The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume 2 (of 2)

The King had been allowed his divorce by his childless wife, Marguerite, and he in turn allowed her to return to Paris from her long exile in Auvergne; ordering that this hôtel should be fittingly arranged for her residence, in 1605. We saw her last, a charming child, in the gardens of the Tournelles. And now she comes here, a worn wanton of nearly fifty-five, her wonted fires still smouldering under the ashes. It is between these two appearances that we like to look on her in the pages of Brantôme and on the canvas of Clouet. Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, has been aptly dubbed the valet-de-place of history; and yet a valet has the merit of looking out of his own eyes from his own point of view. It was for him that Marguerite wrote her "Mémoires," and to him she left them. In after days, when exiled from the court he loved, able only to lick the chops of memory, he wrote her éloge in these glowing words: "If there has ever been anyone in the world perfect in beauty, it is the Queen of Navarre. All who have been, or shall be, near her, are ugly beside her. If there is a miscreant who believes not in the miracles of God, let him look upon her. Many believe that she is rather a goddess of heaven than a princess of earth, and yet perhaps no goddess was ever so lovely."

It is indeed a lovely creature, yet all of earth, whom we see in Clouet's half life-size portrait in the château of Azay-le-Rideau. Her plentiful blond hair curves back above her fine brow, and her bluish-gray eyes smile out with inviting mischievousness. Yet Brantôme has to own that his goddess was easily first in the escadron volant that sailed under her mother's flag, and we may guess what that meant in the court "whose vices it would be repulsive to suggest, and whose virtues were homicide and adultery."

In this Hôtel de Sens, Madame Marguerite held receptions, twice a week, of men of letters and of the arts, with whom her learning allowed her to converse on equal terms; and her kindliness allowed them to feel at ease. For "from her behavior it could never be discovered that she had once been the wife of the King." But the wayward Margot made trouble for herself that ended her stay here after a year or less. She came home from mass at the Célestins on the morning of Wednesday, April 5, 1606, and as she was helped from her coach by her newest favorite page of eighteen, he was killed by her latest discarded favorite, already twenty. She sat in one of these front windows the next day, having neither eaten nor drunk nor slept meanwhile; she looked out on the beheading of the jaunty assassin; that evening she left the Hôtel de Sens forever. For a while she stayed at her hunting-lodge at Issy, already visited by us in former pages, and then went to her last dwelling, on the southern bank in the Pré-aux-Clercs, which looked out across the river at the Louvre, where Henry was unhappy with her successor. The two women remained always friendly, and were seen together in festivities and processions, and the reigning Queen paid many a debt of the deposed Queen. To the last she rouged to the eyes, and wore a flowing wig and low frocks, albeit she had turned dévote, and had found a new idol in her confessor. This was young Vincent de Paul, not yet canonized, whose chaste ministrations made him adored by sinners elderly enough to repent. There she died in the spring of 1615, at the age of sixty-three, the last of the Valois name, leaving everything, mostly debts, to young Louis XIII.

Later along in the seventeenth century, when the court end of the town went to the west, and the Church dignitaries found this region too far afield, this Hôtel de Sens was sold. Its new owners and tenants were the merchants and financiers who crowded then to this quarter. They, too, soon moved farther west, and the place had many strange employments forced upon it. As early as 1692, the messageries for Dijon and Lyons rented it for their town head-quarters. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the palace of the archbishops was degraded to a livery stable and a horsedealer's lair, and the ancient arms of Sens on its front and the escutcheons of Lorraine and Bourbon, prelates of the Church, were covered by a great sign, "Maison de Roulage et de Commission." From this court, in the words of the advertisement of that date, "Le Courrier de la Malle de Paris à Lyons partit à cinq heures et demi du soir, 8 Floréal, an IV."—which was April 27, 1796.

That mail-coach was stopped near Lieussart, its driver killed, and a large sum in assignats and gold carried off. For this crime one Joseph Lesurques was arrested, and was recognized by several witnesses as the robber. He had been an official in Douai, had saved money, and had gone to Paris for the education of his children. Neither his record nor his alibi sufficed to acquit him, the strongest of circumstantial evidence convicted him, and he was executed on October 30, 1796. Two years later the murderer and robber was captured in one Dubosc, who, after a daring escape and recapture, went to the guillotine. By Dubosc's conviction Lesurques was posthumously morally acquitted, but his judicial rehabilitation has never been made, albeit his broken and crazed children petitioned, courts debated, and Deputies chattered through many long years. This true story, our last reminiscence of the Hôtel de Sens, has been put on the French stage as "Le Courrier de Lyons," and on the English stage as "The Lyons Mail."

We go on to the upper end of Rue Fauconnier, and across Rue Saint-Antoine, to where begins Rue Pavée-au-Marais, a most ancient and aristocratic street, filled with grand mansions in its best days and in days not so long gone. It had taken its name as early as the middle of the fifteenth century, when, first of all the Marais streets, it was paved. It was known, unofficially and popularly, as le petit Marais, so closely did it crowd, within its short and select limits, the essential characteristics in architecture and atmosphere of the great Marais. Now, wofully modernized, it holds one relic only, a magnificent relic, that suggests to us, in its solitary dignity, something of the lost glories of this street.

We cross Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, a main thoroughfare of old Paris, whose odd name came from Charles, brother of Saint Louis, Count of Anjou and Provence, and King of Naples and Sicily in 1265. His fortified abode stood on the northern side of this street, at its eastern end just within the old walls. It became, in after times, the hôtel and then the prison of La Force. Its entrance was over yonder, at the corner of modern Rue Malher; and opposite, on the southern corner, was the stone that served as the axeman's block for the Princess of Lamballe. Along this pavement the small Gavroche led the two smaller Thénardier boys, on his way to his hôtel—the plaster elephant in Place de la Bastille. A wide avenue, bordered by modern constructions, is fast taking the place of the old street and robbing it of all its character.

Where Rue Pavée meets Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, stands the Hôtel Lamoignon, formerly the Hôtel d'Angoulême. At that corner a square turret juts out from above the ground floor, overhanging the pavement, its supporting bracket cut under in shell-like curves. About the stately court, entered from Rue Pavée, rise the imposing walls, those of the wings of a little later date and a little more ornate than that of the façade. This front is pre-eminently impressive in its height, in the unusual loftiness of its floors and their windows, in the single Corinthian pilasters, tall and slender and graceful, rising from ground to cornice. They may serve us as a souvenir of Jean Bullant's work in the château of Ecouen and in his portion of Chantilly. Above that cornice the dormer windows spring high under their gabled ends. Beneath them, and over the entrance porch, and on the side wall of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois—profusely decorating, but not overloading, the spacious surfaces that carry them easily—we trace without effort the unworn hunting-horns, the stags' heads, the dogs in chase, the crescent and the initial H so interlaced as to form an H and a D—all the carved emblems of Diane de France, for whom this remarkable structure was planned and built, a little after 1580, by a now unknown architect.

She was born of an Italian mother, during a stay in her country of the son of François I., who was later Henri II. On coming to the throne, in 1547, he legitimatized this daughter, then ten years of age, and gave her education and position in France. She grew up to be a good woman and a good wife to Horace Farnese, Duc de Castro, and to her second husband, François, the eldest son of the Constable Montmorenci. She spent her long life—which saw seven monarchs sitting on the French throne—doing kindly acts, not one of which meant so much for the France she loved as the reconciliation between Henri III. and Henri de Navarre; possible through her, because the sceptic Béarnais took her word for or against any written word of anyone. Dying in 1619, she left this mansion to Charles, Duc d'Angoulême, son of Charles IX. and Marie Touchet, the last of her many benefactions to him. He added these wings, and placed in that on the northern side this stately stone staircase, filling the width between the stone walls, with no hand-rail to break its sweep. Nothing is left of the former grandeur of the interior, which is given up to large industries and petty handicrafts; even the vast and lofty chambers are cut up for trade purposes by partitions and by interposed floorings.

In 1658 the Hôtel d'Angoulême became the Hôtel Lamoignon by purchase of Guillaume de Lamoignon, a wealthy President of Parliament, and in 1684 it went to his son, Chrétien-François de Lamoignon. It was a dwelling worthy of him and of his illustrious name, which it still bears. In it he received the best society of that day—represented to us by Racine, Boileau, Bourdaloue, Regnard, and others of their kidney, all honored in finding a friend in this magistrate of ability, probity, kindliness. It was to him that Boileau addressed his "Sixth Epistle," and to him, when, as Master of Requests, it was his official duty to forbid further performances of "Tartufe" after the first night, Molière submitted without rancor. Perhaps his highest honor, during a life of honors, was his refusal of an election to a fauteuil in the Académie Française.

On April 13, 1763, in this building was opened the first public library of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris. One Antoine Moriau had been for many years collecting, in his apartment on this second floor, some 14,000 volumes and 200 manuscripts, all left to the town at his death in 1759. The municipality kept his rooms, and rented additional rooms on this first floor, opening them to the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The concierge or his wife, honored by the interest shown in their splendid show-place, will conduct such curious strangers as may wish around the corner into Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and through a little gate on that street into a small back court. This is the shabby remnant of Diane's and of Lamoignon's extensive gardens, which once stretched to those of the Hôtel de La Force on the south, and eastwardly to Rue Sévigné. From this spot you may see four or five windows away up in the rear wall of the mansion, and you will be told that these are the windows of Alphonse Daudet's former apartment, wherein he wrote "Fromont jeune et Risler aîné." His large study on the top floor had two high, wide windows, from which he saw the roofs of all Paris on that side. Against the wall at one end of the room was his shelf for standing at his work, and his wife's desk was at the other end; while, between them, carrying the freshly written sheets, trotted the little boy Léon, who is now a man, wielding his own good pen. To him, in those days, the tall Flaubert and Tourgueneff were "giants" by the side of his father, and of the other friends who used to climb these many stairs to this salon in the sky. Daudet has left affectionate records of the old house. His "Rois-en-exil" was written in a pavilion in the garden of Richelieu's old mansion, which stood in the northwestern corner of the then Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, where has been cut, through house and garden, the prolongation of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Rue des Vosges.

The gentle artist, "handsome as a Hindoo god" in those days, says M. Claretie, brought from his beloved Midi a longing for space and air and quiet, and all his abodes in the city were high above the street, with ample breathing-space and unbroken horizon. His earliest Paris home was at the very top of the furnished Hôtel du Senat, still at No. 7 Rue de Tournon. This was the wretched room to which he came back, early one morning, from his first swell reception, his only dress-suit drenched with the wet snow through which he had waded, owning no overcoat. Then, for a while, he occupied an entresol in No. 4 Place de l'Odéon, in "la maison A. Laissus," one of the unaltered houses of that historic place. His last home was on the third floor of No. 31 Rue Bellechasse, in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and one of its delightful old gardens lay beneath his windows, giving him the greenness and the tranquillity so dear to him.

The name of Madame Daudet may not be omitted from this record of the illustrious women of the Marais, although now, in the maturity of her distinction and elegance, she adorns another quarter of Paris. She has made for herself an honored place among French women of letters, and she helped her husband to his own place by her critical powers and her sympathetic appreciation. She both tranquillized and stimulated him through his earlier years of robust strength, and the later invalidism that was yet filled with labor. Her son, who carried the father's sheets across the room to her for approval or correction, has dedicated his "Alphonse Daudet" to his mother, "who aided and encouraged her husband alike in the hours of discouragement and of hopefulness."

There are bits and fragments of vanished antiquity—portals, windows, balconies, brackets, pitifully sundered from the grandeur they stand for and suggest—scattered all about this portion of the Marais. Much of this bygone grandeur was to be found in Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, a street that had been a country road just outside the wall of Philippe-Auguste, and, with the crumbling of the wall, had been speedily built up with stately mansions. One of these, with a fund for its support, was willed, in 1415, to the Grand Prior of France, in trust for such burghers as were freed from all taxation by reason of their extreme poverty. So it came that these francs bourgeois gave their name to the street. Here at No. 30 is a quaint low front, mostly taken up by a spacious entrance-porch, decorated with finely cut dragons; here at No. 31 is the superb portal of the Hôtel Jeanne d'Albret; all that is left of the noble residence of that niece of François I. who married the Duc de Clèves in 1541. It is more than a century from that date before this hôtel holds any history for us, when it became tenanted by César Phébus d'Albret, Marshal of France; a rich and frolicsome Gascon, a friend of Scarron, an especial friend of young Madame Scarron. It was he who killed the Marquis de Sévigné in a duel. The Duchesse d'Albret was an eminently proper person, a bit of a précieuse, and her salon here was a flimsy copy of that of the Hôtel Rambouillet. Scarron's widow, poor and by no means unfriended, found a temporary home in this house, after a short stay with her life-long friend, Mlle. de Lenclos, before taking rooms in the convent, where we have seen her.

When la veuve Scarron, reincarnated in Madame de Maintenon, was living in the grand establishment at Vaugirard, provided by the King for his two children, she is said, by local tradition, to have had her private apartment in the Marais, near where we stand. It was on the first floor of the small and shabby house at No. 7 bis Rue du Perche, and you are shown a ceiling in an upper room, that is claimed to have been painted for the great lady. It is in four sunken squares, wherein pose the four Seasons, in conventional attitudes and unconventional raiment.

Let us stop here on the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, where it meets the end of a little street with the big name of des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, given to it by the great hospital and monastery that occupied these grounds, through which this street was afterward cut, when Philippe-Auguste gathered them just within the safe-keeping of his wall. Just without that wall lay the Hôtel Barbette, in the midst of its own wide lands. On this corner, we stand just on the line of the wall, and look across Rue des Francs-Bourgeois into a court, once the Alleé aux Arbalétriers, over whose entrance is a tablet, recording the murder of Louis d'Orléans, near that spot—a scene sketched in our first chapter. That maze of courts, crowded close with ancient wooden structures, tempts us to search within it for vestiges of the outbuildings of the Hôtel Barbette. And it is worth while exploring the interior of the corner house, if only for its mediæval staircase. Coming out by the courts opening into Rue Vieille-du-Temple, we take a few steps to where it meets the southern side of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and we stand on the exact site of the Porte Barbette of the old wall.

There, on the northeastern corner of the two streets, stands a most ancient building well worth our regard. On the angle, reaching from just above its ground floor to the cornice, is hung a five-sided tourelle of singular beauty. Its heavy supporting bracket is deeply and handsomely corbelled out, and at each angle is a slim colonette, delicately carved. The division line between its two stories is defined by a fine moulding. In the first story is cut a small ogival window, under a prettily crocketed head and a flat finial. This window is iron grated, and its grim visage is softened by a flowering plant set within. The panels of the lower story are plain, and those above are decorated with a lace-like pattern, graceful and elegant, whose lines and curves carry one's eye to the cornice. The plain façade of the house in Rue Vieille-du-Temple has been degraded by modern windows, while that in the other street remains most impressive, with its gabled end. All in all, no such delightful specimen of fifteenth-century Gothic as this Barbette turret can be found in our Marais.

Yet turret and structure are not, as is often stated, any portion of the original Hôtel Barbette. That was built, at the end of the thirteenth century, by Étienne Barbette, a man of wealth and importance, the Provost of Paris under Philippe "le Bel," and his Master of the Mint. The vast enclosure of his grandiose hôtel covered all the ground, from the old wall northward to the line of the present Rues de la Perle and du Parc-Royal; and eastwardly from this Rue Vieille-du-Temple to the gardens of Saint-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, near where now runs Rue Sévigné. This ample domain sufficed for the menus plaisirs of this lucky man, and was merely his petit séjour. Under that blameless guise it served as the abode, a little more than a century later, when rebuilt after the mob had wrecked it, of Isabeau de Bavière, official wife of mad Charles VI. Leaving him to the neglect of servants and to the companionship of Odette, the Queen escaped boredom here, by her dinners and suppers, balls and fêtes; here she invented, or first introduced, the masquerades that were soon the rage of Polite Society. She amused herself with other games, too; such as statecraft, in partnership with her husband's younger brother, Louis d'Orléans. It was from the Barbette that she mismanaged the kingdom, ground down the people with intolerable taxes, pushed the marriage of her daughter Catherine with Henry V. of England, plotted the shameful Treaty of Troyes, which made France an appanage of the English crown, and gave Paris to English troops.

After her husband's death, cast aside by Burgundy and England, she found a drearier refuge in the Hôtel Saint-Paul than that to which she had condemned him there. In its corners she hid while Joan the Maid was undoing the evil work done by this shameless woman, and was bringing back to Paris the son hated by this shameless mother. All through those years she wept and moaned, witnesses have reported; left alone, as she was, with the memories of her lusts and her treasons, with the wreckage of the animal beauty, for which, and for no other quality, she had been selected as the royal consort. Seven days after she learned of the signing of the Treaty of Arras she died, "et son corps fut tant méprisé," says Brantôme, that it was thrown into a boat at the water-gate of Saint-Paul, and, after an unseemly service in Notre-Dame, was sent by night down the Seine to Saint-Denis, "ainsi ni plus ni moins qu'une simple demoiselle!"

Partly destroyed by fire and partly rebuilt, we find the Hôtel Barbette, after another hundred years and more, in the hands of the Comte de Brézé, Seneschal of Normandy. Aged, ugly, crippled, as we see him in Hugo's verse, he is pleasantly remembered for the lovely widow he left for Henri II., and for his lovely tomb left, for our joy, in the cathedral of Rouen. When his widow, Diane de Saint-Vallier, became Diane de Poictiers, Duchesse de Valentinois—an elderly siren of thirty-seven, who was yet "fort aymée et servie d'un des grands rois et valeureux du monde"—she wore always her widow's white and black, and kept to the last that whiteness of skin and purity of complexion that came, she claimed, from her only cosmetic, soap and water. Her coldness of heart had much to do with it, to our thinking. Brantôme saw her when she had come to sixty-two, and was struck by her freshness, "sans se farder," as of thirty. He adds, with his ever-green susceptibility: "C'est dommage que la terre couvre ce beau corps." This property had gone, on her husband's death, in 1561, to his and her two daughters; who profited by its vast extent and by the example set by François I. in similar jobs, to open streets through it, and divide it into parcels for selling. Those streets were named Barbette and Trois-Pavilions, the latter now renamed Elzévir. And if any remnant exists of the second Hôtel Barbette of Diane de Poictiers, it is this corner house and its lovely turret.

By way of this corner, the body of Louis d'Orléans was carried to the Church of the Blancs-Manteaux, in the street of that name just behind us. It lay till morning in the nave, and about the bier gathered royalty and nobility, all through the long November night. The church is gone, and so, too, is his chapel in the Church of the Célestins; and the monument, erected there by Louis XII. to his murdered grandfather and his martyred grandmother, has been placed in the Cathedral of Saint-Denis. The site of the Church of the Blancs-Manteaux is covered by the great central establishment of the Mont de Piété; its grounds are entirely built over; the street that took the name of the monastery, once a perilous coupe-gorge, has grown to be, not respectable, but characterless. We must be content with the phantoms of Saint Louis's white-mantled monks, strolling in their cloisters; later, grown fat and scampish, haunting the low cabarets of this mal-famed street, and rehearsing, within their own precincts, those frenzied mysteries of the mediæval stage, that led to the disbandment and the driving-out of the debauched order.

A step to the south from this street, along Rue Vieille-du-Temple, brings us to the massive entrance-doors of No. 47. Their outer surfaces are richly carved with masks and with figures; on their inner side is an excellent bas-relief representing Romulus and Remus found by the shepherd, when the wolf is giving them suck. About the court, diminutive and dainty, the walls of the small hôtel are adorned with tasteful sculptures, and laden with dials, two of the sun and two of the moon. These anomalous adornments came here through the caprice of a Director of the Royal Observatory, who once occupied the house and who wreaked his scientific humor in this odd fashion. This is the Hôtel de Hollande, a rebuilt remnant of the large mediæval mansion of Maréchal de Rieux. The street just in front of his hôtel, some authorities insist, was the scene of the assassination of the Duc d'Orléans. Reconstructed early in the seventeenth century, the carvings, sculptures, and decorations of this elegant little hôtel are excellent examples of late Renaissance. Unluckily, the bas-reliefs and paintings of the interior may no longer be seen. Beyond this outer court is a smaller court, containing an attractive structure of a later date.

This Hôtel de Hollande has borne that name since, in the reign of Louis XIV., it was the seat of the embassy representing Holland at his court. This being officially Dutch soil, at that time, we may see Racine coming through this entrance-doorway, in full wig and court costume; coming to present his son for introductions at The Hague, where the young man is to be a member of the French Embassy. We have seen the letters sent to him there by his thrifty father. There is another bit of history for us here. It was in this house that the firm "Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie" started in business in 1776, with a capital of 3,000,000 francs. The firm was composed of Caron de Beaumarchais, with the governments of France and Spain for his silent partners; the former putting in 2,000,000 francs, and the latter the other million. The business of this house—and it did a lively business while it lasted—was to supply, secretly and unknown to the English officials in Paris, arms and equipments to the American colonies.

Anne de Montmorenci, the great constable of France, in alliance, against the Huguenots, with the Guises, his near neighbors in the Marais, outfought Condé and Coligny at Saint-Denis in 1567, and died, of the wounds he got in that battle, "in his own hôtel in Rue Saint-Avoie." So says the chronicle, and it tells us further that his was the grandest mansion in the town, with most extensive grounds; far surpassing in size and magnificence the Hôtels Lamoignon and Carnavalet. It was sufficiently spacious for the large-minded John Law, who established his bank in the building two centuries later. When the crash came, and he sought more modest quarters, the State took the building for its bureaux. Now, no stone of the structure can be found, the street from which it had entrance—Saint-Avoie—is merged in that portion of Rue du Temple which crosses Rue Rambuteau, and this broad thoroughfare sweeps over the site of Montmorenci's palace and his gardens.

Turning from Rue Rambuteau into Rue du Temple, we are face to face, at No. 71, with a monumental gateway, richly carved, giving entrance to an ample court. The stately walls surrounding this court have suffered much from time, and more from man. The old façade of this wing on our left is hidden behind a paltry new frontage for shops, and on the roof of the central body before us a contemptible top story has been put. The face of the original lofty attic, above the cornice, carried pilasters in continuation of those below, and these have been brutally mutilated by a line of low windows just over the cornice. For all that, there is a majesty in the stately arcades of these lower stories, and in the unspoiled lower walls, up which climb graceful Corinthian pilasters from ground to cornice. They are similar to those of the Hôtel Lamoignon, built before this Hôtel de Saint-Aignan was transformed from a former structure by de Muet, who doubtless admired, perhaps unconsciously imitated, the best features of the earlier architecture. He has put, in this almost intact right wing, just such a stone staircase, of easy grade and no hand-rail, as that we have seen in the residence built for Diane de France.

There is hardly any history to detain us here, and the great names that once resounded in this court make only far-away echoes now. Claude de Mesme, Comte d'Avaux, a diplomat of the seventeenth century, built this hôtel. At his death, it came to the Duc de Saint-Aignan, a royal Purveyor at the head of Louis XIV.'s Council of Finance. He was a relative of Madame de Scudéry, wife of the Georges whom we have met in his sister's salon. Through his wife's influence with Saint-Aignan, Georges was presented to the King, and succeeded in obtaining a pension—useful to supplement such of his sister's earnings as came in his way. His merits, for which the royal bounty was granted, seem to have been of so momentous a literary character as to be pronounced equal to those of Corneille!

When Olivier de Clisson—Constable of France after the death of his comrade-in-arms, the mighty Duguesclin—brought back Charles VI. victorious to Paris, after crushing the revolt in Ghent under Philip van Artavelde, he found the Marais du Temple fast being reclaimed and built upon. At one corner of the Templars' former wood-yard, on a street to be named du Chaume, now merged in the southern end of Rue des Archives, opposite the end of Rue de Braque, was the fortress-home of his wife, Marguerite de Rohan, within the family enclosure. Here de Clisson made his head-quarters, giving his name to the hôtel. Its entrance, an ogival portal sunk beneath two impressive round turrets, built of different sizes through some vagary, still remains; a most impressive relic, imbedded in more recent walls.

It was de Clisson, who, quite without his consent, gave the King one of the several shocks which culminated in his madness. King and Constable had supped together in the royal apartment of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and the Constable went on his way home. Lighted by the main facts of the affair, we may easily track him. After crossing Rue Saint-Antoine and passing through one of the narrow lanes to Rue Neuve-Sainte-Catherine—now the eastern end of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois—he should have kept along this street to this new home of his. Perhaps the old soldier was not quite sure of his way, so soon after supper and the plentiful petit vin de l'hôtel Saint-Paul, for he found himself beyond his corner, up in Rue Sainte-Catherine, now Rue Sévigné; and there, in front of a baker's shop opposite the spot where now is the Carnavalet, he was set upon by a band of men led by Pierre de Craon, a crony of Louis d'Orléans. They left the tough old warrior in the baker's doorway, bleeding from many wounds, but not quite killed. The King was summoned, came hastily in scanty clothing, and it was long before he recovered from his affright. When he had rallied, he started out to punish the assailant of his favorite captain, and it was on his way to Brittany, with whose duke de Craon had taken refuge, that the King received the final blow to his reason.

The history of the Hôtel de Clisson would weary us, were it told in detail. We may jump to the year 1553, when it came to Anne d'Est, wife of François de Lorraine, Duc de Guise. He and his family were beginning to feel and to show their growing power, and he found these walls not wide enough for his swelling consequence. He bought the Hôtels de Laval and de la Roche-Guyon, whose grounds adjoined his own; so adding to his estate, while others, following the example of François I., were cutting up and selling their Paris lands. Soon the Hôtel de Guise was made up of several mansions, rebuilt and run together, within one enclosure, bounded by Rues de Paradis (now the western end of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois), du Chaume (now des Archives), des Quatre-Fils, and Vieille-du-Temple. The heirs of the last Guise, who died in 1671, sold this property at the end of the seventeenth century, and it came into the grasping hands of Madame de Soubise; bought with the savings of the French peasants, squeezed from them by Louis XIV.'s farmers of taxes, and by him poured into the lap of this lady, one of the many ladies so turning an honest penny. Her complaisant husband, François de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, began to tear down much of the old work, and to replace it by new work, in 1706. For thirty years he kept the most skilful artists and artisans of that day employed on the place within and without; and he left the Hotel de Soubise much as we find it now. To him we owe this striking cour d'honneur, square with curved ends, and framed in a colonnade of coupled columns, that leads a covered gallery from the grand entrance around to the portal of the main building. This is his façade of three stories, with pediment, its columns both composite and Corinthian. For general effect this court has no parallel in Paris.

A light elegant staircase, its ceiling delicately painted, leads to the first floor, whose rooms retain some of their mouldings, their wood-carvings, their decorated doorways and ceilings. Gone, however, are the tapestries, "the most beautiful in the world and most esteemed in Christendom, after those of the Vatican," Sauval assures us.

Vast and magnificent as was this palace, it did not suffice for the son of this prince, the Cardinal Armand Gaston de Rohan, Bishop of Strasburg, who, says Sauval, "was, in his prosperity, very insolent and blinded." On the site of the demolished Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon he built for himself the Palais Cardinal, now commonly known as the Hôtel de Strasbourg. The library, great and precious, which he there collected, together with his hôtel and his blind insolence, came to his grand-nephew, the Cardinal de Rohan of the Diamond Necklace, the last cardinal of a family of cardinals.

At his death, in 1803, desertion and emptiness came to the Hôtel de Strasbourg, as they had already come to the Hôtel de Soubise. The huge size of the buildings rendered them unfit for private residences. At length they were taken for the State by the Emperor, at the urging of Daunou, Director of the Archives of France. By the decree of March 6, 1808, those archives took for their own the Hôtel de Soubise, and the Hôtel de Strasbourg was given to the Imprimerie Impériale. No after-revolution nor any change of rulers has troubled them. As their contents grew, new structures have been added, over the gardens and on the street behind, all done in good taste, all suggesting the uses for which they are meant. The Imprimerie, entered from Rue Vieille-du-Temple, through a court containing a statue of Gutenberg, does the work for the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, for the Ministers and for the Institute. Its Bulletin des Lois, issued to all the Communes of France, carries to completion the mission meant for it when it was begun by Louis XIII., Hugo asserts.

The archives of France must be studied and may not be described. This amazing collection of manuscripts, charters, diplomas, letters, and autographs begins with the earliest day of writing and of records in France, and comes down through all the centuries. It is a spot for unhurried and unhindered browsing during long summer days.

Just in this region is to be seen, better than anywhere, an aspect of the Marais not yet seen in our historic strolling. It is the Marais of to-day and of every day, the work-a-day Marais, whose heart is here in this street of the Temple and the old street of the Temple. In them, and in the streets that cross them, are numerous mansions of a bygone time, with little to say to us in architecture, nothing at all to say to us in history or letters. Side by side with them are tall buildings and huge blocks of modern construction; new and old held and possessed by factories, warehouses, show-rooms; their upper portions given over to strange handicrafts, strangely met together. The making of syphon-tops is next door on the same floor to the wiring of feathers, as Daudet discovered. These narrow streets between the buildings, and these walled-in courts within them, are hushed all through the working-hours, save for the ceaseless muffled rumble of the machinery, and the unbroken low murmur of the human toilers, both intent on their tasks.

Suddenly at noon, these streets are all astir with an industrial, unarmed mob, and the whole quarter is given over to an insurrection, peaceful and unoffending. These workers are making their way to restaurant or rôtisserie or cabaret; some of them saunter along, taking their breakfast "sur le pouce." The men, in stained blouses, are alert, earnest, and self-respecting; the girls, direct of gaze, frank of manner, shrill of voice, wear enwrapping aprons, that fall from neck to ankle, and their hair, the glory of the French working-woman who goes hatless, is dressed with an artless art that would not dishonor a drawing-room. We can carry away with us, from these last scenes, no more captivating memory than this of the most modern woman of our Marais.

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