Finally, on the Anjou Quay, we meet with one of the handsomest mansions of old Paris, that bearing the name of Lauzun, which the generous initiative of the Municipal Council has saved from destruction, the Lauzun mansion with its inimitable wainscoting, its ancient gildings, its glorious past, which is destined to become the museum of all belonging to the seventeenth century: a fine frame for a fine project.
In this old quarter of the Isle of Saint-Louis, at the confluence of the Seine's two arms, painters, writers and poets have always dwelt: George Sand, Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, Méry, Daubigny, Corot, Barye, Daumier, all lived there for a long time. In the Lauzun mansion, were held the sittings of the hashish smokers' club; and the chipped Virgin that looks from her niche at the corner of the Rue Le-Regrattier—formerly known as the street of the Headless Woman—and saw the passage of the whole Romantic Pleiad, will long continue to receive visits from lovers of old Paris.
It is from the Bourbon Quay that one of the most beautiful sights imaginable may best be obtained: a sunset over Paris.
The violet-tinted mass of Notre-Dame stands out with its superbly imposing silhouette against the purpled gold of the fiery sky. All the town dies away in a pink dust of light, whilst the broad roofs of the Louvre, the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, the pepper-box turrets of the Conciergerie, the Saint-Jacques Tower, and the campaniles of the Town Hall, all this landscape alive with history glows in the last rays of the sinking sun. The Seine flows with a surface of liquid gold.
The spectacle is sublime.
No less than the old part of the City, the left bank of the river is rich in souvenirs. There the Roman occupation left the deepest traces. We find the arenas of Lutecia, and, above all, the Thermae of Julian, saved from destruction by the taste and initiative of Du Sommerard at the moment when these grandiose ruins, which were being used as coopers' store-rooms, were about to be pulled down, involving in their fall that jewel of the fifteenth century, the marvellous Hôtel de Cluny. Quite recently, remains of Roman substructures have been discovered near the College de France, in the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Saint-Michel Boulevard; but the glory of the left bank of the river was, in particular, the University and the Sorbonne.
Little to-day is left of these old walls; but, ten years ago, the hill of Sainte-Geneviève still preserved much of its whilom picturesqueness.
There was the Rue Saint-Jacques, with its old book-sellers and seventeenth-century houses, and especially—what dread reminiscences!—the heavy-leaved gate of the Louis-le-Grand Lycée, where Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, and the future Marshal Brune had studied under the mastership of the good Abbé Berardier. I confess that the Louis-le-Grand of our boyhood was black, and gloomy enough also, with its moss-grown playgrounds, its smoky rooms, its punishment chambers up under the roof, where one was frozen in winter and stifled in summer, its punishment chambers in which tradition relates that Saint-Huruge was confined; quite near to the Saint-Jacques blind alley where Auvergne dealers sold such fine trinkets, and to the little Rue Cujas, noisy with the noise of rowdy students—but which rendered us pensive.
There was the Sorbonne, with its paved courtyard, where we used to wait, pale, feverish and anxious, for the posting of the small white notice bearing the names of those candidates for the Baccalaureat that were admitted to the vivâ voce; and we were half-dead with fear at the idea of appearing before the terrible Monsieur Bernès, while we blessed the gods to have given us as examiner the witty and indulgent Monsieur Mézières, who, at least for his part, has not grown old.
Further on, in the rear of Sainte-Barbe, we come to the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, alive and teeming with its old mansions converted into dispensaries or business premises, its petty trades, its popular dancing-rooms, and, last but not least, its celebrated École Polytechnique, dear to all Parisians, which adds its note of cheerfulness to this somewhat sombre quarter.
Quite near there is the Rue Clovis, where formerly stood the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, whose square tower still remains and makes us regret the part that has disappeared. In this Rue Clovis may be seen, crumbling to decay and half-buried under climbing plants—lichens, ivy, sage and moss—a big side of a primitive-looking wall, a fragment of the fortifications of Philippe-Auguste, the belt of stone and lofty strong towers behind which for centuries were heaped houses, palaces, colleges, churches and abbeys, huddling against one another. The church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont opens its elegant portal a few yards away from the Rue Clovis. Illustrious dead were buried there: Pascal, Racine, Boileau.
A crime was also committed in it.
On the 3rd of January 1858, the first day of the novena of Sainte-Geneviève, whose relics repose in one of the side-chapels of the church, dreadful cries were heard: "They have just murdered Monseigneur," and soon a man of haggard looks, clad in black, with blood-red hands, was seen on the Square in the grasp of some policemen who had just arrested him. It was Verger, a half-mad, interdicted priest, who had stabbed to the heart Monseigneur Sibour, Archbishop of Paris!
This charming church should be seen in the early days of January.
A sort of small religious fair is then held in front of the porch. A veritable liturgical library is there for sale, under umbrellas resembling those that used to shelter the orange-dealers: "Mary's Rose-trees," "Miracles at Lourdes," "Synopses of Novenas," "Acts of Faith," "Acts of Contrition," "Lives of the Saints," "Glorifications of the Blessed." Chaplets are sold, holy images, devotional post-cards, orthodox rituals, medals, scapularies—and unfortunately these objects have less artistic value than sentiment about them. It is a delightful Parisian tableau in one of the prettiest settings of the great town.
At the end of the Rue Clovis, is the Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, where the painter Lebrun possessed a lovely house, still standing at No. 49, over-run with ivy and honeysuckle, two or three yards distant from the Scotch college—at present the "Institution Chevallier,"—converted into a prison during the Terror, like most educational institutions. Saint-Just was conveyed thither, after being outlawed on the 9th of Thermidor; and his friends came there to fetch him at eight o'clock in the evening, as well as his colleague Couthon, who was confined in the Port-Libre (the old religious house of Port-Royal). It is easy to imagine the gendarmes, on the steep slopes of the Rue Saint-Jacques, running round the mechanical seat which the impotent Couthon feverishly worked and propelled with handles levered to the wheels, and which travelled rapidly over the hard stones, amid shouts and frightened "sectionnaires,"—easy to conjure up before one's senses the call to arms, the sound of the tocsin, under the downpour of the storm that dispersed the Robespierrian bands camped about the Town Hall, and enabled the troops of the Convention to invade the "Maison Commune" without resistance.
An hour later, Robespierre had his jaw smashed by Merda's bullet; his brother sprang through the window; Le Bas committed suicide; Saint-Just, haughty and impassible, allowed himself to be arrested in silence; Couthon, with his paralysed legs, was flung on to a rubbish heap, and then, bleeding and motionless, was dragged by the feet to the parapet of the quay. He pretended to be dead. "Let us cast him into the water," howled a multitude of fierce voices. "Excuse me, citizens," murmured Couthon, "but I am still alive." So he was reserved for the scaffold.
Behind Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, there is a nook almost unknown to Parisians: a little cloister close to the apse of the church, and containing some admirable painted glass windows by Pinaigrier, the great artist, who, in 1568, charged for the "Parable of the Guests," a three-compartment window painting, which masterpiece now adorns the chapel of the Crucifix, "92 livres 10 sols, including the leading and iron trellis."
It is one of the retreats for poetry and devotion so common in Paris, and yet ofttimes so unsuspected amid the city's noise; and one never forgets the impression produced when leaving the Latin Quarter, with its laughter and songs, and plunging suddenly into this deserted cloister full of dream and melancholy, though so close to the sunny, busy square of the Panthéon, where, on the 27th of July 1830, to the shouts of the people and the army, an actor at the Odéon Theatre, Eric Besnard, replaced once more the inscription: "To her great men the grateful mother country" on the fine temple built by Soufflot, which the Restoration had consecrated to the worship of Sainte-Geneviève.
The Panthéon is certainly the one Parisian building which has been most often baptized and re-baptized. Constructed in consequence of a vow made by Louis XV. when ill at Metz, on the gardens belonging to the original Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, the money that paid for it was derived from a portion of the funds raised by three lotteries drawn every month in Paris.
Soufflot, whose grandiose plans had been accepted, set to work in 1755. Towards 1764, the edifice began to assume shape, and the Parisians in enthusiasm admired the magnificent forms that modified the ancient outlines of their city. But cracks and fissures and sinkings-in occurred; a mad terror succeeded to the wonder: "The building will tumble, and its fall will involve a part of the old quarter of the Sorbonne," people said. Works of shoring up, embanking and strengthening were carried out. Paris breathed again; but poor Soufflot, in despair, could not survive so many tragic emotions. He died in 1781 without finishing his undertaking.
In 1791, the constituent Assembly set apart for the "Honouring of Great Men" the church primitively dedicated to Sainte-Geneviève; and Mirabeau's body was conveyed thither in triumph "to the sounds of trombone and gong, whose notes, by the intensity with which they were produced, tore the bowels and harrowed the heart," says a chronicle of the time.
The great tribune was destined to make but a short stay in the Panthéon,—this was the name given to the secularised church—for on the 27th of November 1793, at the instigation of Joseph Chénier, and after study of the documents found in the iron safe, documents that left no doubt as to "the great treason of the Count de Mirabeau," the Convention, "considering that a man cannot be great without virtue, decreed that Mirabeau's ashes should be removed from the Panthéon, and that those of Marat should be buried there." The sentence was carried out by night, and the "virtuous" Marat took the place of Mirabeau; not for long, however, since, some months later, Marat's body, "depantheonised" in its turn, was cast into the common grave of the small graveyard belonging to Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. Voltaire and Rousseau were, in their turn, triumphantly interred. Voltaire's body, after remaining all night in the ruins of the Bastille, had been brought to the Panthéon on a triumphal car, escorted by fifty girls dressed in antique style through David's care, and by the actors and actresses of the Théâtre Français in their stage dresses. The widow and daughters of the unfortunate Calas walked behind, close to the torn flag of the Bastille. In order to make this interment a never-to-be-forgotten fête, its organisers had provided for everything except for the weather. A dreadful storm descended on the heads of those composing the procession: Mérope, Lusignan, the Virgins, Brutus, and the delegates sent in the names of Politics, the Arts, and Agriculture, were wet to the skin; and, covered with mud and in wretched plight, were compelled to huddle into cabs or shelter themselves under umbrellas.
And thus it was that, on the 12th of July 1791, Voltaire made his entry into the Panthéon.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau followed him there on the 11th of October 1794; his body brought back from Ermenonville, beneath a bower of flowering shrubs, to the agreeable sounds of the "Village Seer," had passed the preceding night on the basin of the Tuileries, transformed for the occasion into an "Isle of Poplars." While yet not so popular as that of Voltaire, his triumph was "one of sensitive souls," and "the man of nature" was interred according to the rites he had himself prescribed. Later, Napoleon peopled the Panthéon with the shades of obscure senators and some few artists, admirals, and generals. Subsequently, the Second Republic made a definitive assignment of the edifice to the cult of great men; and there, on a sunny day, the 3rd of May 1885, Victor Hugo's body was brought in the humble hearse of the poor, amid the acclamations of an immense concourse of people, after spending a night of apotheosis under the Arc de Triomphe, which he had so nobly sung. Since then, Baudin, President Carnot, La Tour d'Auvergne have been buried there; and an admirable decoration, the work of our best contemporary artists, covers the vast walls of this necropolis. Puvis de Chavannes, Humbert, Henri-Lévy, Cabanel, Jean-Paul Laurens are finely represented in it; and, last of all, Edouard Detaille, surpassing himself, has, in an admirable soaring of art, created on the canvas—in Homeric proportions—a mad rush of horses and riders, the old cavaliers of the Republic and the Empire, towards the radiant image of the Motherland, with standards conquered from the enemy by their dauntless heroism.
Around the Panthéon, there used to be, and still is, a labyrinth of little streets, poor and crowded together, once inhabited by those that attended the schools, so numerous in that quarter of the Sorbonne.
The Rue des Carmes remains to us as a perfect specimen of the past, with its houses whose shaking walls support each other, its crumbling façades, its dilapidated staircases; and then, here and there, the relics of a vanished splendour, the entrance to two important colleges, to-day dwindled down into dens of misery, into lodgings of the poor. Narrow and uneven, the Rue des Carmes ascends toilingly between shops whose paint has been streaked by storms, faded by dust and wind; and yet it continues to be full of charm and poetry, this sorry-looking street, crowned at the top by the august proportions of the Panthéon, and framing at the bottom, with its two lines of dingy houses, mean hotels, and dancing-rooms, the delicate and elegant spire of Notre-Dame aloft on the horizon of the clear sky.
It was at the corner of this Rue des Carmes and the Rue des Sept-Voies, not far from Sainte-Geneviève's church, that, at seven o'clock in the evening of the 9th of March 1804, George Cadoudal sprang into the cab that was to take him to the fresh hiding-place which his friends had prepared for him in the house of Caron, the royalist perfumer of the Rue du Four-Saint-Germain. George was narrowly watched, all the Paris police being on the alert. He was recognised, and pursued by the Inspectors of the Prefecture, two of whom pounced on him at the corner of the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and the Rue de l'Observance. The one he killed with a pistol bullet in his forehead, the second he wounded. Meanwhile, the assembled crowd hindered his flight; and a hatter of the neighbourhood seized the outlaw and dragged him to the Police Station. His calmness and dignity and the wit of his replies disconcerted his adversaries. Reproached with having killed a married detective, the father of a family: "Next time have me arrested by bachelors," he retorted. After he had owned to the dagger found upon him, he was asked if the engraving on the handle were not the English hall-mark. "I cannot say," he replied, "but I can assure you that I have not had it[1] hall-marked in France."
Quite near, is the Luxembourg, both palace and prison, the Luxembourg, where Marie de Medici gave such magnificent fêtes, where Gaston d'Orléans yawned so much, and where the Grande Mademoiselle sulked, sighing for the handsome Lauzun; where also the Count de Provence so cleverly prepared, with Monsieur d'Avaray, his escape from France, on the same evening that Louis XVI. and Marie-Antoinette made such bad arrangements for the lugubrious journey that was to lead them to Varennes; the Luxembourg, whose courtyard was used as a promenade by such prisoners as the Terror crowded there; the Luxembourg, whence Camille Desmoulins wrote to his Lucile those heartrending letters that still bear the traces of tears; the Luxembourg whither, a few weeks later, Robespierre was brought as a prisoner, and where, "for want of room," Hally, the porter, refused to receive him; the Luxembourg where, after Thermidor, the artist David painted, from, his dungeon, the shady walk in which he could see his children playing at ball; the Luxembourg of Barras, of Bonaparte, of the Directory fêtes; the Luxembourg, too, of Nodier, of Saint-Beuve, of Murger, of Michelet, of the students, of the workers of Bohemia, of the songs of the worthy Nadaud and Mimi Pinson, near to Bullier's and the Lilac Closerie and also to the Observatory and the ill-omened wall "scored with bullets" where Marshal Ney fell. Everywhere, the same mingling of mirth and sorrow, of laughter and blood. The reason is that each street, each cross-road, almost each house has seen some dark procession pass by or some victorious fête celebrated.
On all these dingy walls of Paris, hands of women or of artists have contrived to put flowers or bird-cages; and no alley is so dismal that it does not harbour a little poetry and dreaming, some gillyflowers and songs.
Not far away is the Carmes prison, in the Rue de Vaugirard, at the corner of the Rue d'Assas; and there all the externals are the same as they were at the moment of the terrible massacre of 1792. At the foot of the staircase one sees still the tiled floor of the small room where, between two corridors, Maillard placed the chair and table that formed the bloody tribunal of the September slaughter; the balcony covered with climbing plants through which issued the unfortunates that were felled, stabbed with pikes, or shot in the large garden; and, at the top of the first story, on the wall bearing even now the red marks of the blood-dripping sabres used by the slayers, may be read the signatures of the fair prisoners who, day after day, in terrified anxiety, waited, each evening, for the fatal order to appear before the Tribunal: Mesdames d'Aiguillon, Terezia Cabarrus-Tallien, Joséphine de Beauharnais. At this date, Tallien, himself suspected and followed by a band of spies, prowled from eve till morn round the sinister prison in which the woman he loved was confined. One day, on his table, 17 Rue de la Perle, he found a poniard that he recognised, a gem of Spain with which Terezia's hands were familiar. It was an imperative order; and on the 7th of Thermidor this note was transmitted to him from "La Force." "The head of the police has just gone from here. He came to tell me that to-morrow I shall ascend to the Tribunal, that is, to the scaffold. It is different from the dream I had in the night: Robespierre dead and the prisons opened.... But, thanks to your signal cowardice, there will soon be no one in France capable of realising it!"
As a matter of fact, the fair Terezia, being more especially aimed at by the Committee, had been mysteriously transferred from the Carmes prison to La Force; and it was from this latter place that she sent her will and testament of vengeance and death. Then, Tallien swore to save his country; the mother country for him was the woman he worshipped. Mad with love and rage, rousing against Robespierre every rancour, terror, and hatred, he spent the night and the day of the 8th in preparing the dreadful and tragical sitting of the 9th of Thermidor, which was a merciless duel between the two sides. He appealed to Fouché, to Collot d'Herbois as to Durand-Maillane and Louchet, to Cambon as to Vadier, to Thuriot as to Legendre, to the few remaining Dantonists as to the eternal tremblers of the Marais; then, springing to the rostrum with a dagger in his hand, he threatened Robespierre, who was nervous, uneasy, distraught, from the presentiment that his power was escaping him; and, at length, after a fearful five hours' struggle, obtained the dread decree outlawing and condemning to the guillotine those who themselves for two years had been mowing down the members of the Convention.
Opposite the Luxembourg, is the Rue de Tournon, where Théroigne de Méricourt and Mademoiselle Lenormand lived; the Countess d'Houdetot dwelt at No. 12, the appearance of which has hardly changed since. If he were to come back and wander about these parts, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would again find almost intact the home of her he chiefly loved, quite near to the Rue Servandoni, a dark, damp lane lurking beneath the walls of Saint-Sulpice, where Condorcet, during the Terror, succeeded in safely hiding himself at the house of Madame Vernet, No. 15. There he terminated—under what sorry conditions!—his Tableau of the Progress of the Human Mind. His wife was living at Auteuil and there painted pastels. No industry prospered under the Terror. "Every one," says Michelet, "was in a hurry to fix on the canvas a shadow of this uncertain life." On the 6th of April, his work being finished, Condorcet dressed himself as a workman, with long beard and cap down over his eyes, a "Horace" in his hand, and in his pocket some poison, for a case of need, prepared him by Cabanis; and escaped from Madame Vernet's. All day, he roamed about the country, in the vicinity of Fontenay-aux-Roses, hoping to find with some friends, Monsieur and Madame Suard, a shelter that they refused him. He spent the night in the woods; then, on the morrow, haggard and starved, he entered a Clamart public-house. There, he made a ravenous meal, while reading his dear Horace. Being questioned and suspected, he was carried off to the district, put on an old horse and thus conducted to the prison at Bourg-la-Reine. At dawn, the gaolers, on going into his cell, stumbled over his corpse. Poison had made an end of this noble life of work, glory, and misery.
Aloft in the same quiet quarter, Saint-Sulpice rears its two unequal towers, on which Chappe planted the great arms of his aërial telegraph. It was in the fine vestry of this imposing church, which has preserved its admirable wood-carvings, that Camille Desmoulins signed the marriage register, when, on the 29th of December 1790, he married his adored Lucile Duplessis. The marriage was a veritable romance; and all Paris crowded to the gates of Saint-Sulpice to see the procession go by. The bride and bridegroom were congratulated; and cheers were given for the witnesses, whose names had already become popular; Sillery, Pétion, Mercier, and Robespierre. Then, the wedding party ascended the Rue de Condé to go and breakfast at Camille's home, No. 1 Rue du Théâtre François (to-day, No. 38 Rue de l'Odéon), on the third floor. There, on the 20th of March 1794, the day of his mother's death, he was arrested, bound like a malefactor, and thence was taken to the Luxembourg hard by. On the 5th of April, Camille was executed amid the shouts of the people who had so flattered him. Lucile followed him to the scaffold a week later! They had sworn to love each other in life and death.... The idyll finished in blood.
Round about Saint-Sulpice, one comes across the Rue Férou, the Rue Cassette, the Rue Garancière, the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, the Rue Madame, with their ancient names and provincial aspect, devout and silent quarters of monastic and semi-mysterious life, and, for this reason, full of infinite charm.
There, on all sides, are heard convent bells and liturgic sounds. The few shops that exist are austere in air and devoted to religious purposes: chasuble makers', holy image dealers', church book and jewellery sellers'. Behind long, sombre walls, shoots of verdure, the plumes of a tree joyously bursting forth remind one of large, unkempt gardens, where all grows wild, full of flowers and birds, inhabited by pious persons and old people who pray as they walk and regretfully dream of the times that are no more.
In the huge Paris, noisy and flippant, mad with sound and movement, tramways and underground railways, it is the refuge of the past, the quarter for prayer, silence, and oblivion; there still seem to live "a few dolent voices of yearnings for the past, which ring the curfew," says Chateaubriand in his Memoirs from beyond the Grave.
Old mansions are numerous.
In the Rue de Varenne alone, each portal awakes a remembrance of the most illustrious names of France's nobility: Broglie, Bourbon, Condé, Villeroy, Castries, Rohan-Chabot, Tessé, Béthune-Sully, Montmorency, Rougé, Ségur, Aubeterre, Narbonne-Pelet, &c., and some of the hosts of these aristocratic dwellings were certainly found disguised, dressed up as horse-dealers, drovers, peasants, workmen, in the Golden Cup hostelry at the corner of the Rue de Varenne, which was celebrated in the history of the Chouannerie: the heroes of Tournebut, my dear friend Lenôtre's interesting work, put up there, says the author, who, himself filled with enthusiasm, knows how to inspire his reader with the same. It was one of the meeting-places used by the sworn companions of George Cadoudal, who hid there several times; and there, too, the royalist conspirators met to complete, for Vendémiaire, Anno IV., their arrangements relative to the abduction of the Convention.
At some little distance, in the Rue Canettes, another rendezvous existed, for emigrants and chouans, in the house of the perfumer, Caron, where a famous hiding-place was used. Hyde de Neuville tells us, in his picturesque memoirs, that one needed only to slip behind the picture, serving as signboard to the perfumery—a picture overhanging the street—then to draw over one the shutter of the neighbouring chamber, for all the police Fouché employed to be tricked, in spite of searching, as they frequently did, the house through and through.
Next, we come upon the Odéon—the old Odéon—still standing on its base, in spite of the countless jests levelled at it, with its famous galleries, where, for many a long year, saunterers have gone to have a look at the last productions of contemporary literature. How often have we lingered in front of the old books or new ones, turning over the leaves, or reading between two pages yet uncut?
It was in 1873 that, under three arcades of the Odéon galleries, the most amiable of publishers, Ernest Flammarion, installed himself in partnership with Ch. Marpon; both of them indefatigable workers, benevolent and witty, they spent treasures of contrivance to get into too narrow a space all the nice, fine books they loved so well, and understood so well how to make others love.
But soon the three arcades were really inadequate; and, progressively, the untiring Flammarion spread round two sides of the big building, before starting out to conquer Paris, and to establish in the city so many bookshops. He had his faithful readers: an old book-lover of narrow purse owned to him that he had read the whole of Darwin's Origin of Species (450 pages) while standing in front of the stall!
Other customers less scrupulous have sometimes carried off the volume they had begun; but the good Flammarion is infinitely indulgent to such "absent-minded" individuals. "The desire to instruct themselves is too strong for their feelings," he murmurs by way of excuse, and, philosophically, he smiles and passes these petty larcenies to his profit and loss account.
Along the Rue de l'École-de-Médecine, passing by the Dupuytren Museum, which was formerly the refectory of the Franciscan monastery, we reach the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the cutting of which did away with so many precious relics; among others, the abode where Marat was assassinated, the Mignon College, and the Saint-Germain Abbey, the front of which opened opposite the row of old, curiously gabled houses which so far have been left alone by architects and builders. These latter heard the cries of the victims that were massacred in the September slaughters. They were lighted by the reflection of eighty-four fire-pots supplied by a certain Bourgain, the candle-maker of the quarter, in order that the families of the slaughterers and the amateurs of fine spectacles might come and contemplate the work; the shopkeepers of the quarter, who were complaisant witnesses, supplied details. These houses also saw Billaud-Varennes congratulate the "workers" and distribute wine tickets to them; and Maillard, surnamed Strike Hard, they saw leave, when his work was done, with his hands crossed behind the skirts of his long grey overcoat, and walk quietly back to his home, like a worthy clerk quitting his office, coughing the while, for he had a delicate chest.
Together with the present presbytery, they form the sole extant witnesses of that dreadful butchery.
Within a stone's throw, once there was the Passage du Commerce, where resounded the butt-ends of the guns of the sectionaries who, on the 31st of March 1794, came at daybreak to arrest Danton and conduct him to the Luxembourg; and it is easy to fancy what must have been that hour of fright and stupefaction. Arrest Danton! the Titan of the Revolution, him whose formidable eloquence had raised fourteen armies from the soil! the Danton of the 10th of August, Danton till then untouchable! It was only a few days after the arrest of Camille with his cruel wit; the Camille of the Palais-Royal, of the Lanterne, the Revolutions of France and Brabant, the Brissot unmasked; the Camille of the "Vieux Cordelier," that masterpiece of wit and courage, in which he dared to speak of clemency to Robespierre and of respect for his fellows to the ignoble Hébert! On the site of Danton's house, the tribune's statue stands to-day; we regret the house.
The Rohan courtyard (the word ought to be written Rouen, for, in the fifteenth century, the yard depended on the old mansion possessed by the Cardinal de Rouen) joins the Passage du Commerce, a few steps from the bookshop where the philanthropic Doctor Guillotin tried on a sheep the knife of his "beheading machine"; it is picturesque and curious, this Rohan courtyard, where you can still see the well of the house once inhabited by Coictier, the doctor of Louis XI.; where, too, the "mule's step" may be found, that Sorbonne doctors, who frequented this quarter, used in order to get off their steeds, and which preserved a very old wall round a garden planted with lilac and turf—alas! destroyed last year. The wall, like that of the Rue Clovis, was a fragment of Philippe-Auguste's fortification, the base of one of whose towers is still to be made out in the Passage du Commerce, No. 4, at the house of a locksmith, who has set up his forge upon it!
The houses there are old, dilapidated, and sordid, but perfect in their picturesqueness; the strangest industries flourish in them, and quite recently one might read there this characteristically Parisian advertisement, "Small hands required for flowers and feathers," beside a plate pointing out the address of the newspaper, Heaven, on the fourth floor, door to the left!
The Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie is on one side; it is the ancient Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, where Marat set up his press and printing-machine in a cellar. At No. 14, in the courtyard of an old mansion occupied by a wall-paper merchant, once stood the premises of the Théâtre-Français. The large entrance door, the staircases leading to the actors' private rooms, the slanting pit of the hall, and even the friezes are still in existence. The King's Comedians played there, on April 18th, 1689, Phèdre and the Médecin malgré lui, and performed in the same building until 1770.
The encyclopædists, d'Alembert, Diderot and his friends, used to meet opposite at the Procope coffee-house, the handsome iron balcony of which is yet subsisting, from where it was so agreeable to hobnob with the balcony of the Comedy. The Procope coffee-house, celebrated in the eighteenth century, was even more so under the Second Empire. In 1867, on the eve of the Baudin trial, Gambetta poured forth in it, to the students of the various University schools, the thunder and lightning bursts of his admirable eloquence. The great orator in 1859 lived at No. 7 Rue de Tournon, in the hotel of the Senate and the Nations, at present to be found there. His small room afforded a fine view over the roofs of Paris, and also remains as it was then.
Near the spot, at No. 1 Rue Bourbon-le-Château, on the 23rd of December 1850, two poor women were assassinated. One of them, Mademoiselle Ribault, a designer on the staff of the Petit Courrier des Dames, edited by Monsieur Thiéry, had the strength to write on a screen with a finger dipped in her own blood: "The assassin is the clerk of M. Thi...." This clerk, Laforcade, was arrested the next day.
How many delightful nooks besides, hardly known by Parisians, are to be met with on the left bank of the river!
Not all have disappeared for ever of those vast melancholy gardens, those hoary mansions buried in streets where the grass grows, and whose noble but gloomy façades would never cause one to suspect the riches they contain. Many are in the vicinity of the Hôtel des Invalides. Others are in the Rue Vanneau, the Rue Bellechasse, the Rue de Varenne, the Rue Saint-Guillaume, the Rue Bonaparte; some also in the Rue Visconti, which dark narrow lane possesses illustrious souvenirs. The famous Champmeslé, Clairon, and Adrienne Lecouvreur lived in the Ranes mansion, built on the site of the Petit-Pré-aux-Clercs, and J. Racine died there in 1697. This house, which bears the number 21, is to-day a girls' boarding-school! And last of all, at No. 17 the great Balzac established the printing-press that ruined him, and that later became the studio of Paul Delaroche. There, was played the sentimental and commercial drama whose poignant phases have been related to us so eloquently by Messieurs Hanoteaux and Vicaire.
All these houses, so pregnant with history, are still visible; yet how few Parisians are acquainted with them!
On the Voltaire Quay lived Vivant, Denon, Ingres, Alfred de Musset, Judge Perrault, Chamillard, Gluck, and Voltaire himself who died there, and whose corpse, wrapped in a dressing-gown and held up by straps, like a traveller asleep, started by night in a travelling-coach, on the 30th of May 1778, from the courtyard of Monsieur de Villette's mansion, with its entrance still in the Rue de Beaune, to be buried outside Paris at the Abbey of Scellières in Champagne.
The flat in which Voltaire passed away has not been altered, and its decoration has remained almost intact, with its wall mirrors, its painted ceilings, and its small mirrored salons contrived in the thick walls.
The Institute is not far, but for the ancient College of the Four Nations to produce its best impression, it needs a special day—an extraordinary sitting, a sensational reception, when the prettiest costumes of the most elegant Parisian dames contrast with the Academicians' green uniforms. On one side, are beauty, charm, and grace; on the other, some of the noblest intelligences, the most illustrious names in Literature, Art, and Science. It is the great intellectual banquet of France in one of the fairest sights of the Capital.
If, however, we wish for something to amuse us, something original, we must mount the endless staircases of the Institute and seek it in the attic portion of the palace, visiting the tiny chambers where formerly it was the custom to put candidates for the Prix de Rome in the competitive music examination.
Inside these closets, at which the sumptuously lodged prisoners of Fresnes-les-Rungis would grumble, on these decrepit walls, the finest talents of our modern school have left traces of their whilom presence—bars of music, verses, drawings, writings of varied nature. I confess I should not dare to reproduce, even expurgated, the inscriptions which confinement and absence from Paris streets and acquaintance have suggested to many an admirable composer of to-day. Saint-Saëns would certainly blush, Bizet's great shade would be troubled, our great and witty Massenet would surely refuse to accept the paternity of his vigorous apostrophes, and—I will be discreet; never mind—it's something very enjoyable, very funny, and quite in the character of the language.
Between the Mint and the lion-poodle of the Institute (from the shelter of which, if we are to believe his delightful Memoirs, Alexandre Dumas contributed so valiantly to the triumph of the 1830 Revolution) nestles a small, provincial-looking Square; Madame Permon, mother of the future Madame Junot, Duchess of Abrantès, lived there until the Revolution. In a small garret of the same house, at the left corner, on the third floor, Bonaparte used to lodge during his rare holidays from the École Militaire. The fine, carved wainscotings are still round the walls of the drawing-room on the ground floor, overlooking the Seine, which the Cæsar that-was-to-be used to enter and there speak of his hopes, and the marble chimney-piece is in its old place; at it he would come and dry his big patched boots that "smoked again," the talkative Madame d'Abrantès tells us. So, while dreaming, the little sub-lieutenant might, from the window, see opposite him the palace whence, for a number of years, he was to conqueringly dispose of the destinies of the dazzled world.
In front of the Institute is the Pont des Arts. There the sight is an enchanting one; the Seine—the gayest, most lively of rivers—crowded with passenger-boats, tugs, barges, and barques. The grey or blue sky is reflected in the water, and the river flows majestically between two verdure-clad quays, surmounted by book-sellers' cases, and inhabited by the most picturesque of populations.
What strange trades there are on the river sides!—watermen's barbers, dog shearers, dockmen, and sand-carters, tollmen and mattress-carders, anglers, bathmen, washerwomen; it is a separate population with its own customs, habits, and peculiar language. And what a splendid frame is round this odd little world seen from the Pont des Arts!