Chapter VII: Part 7

The house was at No. 14 Rue des Moulins, a retired street leading north from Rue Saint-Honoré, and so named because near its line were the mills of the Butte de Saint-Roch--where we are to find the head-quarters of Joan the Maid. One of these mills may be seen to-day, re-erected and in perfect preservation, at Crony-sur-Ourcq, near Meaux, and above its doorway is the image of the patron-saint, to whom the mill was dedicated in the fifteenth century. This quarter of the town had become, during the reign of Louis XIV., the centre of a select suburb of small, elegant mansions, tenanted by many illustrious men. On the rear of his lot the good _abbé_ built a small chapel, and in it and in the house he passed nearly thirty years of self-sacrifice, ended only by his death on December 23, 1789. When the Avenue de l'Opéra was cut in 1877-8, his street was shortened and his establishment was razed. At the nearest available spot, on the wall of No. 23 Rue Thérèse, two tablets have been placed, the one that fixes the site, the other recording the decree of the Constituent Assembly of July, 1789, by which the Abbé de l'Épée was placed on the roll of those French citizens who merit well the recognition of humanity and of his country. And, in 1791, amid all its troubled labors, the Assembly founded the Institution National des Sourds-Muets of Paris, on the base of his humble school. The big and beneficent institution is in Rue Saint-Jacques, at its intersection with the street named in his honor. And it is an honor to the Parisians that they thus keep alive the memory of their great men, so that, in a walk through their streets, we run down a catalogue of all who are memorable in French history. In the vast court-yard, at that corner, under a glorious elm-tree, is a colossal statue of the _abbé_, standing with a youth to whom he talks with his fingers. It is the work of a deaf-mute, Félix Martin, well named, for he is most happy in this work.

Like the Abbé de l'Épée, and for as many years--almost thirty of his half-voluntary, half-enforced exile--Voltaire had devoted himself in his own way to the bettering of humanity, crippled mentally and spiritually. He had given vision to the blind, hearing to the deaf, voice to the speechless. He took in the outcast, and cherished the orphan. With his inherent pity for the oppressed, and his deep-rooted indignation with all cruelty, he had made himself the advocate of the unjustly condemned; and none among his brilliant pages will live longer than his impassioned pleadings for the rehabilitation of the illegally executed Jean Calas. And now he comes back from Ferney, through all the length of France, in a triumphal progress without parallel, welcomed everywhere by exultant worshippers. At four in the afternoon of February 10, 1778, his coach appears just where his statue now stands at the end of Quai Malaquais, then Quai des Théatins. He wears a large, loose cloak of crimson velvet, edged with a small gold cord, and a cap of sable and velvet, and he is "smothered in roses." His driver makes his way slowly along the quay, through the acclaiming crowd, to the home of "_la Bonne et Belle_," the girl he had rescued from a convent and adopted, now the happy wife of the Marquis de Villette. Their eighteenth-century mansion stands on the corner of Rue de Beaune and present Quai Voltaire, unaltered in its simple stateliness. Here Voltaire is visited by all Paris that was allowed to get to him. Mlle. Clairon is one of the first, on her knees at the bedside of her old friend, exhausted by his triumph. She is no longer young, and shows that she owns to fifty-five years, by her retired life at the present numbers 34 and 36 Rue du Bac. There she has her books and her sewing and her spendthrift Comte Valbelle d'Oraison, who lives on her.

D'Alembert and Benjamin Franklin are among his visitors, and the dethroned Du Barry, and thirty _chefs_, each set on the appointment of cook for the master. He goes to the Academy, then installed in the Louvre, and to the Comédie Française, temporarily housed in the Tuileries, the Odéon not being ready. There his "Irène," finished just before leaving Switzerland, is produced, and at the performance on the evening of March 30th he is crowned in his box, his bust is crowned on the beflowered stage, and the palms and laurels and plaudits leave him breath only to murmur: "My friends, do you really want to kill me with joy?" That was the last seen of him by the public. He had come to Paris, he said, "to drink Seine water"; and either that beverage poisoned him, or the cup of flattery he emptied so often. One month after that supreme night, on May 30, 1778, at a little after eleven at night, he died in that corner apartment on the first floor. For thirty years after it was unoccupied and its windows were kept closed.

Almost his last words, as he remembered what the Church had meant to him, and what it might mean for him, were: "I don't want to be thrown into the roadway like that poor Lecouvreur." That fate was spared his wasted frame by the quickness of his nephew, the Abbé Mignot. Here, at the entrance-gate in Rue de Beaune, this honest man placed his uncle's body, hardly cold, in his travelling carriage, and with it drove hastily, and with no needless stops, to Scellières in Champagne. There he gave out the laudable lie of a death on the journey, and procured immediate interment in the nave of his church, under all due rites. The grave was hardly covered before orders from the Bishop of Troyes arrived, forbidding the burial. The trick would have tickled the adroit old man. His body was allowed to rest for thirteen years, and then it was brought back in honor to Paris. A great concourse had assembled, only two weeks earlier, at the place where the Bastille had been, hoping to hoot at the royal family haled back from Varennes. Now, on July 11, 1791, a greater concourse was stationed here, to look with silent reverence on this _cortége_, headed by Beaumarchais, all the famous men of France carrying the pall or joining in the procession. They entered by the Vincennes road, passed along the boulevards, crossed Pont Royal to stop before this mansion, and went thence to the Panthéon. There his remains lay once more in peace, until the Bourbons "de-Panthéonized" both Voltaire and Rousseau.

Benjamin Franklin had come to visit Voltaire here on the quay, by way of the Seine from Passy, in which retired suburb he was then living. The traces he has left in the capital are to be found in two inscriptions and a tradition. We know that he had rooms, during a part of the year 1776, in Rue de Penthièvre, and his name, carved in the pediment of the stately façade of the house numbered 26 in that street, is a record of his residence in it or on its site. There is another claimant to his tenancy for a portion of this same year. The American who happens to go to or through Passy, on a Fourth of July, will have opportune greeting from the Stars and Stripes, draped over the doorway of the old-fashioned building, more a cottage than a mansion, now numbered 21 Rue Franklin. Its owners do this each year, they tell you, in honor of the great American who occupied the cottage in 1776. Their claim is the more credible, inasmuch as the street has been given his name since his day there, when it was Rue Basse. In the following year he went farther afield, and for nine years he remained in a villa in the large garden, now covered by the ugly École des Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne, at the corner of Rues Raynouard and Singer. The Historical Society of Passy and Auteuil has placed a tablet in this corner wall, recording Franklin's residence at this spot from 1777 to 1785. His friend, M. Ray de Chaumont, occupied only a portion of his Hôtel de Valentinois, and gave up the remaining portion to Franklin for his residence and his office, eager to show his sympathy for the colonies and his fondness for their envoy. Only John Adams, when he came, was shocked in all his scrupulosity to find an American agent living rent-free! In this garden he put up the first lightning-conductor in France, and in this house he negotiated the treaty that gave the crown's aid to the colonies and made possible their independence. To this spot came the crowd to catch a glimpse of the homely-clad figure, and men of science and letters to learn from him, and ladies from the court to caress him. And it may have been here that he made answer to the enamoured _marquise_, in words that have never been topped for the ready wit of a gallant old gentleman.

The _cortége_ that accompanied Voltaire's remains to the Panthéon was headed, it has been said, by Beaumarchais; fittingly so, for Beaumarchais was then heir-presumptive to the dramatic crown, and his "Figaro" had already begun to laugh the nobility from out of France. Louis XVI. saw clearly, for once, when he said: "If I consent to the production of the 'Marriage of Figaro,' the Bastille will go." He did consent, and it was played to an immense house on April 27, 1784, in the Comédie Française, now the Odéon. That night the old order had its last laugh, and it rang strangely and sadly. Yet in this comedy, that killed by ridicule--the most potent weapon in France--once played a queen that was, and once a queen that was to be. On August 19, 1785, on the stage of the Little Trianon at Versailles, the Comte d'Artois--brother to Louis XIV., later to be Charles X.--appeared as the Barber, to the Rosina of Marie Antoinette. And, in the summer of 1803, during the Consulate, when Malmaison was the scene of gayeties, a theatre was constructed in the garden, and on its boards, Hortense (soon after Queen of Holland) made a success as Rosina.

Playwriting was merely a digression in the diversified career of this man of various aptitudes, whose ups and downs we have no excuse for dwelling on, as we trace him through Paris streets. There is no tablet to mark his birth, on January 24, 1732, in the house of his father, Caron, the watchmaker of Rue Saint-Denis, opposite the old Cemetery of the Innocents, nearly at Rue de la Ferronerie. Pierre-Augustin Caron he was christened, and it was in his soaring years that he added "de Beaumarchais." This quarter is notable in that it was the scene of the birth and boyhood of four famous dramatists--of Molière, as we have seen, and of Regnard, as we shall see; of Beaumarchais and of Eugène Scribe. To record this latest birth, on December 24, 1791, a tablet is set in the wall of No. 32 Rue Saint-Denis, at the corner of Rue de la Reynie, only a few steps south of the Caron house. It is a plain, old-style house of four stories and a garret, and has become a shop for chocolates and sweets. It has on its sign, "_Au Chat Noir_"; black cats are carved wherever they will cling on its front and side, and a huge, wooden, black cat rides on the cart that carries the chocolate.

Beaumarchais had a residence at No. 6 Rue de Condé in 1773, and at the Hôtel de Hollande, Rue Vielle-du-Temple 47, in 1776. We shall go there later. On the wall of the house, No. 2 Boulevard Beaumarchais, a tablet marks the site of his great mansion and its spacious gardens. These covered the entire triangle enclosed by Rues Amelot, Daval, and Roquette. He had found the money for this colossal outlay, not in his plays, but in all sorts of mercantile transactions, some of them seemingly shabby. It is claimed that he lost large sums in supplying, as the unavowed agent of the crown, war equipment to the struggling American colonies. His palace went up in sight of the Bastille, then going down. The Parisians came in crowds to see his grounds, with their grottoes, statues, and lake; and he entertained all the swelldom of France. There, one day in 1792, the mob from the too-near Faubourg Saint-Antoine came uninvited, and raided house and grounds for hidden arms and ammunition, not to be found. The owner went to the Abbaye prison and thence into exile and poverty. Returning in 1796, he spent his last years in a hopeless attempt to gather up remnants of his broken fortunes, a big remnant being the debt neglected and rejected by the American Congress. The romance of this "Lost Million" cannot be told here. Beaumarchais died in this house in 1799, and was buried in the garden. When the ground was taken for the Saint-Martin Canal in 1818, his remains were removed to Père-Lachaise. The grave is as near that of Scribe as were their birthplaces. His name was given to the old Boulevard Saint-Antoine in 1831, and in 1897 his statue was placed in that wide space in Rue Saint-Antoine that faces Rue des Tournelles. The pedestal is good, and worthy of a more convincing statue of this man of strong character and of contrasting qualities. And at the Washington Head-quarters at Newburgh-on-Hudson, and at the various collections of Revolutionary relics in the United States, you will find cannon that came from French arsenals, and that, it was hinted, left commissions in the hands of Caron de Beaumarchais.

THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION

THE PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION

It is no part of the province of this book to reconstruct the Paris of the Revolution, nor is there room for such reconstruction, now that M. G. Lenôtre has given us his exhaustive and admirable "Paris Révolutionnaire." Despite the destruction of so much that was worth saving of that period, there yet remain many spots for our seeing. The cyclone of those years had two centres, and one of them is fairly well preserved. It is the Cour du Commerce, to which we have already come in search of the tower and wall of Philippe-Auguste. Outside that wall, close to the Porte de Buci, there had been a tennis-court, which was extended, in 1776, into a narrow passage, with small dwellings on each side. The old entrance of the tennis-court was kept for the northern entrance of the new passage, and it still remains under the large house, No. 61 Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. The southern entrance of the passage was in the western end of Rue des Cordeliers, now Rue de l'École-de-Médecine. In 1876, exactly one hundred years after the construction of this Cour du Commerce, its southern half and its southern entrance were cut away by modern Boulevard Saint-Germain, on the northern side of which a new entrance to the court was made. At the same time the houses on the northern side of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine were demolished, and replaced by the triangular space that holds the statues of Danton and Paul Broca among its trees. Those houses faced, across the street, whose narrowness is marked by the two curbstones, the houses, of the same age and the same style, that are left on the southern side of this section of the modern boulevard. One of the houses then destroyed had been inhabited by Georges-Jacques Danton. It stood over the entrance of the court, and his statue--a bronze of his own vigor and audacity--has been placed exactly on the spot of that entrance, exactly under his dwelling-place. The pediment of this entrance-door is now in the grounds of M. Victorien Sardou, at Marly-le-Roi. Danton's apartment, on the first floor above the _entresol_, had two _salons_ and a bedroom looking out on Rue des Cordeliers, while the dining-room and working-room had windows on the Cour du Commerce. Here in 1792 he had his wholesome, peaceful home, with his wife and their son; and to them there sometimes came his mother, or one of his sisters, for a visit.

In the _entresol_ below lived Camille Desmoulins and his wife in 1792. The two young women were close friends, and M. Jules Claretie has given us a pretty picture of them together, in terrified suspense on that raging August 10th. Lucile Desmoulins knew, on the next day, that the mob had at least broken the windows of the Tuileries, for someone had brought her the sponges and brushes of the Queen! And on the 12th, Danton carried his wife from here to the grand _hôtel_ in Place Vendôme, the official residence of the new Minister of Justice. His short life in office being ended by his election to the Convention in the autumn of that year, he returned to this apartment; to which, three months after the death of his first wife in that same year, he brought a youthful bride. And here, on March 30, 1794, he was arrested. Before his own terrible tribunal his reply, to the customary formal questions as to his abode, was: "My dwelling-place will soon be in annihilation, and my name will live in the Panthéon of history." He spoke prophetically. The clouds of a century of calumny have only lately been blown away, and we can, at last, see clearly the heroic figure of this truest son of France; a "Mirabeau of the _sans-culottes_," a primitive man, unspoiled and strong, joyous in his strength, ardent yet steadfast, keen-eyed for shams, doing when others were talking, scornful of phrasemongers, and so genuine beside the petty schemers about him that they could not afford to let him live.

Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist Desmoulins had, in his queer and not unlovable composition, a craving for a hero and a clinging to a strong nature. His first idol was Mirabeau. That colossus had died on April 2, 1791, and Desmoulins had been one of the leaders in the historic funeral procession that filled the street and filed out from it four miles in length. Mont-Blanc was then the street's name, and for a few days it was called Rue Mirabeau, but soon took its present name, Chaussée-d'Antin, from the gardens of the Hôtel d'Antin, through which it was cut. The present No. 42, with a new front, but otherwise unchanged, is the house of Mirabeau's death, in the front room of its second floor. Mirabeau's worthy successor in Camille's worship was Danton, near whom he lived, as we have seen, and with whom he went as secretary to the Ministry of Justice. After leaving office, Camille and his wife are found in his former bachelor home in Place du Théâtre-Français, now Place de l'Odéon. The corner house there, that proclaims itself by a tablet to have been his residence, is in the wrong; and that tablet belongs by right to the house on the opposite corner, No. 2 Place de l'Odéon and No. 7 Rue Crébillon. From his end windows in this latter street, when he had lived there as a bachelor, Camille could look slantwise to the windows of an apartment at No. 22 Rue de Condé, and he looked often, attracted by a young girl at home there with her parents. There is still the balcony on the front, on which Lucile Duplessis ventured forth, a little later, to blow kisses across the street. At the religious portion of their marriage, in Saint-Sulpice on December 29, 1790, the _témoins_ of the groom were Brisson, Pétion, Robespierre. The last-named had been Camille's schoolfellow and crony at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and remained his friend as long as it seemed worth while. The wedding party went back to this apartment--on the second floor above the _entresol_--for the _dîner de noces_. Everything on and about the table--it is still shown at Vervins, a village just beyond Laon--was in good taste, we may be sure, for Desmoulins was a dainty person, for all his tears over Marat; his desk, at which he wrote the fiery denunciations of "Le Vieux Cordelier," had room always for flowers. It was here that he was arrested, to go--not so bravely as he might--to prison, and then to execution with Danton, on April 5, 1794. His Lucile went to the scaffold on the 12th of the same month, convicted of having conspired against the Republic by wandering about the gardens of the Luxembourg, trying to get a glimpse of her husband's face behind his prison window. To us he is not more visible in this garden than he was to her, but in the garden of the Palais-Royal he leaps up, "a flame of fire," on July 12, 1789, showing the Parisians the way they went to the Bastille on the 14th.

In the same section with Danton and Desmoulins, and equally vivid with them in his individuality, we find Jean-Paul Marat. His apartment, where lived with him and his mistress, Simonne Evrard, his two sisters, Albertine and Catherine--all three at one in their devotion to his loathsome body--was in a house a little easterly from Danton's, on the same northern side of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine. It was at this house that Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday d'Armans, on July 13, 1793, presented herself as "_l'ange de l'assassination_," in Lamartine's swelling phrase. She had driven across the river, from the Hôtel de la Providence. In our Dumas chapter we shall try to find her unpretending inn, and shall find only its site. In the Musée Grévin, in Paris, you may see the _baignoire_ in which Marat sat when he received Charlotte Corday and her knife--a common kitchen-knife, bought by her on the day before at a shop in the Palais-Royal. The bath is shaped like a great copper shoe, and on its narrow top, through which his head came, was a shelf for his papers.

The printing-office of Marat's "L'Ami du Peuple," succeeded in 1792 by his "Journal de la République Française," was in that noisiest corner of Paris, the Cour du Commerce. It was in that end of the long building of two low stories and attic, numbered 6 and 8, now occupied by a lithographer. After Marat's death, and that of his journal, the widow Brissot opened a modest stationer's shop and reading-room in the former printing-office, we are told by M. Sardou. It is an error that places the printing-office at the present No. 1 of the court, in the building which extended then through to No. 7 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie. These two lots do, indeed, join in their rear, but Marat has no association with either. In Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, certainly, the "Friend of the People" had storage room in the cellar and an office on an upper floor, but it was in one of the tall houses on the western side of the street, just north of the old theatre.

The only claim to our attention of No. 1 Cour du Commerce--a squalid tavern which aspires to the title of "_La Maison Boileau_"--comes from the presence of Sainte-Beuve. The great critic is said to have rented a room, under his pen-name of "Joseph Delorme," for a long time in this then cleanly _hôtel-garni_, for the ostensible purpose of working in quiet, free from the importunate solicitors of all sorts who intruded on his home in Rue du Mont-Parnasse, No. 11.

Marat's death was frantically lamented by the rabble, that was quite unable to recognize the man's undeniable abilities and attainments, and that had made him its idolized leader because of his atrocious taste in saying in print exactly what he meant. They carried his body to the nave of the church, and later to its temporary tomb in the garden, of the Cordeliers, a step from his house. In the intervals of smiling hours spent in watching heads fall into the basket, in new Place de la Révolution, they crowded here to weep about his bedraped and beflowered bier. The remains were then placed, with due honors, in the Panthéon. Then, within two years, the same voices that had glorified him shrieked that his body and his memory should be swept into the sewer. It was the voice of the people--the voice of Deity, in all ages and in all lands, it is noisily asserted.

When the Franciscan monks, who were called Cordeliers because of their knotted cord about the waist, came to Paris early in the thirteenth century, they were given a goodly tract of ground just within the Saint-Germain gate, stretching, in rough outlines, from Rues Antoine-Dubois and Monsieur-le-Prince nearly to Boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel. The church they built there was consecrated by the sainted Louis IX. in 1262, and when burned, in 1580, was rebuilt mainly by the accursed Henri III. New chapels and cloisters were added in 1672, and there were many other structures pertaining to the order within these boundaries. Of all these, only the Refectory remains to our day. The site of the church, once the largest in Paris, is covered by Place de l'École-de-Médecine and by a portion of the school; something of the shape and some of the stones of the old cloisters are preserved in the arched court of the Clinique; bits of the old walls separate the new laboratories, and another bit, with its strong, bull-nosed moulding, may be seen in the grounds of the water-works behind No. 11 Rue Racine, this street having been cut through the monks' precincts, so separating the Infirmary, to which this wall belonged, and that stretched nearly to the rear walls of Lycée Saint-Louis, from the greater portion of "_Le Grand Couvent de l'Observance de Saint François_."

Turn in at the gateway in the corner of Place de l'École-de-Médecine, and the Refectory stands before you, a venerable fabric of Anne of Brittany's building, with sixteenth and seventeenth century adornments, all in admirable preservation. The great hall, filled with the valuable collection of the Musée Dupuytren, attracts us as a relic of ancient architecture, and as the last existing witness of the Revolutionary nights of the Cordeliers Club. That club had its hall just across the garden alongside the Refectory, in one of the buildings of the cloisters, which, with the church, had been given over to various uses and industries. Hence the name of the club, enrolled under the leadership of Danton, on whom the men of his section looked as the incarnation of the Revolution. To him Robespierre and his republic were shams, and to his club the club of the Jacobins was at first distinctly reactionary. It took but little time, in those fast-moving days, for the Cordeliers, in their turn, to be suspected for their unpatriotic moderation!

We must not leave our Cour du Commerce, without a glance at the small building on the northern corner of its entrance from Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie. It was here that the first guillotine was set up for experiments on sheep, by Dr. Antoine Louis, Secretary of the Academy of Surgeons, and the head of a committee appointed by the National Assembly on October 6, 1791. On that day a clause in the new penal code made death by decapitation the only method of execution, and the committee had powers to construct the apparatus, which was to supersede Sanson's sword. It was not a new invention, for the mediæval executioners of Germany and Scotland had toyed with "the Maiden," but for centuries she had lost her vogue. On December 1, 1789, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had tried to impress on the Assembly the need of humane modes of execution, and had dwelt on the comfort of decapitation by his apparatus until he was laughed down. That grim body could find mirth only in a really funny subject like the cutting off of heads! After two years and more, the machine, perfected by Dr. Louis, and popularly known as "_La Louisette_," was tried on a malefactor in the Place de Grève on April 25, 1792. Three days later the little lady received her official title, "_La Guillotine_."

Dr. Guillotin had made his model and his experiments at his residence, still standing, with no external changes, at No. 21 Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs. It was already a most ancient mansion when he came here to live, and perhaps to remain until his death--in bed--in 1814. It had been known as the Hôtel de Bretagne, and it is rich in personal history. To its shelter came Catherine de Lorraine, the young widow of the Duc de Montpensier, the "lame little devil" whom Henri III. longed to burn alive, for her abuse of him after the murder of her brother Guise. Within its walls, Anne of Austria's treasurer, the rich and vulgar Bertrand de la Bazinière--whom we have met on Quai Malaquais--hoarded the plunder which he would not, or dared not, spend. Louis XIV. gave him, later, lodgings in the Bastille, in that tower named Bazinière always after. In this same Hôtel de Bretagne, Henrietta of France, widowed queen of England, made her temporary home in the winter of 1661, near her daughter, lately installed as "Madame," wife of the King's brother, in the Palais-Royal. Returning from England in 1665, this unhappy queen went to the last refuge of her troubled life in the convent she had founded on the heights of Chaillot. From that farther window of the first story on the right of the court, the Comte de Maulevrier, Colbert's nephew, threw himself down to his death on the pavement on Good Friday, 1706. In time the stately mansion became a _hôtel-garni_, was appropriated as National Domain in the Revolution, and sold in a lottery.

"_La Guillotine_," having proved the sharpness of her tooth, was speedily promoted from Place de Grève to a larger stage in Place de la Réunion, now Place du Carrousel, and thence in May, 1793--that she might not be under the windows of the Convention--to Place de la Révolution, formerly Place de Louis XV., at present Place de la Concorde. This wide space, just beyond the moat of the Tuileries gardens, had in its centre, where now is the obelisk of Luxor, a statue of the late "well-beloved," then altogether-detested, King for whom the place had been named; and a little to the east of that point the scaffold was set up. Lamartine puts it on the site of the southern fountain, for the effect he gets of the flowing of water and of blood; this is one of his magniloquent phrases, which scorn exactness. On January 21, 1793, for the execution of Louis XVI., the guillotine was removed to a spot just westward of the centre, that it might be well protected by the troops deploying about the western side of the _place_, and into the Champs Élysées and Cours la Reine. For a while in 1794, the guillotine was transferred to the present Place de la Nation--where we shall find it in a later chapter--to come back to Place de la Révolution in time to greet Robespierre and his friends.

Standing here, we are near the other centre of Revolutionary Paris, made so by the Club of the Jacobins, that met first in the refectory, later in the church of the monastery from which it took its name. The site of these buildings is covered by the little Marché Saint-Honoré and by the space about. The club of the more moderate men, headed by Bailly and Lafayette, had its quarters in the monastery of the Feuillants, which gave its name to the club, and which extended along the south side of Rue Saint-Honoré, eastwardly from Rue de Castiglione; this street being then the narrow Passage des Feuillants, leading from Rue Saint-Honoré to the royal gardens, and to the much-trodden Terrasse on the northern side of those gardens facing the Manège. This building had been erected for the equestrian education of the youth who afterward became Louis XV., and was converted into a hall for the sitting of the Assembly, after that body had been crowded for about three weeks, on coming to Paris from Versailles, into the inadequate hall of the Archbishop's palace, on the southern shore of the City Island, alongside Notre-Dame. The Convention took over the Manège from the Assembly, and there remained until May, 1793, when it removed to the more commodious quarters, and more befitting surroundings, of the Tuileries. The old riding-school, whose site is marked by a tablet on the railing of the garden opposite No. 230 Rue de Rivoli, was swept away by the cutting of the western end of that street, under the Consulate in 1802.

When Maximilien Robespierre came up from Arras--where he had resigned his functions in the Criminal Court, because of his conscientious objections to capital punishment--he found squalid quarters, suiting his purse--which remained empty all through life--in Rue Saintonge. That street, named for a province of old France, remains almost as he saw it, one of the few Paris streets that retain their original buildings and ancient atmosphere. The high and sombre house, wherein he lodged from October, 1789, to July, 1791, is quite unaltered, save for its number, which was then 8 and is now 64. From here, Robespierre was snatched away, suddenly and without premeditation on his part, and planted in the bosom of the Duplay family. They had worshipped him from afar, and when, from their windows, they saw him surrounded by the acclaiming crowd, on the day after the so-called massacres of the Champ-de-Mars of July 17, 1791, the peaceful carpenter ran out and dragged the shrinking great man into his court-yard for temporary shelter. The house was then No. 366 Rue Saint-Honoré. If any reader wishes to decide for himself whether the modern No. 398 is built on the site of the Duplay house, of which no stone is left, as M. Ernest Hamel asserts; or whether the present tall structure there is an elevation on the walls of the old house, every stone of which is left, as M. Sardou insists; he must study the pamphlets issued by these earnest and erudite controversialists. There is nothing more delightful in topographical sparring. The authors of this book can give no aid to the solicitous student; for they have read all that has been written concerning the subject, they have explored the house, and they have settled in silence in the opposing camps!

In the Duplay household, to which he brought misery then and afterward, Robespierre was worshipped during life and deified after death. To that misguided family, "this cat's head, with the prominent cheekbones, seamed by small-pox; his bilious complexion; his green eyes rimmed with red, behind blue spectacles; his harsh voice; his dry, pedantic, snappish, imperious language; his disdainful carriage; his convulsive gestures--all this was effaced, recast, and transformed into the gentle figure of an apostle and a martyr to his faith for the salvation of men." From their house, it was but a step to the sittings of the Assembly. It was but a few steps farther to the garden of the Tuileries and to the "_fête de l'Être Suprême_," planned by him, when he had induced the Convention to decree the existence of God and of an immortal soul in man. He cast himself for the rôle of High Priest of Heaven, and headed the procession on June 8, 1794, clad in a blue velvet coat, a white waistcoat, yellow breeches and top-boots; carrying in his hand flowers and wheat-ears. He addressed the crowd, in "the scraggiest prophetic discourse ever uttered by man," and they had games, and burned in effigy Atheism and Selfishness and Vice! Such of the stage-setting of this farce as was constructed in stone remains intact to-day, for our wonder at such childishness, and our admiration of the architectural perfection of the out-of-door arena.

From this Duplay house, Robespierre used to go on his solitary strolls, accompanied only by his dogs, in the woods of Monceaux and Montmorenci, where he picked wild-flowers. From this house he went to his last appearance in the Convention on the _9 Thermidor_, and past it he was carted to the scaffold, on the following day, July 28, 1794. He had followed Danton within a few months, as Danton had predicted. They were of the same age at the time of their death, each having thirty-five years; the younger Robespierre was thirty-two, Saint-Just was twenty-six, Desmoulins thirty-four, when their heads fell. Mirabeau died at the age of forty-two, Marat was forty-nine when stabbed. Not one of the conspicuous leaders of the Revolution and of the Terror had come to fifty years!

When the tumbrils and their burdens did not go along the quays to Place de la Révolution, they went through Rue Saint-Honoré, that being the only thoroughfare on that side of the river. From the Conciergerie they crossed Pont au Change, and made their way by narrow and devious turnings to the eastern end of Rue Saint-Honoré, and through its length to Rue du Chemin-du-Rempart--now Rue Royale--and so to the scaffold. Short Rue Saint-Florentin was then Rue de l'Orangerie, and was crowded by sightseers hurrying to the _place_. Those of the victims not already confined in the Conciergerie were sent to the condemned cells there, for the night between sentence and execution. The trustworthy history of the prisons of Paris during the Revolution remains to be written, and there is wealth of material for it. There were many smaller prisons not commonly known, and of the larger ones that we do know, there are several, quite unchanged to-day, well worth unofficial inspection. The Salpêtrière, filling a vast space south of the Jardin des Plantes, was built for the manufacture of saltpetre, by Louis XIII.; and, by his son, was converted into a branch, for women, of the General Hospital. A portion of its buildings was set apart for young women of bad character, and here Manon Lescaut was imprisoned. The great establishment is now known as the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, and is famous for its treatment of women afflicted with nervous maladies, and with insanity. The present Hospice de la Maternité was also perverted to prison usages during the Revolution. Its formal cloisters and steep tiled roofs cluster about its old-time square, but its ancient gardens, and their great trees, are almost all buried beneath new masonry. The façade of the chapel, the work of Lepautre, is no longer used as the entrance, and may be seen over the wall on Boulevard de Port-Royal. Another prison was that of Saint-Lazare, first a lazar-house and then a convent, whose weather-worn roofs and dormers show above the wall on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. On the dingy yellow plaster of the arched entrance-gate one may read, in thick black letters: "_Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction._" Unaltered, too, is the prison in the grounds of the Carmelites, to be visited later in company with Dumas; and the Luxembourg, that was reserved for choice captives. The prison of the Abbey of Saint-Germain was swept away by the boulevard of that name. Its main entrance for wheeled vehicles was through Rue Sainte-Marguerite, the short section left of that street being now named Gozlin. Of the other buildings of the abbey, there remain only the church itself, the bishop's palace behind in Rue de l'Abbaye, and the presbytery glued to the southern side of the church-porch. Its windows saw the massacres of the priests and the prisoners, which took place on the steps of the church and in its front court. When you walk from those steps across the open _place_, to take the tram for Fontenay-aux-Roses, you step above soil that was soaked with blood in the early days of September, 1792. Some few of the abbey prisoners were slaughtered in the garden, of which a portion remains on the south side of the church, where the statue of Bernard Palissy, by Barrias, stands now. In other chapters, the destruction of the Grand-and the Petit-Châtelet has been noted. La Force has gone, and Sainte-Pélagie is soon to go. And the Conciergerie has been altered, almost beyond recognition, as to its entrances and its courts and its cells. Only the Cour des Femmes remains at all as it was in those days.

There are three victims of the Terror who have had the unstinted pity of later generations, and who have happily left traces of their presence on Paris brick and mortar. The last of these three to die was André-Marie de Chénier, and we will go first to his dwelling. It is an oddly shaped house, No. 97 Rue de Cléry--Corneille's street for many years--at its junction with Rue Beauregard; and a tablet in its wall tells of de Chénier's residence there. Born in Constantinople in 1762, of a French father--a man of genius in mercantile affairs--and a Greek mother, the boy was brought to Paris with his younger brother, Joseph-Marie, in 1767. They lived with their mother in various streets in the Marais, before settling in this final home. Here Madame de Chénier, a poet and artist in spirit, filled the rooms with the poets and artists and _savants_ of the time, the friends of her gifted sons. Hither came David, gross of body, his active mind busied with schemes for his annual exhibitions of paintings, the continuation of those begun by Colbert, and the progenitor of the present _Salons_; Alfieri, the poet and splendid adventurer; Lavoisier, absorbed in chemical discovery. Here in his earlier years, and later, when he hurried home from the French Embassy in London on the outbreak of the Revolution, André de Chénier produced the verse that revived the love of nature, dead in France since Ronsard, and brought a lyric freshness to poetry that shamed the dry artificialities so long in vogue. That poetry was the forerunner of the Romantic movement. In his tranquil soul, he hoped for the pacific triumph of liberty and equality, and his delicate spirit abhorred the excesses of the party with whose principles he sympathized. He was taken into custody at Passy, early in 1794, while visiting a lady, against whose arrest he had struggled, locked up in Saint-Lazare for months, convicted, and sent to the Conciergerie. He was guillotined in Place de la Nation on July 26, 1794, only the day before Robespierre's fall, and was one of the last and noblest sacrifices to the Terror. We shall look on his burial-place in our later rambles. Müller has made André de Chénier the central figure of his "Roll-Call," now in the Louvre. He sits looking toward us with eyes that see visions, and his expression seems full of the thought to which he gave utterance when led out to execution: "I have done nothing for posterity, and yet," tapping his forehead, "I had something here!"

In 1795 this little house was surrounded by a great crowd of citizens come to bury Louis de Chénier, the father. The Section of Brutus guarded the bier, draped with blue set with silver stars, to suggest the immortality of the soul! And they gave every honor they could invent to the "_Pompe funèbre d'un Citoyen Vertueux_," whose worthy son they had beheaded.

Joseph-Marie de Chénier lived for many years under suspicion of having given his assent if not his aid to his brother's death, albeit the mother always asserted that he had tried to save André. Joseph was a fiery patriot, and a man of genius withal. He wrote the words of the "Chant du Départ" which, set to music by Méhul, proved almost as stirring as the "Marseillaise" to the pulses of the Patriots. Music was one of the potent intoxicants of the time, and the Revolution was played and sung along to the strains of these two airs, and of "Ça ira" and the "Carmagnole." The classic style, which had hitherto prevailed, gave way before the paltry sentimentality and the tinkling bombast of the music adored by the mob. David planned processions marching to patriotic airs, and shallow operas were performed in the streets. Yet Rouget-de-l'Isle, the captain of engineers who had given them the "Marseillaise," was cashiered and put into a cell; being freed, he was left to starve, and no aid came to him from the Empire or the Bourbons, naturally enough. Louis-Philippe's government found him in sad straits, in that poor house No. 21 of the poor Passage Saulnier, and ordered a small pension to be paid to him during his life. His death came in 1836.

Joseph-Marie de Chénier was a playwright, also, and in 1798 he had created a sensation by his "Charles IX.," produced at the Comédie Française, now the Odéon. In the part of the King, wonderfully made up and costumed, Talma won his first notable triumph. "This play," cried Danton from the pit, "will kill royalty as 'Figaro' killed the nobility." Joseph-Marie lived, not too reputably, but very busily, until January 10, 1811; a fussy politician, a member of the Convention, of the Council of Five Hundred, and of the Institute, Section of the French Tongue and Literature, always detested by his associates, by the Emperor, and by the common people.

When the Place Dauphine of Henri IV. was finished, the new industry of the spectacle-makers established itself in the same buildings we see to-day, and gave to the place the name of Quai des Lunettes. Later came the engravers, who found all the light they needed in these rooms, open on three sides. Among them was a master-engraver, one Phlipon, bringing his daughter, Marie-Jeanne--her pet name being Manon--from the house of her birth, in 1754, in Rue de la Lanterne, now widened into Rue de la Cité. It is not known whether the site of that house is under the Hôtel-Dieu or the Marché-aux-Fleurs. Their new home stood, and still stands, on the corner of the northern quay, and is now numbered 28 Place Dauphine and 41 Quai de l'Horloge. The small window of the second floor lights the child's alcove bedroom, where this "daughter of the Seine"--so Madame Roland dubs herself in her "Memoirs"--looked out on the river, and up at the sky, from over Pont au Change to beyond the heights of Chaillot, when she could lift her eyes from her Plutarch, and her thoughts from the altar she was planning to raise to Rousseau. It must be owned that this all too-serious girl was a prig; a creature over-fed for its size, the word has been happily defined. At the age of eleven, she was sent to the school of the "_Dames de la Congrégation_," in the Augustinian convent in Rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne. It has been told how that ancient street was cut in half by Rue Monge. In its eastern section, now named Rue de Navarre, was Manon's school, directly above the Roman amphitheatre, discovered only of late years in the course of excavations in this quarter. The portion that is left of this impressive relic is in good preservation and in good keeping. Her school-days done, the girl spent several years in this house before us, until her mother's death, and her father's tipsiness, sent her back to her convent for a few months. Then, having refused the many suitors who had thronged about her in her own home, she found the philosopher she wanted for a husband in Jean-Marie Roland de la Platrière, a man much older than she; lank, angular, yellow, bald, "rather respectable than seductive," in the words of the girl-friend who had introduced him. But Manon Phlipon doubtless idealized this wooden formalist who adored her, as she idealized herself and all her surroundings, including The People, who turned and rent her at the last. She gave to her husband duty and loyalty, and it was not until she counted herself dead to earth and its temptations, in her cell at Sainte-Pélagie, that she addressed her last farewell to him, whom "I dare not name, one whom the most terrible of passions has not kept from respecting the barriers of virtue." This farewell was meant for François-Léonard-Nicolas Buzot, Girondist member of the Assembly and later of the Convention. He remained unnamed and unknown, until his name and their secret were told by a bundle of old letters, found on a book-stall on Quai Voltaire in 1864. She had met him first when her husband came from Lyons, with petitions to the Assembly, in February, 1791, and took rooms at the Hôtel Britannique, in Rue Guénégaud. Her _salon_ soon became the gathering-place of the Girondists, where those austere men, who considered themselves the sole salvation of France, were austerely regaled with a bowl of sugar and a _carafe_ of water. Their hostess could not bother with frivolities, she, who in her deadly earnestness, renounced the theatre and pictures, and all the foolish graces of life! The Hôtel Britannique was the house now numbered 12 Rue Guénégaud, a wide-fronted, many-windowed mansion of the eighteenth century. Its stone steps within are well worn, its iron rail is good, its second floor--the Roland apartment--still shows traces of the ancient decorations.

Buzot lived at No. 3 Quai Malaquais, an ancient mansion now replaced by the modern structure between the seventeenth-century houses numbered 1 and 5. For when the Convention outlawed the Girondists, and Buzot fled, it was decreed that his dwelling should be levelled to the ground, and on its site should be placed a notice: "_Là fut la maison du roi Buzot._" So that it would seem that his colleagues of the Convention had found him an insufferably Superior Person.

Leaving this apartment on his appointment to office in 1792, Roland took his wife to the gorgeous _salons_ of the Ministry of the Interior, in the _hôtel_ built by Leveau for the Comte de Lionne, and beautified later by Calonne. It occupied the site of the present annex of the Bank of France just off Rue des Petits-Champs, between Rues Marsollier and Dalayrac. Here, during his two terms of office in 1792 and 1793, Roland had the aid of his wife's pen, as well as the allurements of her personal influence, in the cause to which she had devoted herself. The masculine strength of her pen was weakened, it is true, by too sharp a feminine point, and she embittered the Court, the Cordeliers, the Jacobins, all equally against her and her party. For "this woman who was a great man," in Louis Blanc's true words, was as essentially womanly as was Marie Antoinette; and these two most gracious and pathetic figures of their time were yet unconscious workers for evil to France. The Queen made impassable the breach between the throne and the people; Madame Roland hastened on the Terror. And each of them was doing exactly what she thought it right to do!