Berri. There he spent his twenty-third year, utilizing his leisure to plan his "Henriade," and to finish his "Oedipe." When set free, he came out as Voltaire. Whether he took this new name from a small estate of his mother, or whether it was an anagram of _Arouet fils_, is not worth the search; enough for us that it is the name of him, who was to become, as John Morley rightly says, "the very eye of eighteenth-century illumination," and to whom we may apply his own words, used magnanimously of his famous contemporary, Montesquieu; that humanity had lost its title-deeds, and he had recovered them.

Once again in the world, he produced his "Oedipe" in 1718, with an immediate and resounding success, which was not won by his succeeding plays between 1720 and 1724. It was during this period that he spasmodically disappeared from Paris, reappearing at Brussels, Utrecht, The Hague; "_jouant à l'envoyé secret_," as was his mania then and in later years. During one of these flittings as an ambassador's ghost, he met Rousseau, and they were close friends until the day when Rousseau, showing to Voltaire his "Letter to Posterity," was told that it would never reach its address! That gibe made them sworn enemies. In Paris, during these years, Voltaire had no settled home. We have seen him in the _salon_ of Mlle. Lecouvreur, in Rue Visconti, and we have seen him there, a sincere mourner at her death-bed. It has been told in an earlier chapter, how that fine creature had sat by Voltaire's sick-bed, careless of her own danger from the small-pox, with which he was stricken in November, 1723. He frequented many haunts of the witty and the wicked during these years, and a historic scene in one of these has been put on canvas by Mr. Orchardson. One evening in the year 1725, Voltaire was a saucy guest at the table of the Duc de Sully, descendant of Henri IV.'s great minister, in the noble mansion in Rue Saint-Antoine, to be visited by us later. On going out, he was waylaid and beaten by the lackeys of the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, who desired to impress by cudgels the warning that, while princes are willing to be amused at the table where sit "only princes and poets," the poets must not presume on the privilege. In the painting, Voltaire reappears in the room to the remaining guests, dishevelled and outraged. Later he challenged Rohan, whose reply came in an order of committal to the Bastille. After two weeks in a cell, Voltaire's request to go to England in exile was gladly accorded by the government.

We all know well the Voltaire of an older day, in his statues beside the Institute and within that building, beside the Panthéon, in Square Monge, and in the _foyer_ of the Théâtre Français. To see him at this younger day, we must turn into the court-yard of the Mairie of the Ninth Arrondissement at No. 6 Rue Drouot--an ancient and attractive family mansion. In the centre of the court is a modern bronze, showing "the ape of genius" at the age of twenty-five, a dapper creature with head perked up and that complacent smile so marked in all his portraits. This smirk may be due less to self-satisfaction than to that physical peculiarity, claimed by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his own case, which is caused by the congenital shortening of the levator muscles of the mouth. The statue's right hand rests jauntily on the hip, in the left hand is a book, and the left skirt of the long coat is blown back, showing the sword that was worn by young philosophers who would be young bloods. The pedestal holds two bas-reliefs; the youth in Ninon's _salon_, the patriarch at Ferney, and cut in it are his words: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

During his years in England, Voltaire made acquaintance with all the notable men of letters then living, and with William Shakespeare in his works. In them he tolerantly found much merit, but always styled their author a barbarian. Those barbarisms and savageries he civilized and smoothed to his pattern, for his "Brutus" is an unconscious echo of "Julius Cæsar," his "Zaïre" a shadow of "Othello." He refused to call on Wycherly "the gentleman," as Wycherly insisted, but was glad to meet Wycherly the playwright. Nor did Voltaire turn his back on men and women of fashion, but used them so cleverly as to enable him to carry home to France a small fortune, from the subscriptions to his English edition of the "Henriade." He was shrewd in money matters, and a successful speculator for many years. We first hear of him again in Paris in 1729, getting army contracts and making money in queer ways. Yet all through life his pen was always busy, and in this same year it is at work in a grand apartment of the Hôtel Lambert. This was the mansion of M. du Châtelet, husband--officially only--of "_la sublime Émilie_," with whom Voltaire had taken up his abode. The Hôtel Lambert remains unchanged at the eastern end of Île Saint-Louis, looking, from behind its high wall and its well-shaded garden, at its incomparable prospect. Its entrance at No. 2 Rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Île opens on a grand court and an imposing façade. "This is a house made for a king, who would be a philosopher," wrote Voltaire to his august correspondent Frederick the Great. He himself was neither king of this realm nor proved himself a philosopher in its grotesque squabbles. Madame du Châtelet was as frankly unfaithful to him as to her husband, who was frequently called in to reconcile the infuriated lovers. She was a woman of unusual abilities as well as of unusual indelicacies, with an itch for reading, research, and writing, her specialties being Newton and mathematics.

In 1733 this queer couple found it to their comfort to quit Paris, where Voltaire was ceaselessly beset by the suspicions of the powers that regulated thought in France. They moved about much, to Voltaire's discomfort, living sometimes at Cirey, on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine, with or without the complaisant du Châtelet; sometimes in a mansion taken by Voltaire in Paris. This stood on the corner of two streets no longer existing, Rues du Clos-Georgeau and Traversière-Saint- Honoré, at No. 25 of the latter; and its site now lies under the roadway of new Avenue de l'Opéra. The cutting of this avenue has left unchanged only the northern end of Rue Traversière, and this has been renamed in honor of Molière. To place Voltaire's residence in the old mansion at the new number 25 in this street, as a recent topographer has done, is an ingenuous flight of fancy.

Here Voltaire went back to live after death had taken "_la sublime Émilie_" from him, from her other lover, and from her husband. This legal husband was less inconsolable than Voltaire, whose almost incredible reproach to the third man in the case makes Morality hold her hand before her face--peeping between the fingers, naturally--while Immorality shakes with frank laughter. On the second floor of this house, Voltaire remained, "_de moitié avec le Marquis du Châtelet_;" the first floor, which had been her own, being thenceforward closed to them both. Here he tried to find companionship with his selfish and stolid niece, Madame Denis, and with his _protégé_ Lekain. He transformed the garret into a private theatre, for the production of his plays, free from the royal or the popular censor; and for the training of Lekain in the part of Titus, in "Brutus." That promising, and soon accepted, actor made his _début_ at the Théâtre Français in September, 1750, and his patron was not among the audience. From this house, Voltaire went frequently across the river to visit Mlle. Clairon in her apartment in Rue Visconti, so well known to him when tenanted by Mlle. Lecouvreur, twenty years earlier. And from this house, wherein he came to be too desolate and lonely, Voltaire went forth from France in 1751, to find a still more uncongenial home at Potsdam. With his queer life there, and his absurd quarrels with Frederick the Great, this chronicle cannot concern itself.

"_Café à la Voltaire_" is the legend you may read to-day on a pillar of the Café Procope, in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, directly opposite the old Comédie Française. We have seen the mixed delight and doubt with which coffee was first sipped by the Parisians of the end of the seventeenth century, but it won its way, and in 1720 the Sicilian Procope opened this second Paris _café_. It soon became the favorite resort by night of the playwrights and play-actors, and the swells among the audience, of the playhouse across the street. Gradually the men of letters, living in and visiting the capital, made this _café_ their gathering-place of an afternoon; so that, on any day in the middle years of the eighteenth century, all the men best worth knowing might be found here. Their names are lettered and their atrocious portraits painted on its inner walls. In the little room on the left, as you walk in on the ground floor, they treasure still, while these lines are written, Voltaire's table. He sat here, near the stage that produced his plays, sipping his own special and abominable blend of coffee and chocolate. With him sat, among the many not so notable, Diderot, d'Alembert, Marmontel, Rousseau, with his young friend Grimm--hardly yet at home in Paris, not at all at home with its language--and Piron, Voltaire's pet enemy, who wrote his own epitaph:

"_Ci-gît Piron,
Que ne fut rien,
Pas même Académicien._"

Here, on an evening in 1709, sat Alain-René Le Sage, awaiting in suspense the verdict on his "Turcaret," brought out in the theatre opposite, after many heart-breaking delays; for the misguided author had convinced himself that his title to fame would be founded on this now-forgotten play, rather than on his never-to-be-neglected "Gil Blas"!

During the Revolution, while the Café de la Régence, which faces the present Comédie Française, was the pet resort of the royalist writers, this Café Procope was the gathering-place of the Republican penmen; and they draped its walls in black, and wore mourning for three days, when word came across the water in 1790 of the death of Benjamin Franklin, the complete incarnation to them of true republicanism. Toward the unlamented end of the Second Empire, a small group of young American students was to be found, of an evening, in the Café Procope, harmlessly mirthful over their beer. After a while, they were content to sit night after night in silence, all ears for the monologue at a neighboring table; a copious and resistless outburst of argument and invective, sprinkled with Gallic anecdote and with _gros mots_, and broken by Rabelaisian laughter, from a magnificent voice and an ample virility. They were told that the speaker was one Léon Gambetta, an obscure barrister, already under the suspicion of the police of the "lurking jail-bird," whom he helped drive from France, within a few years.

The old house is to-day only a pallid spectre of its aforetime red-blooded self, and is nourished by nothing more solid than these uncompact memories. Loving them and all his Paris, its kindly proprietor tries to revitalize its inanimate atmosphere by his "_Soirées littéraires et musicales_." In a room upstairs "ancient poems, ancient music, old-time song," are listened to by unprinted poets, unplayed dramatists, unhung painters. Some of them read their still unpublished works. The _patron_ enjoys it all, and the waiters are the most depressed in all Paris.

Denis Diderot gives the effect in his work, as Gambetta did in the flesh, of a living force of nature. When, at that same table, Diderot opened the long-locked gate, the full and impetuous outflow swept all before it, submerged and breathless. In his personality, as vivid as that of Mirabeau, we see a fiery soul, a stormy nature, a daring thinker, a prodigious worker. His head seemed encyclopædic to Grimm, his life-long friend; and Rousseau, first friend and later enemy, asserted that in centuries to come that head would be regarded with the reverence given to the heads of Plato and of Aristotle. Voltaire could imagine no one subject beyond the reach of Diderot's activity. Arsène Houssaye names him "the last man of the day of dreaming in religion and royalty, the first man of the day of the Revolution." And John Morley, looking at him from a greater distance than any of these, and with keener eyes, ranks him higher as a thinker than either Rousseau or Voltaire. As thinker, essayist, critic, cyclopædist, Diderot is indeed the most striking figure of the eighteenth century. Rugged, uncouth, headlong, we see him, "_en redingote de peluche grise éreintée_," in the philosophers' alley of the Luxembourg garden, strolling with more energy than others give to striding. Striking and strong he is in the exquisite bust by Houdon in the Louvre, yet with a refinement of expression and a delicacy of poise of the head that are very winning. This effect might have been gained by a Fragonard working in the solid.

Here, under the trees where meet Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rues de Rennes and Bonaparte, it is the student whom we see in bronze, leaning forward in his chair, a quill pen in hand, his worn face bent and intent. This spot was selected for the statue because just there Diderot resided for many years. His house was at No. 12 Rue Taranne, on the corner of Rue Saint-Benoît, and it was torn down when the former street was widened into the new boulevard. Here, young Diderot, refusing to return to the paternal home at Lancres, when he left the Collége d'Harcourt--the school of Boileau and Racine--lived in a squalid room, during his early days of uncongenial toil in a lawyer's office and of all sorts of penwork that paid poorly--translations, sermons, catalogues, advertisements. Here he was hungry and cold and unhappy; here, in 1743, he married the pretty sewing-girl who lived in this same house with her mother, and who became a devoted and faithful wife to a trying husband. For her he had the only clean love of his not-too-clean life. From this garret he poured forth prose, his chosen form of expression, when poetry was the only vogue, and it is by his persistence, perhaps, that prose has come to the throne in France. And it was while living here that he originated the art-criticism of his country; clear and thorough, discriminating and enthusiastic. Earlier notices of pictures had been as casual as the shows themselves; begun in 1673, under Colbert's protection and the younger Mansart's direction, in a small pavilion on the site of the present Théâtre Français, having one entrance in Rue de Richelieu, another in the garden, into which the pictures often overflowed. When Diderot wrote his notices for Grimm, the exhibitions had permanent shelter in the halls of the Louvre. In 1746, still in this house, he published his "Philosophic Thoughts" and other essays that were at first attributed to Voltaire, and that at last sent the real author to Vincennes. There he was kept for three maddening months by an outraged "Strumpetocracy" and a spiteful Sorbonne, on its last legs of persecution for opinion. You may go to this prison by the same road his escort took, now named Boulevard Diderot, with unconscious topographic humor.

To visit "great Diderot in durance," Grimm and Rousseau came by this road; stopping, before taking the Avenue de Vincennes, at a farm-house on the edge of Place du Trône--now, Place de la Nation--where the sentimentalist quenched his thirst with milk. That was the day when Rousseau picked up the paradox, from Diderot, which he elaborated into his famous essay, showing the superiority of the savage man over the civilized man. There is as slight trace to be found of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Paris of to-day as in the minds of the men of to-day. We see him first, in 1745, at the Hôtel Saint-Quentin of our Balzac chapter, carrying from there the uncomely servant, Thérèse le Vasseur. After this he appears fitfully in Paris through many years. In 1772 he is in Rue Plâtrière--a street now widened and named for him--on the fourth floor of a wretched house opposite the present Post-office. There he was found by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre--as thin-skinned and touchy as Rousseau, yet somehow the two kept friendly--with his repulsive Thérèse, whom he had made his wife in 1768. This preacher of the holiness of the domestic affections had sent their five children to the foundling hospital, according to his own statement, which is our only reason for doubting that he did it. Bernardin found him, clad in an overcoat and a white _bonnet_, copying music; of which Rousseau knew nothing, except by the intuition of genius. For those who wish, there are the pilgrimages to the Hermitage at Montmorenci, occupied by him in 1756, and nearly forty years later by a man equally attractive, Maximilien Robespierre; and to Ermenonville, the spot of Rousseau's death in 1778. It is easier to stroll to the Panthéon, where, on one side, is a statue of the author of "Le Contrat Social" and "Émile," which gives him a dignity that was not his in life. This tribute from the French nation was decreed by the National Convention of _15 Brumaire, An II_, and erected by the National Assembly in 1791. Durable as its bronze this tribute was meant to be, at the time when he was deified by the nation; since then, his body and his memory have been "cast to the dogs; a deep-minded, even noble, yet wofully misarranged mortal." While acknowledging his impress on his generation as an interpreter of moral and religious sentiment, and without denying the claim of his admirers, that he is the father of modern democracy, we may own, too, to a plentiful lack of liking for the man.

Released and returned to his wife in Rue Taranne, Diderot lost no time in beginning again that toil which was his life. With all his other work--"Letters on the Blind, for the use of those who can see," dramas now forgotten, an obscene novel that paid the debts of his mistress--he began and carried out his Encyclopædia. "No sinecure is it!" says Carlyle: "penetrating into all subjects and sciences, waiting and rummaging in all libraries, laboratories; nay, for many years fearlessly diving into all manner of workshops, unscrewing stocking-looms, and even working thereon (that the department of 'Arts and Trades' might be perfect); then seeking out contributors, and flattering them, quickening their laziness, getting payment for them, quarrelling with bookseller and printer, bearing all miscalculations, misfortunes, misdoings of so many fallible men on his single back." On top of all, he had to bear the spasmodic persecution of the Government instigated by the Church. The patient, gentle d'Alembert, with his serenity, his clearness, and his method, helped Diderot more than all the others. And so grew, in John Morley's words, "that mountain of volumes, reared by the endeavor of stout hands and faithful," which, having done its work for truth and humanity, is now a deserted ruin.

As he brought it to an end after thirty years of labor, Diderot found himself grown old and worn, and the busiest brain and hand in France began to flag. By now, he stood next in succession to the King, Voltaire. Yet, for all the countless good pages he has written, it has been truly said that he did not write one great book. Other urgent creditors, besides old age, harassed him, and he had to sell his collection of books. They were bought by the Empress Catharine of Russia, at a handsome value, and she handsomely allowed him to retain them for her, and furthermore paid him a salary for their care. Grimm urged on her, in one of his gossiping _feuilles_, that have given material for so much personal history, the propriety of housing her library and its librarian properly, and this was done in the grand mansion now No. 39 Rue de Richelieu. We have come to this street with Molière and with Mignard, and there are other memories along this lower length, to which a chapter could be given. We can awaken only those that now belong to No. 50. Here lived a couple named Poisson, and on March 19, 1741, they gave in marriage to Charles Guillaume le Normand their daughter Jeanne-Antoinette, a girl of fifteen. That blossom ripened and rottened into La Pompadour. The house is quite unchanged since that day. In a large rear room on its first floor, in the year 1899, future chroniclers will be glad to note that Moncure D. Conway made an abbreviation of his noble life of Thomas Paine for its French translation. His working-room was in the midst of the scenes of Paine's Paris stay, but not one of them can be fixed with certainty.

The house numbered 39 of this street is occupied by the "_Maison Sterlin_," a factory of artistic metal-work in locks and bolts and fastenings for doors and windows. It is an attractive museum of fine iron and steel workmanship, ancient and modern. There, in a case, is preserved the superbly elaborate key of Corneille's birth-house in Rouen. The brothers Bricard have had the reverent good taste to retain the late seventeenth-century interior of their establishment, and you may mount by the easy stairs, with their fine wrought-iron rail, to Diderot's dining-room on the first floor, its panelling unaltered since his death there, on July 31, 1784. He had enjoyed, for only twelve days, the grandest residence and the greatest ease his life had known. They had been made busy days, of course, spent in arranging his books and pictures. Sitting here, eating hastily, he died suddenly and quietly, his elbows on the table. On August 1st his body was buried in the parish church of Saint-Roch, and the tablet marking the spot is near that commemorating Corneille, who had been brought there exactly one hundred years before.

This church is eloquent with the presence of these two, with the voice of Bossuet--"the Bible transfused into a man," in Lamartine's phrase--and with the ping of Bonaparte's bullets on its porch; yet there is a presence within, less clamorous but not less impressive than any of these. In the fourth chapel, on your left as you enter, is a bronze bust of a man, up to which a boy and a girl look from the two corners of the pedestal. This is the monument of Charles Michel, Abbé de l'Épée, placed above his grave in the chapel where he held services at times, and the boy and girl stand for the countless deaf-and-dumb children to whom he gave speech and hearing. The son of a royal architect, with every prospect of preferment in the Church, with some success as a winning preacher, his liberal views turned him from this career. His interest in two deaf-mute sisters led him to his life-work. There were others in England, and there was the good Pereira in Spain, who had studied and invented before him, but it is to this gentle-hearted Frenchman that the world of the deaf and dumb owes most for its rescue from its inborn bondage. He gave to them all he had, and all he was; for their sake he went ill-clad always, cold in winter, hungry often. He had but little private aid, and no official aid at all. He alone, with his modest income, and with the little house left him by his father, started his school of instruction for deaf-mutes in 1760.