Dumas lives and will never die as long as men love strength and daring, loyalty and generosity, good love-making and good fighting. He has put his own tenderness and frankness and vivacity into the real personages, whom he has reanimated and refined; and into the ideal personages, whom he has made as real as the actual historic men and women who throng his thrilling pages. His own virility and lust of life are there, too, without one prurient page in all his thousands. And he tells his delightful stories not only with charm and wit, but in clean-cut, straightforward words, with no making of phrases.

Very little of the Valois Paris is left to-day, and the searcher for the scenery familiar to Margot and to Chicot must be content with what is left of the Old Louvre, and of the then new Renaissance Louvre as it was known to the grandchildren of its builder, François I. Of the old, the outer walls and the great central tower are outlined by light stones in the darker pavement of the southwest corner of the present court. Of the new structure, as we see it, the cold and cheerless Salle des Caryatides lights up unwillingly to us with the brilliancy of the marriage festival of Marguerite de France and Henri de Navarre, as it is pictured by Dumas. This festivity followed the religious ceremony, that had taken place under the grand portal of Notre-Dame, for Henry's heresy forbade his marriage within. He and his suite strolled about the cloisters while she went in to mass. In this hall of the Caryatides his body, in customary effigy, lay in state after the assassination. There is no change in these walls since that day, except that a vaulted ceiling took the place, in 1806, of the original oaken beams, which had served for rare hangings, not of tapestries, but of men. The long corridors and square rooms above, peopled peaceably by pictures now, echoed to the rushing of frightened feet on the night of Saint Bartholomew, when Margot saved the life of her husband that was and of her lover that was to be. Hidden within the massive walls of Philippe-Auguste's building is a spiral stairway of his time, connecting the Salle des Sept Cheminées with the floor below, and beneath that with the cumbrous underground portions of his Old Louvre. As one gropes down the worn steps, around the sharp turns deep below the surface, visions appear of Valois conspiracy and of the intrigues of the Florentine Queen-Mother.

Here the wily creature had triumphed at last after waiting through weary years of humiliated wifehood; passed, such of them as Henri II. was willing to waste in Paris far from his beloved Touraine, in the old Palais des Tournelles. We shall visit, in another chapter, that residence of the early kings of France, when they had become kings of France in more than name.

After the accidental killing of Henry at the hand of Montmorency in the lists of this palace, his widow urged its immediate destruction, and this was accomplished within a few years. One portion of the site became a favorite duelling-ground, and it was here—exactly in the southeastern corner of Place des Vosges, where now nursemaids play with their charges and romping schoolboys raise the dust—that was fought, on Sunday, April 27, 1578, the duel, as famous in history as in the pages of Dumas, between the three followers of the Duc de Guise and the three mignons of Henri III. Those of the six who were not left dead on the ground were borne away desperately wounded. The instigator of the duel, Quélus—"un des grands mignons du roy"—lay for over a month, slowly dying of his nineteen wounds, in the Hôtel de Boissy, hard by in Rue Saint-Antoine, which the King had had closed to traffic with chains. By his bedside Henri spent many hours every day, offering, with sobs, 100,000 francs to the surgeon who should save him.

Not far from this house of death, in Rue Saint-Antoine too, was a little house, very much alive, for it belonged to Marguerite—Navarre only in name—to which none may follow her save the favored one to whom her latest caprice has given a nocturnal meeting. She is carried there, under cover of her closed litter, whenever her mother, never her husband, shows undue solicitude concerning her erratic career.

In the same street, on the corner of Rue Sainte-Catherine, now Sévigné—where stand new stone and brick structures—was the town house of the Comte de Monsoreau. To this house, says Brantôme, Bussy d'Amboise, done with Margot, was lured by a note written by the countess, under her husband's orders and eyes, giving her lover, Bussy, his usual rendezvous during the count's absence. This time the count was at home, with a gang of his armed men; and on this corner, on the night of August 19, 1579, the gallant was duly and thoroughly done to death, not quite so dramatically as Dumas narrates it in one of his magnificent fights.

This Rue Saint-Antoine was, in those days, hardly less of a bustling thoroughfare than in our days, albeit it was then a country road, unpaved, unlighted, bordered by great gardens with great mansions within them, or small dwellings between them. Outside Porte Saint-Antoine—that gate in the town wall alongside the Bastille where now is the end of Rue de la Bastille—on the road to Vincennes, was La Roquette, a maison-de-plaisance of the Valois kings. Hence the title of the modern prisons, on the same site. It was a favorite resort of the wretched third Henry, that shameless compound of sensuality and superstition; and it was on his way there, at the end of Rue de la Roquette, that the vicious little lame Duchesse de Montpensier had plotted to waylay him, and to cut his hair down to a tonsure with the gold scissors she carried so long at her girdle for that very use. He had had two crowns, she said—of Poland and of France—and she meant to give him a third, and make a monk of him, for the sake of her scheming brother, the Duc de Guise. The plot was betrayed, just as Dumas details, by one Nicolas Poulain, a lieutenant of the Prévôt of the Île de France, in the service of the League.

Gorenflot's priory—a vast Jacobin priory—was on the same road, just beyond the Bastille. To visit him out here came Chicot, almost as vivid a creation in our affections as d'Artagnan. Once, when the fat and esurient monk was fasting, Chicot tormented him with a description of their dinner awhile ago, near Porte Montmartre, when they had teal from the marshes of the Grange Batelière—where runs now the street of that name—washed down with the best of Burgundy, la Romanée. These two dined most frequently and most amply, at "La Corne d'Abondance"—a cabaret on the east side of Rue Saint-Jacques, opposite the cloisters and the gardens of Saint-Benoît, where the boy François Villon had lived more than a century before. Either of the two shabby, aged hotels, still left at one corner of the old street may serve for Chicot's pet eating-place. His dwelling was in Rue des Augustins, now Rue des Grands-Augustins. Where that street meets the quay of the same name, is a restaurant dear to legal and medical and lay gourmets, where those two noble diners would be enchanted to dine to-day. Near Chicot's later dwelling in Rue de Bussy—now spelt "Buci"—was the inn, "The Sword of the Brave Chevalier," which served as the meeting-place of the Forty-five Guardsmen, on their arrival in Paris. You may find, in that same street, the lineal descendant of that inn, dirty and disreputable and modernized as to name, but still haunted for us by those forty-five gallant Gascon gentlemen.

The striking change of atmosphere, from the Valois court to the regency of Marie de' Medici and the reign of the two great cardinals, is shown clearly in the pages of Dumas, with his perhaps unconscious subtlety of intuition. We greet with delight the entrance into Paris of a certain raw Gascon youth mounted on his ludicrously colored steed, and we are eager to follow him to the hôtel of the Duc de Tréville in Rue du Vieux-Colombier. This street stretches now, as then, between Place de Saint-Sulpice and Place de la Croix-Rouge, but it has been widened and wholly rebuilt, and the courtyard that bustled with armed men, and every stone of de Tréville's head-quarters, have vanished.

The hôtel of his temporary enemy, Duc de La Trémouille, always full of Huguenots, the King complained, was in Rue Saint-Dominique, at No. 63, in that eastern end cut away by Boulevard Saint-Germain. This had been the Trémouille mansion for only about a century, since the original family home had been given over to Chancellor Dubourg. Built by the founder of the family, Gui de La Trémoille—as it was then spelt—the great fighter who died in 1398, that superb specimen of fourteenth-century architecture, with additions late in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth centuries, stood at the corner of Rues des Bourdonnais and de Béthisy—two of the oldest streets on the north bank—until the piercing of Rue de Rivoli in 1844 compelled its destruction. Fragments of its fine Gothic carvings are set in the wall of the court of No. 31 Rue des Bourdonnais, a building which occupies a portion of the original site. On the front of this house is an admirable iron balcony of later date. And just above, at No. 39 of this street, over the entrance gate of the remaining wing of another mediæval mansion, is a superbly carved stone mask of an old man with a once gilded beard.

It was the new Hôtel La Trémouille, on the south side of the river, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, that was nearly wrecked by de Tréville's guardsmen, running to the rescue of d'Artagnan on that morning of his duel with Bernajoux, and of his danger from the onslaught of de La Trémouille's retainers.

That duel ought to be good enough for us, but we have a hankering for the most dramatic and delightful of all duels in fiction. To get to its ground, we may follow either of the four friends, each coming his own way, each through streets changed but slightly even yet, all four coming out together at the corner of Rues de Vaugirard and Cassette; where stands an ancient wall, its moss-covered coping overshadowed by straggling trees, through whose branches shows the roof of a chapel. It is the chapel, and about it are the grounds, of the Carmes Déchaussés. A pair of these gentry, sent by Pope Paul V., had appeared in Paris in the year of the assassination of Henri IV., and drew the devout to the little chapel they built here in the fields. The order grew rapidly in numbers and in wealth, acquiring a vast extent of ground; roughly outlined now by Rues de Vaugirard, du Regard, du Cherche-Midi and Cassette. The corner-stone of the new chapel, that which we see, was laid by the Regent Marie de' Medici on July 26, 1613. Beyond its entrance, along the street, rise modern buildings; but behind the entrance in the western end of the wall, near Rue d'Assas, stands one of the original structures of the Barefooted Carmelites. This was used for a prison during the Revolution, and no spot in all Paris shows so graphic a scene of the September Massacres. Nothing of the prison has been taken away or altered. Here are the iron bars put then in the windows of the ground floor on the garden side. At the top of that stone staircase the butchers crowded about that door; out through it came their victims, to be hurled down these same steps, clinging to this same railing; along these garden walks some of them ran, and were beaten down at the foot of yonder dark wall. This garden has not been changed since then, except that a large portion was shorn away by the cutting of Rues d'Assas and de Rennes and the Boulevard Raspail.

The narrow and untravelled lane, now become Rue Cassette, and the unfrequented thoroughfare, now Rue de Vaugirard, between the monastery and the Luxembourg Gardens—which then reached thus far—met at just such a secluded spot as was sought by duellists; and this wall, intact in its antique ruggedness, saw—so far as anybody or anything saw—the brilliant fight between five of Richelieu's henchmen, led by the keen swordsman Jussac, and Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, aided by the volunteered sword of d'Artagnan; the sword he had meant to match against each one of the three, at whose side he found himself fighting in the end. And so, cemented by much young blood, was framed that goodly fellowship, of such constancy and vitality as to control kings and outwit cardinals and confound all France, as the lover of Dumas must needs believe!

Not only the duelling ground, but many of the scenes of "The Three Musketeers" are to be looked for in this quarter, near to de Tréville's dwelling; where, too, the four friends, inseparable by day, were not far apart at night, for they lived "just around the corner," one from the other.

Athos had his rooms, "within two steps of the Luxembourg," in Rue Ferou, still having that name, still much as he saw it. Those few, whom the taciturn Grimaud allowed to enter, found tasteful furnishing, with a few relics of past splendor; notably, a daintily damascened sword of the time of François I., its jewelled hilt alone worth a fortune. The vainglorious Porthos would have given ten years of his life for that sword, but it was never sold nor pledged by Athos.

Porthos, himself, lived in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, he used to say; and he gave grandiloquent descriptions of the superb furniture and rich decorations of his apartment. Whenever he passed with a friend through this street, he would raise his head and point out the house—before which his valet, Mousqueton, was always seen strutting in full fig—and proudly announce, "That is my abode." But he never invited that friend to enter, and he was never to be found at home. So that one is led to suspect that his grand apartment is akin to his gorgeous corselet, having only a showy front and nothing behind! We know that his "fine lady," his "duchess," his "princess"—she was promoted with his swelling mood—was simply a Madame Coquenard, wife of a mean lawyer, living in Rue aux Ours. That dingy street, named from a corruption of the ancient "Rue où l'on cuit des oies," between Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, has been partly cut away by Rue Étienne-Marcel; but its tall, hide-bound, tight-fisted houses, that are left, make vivid to us those scrimped Sunday dinners, at which Porthos was famished even more than the already starved apprentices; and bring home to us his artful working on the lady's credulous infatuation, that he might get his outfit from her husband's strongbox.

The wily Aramis let his real duchess pass, with his friends, for the niece of his doctor, or for a waiting-maid. She was, indeed, a grande dame, beautiful and bold, devoted to political and personal intrigue, the finest flower of the court of that day. Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse, known as "la Frondeuse Duchesse," was the trusted friend of Anne of Austria, and the active adversary of Richelieu and of Mazarin, and exiled from Paris by each in turn. She plays as busy a rôle in history as in Dumas. The daughter of Hercule de Rohan, Duc de Montbazon, and the wife of Charles d'Albert, Duc de Luynes, and, after his death, of Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse, this zealous recruit of the Fronde naturally had her "fling" in private as well as in public life. Her Hôtel de Chevreuse et de Luynes was one of the grandest mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, as it originally stood at No. 31 Rue Saint-Dominique. The cutting of Boulevard Saint-Germain, leaving it No. 201 of that boulevard, has shorn off its two wings and its great front court. The main body, which remains, is impressive in the simple, stately dignity stamped on it by Mansart, who gave to it his own roof. Its first-floor salons and chambers, lofty and spacious, glow with the ornate mouldings and decorations of that period, mellowed by the sombre splendors of its tapestries. Much of the garden—once a rural park within city limits—has been cut away by Boulevard Raspail, but from that street one sees, over the new boundary wall, wide-spreading trees that strike a welcome note of green amid surrounding stone. The latest Bottin, with no room for romance within its covers, gives the Comtesse de Chevreuse as tenant of the house, along with other tenants, to whom she lets her upper floors.

Aramis was not a guest at that mansion, his rôle being that of her host at his own apartment; daintily furnished and adorned, in harmony with his taste and that of his frequent visitor. His comrades in the troop had infrequent privilege of admission. His apartment, on the ground floor, easy of entrance, was in Rue de Vaugirard, just east of Rue Cassette, and his windows looked out on the Luxembourg Gardens opposite. There were three small rooms, communicating, and the bedroom behind gave on a tiny garden, all his own, green and shady and well shut in from prying eyes. The whole place forms a most fitting entourage for the youthful priest who, after this episode of arms and of intrigue, was to rise so high in the Church, and who has always been, to all readers, the least congenial of the four musketeers.

To the most sympathetic of them, d'Artagnan, dearer to us than all the others, we are eager to turn. The real d'Artagnan of history, who succeeded de Tréville in command of the Guards, has left his memoirs, possibly written by another hand under his guidance. They are commonplace and coarse, broad as well as long, and leave us with no distinct portrait of the man. Our d'Artagnan, bodied forth from that ineffective sketch by the large brush that never niggled, might serve as an under-study for Henri IV.; equally brave and resourceful, equally buoyant in peril and ready in disaster; with the same guileless and ingenuous candor that covered and carried off the craftiness beneath. The Gascon, no less than the Béarnais, was master of the jaunty artlessness of an astute and artful dodgery, a fausse-bonhomie that is yet delicious and endears them both to us.

Stroll down Rue Servandoni, in its short length from Rue de Vaugirard to Rue Palatine against Saint-Sulpice Church—the architect of whose western towers, Servandoni, gave his name to this street—and you will not fail to find, among the old houses still left, one which might have sheltered d'Artagnan during his early days in de Tréville's troop. This street was then known as Rue des Fossoyeurs, and, still as narrow though not quite so dirty as in d'Artagnan's day, has been mostly rebuilt. His apartment—"a sort of garret," made up of one bedroom and a tiny room in which Planchet slept—was at the top of a house, given as No. 12 and No. 14 in different chapters, owned by the objectionable and intrusive husband of the beloved Constance. For her sake, d'Artagnan remains in these poor rooms, and there his three friends say good-by to Paris and to him, now lieutenant of the famous troop.

"Twenty Years After" we find our friend, but slightly sobered by those years, in search of a good lodging and of a good table. He fell on both at the inn, "La Chevrette," kept by the pretty Flemish Madeleine, in Rue Tiquetonne. Once a path on the outer side of the ditch, north of the town-wall, named for Rogier Tiquetonne, or Quinquetonne, a rich baker of the fourteenth century, that narrow curved street is, still, as to most of its length, a village highway in the centre of Paris. Its tall-fronted houses rise on either hand almost as he saw them. Among them is the Hôtel de Picardie, and it is out of reason to doubt that d'Artagnan, in memory of Planchet—for Planchet came from Picardy—was attracted by the name and made search therein for suitable rooms. Or, it may please our fancy to believe that this inn bore then the sign of The Kid, and that the kindly hostess changed its name, later, in memory of Planchet, grown prosperous and rich.

D'Artagnan, mounting still higher in rank and income while here, went down lower in the inn; and one fine morning said to his landlady: "Madeleine, give me your apartment on the first floor. Now that I am captain of the Royal Musketeers, I must make an appearance; nevertheless, still keep my room on the fifth story for me, one never knows what may happen!"

Good Master Planchet, sometime valet, and lifelong friend of the great d'Artagnan, turned grocer, and lived over his shop at the sign of "Le Pilon d'Or," in Rue des Lombards. This had been a street of bankers and money-dealers in the outset, and it was named, to alter De Quincey's ornate reference to another Lombard Street, after the Lombards or Milanese, who affiliated an infant commerce to the matron splendors of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. When the financial centre went westward, this street was invaded by the grocers and spice-dealers, who hold it to this day. Its narrow length is still fragrant with the descendants of the spices in which Planchet traded, and of the raisins into which d'Artagnan plunged his hands so greedily.

D'Artagnan, while living on the left bank in his early days, made his way by this street to visit his flame Lady de Winter. That dangerous adventuress is domiciled by Dumas at No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, the number of the house still the same. It is a historic house, and its story is told in our Hugo pages. Dumas was one of the frequenters of Hugo's apartment there, and made use of it and its approaches in "The Three Musketeers."

When Athos came to town, in later years, it was his custom to put up at the auberge, "Au Grand Roi Charlemagne," in Rue Guénégaud; a street bearing still its old name, but the inn has gone. So, too, has gone the sign of The Fox, in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, where he found quarters for himself and his son Bragelonne, twenty years after. He brought the youth here, to the scenes of his own youth, hoping to launch him in a like career of arms.

From there, the two went, one night, across the river to a house in the Marais, known to all the footmen and sedan-chairmen of Paris, says Dumas; a house not of a great lord or of a great lady, and where was neither dancing, dining, nor card-playing; yet it was the favorite resort of the men best worth knowing in Paris. It was the abode of "le petit Scarron." About his chair, wherein he was held helpless by his paralysis, met especially the enemies of Mazarin, the witty and lewd rhymesters of the Fronde—not one of them as witty or as lewd as was the crippled host. Yet some soupçon of decency had been brought into his house by his young wife; the poor country girl of sixteen, Françoise d'Aubigné, who accepted the puny paralytic of forty and more, rather than go into a convent. After his death she became Madame de Maintenon, and later Queen of France, by her secret marriage with Louis XIV., as old and almost as decrepit as was her first husband.

Dumas has brought Scarron to this house a few years later than history warrants, and he places the house in Rue des Tournelles, while it was really a short step from there, being at the corner of Rues des Douze-Portes and de Saint-Louis, now Rue Turenne. We shall visit it in our final stroll.

With the going of time came the loosening of the ties that held the great quartette together; yet, each passing on his own way, all were ready to reunite, at any moment, for a new deed of emprise and for the joy of countless readers. We spare ourselves the pain of seeing them at that cruel moment when they found themselves on opposing sides, blade crossing blade. We take leave of Aramis, the Bishop, deep in the intrigues dear to his plotting spirit; of Porthos, complacent in his wealth, growing more corpulent at his well-spread table; of Athos, sedate and dignified, content in the tranquil life of his beloved château, at Blois.

And d'Artagnan? Most fitting in his eyes, mayhap, would it be to take our last look at him in the height of his glory, host of the Hôtel de Tréville, receiving the King at his own table. We prefer, rather, to hold him in memory just when Athos introduces his old comrade to the assemblage at Blois, as "Monsieur le Chevalier d'Artagnan, Lieutenant of his Majesty's Musketeers, a devoted friend and one of the most excellent and brave gentlemen I have ever known."

The reading world echoes his words. In the whole range of fiction there exists no gentleman more excellent and more brave!

THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO

THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO

When Madame Hugo brought her two younger boys, Eugène and Victor, to Paris in 1808, she took a temporary lodging in Rue de Clichy, until she found an apartment with a garden, on the southern side of the Seine. In this part of the town, where gardens, such as she needed, are plentiful even yet, she sought all her future abodes. Her first home in this quarter was near the old Church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. Victor, then six years old, could never recall its exact site, after he grew up, and could not say if the house were still standing. This ground-floor apartment proved to be too small for the small family; which was soon installed, a few steps farther south, in a roomy old house within its own garden. It was a portion of the ancient Convent of the Feuillantines, left untouched by the Revolution, at Impasse des Feuillantines, No. 12—an isolated mansion in a deserted corner of southern Paris. The great garden running wild, its fine old trees, and its ruined chapel, claimed the first place in the recollections of Victor's boyhood; "a religious and beloved souvenir," he fondly regarded it.

This homely paradise has disappeared; partly invaded by the aggressive builder, and partly cut away to make room for Rue d'Ulm, called by Hugo a "big and useless street." The greater portion of the site of his house and garden is now covered by the huge buildings of one of the city schools. By a curious coincidence, at No. 12 Rue des Feuillantines—which must not be confused, as it is often confused, with the Impasse of the same name—there stands just such an old house, in the midst of just such gardens, shaded by just such old trees, as Hugo describes in the pathetic reminiscences of his youth, and as those of us remember, who saw his old home, only a few years ago.

His childish memories went back, also, to his days at school in Rue Saint-Jacques, not far from home; and to a night lit up by the illumination of all Paris, in celebration of the birth of the little King of Rome, in 1811. This was just before the sudden journey of the three to Madrid to join General Hugo. The delineation of the boy Marius, swaying between his clashing relatives, is a vivid drawing of the attitude, during these and later years, of the young Victor, leaning at times toward his Bourbonist mother, at times toward his Bonapartist father. Of that gallant soldier, whose hunt for "Fra Diavolo"—the nickname of a real outlaw—seems to belong rather to the realm of fiction than of fact, one hears but little in his son's early history. Except to send for them from Madrid, and except for his brief appearance in Paris, during the Hundred Days, General Hugo seldom saw and scarcely influenced these two younger sons during their boyhood.

Once more in Paris, and for awhile at the Feuillantines, we find the devoted mother settling herself and her sons, on the last day of the year 1813, in a roomy old building of the time of Louis XV., in Rue du Cherche-Midi. Her rooms were on the ground floor, as usual, with easy access to the health-giving garden, and the boys slept above. There was a court in front, in which, during the occupation of Paris by the Allies, were quartered a Prussian officer and forty of his men; to the disgust of the mother, and to the joy of her boys, captivated by soldierly gewgaws. The site of court and house and garden is covered by a grim military prison, in which history has been made in the closing years of the nineteenth century.

On the other side of the street, at the corner of Rue du Regard, was and is the Hôtel de Toulouse, a seventeenth-century structure, named for its former occupant, the Comte de Toulouse, son of Madame de Montespan. It was used as a prison early in the nineteenth century, and since then it has been the seat of the Conseil-de-Guerre; famous, or infamous, in our day, as the head-quarters of the Court-Martial. The wide façade on the court has no distinction, nor has the "Tribunal of Military Justice" on the first floor; to which we mount by the broad staircase at the left of the entrance-door. Above are the living-rooms of the commandant, who was a Monsieur Foucher at that time, with whose family, the Hugo family, already acquainted, formed now a lasting friendship. It was this intimacy that made their home here the brightest spot in Hugo's boyish horizon.

When Napoleon's return from Elba brought his old officers back to their allegiance, General Hugo hurried to Paris, and, before hurrying away again, placed his boys in a boarding-school—the Abbaye Cordier, in Rue Sainte-Marguerite. This was a gloomy little street, dingy with the smoke of the smiths' forges that filled it, elbowed in among equally narrow ways between the prison of the Abbaye—then standing where now runs the roadway of modern Boulevard Saint-Germain—and the Cour du Dragon. This superb relic of ancient Paris has been left untouched, and the carved dragon above its great arched entrance looks down, out of the past, on modern Rue de Rennes. Rue Sainte-Marguerite has been less lucky, for such small section of it, as remained after the cutting of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue de Rennes, is mainly rebuilt, and renamed Rue Gozlin.

A little later, Victor was advanced to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the college of many another Frenchman who became famous in after life, notably of Molière. These two youths saw the same buildings of the Lycée and studied in the same rooms; for it was demolished and rebuilt only under the Second Empire. It stood—and the new structure stands—in Rue Saint-Jacques, behind the Collége de France. It was something of a stretch for youthful legs by the roundabout way between college and home, but he plodded sturdily along, that solemn lad, taking himself and all he did as seriously then as when he became a Peer of France, and the self-elected Leader of a Cause.

In 1818 Madame Hugo and her boys came to a new home on the third floor of No. 18 Rue des Petits-Augustins, in a wing of that old abbaye of the Augustin fathers, which had given its name to the street, now Rue Bonaparte. The entrance court, on that street, of the École des Beaux-Arts, covers the site of this wing, and the school has replaced the rest of the monastery, saving, within its modern walls, only the chapel built by Queen Marguerite. In the old court and the old buildings behind, at that time, were stored tombs of French kings and historic monuments and historic bones, removed from their original grounds, as has been told in our Molière chapter, to save them from mutilation at the hands of the Revolutionary Patriots. On this queer assemblage the boys' room looked down; their mother, from her front windows, looked down on the remains of the vast gardens of the Hôtel de La Rochefoucauld, once a portion of the grounds of Marguerite, that stretched to the north of Rue Visconti, between Rues de Seine and Bonaparte. The view, so far below, could not compensate Madame Hugo for the loss of her own garden, which meant sun and air and health. She drooped and fell ill, and her only solace was the devotion of her son Victor. Whenever she was able to go out, they spent their evenings with the Foucher family, at the Hôtel de Toulouse. While the boys sat silent, listening to the talk of their elders, Victor's eyes were busy, and they taught him that Adèle Foucher was good to look upon. These two children walked, open-eyed, into love, as simply and as naturally as did Cosette and Marius; and after a brief period of storm and stress, their marriage came in due time, and they began their long and happy life together.

This Hugo home in Rue des Petits-Augustins, rising right in front of all who came along Rue des Beaux-Arts, was a familiar sight to a young Englishman, about ten years after this time. His name was William Makepeace Thackeray, and he was lodging in this latter street among other students of the Latin Quarter, and trying to make a passable artist with the material given him by nature for the making of an unsurpassable author. His way lay in front of the old abbaye, each time he went to or from the schools, or his modest restaurant. Thirion was the host of this cheap feeding-place, esteemed by art students, on the northern side of old Rue des Boucheries; of which this side and some of its buildings have been saved, while the street itself has been carried away in the wider stream of Boulevard Saint-Germain. There, at No. 160, to-day, you will find the same restaurant, under the same name on the sign, and the same rooms, swarming with students as during Thackeray's days in Paris.

In 1821, at the end of her term of three years in the abbaye, Madame Hugo took her sons and her furniture directly up Rue Bonaparte and turned into Rue des Mézières, and in its No. 10 they were soon settled in a ground floor with its garden. The great new building at No. 8 stands on the site of house and court and garden. There is left, of their day there, only the two-storied cottage on the western end of No. 6 Rue des Mézières—then No. 8—which preserves the image of the Hugo cottage, and brings back the aspect of the street as they saw it, countrified with just such cottages.

Early in their residence here, Victor was honored by a summons to visit Châteaubriand, long the literary idol of the schoolboy, who had written in his diary, when only fourteen: "I will be Châteaubriand or nothing!" For he had begun to rhyme already at the Cordier school, and in his seventeenth year he had established, in collaboration with his eldest brother, Abel, "Le Conservateur Littéraire," a bi-monthly of poetry, criticism, politics, most of it written by Victor. It lived from December, 1819, to March, 1821, and its scarce copies are prized by collectors. Now the precocious boy's ode "On the death of the Duke of Berry"—assassinated by Louvel in February, 1820, in Rue Rameau, on the southern side of Square Louvois, then the site of the opera-house—had fallen under the eye of Châteaubriand, who was reported to have dubbed him "The Sublime Child." Châteaubriand denied this utterance, in later years, but agreed to let it stand, since the phrase had become "consecrated." It was at the door of No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique, then the residence of the elder author, that the young poet knocked in those early days of his fame; and here, a little later, he was invited by the diplomat to join his Embassy to Berlin. Madame Hugo's health prevented the acceptance of this flattering offer.

While still at this home in Rue des Mézières, Victor received another honor in a call from Lamartine, the lately and loudly acclaimed author of "Les Méditations," who was then about thirty-one years of age. In a letter, written many years after, Lamartine described this first meeting: "Youth is the time for forming friendships. I love Hugo because I knew and loved him at a period of life when the heart is still expanding within the breast.... I found myself on the ground floor of an obscure house at the end of a court. There a grave, melancholy mother was industriously instructing some boys of various ages—her sons. She showed me into a low room a little apart, at the farther end of which, either reading or writing, sat a studious youth with a fine massive head, intelligent and thoughtful. This was Victor Hugo, the man whose pen can now charm or terrify the world."

The grave, melancholy mother died in the early summer of 1821, and her bereaved sons carried her body across the Place, to the Church, of Saint-Sulpice and then to the Cemetery of Mont-Parnasse. On the evening of that day of the burial, Victor returned to the cemetery, and there, overcome with grief and choked by sobs, the boy of only nineteen wandered alone for hours, recalling his mother's image and repeating her name. Seeking blindly for some comforting presence, he found his way, that same night, to the Hôtel de Toulouse, for a glimpse of Adèle Foucher. Unseen himself, he saw her dancing, all unconscious of his mother's death and his heart-breaking loss.

After weeks of wretched loneliness, young Hugo went to live, with a country cousin just come to town, on the top floor of No. 30 Rue du Dragon. This street is connected with the court of the same name by a narrow passage under the houses at the western end of the court. No. 30 is still standing, a high, shabby old building, that yet suggests its better days. In the belvedere high above the attic windows, Hugo lived the life of his Marius, keeping body and soul together on a slender income of 700 francs a year. Luckier than Marius, who could only follow Cosette and the old convict in the Luxembourg Gardens, Hugo was allowed little walks there with his adored lady, her mother always accompanying them. This chaperonage did not prevent the secret slipping of letters between the lovers' hands, and many of these have been preserved for future publication.

It was at this time that the Post-office officials held up, in their cabinet-noir, a letter from Hugo, offering the shelter of his one room, "au cinquième," to a young fellow implicated in the conspiracy of Saumur, and hiding from the royal police. Hugo makes this offer, his letter explains, in pure sympathy for a misguided young man in peril of arrest and death; his own allegiance to the throne being so established as to permit him to give this aid with no danger to himself and no discredit to his loyalty. The letter was copied, resealed, sent on its way; the copy was carried to Louis XVIII., and so moved him—not in the direction meant by his officials—that he made inquiry about its writer, and presently gave him a pension. This incident was not known to Hugo until many years after.

Among the men who visited him in this garret was Alfred de Vigny, then a captain in the Royal Guard, and dreaming only, as yet, of his "Cinq-Mars." Hugo was dreaming many dreams, too, over his work, and his brightest dream became a reality in October, 1822, when, in Saint-Sulpice's Chapel of the Virgin—the chapel from which his mother had been buried eighteen months earlier—was performed the Church part of his marriage with Adèle Foucher. The wedding banquet was given at the Hôtel de Toulouse by her father, who had been won over to this immediate marriage, despite the delay he had urged because of the youth of the bride and the poverty of the bridegroom.

The young couple, whose combined ages barely reached thirty-five, found modest quarters for awhile in Rue du Cherche-Midi, near her and his former homes, and then removed to No. 90 Rue de Vaugirard. Their abode, cut away by the piercing of that end of Rue Saint-Placide, is replaced by the new building still numbered 90 Rue de Vaugirard, near the corner of Rue de l'Abbé-Grégoire.

In this first real home of his married life, Hugo produced his "Hans d'Islande" and his "Bug Jargal"—the latter rewritten from a crude early work—by which, poor things though they were, he earned money, as well as by his poems, poured forth in ungrudging flood. In the ranks of the Classicists at first, he soon fell into line with the Romanticists, and by 1827 he was the acknowledged leader of "La Jeune France." On his marriage, he had been allotted the pension, already alluded to, of 1,500 francs yearly, by Louis XVIII., in recognition of his Royalist rhymings, and this sum was doubled in 1823.

With their growing fortune, the young couple allowed themselves more commodious quarters. These they found, early in 1828, in a house behind No. 11 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a street somewhat curtailed in its length by the cutting of Rue de Rennes, and the old No. 11 is now No. 27. A long alley, once a rural lane between bordering trees, leads to the modest house hidden away from the street. Quiet enough to-day, it was quieter then, when it was really in the Fields of Our Lady, in that quarter of the town endeared to Hugo by his several boyhood-homes.

The long, low cottage, since divided and numbered 27 and 29, still faces the street, just as when he first passed under its northern end into the lane, with his young wife. She writes, in her entrancing "Life of Victor Hugo, by a Witness": "The avenue was continued by a garden, whose laburnums touched the windows of his rooms. A lawn extended to a rustic bridge, the branches of which grew green in summer." The rustic bridge, the lawn, and the laburnums are no longer to be found, but the house is untouched, save by time and the elements. Behind those windows of the second floor, where was their apartment, was written "Marion Delorme," his strongest dramatic work, in the short time between the 1st and the 24th of June, 1829; and there he read it to invited friends, among whom sat Balzac, just then finishing, in his own painstaking way, "Les Chouans." In October of this year "Hernani" was written and put on the boards of the Comédie Française, long before reluctant censors allowed "Marion Delorme" to be played.

To these rooms came, of evenings, those brilliant young fellows and those who were bent on being brilliant, who made the vanguard of the Romanticists. Here was formed "le Cénacle," of which curious circle we shall soon see more. Here Sainte-Beuve dropped in, from his rooms a few doors off, at No. 19, now No. 37, Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs; dropped in too frequently, for the "smiling critic" came rather to smile on young Madame Hugo than for other companionship. Sometimes of an afternoon, such of the group as were walkers would start for a long stroll out to and over the low hills surrounding the southern suburbs, to see the sun set beyond the plains of Vanves and Montrouge. As they returned they would rest and quench their modest thirst in a suburban guinguette and listen to the shrill fiddling of "la mère Saguet." All this and much more is told in Hugo's verse. The town has grown around and beyond the tavern, where it stands on the southwestern corner of Rue de Vanves and Avenue du Maine, its two stories and steep roof and dormer windows all like an old village inn going to decay.

One day, late in 1828, Hugo started from his house for the prison of the Grande-Force, to visit Béranger. The simple-seeming old singer, during his nine months' imprisonment, had an "at home" every day, receiving crowds of men eminent in politics and in letters. His conviction made one of the most potent counts in the indictment of the Bourbons by the populace, two years later.

It was in this way that Hugo had opportunity to study the prison, in such quick and accurate detail, as enabled him to make that dramatic description of the escape of Thénardier; an escape made possible, at the last, by little Gavroche, fetched from his palatial lodging in the belly of the huge plaster elephant on Place de la Bastille, on the very night of his giving shelter to the two lost Thénardier boys, whom he—the heroic, pathetic, grotesque creature—didn't know to be his brothers any more than he knew he was going to rescue his father!

This prison had been the Hôtel du Roi-de-Sicile, away back in the "middling ages," and had been enlarged and renamed many times, until it came, about 1700, to Caumont, Duc de La Force, whose name clung to it until its demolition early in the Second Empire. Taken in 1754 by the Government, Necker made of it what was then considered a "model prison," to please the King, and to placate himself and the philosophers about him, righteously irate with the horrors of the Grand-Châtelet. The Terror packed its many buildings, surrounding inner courts, with political prisoners, and killed most of them in the September Massacres. Its main entrance was on the northern side of Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, near Rue Malher, recently cut. Just at the southwestern junction of those two streets, stood—men yet living have seen it—the borne (a large stone planted beside the roadway to keep wheels from contact with the bordering buildings), on which was hacked off the head of the Princesse de Lamballe, as she was led from that entrance to be "élargie," on the morning of September 3, 1792.

The landlady of the Hugo household had retired from trade with enough money to buy this quiet place, set far back from this quiet street, intending to end her days in an ideal resting-place. From the first, her smug comfort had been violated by many queer visitors, and when "Hernani" made its hit, there was a ceaseless procession of the author's noisy admirers, by night and by day, on her staircase and over her head—she had kept the ground floor for her tranquil retreat—until the maddened woman gave Monsieur Hugo "notice to quit." She liked her tenants, she hastened to say, she felt for the poor young wife in her loss of sleep, and, above all, she pitied her for having a husband "who had taken to such a dreadful trade!"

So they had to move, and late in 1830, or early in 1831, they went across the river to No. 9 Rue Jean-Goujon, where, in an isolated house surrounded by gardens, in the midst of the then deserted and desolate Champs-Élysées, they could be as noisy as they and their friends chose. Soon after coming here they took their new daughter and their last child, Adèle, to Saint-Philippe-du-Roule for her baptism, as Hugo recalled, twenty years later, at Balzac's burial service in the same church. But here, despite the fields that tempted to walks in all directions, Hugo shut himself in and shut out his friends. For he was bound, by contract with his publisher, to produce "Notre-Dame de Paris" within a few months. With his eye for effect, he put on a coarse, gray, woollen garment, reaching from neck to ankles, locked up his coats and hats, and went to work, stopping only to eat and sleep. He began his melodramatic book to the booming of the cannon of a Parisian insurrection, and he ended it in exactly five and one-half months, just as he had got to the last drop of ink in the bottle he had bought at the beginning. He thought of calling this romance "What there is in a Bottle of Ink," but gave that title to Alphonse Karr, who used it later for a collection of stories. Goethe's verdict on "Notre-Dame de Paris" must stand; it is a dull and tiresome show of marionettes.

This house has gone, that street has been rebuilt, the whole quarter has a new face and an altered aspect. After his book was finished, Hugo hurried out to see the barricades of 1832, which he has glorified in "Les Misérables." At this time, too—by way of contrast—he permits a glimpse of his undisturbed home life. It is seen by a friend, who, "ushered into a large room, furnished with simple but elegant taste, was struck with the womanly beauty of Madame Hugo, who had one of her children on her knee." When he saw the poet, sitting reading by the fireside close by, "he was vividly impressed with the resemblance of the entire scene to one of Van Dyck's finest pictures."

During the rehearsals of "Le Roi s'Amuse," in October, 1832, Hugo found time to settle himself and his family in the apartment on the second floor of No. 6 Place Royale, now Place des Vosges. We shall prowl about this historic spot when we come to explore the Marais; just now, only this apartment and this house come under our scrutiny. It was one of the earliest and grandest mansions of this grand square, and took its title of Hôtel de Guéménée when that family held possession in 1630. Ten years later one of its floors was tenanted by Marion Delorme, whose gorgeous coach with four horses drew a crowd to that south-eastern corner whenever she alighted, and whose dainty rooms drew a crowd of another sort on her evenings, so much the vogue. They were the gathering-place of the swells of her day, of dignitaries of the court and the Church, of men famous in letters and science, all attracted by the charm and wit and polish of this young woman. In his "Cinq-Mars," de Vigny brings together in her salon, among many nameless fine people, Descartes, Grotius, Corneille—fresh from his latest success, "Cinna"—and a youth of eighteen, Poquelin, afterward Molière. This is well enough, but he goes too far in his fancy for a telling picture, and drags in Milton, shy and silent. John Milton had long before passed through Paris, on his way home from Italy, and was then busy over controversial pamphlets in London. Nor can the English reader take seriously the recitation, urged on "le jeune Anglais," of passages from his "Paradise Lost"—written twenty years later—a recitation quite comprehended by this exclusively French audience. For the Delorme is moved to tears, and Georges Scudéry to censure, so shocked are his religious scruples and his poetic taste! De Vigny is surer of his stepping when on French ground, and plausibly makes Marion a spy on the conspirators, in the pay of Richelieu. At that time, during the construction of his Palais-Cardinal—now the Palais-Royal—his residence was diagonally opposite No. 6, in the northwestern corner of Place Royale. That corner has been cut through, and his house cut away, by the prolongation of Rue des Vosges along that side of the square. It has been said that the cardinal's hunting to death of Cinq-Mars was less a punishment for the conspiracy against King and State than a personal vengeance on the dandy, with a hundred pairs of boots, who had supplanted him with Mlle. Delorme. The Marais streets knew them both well. Cinq-Mars lived with his father in the family Hôtel d'Effiat, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, demolished in 1882. Marion did not pine long after his execution, but went her way gayly, until she was driven by her debts to a pretended death and a sham funeral, at which she peeped from these windows. She sank out of sight of men, and died in earnest, before she had come to forty years, in her mother's apartment in Rue de Thorigny, leaving a fortune in fine lace and not a sou in cash for her burial.

De Vigny proves his intimate acquaintance with this house, during Hugo's residence, by his use of its back entrance for the confederates of Cinq-Mars, making their way to Delorme's house, on the night of their betrayal. And Dumas makes this entrance serve for d'Artagnan in his visits to Lady de Winter and to her attractive maid.

That entrance is still in existence from Rue Saint-Antoine, by way of the Impasse—then Cul-de-sac—Guéménée, and at its end through a small gate into the court, and so by a back door into the house. Through that rear entrance crowded a squad of the National Guard, from Rue Saint-Antoine, during the street fighting of February, 1848, intending by this route to enter the square unseen, and secure it against the regular troops of Louis-Philippe. Some few among them amused themselves by mounting the stairs and invading Hugo's deserted apartment. He had gone, that day, at the head of a detachment of the royal force, not leading it against the rioters, but lending his influence as Peer of France to save, from its bayonets, the fellow-rioters of the men just then intruding on his home. They did no harm, happily, as they filed through the various rooms, and past a child's empty cradle by the side of the empty bed. It had been the cradle of the daughter, Adèle, and perhaps of the other babies, and was always cherished by Madame Hugo. In a small room in the rear, that served as Hugo's study, the leader of the band picked up some written sheets from the table, the ink hardly dry, and read them aloud. It was the manuscript of "Les Misérables," just then begun, but not finished and published until 1862, when the exile was in Guernsey.

While plodding along with that great work, Hugo put forth from this study much verse and his last plays. Here, in 1838, he wrote his final dramatic success, "Ruy Blas," and his final dramatic failure, "Les Burgraves," which ended his stage career. From here he went to his fauteuil in the Academy in 1841, the step to the seat of Peer of France, accorded him by the King within a few years. Meanwhile, his larger rooms hardly held the swelling host of his friends, and, it must be said, his flatterers. Not Marion Delorme had more, nor listened to them with a more open ear. Their poison became his food. Indeed, the men who formed "le Cénacle," in these and other salons, seemed to find their breath only in an atmosphere of mutual admiration. Each called the other "Cher Maître," and all would listen, in wistful reverence, to every utterance of the others and to the deliverance of his latest bringing-forth, vouchsafed by each in turn. While Lamartine, standing before the fireplace, turned on the pensive tune of his latest little thing in verse, Hugo gazed intent on him as on an oracle. Then Hugo would pour forth his sonorous rhymes, his voice most impressive in its grave monotone. The smaller singers next took up the song. No vulgar applause followed any recitation, but the elect, moved beyond speech, would clutch the reciter's hand, their eyes upturned to the cornice. Those not entirely voiceless with ecstasy might be heard to murmur the freshest phrases of sacramental adoration: "Cathédrale," or "Pyramide d'Égypte!"

There were certain minor chartered poseurs in the circle. There was Alfred de Vigny, "before his transfiguration," to whom might be applied Camille Desmoulins's gibe at Saint-Just: "He carries his head as if it were a sacrament." To which Saint-Just replied by the promise, that he kept, to make Camille carry his head after the fashion of Saint-Denis. There was Alfred de Musset, who had been brought first to the cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs by Paul Foucher, his schoolmate and Hugo's brother-in-law. Like his Fantasio, de Musset then "had the May upon his cheeks," and was young and gay and given to laughter; now, old at thirty, he posed as the bored and blasé prey and poet of passion.