Chapter VIII: Part 8

On January 23, 1793, two days after the King's death, Roland left office forever and removed to a house in Rue de la Harpe, opposite the Church of Saint-Cosme. That church stood on the triangle made by the meeting of Rues de l'École-de-Médecine and Racine with Boulevard Saint-Germain. On the eastern side of that boulevard, once the eastern side of Rue de la Harpe, where it meets modern Rue des Écoles, stood the Roland house. The students and studentesses, who sip their coffee and beer on the pavement of Vachette's, are on the scene of Madame Roland's arrest, on the night between May 31st and June 1st. On the former day, seeing the end so near, Roland had fled. His wife was taken to the prison of the Abbaye, and given the cell which was to be tenanted, six weeks later, by Charlotte Corday. Released on June 22d and returned to her home in Rue de la Harpe, she was re-arrested on the 24th and locked up in Sainte-Pélagie. It was an old prison, long kept for the detention of "_femmes et filles, dont la conduite est onéreuse_," and its character had not been bettered by the character of the female prisoners sent there by the Terror. This high-minded woman, subjected to infamous sights and sounds, preserved her serenity and fortitude in a way to extort the "stupefied admiration" of her fellow-prisoners, as one of these has testified. It was only in her cell that the great heart gave way. There she found solace, during her four months' confinement, with Thomson's "Seasons," "done into choice French," with Shaftesbury and an English dictionary, with Tacitus, and her girlhood companion, Plutarch. And here she busied herself with her "Memoirs," "writing under the axe," in her own phrase. In the solitude of her cell, indeed, she was sometimes disturbed by the unseemly laughter of the ladies of the Comédie Française, at supper with the prison-governor in an adjacent cell. We shall see, later, how these ladies came to be here. More acceptable sounds might have come almost to her ears; that of the hymn-singing or of the maiden laughter of the girls in her old convent, only a few steps away. The prison-register contains her description, probably as accurate as matter-of-fact: "Height, five feet; hair and eyebrows, dark chestnut; brown eyes; medium nose; ordinary mouth; oval face, round chin, high forehead." From Sainte-Pélagie she went to the Conciergerie on November 1st, the day after the guillotining of the Girondists, and thence in eight days to her own death. It has been told, by every writer, that she could look over at her girlhood home, as her tumbril crossed Pont au Change. It has not been told, so plainly as it deserves, that her famous utterance on the platform was made fine for historic purposes, as was done with Cambronne's magnificent monosyllable at Waterloo. She really said: "_O Liberté, comme on t'a jouée!_" With these words, natural and spontaneous and without pose, she is, indeed, "beautiful, amazonian, graceful to the eye, more so to the mind."

Within a few days of her death died her husband and her lover. Roland, on hearing of her execution, in his hiding-place near Rouen, thrust his cane-sword into his breast; Buzot, wandering and starving in the fields, was found half-eaten by wolves. She had confided her daughter Eudora and her "Memoirs" to the loyal friend Bosc, who hid the manuscript in the forest of Montmorenci, and in 1795 published it for the daughter's benefit. The original is said to be in existence, on coarse gray paper, stained with her tears. Sainte-Beuve speaks of them as "delicious and indispensable memories," deserving a place "beside the most sublime and eloquent effusions of a brave yet tender philosophy." When he praises that style, clearer and more concise than that of Madame de Staël, "that other daughter of Rousseau," he does not say all; he might have added that, like Rousseau, she occasionally speaks of matters not quite convenient to hear.

It is difficult to refrain from undue admiration and pity, to remain temperate and modest, when one dwells on the character and qualities, the blameless life and the ignominious death, of Marie-Jean-Antoine- Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. We may look up at his thoughtful face in bronze on Quai Conti, alongside the Mint, where he lived in the _entresol_ of the just completed building, when appointed Director of the Hôtel de la Monnaie by his old friend Turgot, in 1774. We may look upon the house in Rue Servandoni where he hid, and from which he escaped to his death. His other Paris homes have no existence now. His college of Navarre--oldest of all those in the University--has been made over into the École Polytechnique; and the house he built for himself in Rue Chantereine, which was afterward owned by Josephine Beauharnais, has long since disappeared. When only twenty-two years of age he wrote his famous essay on the Integral Calculus, when twenty-six he was elected to the Academy of Sciences. Made Perpetual Secretary of that body in 1777, it came in the course of his duties to deliver eulogies on Pascal, d'Alembert, Buffon, and Franklin, and others of the great guild of science. These are more than perfunctory official utterances, they are of an eloquence that shows his lovable character as well as his scientific authority. He contributed largely to Diderot's Encyclopædia, and put forth many astronomical, mathematical, and theological treatises during his busy life. He wrote earnestly in favor of the independence of the American colonies, and was one of the earliest advocates of the people's cause in France. But he was much more than a man of science and of letters; he was a man with a great soul, "the Seneca of the modern school," says Lamartine; the most kindly and tolerant friend of humanity, and protector of its rights, since Socrates. He believed in the indefinite perfectibility of the human race, and he wrote his last essay, proving its progress upward, while hiding in a garret from those not yet quite perfect fellow-beings, who were howling for his head! He was beloved by Benjamin Franklin and by Thomas Paine. Members of the Convention together, he and Paine prepared the new Constitution of 1793, in which political document they found no place for theological dogma. Robespierre prevented the adoption of this Constitution, having taken God under his own protection. Condorcet made uncompromising criticism, and was put on the list of those to be suspected and got rid of. Too broad to ally himself with the Girondists, he was yet proscribed with them, on June 2, 1793. His friends had forced him to go into hiding, until he might escape. They had asked Madame Vernet--widow of the painter Claude-Joseph, mother of Carle, grandmother of Horace--to give shelter to one of the proscribed, and she had asked only if he were an honest man. This loyal woman concealed him in her garret for nearly one year, and would have kept him longer, but that he feared for her safety, and for that of his wife and daughter, who might be tracked in their visits to him by night. He had finished his "Esquisse d'un Tableau historique des Progrès de l'Esprit humain," full of hope for humanity, with no word of reproach or repining, and then he wrote his last words: "Advice of one proscribed, to his Daughter." This is to be read to-day for its lofty spirit. He gives her the names of certain good men who will befriend her, and among them is Benjamin Franklin Bache, the son of our Franklin's daughter Sally, who had been in Paris with his grandfather.

Then, this letter finished, early on the morning of April 5, 1794, he left it on his table and slipped out, unseen by the good widow Vernet, from the three-storied plaster-fronted house now No. 15 of Rue Servandoni, and still unaltered, as is almost the entire street. Through it he hurried to Rue de Vaugirard, where he stood undecided for a moment, the prison of the Luxembourg on his left, and the prison of the Carmelites on his right, both full of his friends. And on the walls, all about, were placards with big-lettered warning that death was the penalty for harboring the proscribed. Here at the corner, he ran against one Sarret, cousin of Madame Vernet, who went with him, showing the way through narrow streets to the Barrière du Maine, which was behind the present station of Mont-Parnasse. Safely out of the town, the two men took the road to Fontenay-aux-Roses, and at night Sarret turned back. Condorcet lost his way, and wandered about the fields for two days, sleeping in the quarries of Clamart, until driven by hunger into a wretched inn. Demanding an omelet, he was asked how many eggs he would have; the ignorant-learned man ordered a dozen, too many for the working-man he was personating, and suspicions were aroused. The villagers bound and dragged him to the nearest guardhouse at Bourg-la-Reine. He died in his cell that night, April 7, 1794, by poison, it is believed. For he wore a ring containing poison; the same sort of poison, it is said, that was carried by Napoleon, with which he tried--or pretended to try--to kill himself at Fontainebleau. In the modern village of Bourg-la-Reine, five and a half miles from Paris, the principal square bears the name of Condorcet, and holds his bust in marble.

"_La Veuve Condorcet_" appears in the Paris _Bottin_ every year until 1822, when she died. She had been imprisoned on the identification of her husband's body, but was released after Robespierre's death. She passed the Duplay house every day during those years, going to her little shop at 232 Rue Saint-Honoré. There she had set up a linen business on the ground floor, and above, she painted portraits in a small way. She was a woman of rare beauty and of fine mind, with all womanly graces and all womanly courage. Married in 1786, and much younger than her husband, timorous before his real age and his seeming austerity, she had grown up to him, and had learned to love that "volcano covered with snow," as his friend d'Alembert had said he was. She had a pretty gift with her pen, and her translation into French of Adam Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" is still extant. Her little _salon_ came to be greatly frequented in her beautiful old age.

Condorcet's famous fellow-worker in science, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, was guillotined in May, 1794, the two men having the same number of years, fifty-one. He was condemned, not for being a chemist, albeit his enlightened judges were of the opinion that "the Republic has no need of chemists," but because he had filled, with justice and honesty, his office of Farmer-General under royalty. Their contemporaries of nearly equal age, Gaspard Monge and Claude-Louis Berthollet, escaped the guillotine, and were among the _savants_ in the train of General Bonaparte in his Italian and Egyptian campaigns. After many years of useful labors, they died peacefully under the Restoration.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, of almost equal years with these four, lived to a greater age, and received higher honors from the Emperor and the Bourbons. Coming from his birth-place in Calvados in 1767, his first Paris home to be found is in Rue des Noyers; one side of which ancient street now forms that southern section of Boulevard Saint-Germain opposite Rue des Anglais, its battered houses seeming to shrink back from the publicity thrust upon them. In that one now numbered 57 in the boulevard, formerly No. 33 Rue des Noyers, Alfred de Musset was born in 1810; and in the same row lived Laplace in 1777. In 1787 we find him in Rue Mazarine, and in 1790 in Rue Louis-le-Grand, and this latter residence represents his only desertion of the University side of the Seine. He returned to that bank when placed by the Consuls in the Senate, and made his home in 1801 at No. 24 Rue des Grands-Augustins, and in the following year at No. 2 Rue Christine. These stately mansions of that period, only a step apart, remain as he left them. When Laplace was made Chancellor of the Senate, in 1805, his official residence was in the Luxembourg, and there it continued until 1815, the year of the Restoration. His private residence, from 1805 to 1809, was at No. 6 Rue de Tournon, a house still standing in all its senatorial respectability. He gave this up, and again took up his quarters in the Luxembourg, when made a Count of the Empire and Vice-President of the Senate.

From the Medician palace, which appears in the _Bottin_ of those years as simple No. 19 Rue de Vaugirard, Laplace removed to No. 51 of that street, when the returned Bourbons made him a Peer of France. This house, near Rue d'Assas--named for the Chevalier Nicolas d'Assas, the heroic captain of the regiment of Auvergne during the Seven Years' War--is unaltered since his time. His last change of abode was made in 1818, to Rue du Bac, 100, where he died in 1827. It is a mansion of old-fashioned dignity, with a large court in front and a larger garden behind, and is now numbered 108. The growing importance of his successive dwellings, every one of which may be visited to-day, mark his growth in importance as a man of state. The growth of the man of science is represented by his colossal "La Mécanique Céleste," which first appeared in 1799, and was continued by successive volumes until its completion in 1825. Its title, rather than his titles, should be inscribed on his monument.

A little later than these famous _confrères_, Georges Cuvier appears in Paris--in Hugo's half-truth--"with one eye on the book of Genesis and the other on nature, endeavoring to please bigoted reaction by reconciling fossils with texts, and making the mastodons support Moses." His first home, at the present 40 Rue de Seine, is a fine old-fashioned mansion. He removed to the opposite side of that street in 1810, and there remained until 1816, his house being now replaced by the new and characterless structure at No. 35. Full of character, however, is his official residence as Professor in the Jardin des Plantes, which took again its ancient title of Jardin du Roi during the Restoration. "_La Maison de Cuvier_" is a charming old building near the garden-entrance in Rue Cuvier, and within is the bust of this most gifted teacher of his time. His genuine devotion to science and his tolerance for all policies carried him through the several changes of government during his life. He completed the Napoleonic conquest of Italy and Holland by his introduction of the French methods of education, perfected by him. The Bourbons made him Baron and Chancellor of the University, and the Orleans king elevated him to the Peerage of France. He died in 1832.

Paul-François-Jean-Nicolas, Comte de Barras--soldier, adventurer, a power in the Convention, the power of the Directory, practically dictator for a while--has added to the hilarity of the sceptical student of history by his "Memoirs," kept concealed since his death, in 1829, until their publication within a few years. Splendidly mendacious in these pages as he was in life, Barras posed always as the man on horseback of _his "13 Vendémiaire_." On that day, unwittingly yet actually, he put into the saddle--where he stayed--his young friend Buonaparte, whose qualities he had discovered at the siege of Toulon. This artillery officer, while planting his batteries to cover every approach to the Tuileries, where cowered the frightened Convention, took personal command of the guns that faced Saint-Roch. The front of that church still shows the scars of the bullets that stopped the rush of the Sections in that direction. This battery was placed at the Rue Saint-Honoré end of the narrow lane leading from that street to the gardens of the Tuileries--there being then no Rue de Rivoli, you will bear in mind. This lane was known as Rue du Dauphin, because of the royal son who had used it, going between the Tuileries and the church; after that day, it was popularly called Rue du 13-Vendémiaire, until it received its official appellation of Rue Saint-Roch, when widened and aligned in 1807. At this time there were only two houses in the street, near its southern end, and one of them was a _hôtel-garni_, in which young Buonaparte caught a short sleep on that night of October 5, 1795. The oldest structure in Rue Saint-Roch to-day is that with the two numbers 4 and 6, and it is known to have been already a _hôtel-garni_ in the first years of the nineteenth century, when it was refaced. So that it is well within belief that we have found here Buonaparte's head-quarters for that one night.

Let us now, crossing the river, get on the ground of positive proof, safe from doubts or conjectures. The Duchesse d'Abrantès, wife of that adorable ruffian, Andoche Junot, made a duke in 1807 by the Emperor, writes in her "Memoirs": "To this day, whenever I pass along Quai Conti, I cannot help looking up at the garret windows at the left angle of the house, on the third floor. That was Napoleon's chamber, when he paid us a visit; and a neat little room it was. My brother used to occupy the one next it." Madame Junot had been Mlle. Laure Permon, whose father, an army contractor, had brought his family to Paris early in 1785, and leased for his residence the Hôtel Sillery, formerly the Petit Hôtel Guénégaud. Madame Permon, a Corsican lady, had been an early friend of Madame Buonaparte, and had rocked young Buonaparte in his cradle; so that he was called by his first name in her family, as her daughter shows in this quotation. Finding him at the École Royale Militaire in Paris, she invited him to her house for frequent visits, once for a week's stay, whenever permission could be got from the school authorities. He was a lank, cadaverous, dishevelled lad, solitary, taciturn, and morose; brooding over the poverty that had forced him to seek an unpaid-for scholarship, and not readily making friends with the more fortunate Albert Permon. Yet he came often, and was nowhere so content as in this house before us. It stands far back from the front of the quay, half-hidden between the Institute and the Mint, and is numbered 13 Quai Conti, and its entrance is on the side at No. 2 Impasse Conti. Its upper portion is now occupied by a club of American art students. Constructed by Mansart, its rooms are of admirable loftiness and proportion, and retain much of their sixteenth-century decoration. Here in this _salon_ after dinner, young Buonaparte would storm about the "indecent luxury" of his schoolmates, or sit listening to Madame Permon, soothed by her reminiscent prattle about Corsica and his mother, to whom he always referred as Madame Letitia. Here he first showed himself to the daughters in his new sub-lieutenant's uniform, before joining his regiment on October 30, 1785, and they laughed at his thin legs in their big boots.

The École Supérieure de Guerre, commonly called the "École Militaire," remains nearly as when constructed under Louis XV., but it is impossible to fix on the room allotted to this student during his year there--a small, bare room, with an iron cot, one wooden chair, and a wash-stand with drawers. The chapel, now unused, remains just as it was when he received his confirmation in it. He arrived at this school, from his preparatory school at Brienne, on the evening of October 19, 1784, one of a troop of five lads in the charge of a priest. They had disembarked, late that afternoon, at Port Saint-Paul, from the huge, clumsy boat that brought freight and passengers, twice a week, from Burgundy and the Aube down the Seine. The priest gave the lads a simple dinner near their landing-place, and led them across the river and along the southern quays--where the penniless young Buonaparte bought a "Gil-Blas" from a stall, and a comrade in funds paid for it--and, stopping for prayers at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he handed them over to the school authorities.

From that moment every hour of young Buonaparte's year in Paris can be accounted for. And no foundation can be discovered or invented for the fable, mendaciously upheld by the tablet, placed by the Second Empire in the hallway of No. 5 Quai Conti, which claims a garret in that tall, up-climbing, old house as his lodging at that time or at any later time. This flimsy legend need no longer be listened to. Not far away, however, is a garret that did harbor the sub-lieutenant in the autumn of 1787. It is to M. Lenôtre that we owe this delightful find. Arriving in Paris from Corsica, after exactly two years of absence, Buonaparte took room No. 9, on the third floor of the Hôtel de Cherbourg, Rue du Four-Saint-Honoré. That street is now Rue Vauvilliers, its eastern side taken up by the Halles, and its present No. 33, on the western side, is the former _hôtel-garni_, quite unchanged as to its fabric. Here he was always writing in his room, going out only for the frugal meals that cost him a few _sous_, and here he had his first amorous adventure, recited by him in cynical detail under the date: "_Jeudi 22 Novembre 1787, à Paris, Hôtel de Cherbourg, Rue du Four-Saint-Honoré._"

On August 10, 1792, Buonaparte saw the mob carry and sack the Tuileries. He was in disgrace with the army authorities, having practically deserted to Corsica, and he had come back for reinstatement and a job. In his Saint-Helena "Memorial," he says that he was then lodging at the Hôtel de Metz in Rue du Mail. This is evidently the same lodging placed by many writers in Rue d'Aboukir, for many of the large houses that fronted on the first-named street extended through to the latter, as shall be shown later. The hotel is gone, and the great mercantile establishment at No. 22 Rue du Mail covers its site.

Gone, too, is the shabbily furnished little villa in Rue Chantereine, where he first called on Josephine de Beauharnais, where he married that faded coquette--dropping the _u_ from his name then, in March, 1796--and whence he went to his _18 Brumaire_. The court-yard, filled with resplendent officers on that morning, is now divided between the two courts numbered 58 and 60 Rue de la Victoire; that name having been officially granted to the street, on his return from his Italian campaign in 1797. The villa, kept by the Emperor, and lent at times to some favorite general, was not entirely torn down until 1860. Its site is now covered by the houses Nos. 58 and 60.

Rue Chantereine was, in those days, almost a country road, bordered by small villas; two of them were associated with Napoleon Bonaparte. In one of them, Mlle. Eléonora Dennelle gave birth, on December 13, 1806, to a boy, who grew up into a startling likeness of the Emperor, as to face and figure, but who inherited from him only the half-madness of genius. He lived through the Empire, the Restoration, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, and into the Republic that has come to stay, dying on April 15, 1881. To another modest dwelling in this same street, there came the loving and devoted Polish lady, Madame Walewski, who had thrown herself into the Emperor's arms, when she was full of faith in his intent to liberate her native land. Their son, Alexandre Walewski, born in 1810, was a brilliant figure in Paris, where he came to reside after the fall of Warsaw. A gifted soldier, diplomat, and writer, he died in 1868.

So, of the roofs that sheltered the boyhood of Napoleon, three still remain. Of those loftier roofs that sheltered his manhood, there are also three still to be seen. In the Paris _Bottin_ of the first year of the nineteenth century, the name of Napoleon Bonaparte appears as a member of the Institute, Section of Mechanism, living in the palace of the Luxembourg. In 1805 his address is changed to the palace of the Tuileries, and he is qualified "Emperor of the French;" enlarging that title in 1806 to "Emperor of the French and King." The Tuileries are swept away, and Saint-Cloud has left only a scar. The Luxembourg remains, and so, too, the Palais de l'Élysée, where he resided for a while, and the _château_ of Malmaison has been restored and refurnished in the style of Josephine, as near as may be, and filled with souvenirs of her and of her husband. Her body lies, with that of her daughter Hortense, in the church of the nearest village, Reuil, and his remains rest under the dome of the Invalides--his last roof.

There is a curious letter, said to be still in existence, written by young Buonaparte to Talma, asking for the loan of a few francs, to be repaid "out of the first kingdom I conquer." He goes on to say that he has found nothing to do, that Barras promises much and does little, and that the writer is at the end of his resources and his patience. This letter was evidently written at that poverty-stricken period between 1792 and 1795, when he was idly tramping Paris streets with Junot, the lovable and generous comrade from Toulon; or with Bourrienne, now met first since their school-days at Brienne, who was to become the Emperor's patient confidential secretary. At that period Talma had fought his way to his own throne. Intimate as he had been with Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins, Joseph-Marie de Chénier and David, he had, also, made friends with the Corsican officer, either during these years of the letter or probably earlier. He made him free of the stage of the Théâtre Français, and lent him books. His friendship passed on to the general, the Consul, and the Emperor, and it was gossipped that he had taught Bonaparte to dress and walk and play Napoleon. Talma always denied this, avowing that the other man was, by nature and training, the greater actor!

Joseph-François Talma used to say that he first heard of a theatre, from seeing and asking about the old Théâtre de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne, whose entrance was in Rue Mauconseil, opposite the place of his birth, on January 15, 1763. As he grew up he learned a good deal more about the theatre, for he went early and often. He was only fifteen when he was one of the audience in the Théâtre Français, on that night of the crowning of Voltaire, and one of the crowd that tried to unharness the horses, and drag the old man from the Tuileries to his house on the quay. By day the lad was learning dentistry, his father's profession--it was then a trade--and the two went to London to practice. For a while young Talma got experience in that specialty from the jaws of the sailor-men at Greenwich, and got gayer and more congenial experience in amateur theatricals in town. They returned to Paris, and the father's sign, "_M. Talma, Dentiste_," was hung by the doorway of No. 3 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, next to the corner of Rue Saint-Honoré. From the house that was there before the present modern structure, young Talma went across the river to the Comédie Française, on the night of November 21, 1787, and made his _début_ as Seide in "Mahomet."

In our chapter on Molière, we left the Comédie Française, on its opening night in 1689, at the house in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie. There it remained for nearly a century, until forced, by overflowing houses, to find a larger hall. While this was in course of construction the company removed, in 1770, to the Salle des Machines in the Tuileries, already transformed into a theatre by the Regent for his ballets. Here the troupe played until the completion of the new theatre in 1782. That new Comédie Française is now the Second Théâtre Français, the Odéon, the second largest hall in Paris. It was burned in 1799 and again in 1818. In 1789 it took the title of Théâtre National; in 1793, Théâtre de l'Égalité was the newest name forced upon the unwilling comedians, who were, as always with that profession, fond of swelldom and favorites of princes. The house being in the very centre of the Cordeliers quarter, in _la Section Marat_, there was always constant friction between players and audience, and by 1793 this had so exasperated the ruling powers--the _sans-culottes_--that nearly the whole troupe was sent to prison, charged with having insulted the Patriots on the boards, and with having given "proofs of marked incivism." The ladies of the company, aristocrats by strength of their sex, occupied cells in Sainte-Pélagie, where we have already listened to their merriment. They escaped trial through the destruction of their _dossiers_ by a humane member of the Committee of Safety, and the _9 Thermidor_ set them free. Talma had already left the troupe in April, 1791, driven away, with two or three friends, by dissensions and jealousies. They went over to the new house which had been constructed, in 1789, at a corner of the Palais-Royal, by enterprising contractors with influential politicians between them. It was called at first Théâtre Français de la Rue de Richelieu, and, in 1792, Théâtre de la République. On Talma's desertion of the old house, there began a legal process against him, exactly like that instituted by the same Comédie Française against M. Coquelin, a century later, when the theatre had for its lawyer the grandson of its advocate of 1792; and the decision of the two tribunals was the same in effect. Talma stayed at the theatre in the Palais-Royal, to which he drew the discerning public, and, after ten years of rivalry, the two troupes joined hands on those boards, and so the Comédie Française came to the present "House of Molière."

It would seem that Talma was a shrewd man of business, and drew money in his private rôle of landlord. He owned the house in which Mirabeau died, in Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and always referred to the great tribune as "_mon ancien locataire, Mirabeau_." Just beyond, in Rue Chantereine, Talma was attracted by the small villa built by the architect Ledoux, for Condorcet, it is said. Perhaps the actor had seen, in that street, an even more plausible actor, Giuseppe Balsamo by name, calling himself the Count Cagliostro. He had established himself in one of the villas in this street, on coming to Paris to ply his trade, toward 1784. And in 1778 the wonder-working Mesmer had set up his machinery and masqueraded as a magician in a house in the same street. Benjamin Franklin went there, one of a government commission sent to investigate the miracles.

In his new residence in Rue Chantereine, Talma welcomed his friends among the Revolutionary leaders, and gave them _bouillon_ in the kitchen, when he came home from the theatre at night. In 1795 he sold the villa to Josephine de Beauharnais, and he always said that her first payment was made to him from moneys sent to her, by her husband, from Italy. It is not known whether Talma owned, or leased, an apartment in No. 15 Quai Voltaire, where he lived from 1802 until 1806. The house, now No. 17, one of the ancient stately structures facing the quay, is somewhat narrower than its neighbors. During the ten years between 1807 and 1817 he had an apartment at No. 6 Rue de Seine; possibly in that pavilion in the court which was built by Marguerite de Valois for her residence, and which has been heightened by having two new floors slipped between the lower and top stories, leaving these latter and the façade much as she built them. His home, from 1818 to 1821, at No. 14 Rue de Rivoli, is replaced by the new structures at the western end of that street, which is entirely renumbered. After two more changes on the northern bank, he finally settled at No. 9 Rue de la Tour-des-Dames. Until 1822 there was still to be seen the tower of the windmill owned by the "_Dames de Montmartre_," which gave its name to this street. At its number 3, a small _hôtel_, circular-fronted and most coquettish, lived Mlle. Mars, it is believed, and here she was the victim of the earliest recorded theft of an actress's jewels. The simple and stately house, of a low curtain between two wings, with two stories and a mansard roof, bearing the number 9, is the scene of Talma's last years and of his death, on October 19, 1826. His final appearance had been on June 11th of that year, in his marvellous personation of Charles VI. At this house we shall see Dumas visit the old actor, who had seen Voltaire! Dumas says that Talma spared nothing in his aim at accuracy, historic and archæologic, when creating a new rôle or mounting a new play. Indeed, we know that Talma was the first great realist in costume and scenery, as we know that he first brought the statues of tragedy down to human proportions and gave them life-blood. Dumas dwells especially on the voice of the great tragedian--a voice that was glorious and sincere, and in anguish was a sob.

There is a glowing portrait of Talma from the pen of Chateaubriand, in which he makes plain that the tragedian, while he was, himself, his century and ancient centuries in one, had been profoundly affected by the terrible scenes of the Terror which he had witnessed; and it was that baleful inspiration that sent the concentrated passion of patriotism leaping in torrents from his heart. "His grace--not an ordinary grace--seized one like fate. Black ambition, remorse, jealousy, sadness of soul, bodily agony, human grief, the madness sent by the gods and by adversity--_that_ was what he knew. Just his coming on the scene, just the sound of his voice, were overpoweringly tragic. Suffering and contemplation mingled on his brow, breathed in his postures, his gestures, his walk, his motionlessness."

Thomas Carlyle seems strangely placed in the stalls of the Théâtre Français, yet he sat there, at the end of his twelve-days' visit to Paris in 1825. "On the night before leaving," he writes, "I found that I ought to visit one theatre, and by happy accident came upon Talma playing there. A heavy, shortish, numb-footed man, face like a warming-pan for size, and with a strange, most ponderous, yet delicate expression in the big, dull-glowing black eyes and it. Incomparably the best actor I ever saw. Play was 'Oedipe'; place the Théâtre Français."