And, just here, it is curious to recall the fact that Goldsmith was busied, during the last months of his life, on a translation of Scarron's "Roman Comique," and his bethumbed copy was found on his desk, after his death.

Scarron was always poor and always importunate, and yet he was "a pleasant prodigy never before seen," he says of himself; rightfully claiming that he was able "to sport with misery and jest in pain." Paralyzed and still a prey to incurable torments, immovable in his armchair except for his nimble fingers, he drove his pen merrily to the making of comedies, tales, pamphlets, and the verse that, like him, was impishly awry with mockery, as if chattered by "a wilderness of monkeys." Letters, too, he wrote in this house, that give us striking glimpses of the man and of his time. In them we discover that "most terribly" was the sanctified slang then for the modern abomination "awfully." Appeals for money make up much of his correspondence, but there is never a hint of a loan in the charming letters to the "belle ange en deuil," Madame de Sévigné; in which he always assures her that she is a dangerous person, and that those who look on her without due care, grow sick upon it immediately, and are not long-lived. Mlle. de Lenclos was a favorite of his, too, and that "charmant objet, belle Ninon," came to sit for hours beside his invalid-chair. She made friends with the young wife, too, but complained that she was "trop gauche" to learn gallantry, and was "vertueuse par faiblesse." The large-minded lady frankly owns: "J'aurais voulu l'en guérir, mais elle craignait trop Dieu." For all that, the friendship then formed between the two women was never broken, and when the widow Scarron came to position and power she offered a place at court to her elder friend; an offer that was refused, for the old lady never grew old enough to change her mode of life. And there is little doubt that the younger woman often looked back with longing to those wretched days that were so happy. She said once, seeing the carp dying of surfeit in the Versailles pond: "Elles regrettent leur bourbe," suggesting that, like them, she suffered from satiety.

Years before his marriage, Scarron had lived with his sister in this same little street of "Twelve Doors," and had grown very fond of the "beau quartier des Marests." He asks: "Who can stay long from the Place Royale?" When he returned to Paris in 1654—having married in 1652, and having made a long stay in Touraine—he came back to his beloved Marais, and took a three-years' lease of this apartment. At its termination the lease was probably renewed, for it is a time-honored tradition that makes this old house the place of his death, on October 14, 1660.

Between fifty and one hundred years later—the exact date is not to be got at—the garret above was crowded with the pet dogs and cats and birds of Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, who lived in filth among them, seldom eating, never washing, always smoking. The big blond dramatist had fallen a victim to poverty and melancholy, after a short career of success on those boards which he stained with the blood of many violent deaths. He had said that, since Corneille had taken heaven for his own and Racine had seized upon earth, he could place his scenes only in hell. He was rescued, and taken from this garret, by the pension obtained through La Pompadour. That great lady was not prompted by any comprehension of the sombre power of his tragedy, but by a desire to wreak her spite against Voltaire by the exaltation of a rival.

Scarron's widow was left in poor case, with only her husband's small pension for support, and this was stopped by Colbert on the death of Anne of Austria, in 1666. That Queen-Mother had endowed an institution for poor girls and sick women, and with these "Hospitalières de la Place Royale," Madame Scarron found shelter, having sold all that she owned. In 1669 she was put in charge of the first child of the King and Madame de Montespan, and we know all the rest, to the secret marriage in 1685. Such of the buildings of the "Hospitalières" as are left now form part of the Hôpital Andral, and their old roofs and dormers and chimneys take our eye above the low wall as we turn into Rue des Tournelles. In this street is the hospital's main entrance, and through its gate we look across the garden, that stretches back to the former entrance in Impasse de Béarn; now opened only to carry out for burial the bodies of those dying in the hospital.

The line of walls along Rue des Tournelles was broken by only a few isolated houses, when François Mansart selected a site here, and put thereon his own dwelling, unpretending as the man himself, in contrast with the grand mansions he had planned for his noble and wealthy clients. This is his modest entrance-court, at No. 28 Rue des Tournelles, and behind it is the simple façade of his hôtel. This building probably formed his entire frontage, or it may have been the corps-de-logis of a more extensive structure, whose two wings reached out toward the street at Nos. 26 and 30. This number 28, whether the central or the entire body of the building, remains in perfect preservation. At Mansart's death, in 1666, it came, along with most of his property, to his sister's son, whom he had adopted, and trained to be the architect known as Jules Hardouin Mansart. He gained position and pay in the royal employ, more by this adoptive name than by his abilities. As Superintendent of Buildings under Louis XIV. he is responsible for most of the horrors of the palace of Versailles, yet the dome of the Invalides proves him to have been capable of less meretricious work.

On taking possession of his uncle's mansion, he had, as sole tenant of his spacious and inviting first floor, Mlle. Anne Lenclos, popularly christened Ninon de Lenclos, then fifty years of age. Her dwelling is the end and object of this short walk, and together with the house from which we started, and the one at which we stopped, it gives us a complete picture of the social doings of the Marais at that period. We are allowed to enter among the men with whom we have come, and we will go in, let us say, with young de Sévigné, who finds his way here frequently, from his pied-à-terre in his mother's house, as his father and his grandfather had found their way to Ninon's abode. Under the stone balcony on the court-front we step up into a goodly hall, from which rises a stone staircase, its outer end finely carved, its steps well worn by many visitors through the years. An admirable medallion looks down from the wall as we mount, and in the rooms above we find carved panels and decorated ceilings, many of them done by Lebrun and Mignard, probably for the fair tenant. They are so carefully kept that canvas covers such of them as are feared to be "trop lestes" for modern eyes, in the modest words of the ancient concierge. Mansart put an excellent façade on his garden-front, and its coupled Ionic columns, and balconies of wrought-iron railings, are all there unmutilated. But the garden, then stretching to Boulevard Beaumarchais, is now hidden under the shops that front on that boulevard.

To these rooms and this garden thronged the same men whom we have seen in the Sévigné and Scudéry salons, and these reunions were as decorous as those, and perhaps somewhat more cheerful and more natural in tone. For, while Ninon had the honor of being enrolled in the "Grand Dictionnaire des Précieuses," published in 1661, and while she had been presented at the Hôtel de Rambouillet at the early age of seventeen, she had none of the pretensions nor the ridiculosities of "Les Femmes Savantes." She was absolutely genuine, not ashamed to be natural, quite ready to laugh or to cry with her friends. These friends, drawn to her less by her beauty than by her charm, were held always by her sunny amiability, her quick sympathies, her frank camaraderie. She was the Clarisse of Mlle. de Scudéry's "Clélie;" an enjouée aimable, who never denied herself the indulgence of any caprice of head or of heart. Yet, as she laughingly confessed, while she thanked God every night for the good wits given her, she prayed every morning for better protection against the follies of her heart. It is a faithful portrait that is given in the verse of her day:

Beyond most women of that time, she was really cultivated, in the best meaning of that word; far different from the meaningless Culture with a capital, of our time. She was fond of philosophy, withal, and took turns with Plato and with Montaigne; and would speculate on the problems of life either with Church dignitaries or with the epicurean Saint-Évremond. And she captivated them all, men of all sorts, beginning with her girlish years—when she dutifully obeyed her father, who preached pleasure to her, rather than her mother, who pushed her toward a convent—through all her long life of incredibly youthful heart and body, to her amazing conquests when over sixty. A portrait of her at about this age hangs in Knole House, Sevenoaks; her hair, parted down the middle and plainly drawn back in modest fashion, her alluring eyes and her ingenuous direct smile, give her the look of a girl. Richelieu was her first admirer, Voltaire was the latest. When brought to this house, where he celebrated Ninon's ninetieth birthday in verse, young Arouet was only about twelve years old, as was told in a preceding chapter. She was charmed with the youthful genius, and, dying within a few weeks, in 1706, she left him two thousand crowns for buying his beloved books.

From five until nine in the evening, Ninon was "at home" here, up to her eighty-fourth year, in 1700. Before her visitors went away, they sat down to a simple supper, served with no parade and at small expense. Many of the guests, following the fashion of Scarron's friends and of the persistent diners-out of that day, brought their own plats. We get a glimpse of the simplicity of these suppers "à tous les Despréaux et tous les Racines," and of the homely, social ways of the bourgeoisie, in Voltaire's tiresome comedy "Le Dépositaire."

We look about these rooms, in which we are standing, and wish we might have seen Boileau and Racine here; we seem to see Molière, reading his unacted and still unnamed play, and consulting his hostess as to whether "Tartufe" will do for a title; and old Corneille, forgetting to be shy and clumsy at her side; and Scarron, wheeled in his chair, quicker in his scoffing for her quick catching of the point; and La Rochefoucauld, less of a surly and egotistic poseur in her presence, content to sparkle as a boudoir Machiavelli; and Huyghens, fresh from his discovery of the moons of Saturn, finding here a heavenly body of unwonted radiance, and setting to work to write erotic verse mixed with mathematics. The great Condé himself, proud, vain, hardest-hearted of men, melts when he meets her; broken and decrepit, he climbs out from his sedan-chair—"that wonderful fortification against bad weather and the insults of the mud," says delicious Mascarille—and approaches, hat in hand, the calèche of that other aged warrior, Ninon de Lenclos.

Through No. 23 of Boulevard Beaumarchais, which occupies the site of her garden, we come out on that broad thoroughfare, passing on our right the buildings covering the gardens that once countrified this east side of Rue des Tournelles. We cannot now search among the houses there for that one inhabited by the Abbé Prévost, some time between 1730 and 1740, while he was writing his enthralling story of "Manon Lescaut." Almost at the end of the boulevard, men are sitting about tin tables on the pavement, drinking good beer, on the very site of the gate of Saint-Antoine. Just there, outside the gate, stood Lady de Winter, pointing out to her two hired assassins her pet enemy, d'Artagnan, as he rode out on the Vincennes road, on his way to the siege of Rochelle. The gate abutted on the western side of the Bastille, and its figures, carved by Jean Goujon for decorations of a later day, may be seen in the Cluny Gardens.

Traced in the pavement of Place de la Bastille and across Rue Saint-Antoine, you may follow the outlines of such portions of the walls and towers of the great prison as are not hidden under the houses at the two corners. When you ask for your number in the omnibus office of the place, you are standing in the Bastille's inner court. Across its outer eastern ditch and connected with the wall of Charles V., was thrown a projecting bastion, the tower of which stood exactly where now rises the Column of July. At the corner of Rues Saint-Antoine and Jacques-Cœur, a tablet shows the site of the gateway that gave entrance to the outer court, which led southwardly along the line of the latter small street. By this gateway the armed mob entered on July 14, 1789. Lazy Louis XVI., hard at work on locks and other trifles at Versailles—having as yet no news from Paris—writes in his diary for that day: "Rien"! That mob had found the fortress as little capable of resistance as the throne that it overturned a while later; both proved to be but baseless fabrics of an unduly dreaded terror. Indeed, it was the power behind this prison that was stormed on that day. There were plenty of prisons in Paris, as fast and as secret as was the Bastille. This was more than a prison to these people; it gloomed over their lives as its towers gloomed over their street—a mysterious and menacing defiance, a dumb and docile doer of shady deeds, a symbol of an authority feared and hated. And so these people first tore away the tool, and then disabled the hand that had held it. It was a stirring act in the drama, though a trifle melodramatic.

"Palloy le Patriote," as he styled himself, takes the centre of the stage just here, and, like all professional patriots, in all lands and all times, he makes a good thing of his patriotism. He was the contractor for demolishing the walls and for clearing the ground of the wreckage, at a handsome price; and he doubled his wage by the sale of the materials. Some of the stones went, queerly enough, to the building of Pont de la Concorde; others of them may be seen in the walls of the house on the western corner of Boulevard Poissonière and Rue Saint-Fiacre, and of other houses in the town. With the stones not fit for these uses, and with the mortar, he made numerous models of the Bastille, which were purchased by the committees and sent as souvenirs to the chief towns of the then newly created departments. One of these models is in the Musée Carnavalet. So, too, the thrifty Palloy turned the ironwork dug out into hat and shoe buckles, and the woodwork into canes and fans and tobacco-boxes; all, at last, into coin for his patriotic pocket. The gate of one of the cells was removed, and rebuilt in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie; where it may be seen by the inmates, who care nothing for a door more or less, but never by the outsider, who would like to get in for a glimpse!

To "Palloy the Patriotic" and his gang of a thousand workingmen, rides up on his white horse, one day, the first commander of the just invented and organized National Guard—Lafayette, aptly named by Mirabeau the "Cromwell-Grandison" of his nation. He looks over the busy ground, and gives orders that the men shall receive a pint of wine and a half-franc daily; but they got neither money nor wine, both doubtless "conveyed, the wise it called," on the way, by Palloy or by other "patriots." Lafayette carried away the great key of the Bastille's great entrance-door, and sent it to George Washington by Thomas Paine, when, a few years later, Paine got out of the Luxembourg prison and out of France. It is one of the cherished relics at Mount Vernon, and not one is more impressive and more appropriate in that place, since it was the success of the American revolutionists that inspirited those who opened the Bastille.

We pass along Rue Saint-Antoine, so commonplace and sordid to-day, so crowded with history and tradition. It has seen, in its short length, pageants of royalty and nobility, the hide-and-seek of romance, the blood-letting of sharp blades, the carnage of the common people, such as no other street of any other town has known. Its memories would fill a fat volume.

The little temple of Sainte-Marie on our left, as we go—a reduced imitation of Rome's Pantheon—is a design by François Mansart, and while it has his grace of line and his other qualities, it is not a notable work. Built on the site of the Hôtel de Boissy, wherein Quélus died and his lover Henry wept, it was intended for the chapel of the "Filles de la Visitation," and their name clings to it, although it has been made over to the Protestant Church. To this convent fled Mlle. Louise de la Fayette from Louis XIII.; who, ardent in the only love and the only chase known in his platonic career, visited her here until his confessor, Vincent de Paul, showed him the scandal of a King going to a nunnery. So he had to leave her, secure under the veil and the vows of the cloister. She became Sœur, and later Mère, Angélique, of the Convent of Sainte-Madeleine, founded in 1651 by Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I., which stood on the far-away heights of Chaillot, where now is the museum of the Trocadéro. There the sister and the sweetheart of Louis XIII. lived together for many years.

A few steps farther, and we come to Rue Beautreillis; its pavement and its houses on both sides, nearly as far as Rue Charles V., covering the Cemetery of old Saint-Paul; which extended westerly toward Passage Saint-Pierre, wherein we may find the stone walls, now roofed in with wood, of the charniers. There had been a suburban cemetery outside the old wall, which was brought within city limits by the new wall, and served as the burial-ground of the prisoners who died in the Bastille. It did not so serve, as is commonly asserted, for the skeletons found in chains in the cells, when the prison was opened by righteous violence, because no such skeletons were found. "The Man in the Iron Mask" was buried in this ground, close alongside the grave of Rabelais, dug exactly one hundred and fifty years earlier. Pass through the two courts that lie in the rear of No. 17 Rue Beautreillis, and you will find yourself in a large waste garden, in one corner of which the persuasive concierge points out the grave of the "Masque-de-Fer." It may well be that she is not misled by topographical pride, for this ground was certainly a portion of the old burial-ground, and not impossibly that portion where Rabelais and "Marchioly" were laid near together. This is the prisoner's name on the Bastille's burial-register, and not far from his real name. For we know, as surely as we shall ever know, that this prisoner of State was the Count Ercolo Antonio Mattioli, Secretary of State of Charles IV., Duke of Mantua. The count had agreed to betray his trust and to sell his master's fortress of Casali to the French representative; with this in their possession, Pignerol belonging already to France, Louis XIV. and Louvois would dominate all upper Italy. Mattioli took his pay, and betrayed his paymaster; the scheme miscarried, and the schemer deserved another sort of reward. His open arrest, or execution, or any public punishment, meant exposure and scandal to the Crown and the Minister and the Ambassador of France. So he was secretly kidnapped, and became "The Man in the Iron Mask." At his death, in 1703, his face was mutilated, lest there might be recognition, even then; the walls of his cell were scraped and painted, to obliterate any marks he might have put on them; his linen and clothing and furniture were burned. Had Voltaire suspected the results of modern research, he would not have put forth his theory, in the second edition of his "Questions sur l'Encyclopédie," that this prisoner was an elder brother of Louis XIV. Yet, but for Voltaire's error, we should have lost those delightful pages of Dumas, wherein Aramis carries off from the Bastille this elder brother and rightful heir to the crown, leaving Louis XIV. in the cell, and at last replaces his puppets in their original positions.

This Cemetery of Saint-Paul, dating back to Dagobert, when the burial-grounds on the Island had become overpeopled, had its own small chapel of the same name, which had fallen out of use and into ruin. Charles V., bringing it within his enclosure of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, rebuilt and enlarged it and made it the church of the royal parish. All the daughters and the sons of France were thenceforth baptized here, and it became the favorite church of the nobility. After Louis XI.'s time, and the desertion of this quarter by royalty, the little church lost its vogue. In 1794 it was appropriated and sold as National Domain, and torn down soon after. Its site is covered by the buildings on and behind the eastern side of Rue Saint-Paul, opposite the space between Passage Saint-Paul and Rue Eginhard. This is the small street selected by Alphonse Daudet for the shop of his brocanteur Leemans, to which comes the fascinating Sephora, of "Les Rois en Exil." Daudet has overdone it in going so far for his local color; the street is a noisome alley, entered by an archway from Rue Saint-Paul, holding only two or three obscene junk-shops.

And now, passing the flamboyant Italian façade—a meretricious imitation of the front of Saint-Gervais—of the Church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, which has absorbed the name of old Saint-Paul, we reach at last the ample space where the two streets of Rivoli and of Saint-Antoine meet and so make one broad, unbroken thoroughfare through the length of the town, from the place where the Bastille was to the place now named Concorde. This grand highway has existed only since the middle of the nineteenth century. The Consulate and the First Empire had cut Rue de Rivoli along the upper edge of the Tuileries Gardens as far easterly as Rue de Rohan; from there it was prolonged, taking the line of some of the old, narrow streets and piercing through solid masses of ancient buildings, in the last years of Louis-Philippe; and was carried from the Hôtel de Ville to this point by the Second Empire. All through earlier days, the route, common and royal, from the Louvre and the Tuileries to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, the Tournelles, the Bastille, and the Arsenal, was by way of narrow Rue Saint-Honoré and its narrower continuation, Rue de la Ferronerie, thence around by Rue Saint-Denis into Rue des Lombards, and so along Rues de la Verrerie and Roi-de-Sicile to the old gate of Saint-Antoine, that stood just behind us here at the end of Rue Malher. Outside that gate was the country road leading to Vincennes, which was transformed into the city street, known to us as Rue Saint-Antoine, through the protection given by Charles V.'s new wall and by his Bastille. There had been, long before, a Rue Saint-Antoine, and it curves away here on our left, and is called Rue François-Miron, so named in honor of that Prévôt des Marchands in Henri IV.'s time, who merits remembrance as an honest, high-minded, capable administrator of his weighty office.

Thus this street of old Saint-Antoine was the thoroughfare—at first from the entrance into the town by the old gate of Saint-Antoine, and afterward from the new street of Saint-Antoine and its entrance gate farther east—to the open space behind the Hôtel de Ville, alongside Saint-Gervais, and so to the bridges and the Palace on the Island. It was a street "marvellously rich" in shops, having no rival except in Rue Saint-Denis. Its shopkeepers shouted, from their doors or from the pavement in front, the merits of their wares to the throng swarming always along. Their wares were worthy of the city that, with its fast-growing population, equalled Venice herself in wealth, display, and splendor, if we may trust the word of an exultant scribbling citizen of the Paris of Charles V.

So, too, it was the grand highway for royal entries, for troops, for ambassadors with their trains, for any parade that demanded display and attracted spectators. Such an array came along here on August 26, 1660, when young Louis XIV. brought into his town his young bride, Maria Theresa of Spain, each of them being just twenty-two years old. It was the showiest pageant and the longest procession yet seen in Paris, taking ten or twelve hours to pass. The bride—a slight, pretty, girlish figure, in white satin and pearls, and a violet mantle of velvet—leaned back on the crimson velvet of her huge gilded chariot; at her right on horseback was the King, in cloth-of-gold and black lace, his collars and ruffles of white point. In the resplendent retinue nothing so blazed as the superb empty coach of the Cardinal-Minister Mazarin, its panels painted by Lebrun, drawn by the famous mules and escorted by the Mousquetaires. Less than a year later Mazarin was carried through Paris in his hearse, caring no more for mules or any tomfoolery.

The procession had entered the town under Claude Perrault's triumphal arch at the end of the Vincennes Avenue, and through Porte Saint-Antoine, cleaned up and sculptured afresh for this day, and so by new Rue Saint-Antoine, along this present Rue François-Miron. It was packed with spectators, among whom was La Fontaine, who sent a long rhymed description of the show to his patron, Fouquet, not omitting mention of the cardinal's mules. These, too, were spoken of with fitting praise in a letter written to a friend by young Madame Scarron—to be a widow, within a few weeks—who was also in the throng. Years after, she confessed to the credulous King that on that day she had first seen him and first loved him, and that she had never ceased to love him since! We may not consider the Duchess of Orleans unduly prejudiced when she refers to Madame de Maintenon as "that hussy."

At No. 88 Rue François-Miron you may see an excellent balcony of that period, solidly and richly wrought in iron, supported by captivating stone dragons of fantastic design. There were similar balconies on the front of the great mansion at No. 68—which was then No. 62—but of these only a small one is still left over the portal. They were all crowded with a most select mob of the elect on the day of this procession. There was Anne of Austria, in her black mantle, looking down on her son, her thoughts turning back to her own bridal procession over the same route, and her own youthful blond beauty of forty-five years before. By her side sat Henrietta of France, widow of Charles I., and her daughter, Henrietta Anne of England. The girl may have gazed with curiosity on the over-dressed fop riding at the bride's left wheel. This was Philippe d'Orléans, who was to be her husband, and was, through his complacent creatures, to poison her within ten years from this day. In another balcony sat Mazarin, too ill to take part in the procession.

The hostess of these great ladies was one Catherine Bellier, wife of Pierre de Beauvais; and this house is the Hôtel de Beauvais. The husband had been a pedlar or a shopkeeper, and had amassed sufficient wealth from ribbons to enable him to buy his title. The wife had served as first femme-de-chambre to Anne of Austria, and had so learned many secrets of that queer court, of its Queen-Mother, and of her Cardinal. In that court there was no more unscrupulous creature than this Catherine Bellier. The deliciously outspoken Duchess of Orleans—the second wife of that Philippe we have just seen—describes this woman as one-eyed and hideous, of profligate life, and apt in all intrigue. To the day of her death she loved to appear in flamboyant costumes at the court, where she was treated with distinction because of what she knew. Anne of Austria gave her the stone for the construction of this hôtel, and she used to visit her waiting-woman and confidente here. A popular verse of the day ran:

The design of the Hôtel de Beauvais, by Antoine Lepautre, is most daring and original in its great interior oval court, embellished with pilasters that are topped with finely carved stone masks. Despite the unhallowed devotion to cleanliness which, with its whitewash, has robbed it of its former lovely bloom of age, this court remains one of the most impressive specimens of seventeenth-century domestic architecture in all Paris. From the street we pass through an ample gateway, its curved top surmounted by a great shell. The vestibule is ornamented with escutcheons, alternating with the garlanded ox-skulls of Roman-Doric decoration—mistaken by many for rams' heads, so as to make a sculptor's pun on Bellier—all admirably carved in stone. The noble staircase has Corinthian columns, and a massive stone balustrade so perfectly pierced into fine lines of intertwisted tracery as to give delicacy to it, thick and broad as it is. Cut in stone escutcheons in the ceiling of this stairway are the intertwined initials of the brand-new nobility that built it. The grand salons of the first floor have been partitioned off into small rooms for trade purposes. No character of any sort has been left to the interior.

The ground on which we tread here, while a portion of the Marais of old Paris, is not the Marais of modern Paris, as it is commonly designated. Yet this region toward the river, built on during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after the opening up of the grounds of the Hôtel Saint-Paul and the cutting of streets through them, holds enticements in architecture and in story that tempt us to turn our backs for a while on our own Marais.

Many of the streets here remain unmodernized and unspoiled, and here are hôtels as perfectly preserved as this Hôtel de Beauvais. At No. 26 Rue Geoffroy-Lasnier we stop in delight before an entrance-door superbly carved and heavy with a glorious knocker—a lion's head holding a great ring in its mouth. Above this door we read: "Hôtel de Châlons, 1625, et de Luxembourg, 1659." The small court within, diminished by modern stables on one side, retains on its other side an ancient iron fountain. The façade of the miniature hôtel giving on this court is in well-balanced stone and brick; its shapely windows are surrounded by male and female masks, and by delicate foliage twining about the monograms of the aforetime exalted owners—all elaborately carved in stone. The roof rises gracefully to its ridge, and each gable end is surmounted by a well-wrought iron finial. There is a modest garden behind, shut in and hid by the buildings about, which hide, too, the simple and attractive stateliness of that rear face of the Hôtel de Châlons. The enchanting isolation and the singular charm of this concealed corner give us the feeling that here is a bit of Bourges, gently dropped, tranquil and untroubled, into the midst of these turbulent streets.

A little farther along, at No. 32 in this street of Geoffroy-Lasnier, behind a commonplace house-front and a commonplace court, you shall find a staircase, with an iron rail below and a wooden rail above, that make a most uncommon and interesting picture.

Turning into Rue de Jouy, an altogether delightful old-time street, we pass through a monumental gateway at No. 7 into a symmetrical court. Facing us is the Hôtel d'Aumont, and it tells us more than is told by any structure hereabout of the merits of François Mansart. This front of two stories and of his own roof is faultless in proportion and dainty in adornment. He has given it the stamp of the stately days of the Grand Monarch by the four œils-de-bœuf above the perfect cornice of the second floor, two on either side of the central window. In the two corners of the court, at each angle of the building, are round-fronted stone perrons, broad and low and inviting. That on our left gives entrance to a small hall, the staircase in which carries an exquisite wrought-iron rail that lifts and lightens the stone steps. By them we mount to the chambers of the first floor, small as was the custom then, with one grand central reception-room, excellent in its proportions, its vaulted ceiling curiously carved in relief. All these rooms are, by the good taste and generous spirit of the owners of the property, kept in perfect condition, the furniture is of the period, and the painting—done by Lebrun a century later than the ceiling on which it is placed—is fresh and untarnished.

Mansart's commission for this construction came from that Duc d'Aumont who was Maréchal of France and Governor of Paris under Louis XIII. A descendant of the early fighters of old France, he seems to have been one of those favorites of fortune who, in the phrase of Beaumarchais, give themselves only the trouble to be born. At the age of ten he began his career as a colonel of cavalry, and continued it through a long line of lucky promotions in place and pay. Dying in 1704, he left this hôtel packed with furniture, paintings, bibelots, and curios, and its stables filled with the carriages he had invented; an amazing collection, requiring months for its sale by his heirs.

The hôtel is now occupied by the Pharmacie Centrale of France, to whose officials is due our gratitude for their rare and scrupulous respect for this delightful relic. Over its spacious gardens behind they have erected their immense laboratories and offices, which we may enter under the great vaulted porch at No. 21 Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyères. That once narrowest of the streets of old Paris, as quaint as its name, given it by the branch of the Hyères nunnery having its seat here, has become a broad and bustling thoroughfare. The plain rear elevation of the hôtel can be seen here from the little corner of the garden that is still kept, and kept green by the choice plants of the company. In it is a capital bust of Dorvault, physician, author, founder of the Pharmacie Centrale. This may be the very bit of garden noticed by Dr. Martin Lister, an English traveller in France at the close of the seventeenth century. He dined with the Duc d'Aumont, and records that, opening from the dining-room, was a greenhouse through which his noble host led him into the garden.

Along through the rocky ravine that bears the name of Charlemagne, and does him no honor, we pass, by way of Rue Saint-Paul, into the short street that started in life as Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul, and has now taken the name of Charles V. Here, among the ancient fronts, we are attracted by that which is numbered 12, low and wide, with two floors and dormers above. Through its entrance-door, capped by a well-carved mask that smiles stonily down on us, we may enter the court by the courtesy of the sister, who smiles sweetly. This building is occupied by the girls' school of a sisterhood, whose youthful communiantes happen to be forming in procession for a function to-day. They flutter about in innocent white, in unconscious contrast with the great lady and great criminal whom we have come to see. For this was the Hôtel d'Aubray, and its most distinguished tenant was the Marquise de Brinvilliers.

Let us look about the court and the little garden behind, both embraced by the two wings of the structure. That wing on our right, with round arches and a round tower at its end, is evidently of the original fabric and intended for stabling. This wing on our left, now extended by a new chapel, was, when built, meant to contain only this staircase, whose wide and broad stone steps and well-wrought iron balustrade mount gradually about a spacious central well. Here, resting on the bench at its foot, we may recall what is known about the strange and monstrous woman who once lived here.

She was Marie-Madeleine Dreux d'Aubray, and her father was an officer of Louis XIV., appointed Civil Lieutenant of the Châtelet Prison. He married her in 1651, when she was twenty-one, to the wealthy and dissolute Marquis de Brinvilliers, who was not a model husband. She was nothing loath, with her inborn instincts, to follow the example set by him. Among her lovers, a certain Gaudin de Sainte-Croix was much talked of; so much so that the lady's father, more powerful than her husband, and doubtless more outraged by the shameless publicity of the liaison, had Sainte-Croix taken from his daughter's carriage, as they rode together, and put into the Bastille. There his cell-mate was an Italian known only as Exili, a past-master in poisons, who boasted that he had brought to death at least one hundred and fifty men and women in Rome alone. He taught his trade to Sainte-Croix, who proved to be an apt pupil, and who continued his studies after his release. He took rooms with an apothecary in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and fitted up a laboratory. There his Marquise visited him, and was taught in her turn the use of his potions, among which the "manna of Saint-Nicholas" became her favorite.

For she took pains and showed conscience in her experiments, mainly on the patients in the hospitals, wherein she was a constant charitable worker. Thus she soon learned to dispense her poisoned wafers with scientific slowness and precision. But she was anxious that her charity should begin at home. Her father failed gradually with some obscure and unaccountable malady, and died in torment; and she nursed him tenderly to the end. There were too many in her family for her comfort, and her relatives outside had been too solicitous about her; so some sickened and some died off, she caring for all and lamenting each death. She had a sister, a Carmelite nun, who was never blinded by the round, girlish face, appealing blue eyes, and beguiling ways that bewitched so many. This woman guarded her own life and watched over others of the family. The attempts made by the marchioness on her husband's life were caused to fail, it is believed, by the attenuation of the poisons mixed for her by Sainte-Croix, who doubtless feared that he must marry the widow if he allowed her to become a widow. He himself was found dead, in 1672, in his laboratory, poisoned by the fumes of his devilish brews, through the breaking of the glass mask worn at his work. The official search among his effects discovered a casket, addressed to the marchioness at this dwelling; being opened, its contents were found to be her own ardent love-letters to him, a document detailing the doses and periods for the proper administration of the poisons, and a choice assortment of preparations of opium, antimony, sulphur. There was also a water-like liquid, unknown to chemists, which was found to kill animals instantaneously, leaving no lesions of any organ that could be traced by science. Sainte-Croix's servant made a disclosure, and the marchioness, hearing of his arrest and the finding of her package, made "confession by avoidance" by a flight to England. She slipped down these stairs, out through that doorway, and took coach around the corner for a northern port.

Colbert's brother was then Ambassador at the court of Saint James, and between them her capture was planned; she got wind of it, and fled to Liège, where she felt sure of safety in a convent. To her appears, after a while, a handsome and susceptible young abbé, who allows himself to be corrupted, and arranges for an elopement to a more congenial refuge for lovers. She climbs gayly into his carriage, his men surround it, and she is driven across the frontier into France and to the Bastille. The abbé was Desgrais, an eager police officer detailed for this duty. He returned to her room in the convent, and found scattered sheets of paper containing notes that began a confession. This confession she was forced to complete and confirm by the torture by water—repugnant to her coquetry, because it would spoil her figure; "toute mignonne et toute gracieuse," had said an adorer of her early days. She showed courage at the last, Madame de Sévigné states, in the letters that were full of the trial and execution. She was burned, having first been beheaded. "Her poor little body was thrown, after her execution, into a good large fire, and her ashes blown about by the wind; so that we may be breathing her," Sévigné writes. This took place late in the afternoon of July 16, 1676—she was just over forty-five years of age—on Place de Grève, to which she was carted in a tumbril, having stopped on the way in front of Notre-Dame, and there, on her knees on the stones—her feet bare, a rope around her neck, a consecrated lighted taper in her uplifted hand—made to confess afresh.

Turning from this street down through Rue Beautreillis, we pass the end of Rue des Lions, on whose southern side we have already found remains of the Hôtel des Lions du Roi. On its northern side is a row of plaster-fronted houses, commonplace and shabby. In one of those garrets there was living, shortly after 1830, a poor family of Jews named Félix, lately arrived from the Canton Aarau in Switzerland. Their two little girls went about the streets, singing and picking up coppers. One day in the Place Royale, among those who stopped to listen was a kindly eyed gentleman, who handed to the younger and thinner of the two pinched children a piece of silver. "That is Victor Hugo," said a woman in the crowd, as he went his way to his home in the corner. That small singer was Élisa Rachel Félix, known to us as the great Rachel.

Years after, when the world had given all that it could give to Rachel, she returned, from a voyage to Egypt in search of health, to the Place Royale to die. "It is on the way to Père-Lachaise," she said, when, in 1857, she moved into the immense and superbly furnished apartment on the first floor of No. 9, where her friends, she thought, would have ample room for her burial service. It is only a step in space from this garret to that palace. There, within a few months—although her death came at the country-seat of Victorien Sardou's father, whom she was visiting—that service was held, and from there her body was borne to Père-Lachaise.

Going down Rue du Petit-Musc, we reach the Quai des Célestins, and here on our left is the beginning of broad Boulevard Henri IV., cutting away, in its diagonal course through the grounds of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, much history and romance. Nothing is left of the gardens of the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, whose site is marked by a tablet on the corner of the street of that name, at No. 10 Rue de la Cerisaie. This tablet tells us that the hôtel was the residence of the Czar Peter the Great in 1717; the guest, during his short sojourn in Paris, of the Maréchal de Villeroy, its owner then. We prefer to go back from that visit over a hundred years to a more attractive presence in this house. This was Gabrielle d'Estrées, beloved of Henry, who—for his fondness for her and their two fine boys—would have made her his wife, and have made them his legitimate successors, if he could have had his way.

It was Sébastien Zamet who was their host in this "palais d'amour du roi." The son of a shoe-maker of Lucca, he had found his fortune in Paris, like so many of his countrymen in those days, and he built here "a true fairy palace, such as romances describe," says Saint-Simon. And here, walking in the garden after supper on the evening of April 9, 1599, the lovely Gabrielle was taken ill very suddenly. They carried her to the Hôtel de Sourdis and put her in the care of her aunt, with whom she had passed a portion of her girlhood in that mansion. It stood within the precincts of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, its entrance on Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, where now is the end of Rue Perrault. Here Gabrielle died, in agony, at six o'clock of the next morning; poisoned, say Sismondi, Michelet, and the rest, but by whose hand we shall never know. The Hôtel des Mousquetaires, that you will find at No. 4 of Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, was then in existence, and so, too, were many of these tall façades, with ancient, iron balconies that look down on the narrow winding street, then a crowded thoroughfare of old Paris. After Zamet's death his house was bought by the Duc de Lesdiguières, Marshal and later Constable of France, from whom it took its permanent name. We have already come here with Boileau to see the veteran Frondeur, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, whose last years were passed in this mansion, under the care of one niece, Madame de Lesdiguières, and comforted by another niece, Madame de Sévigné.

On the quay, off on our left, the Célestins caserne occupies a small portion of the immense grounds of the Célestins Monastery. It was a rich community, made so by the many gifts of kings, from Charles V. down, to "leurs bien aimés chapelains et serviteurs en Dieu." These pious beggars were not too proud to accept anything, and time fails to tell of the splendors of their church, which became a museum of monuments, tombs, statues, and was demolished in 1849, many of its treasures having been destroyed during the Revolution. The godly brethren are remembered in the name of the barracks and of the quay, and to some of us, it must be owned, by the delectable dish of their invention, omelette à la Célestins.

That long façade beyond, on Rue de Sully, belongs to the Arsenal, the building alone left, its spacious gardens now under streets and houses. We have come to its library with young Balzac, when he escaped from his grinding drudgery and his dreary garret in Rue Lesdiguières. We have driven here with Madame Récamier on the day before her death. The most winning memory of the place is that of Charles Nodier, an adorable man of genius, whose very defects were lovable, we are told by the elder Dumas, who loved him. Nodier and Charles Lamb were hissing, almost in the same year, each his own damned play. Many others besides Dumas loved Nodier—Royalists and Republicans, Classicists and Romanticists; and they crowded his salon here of an evening. For this was his official residence as Librarian, occupied by him from his appointment in 1823 until his death in 1844. His historic green drawing-room, where men were friendly who fought outside, and the smaller rooms of his apartment on the first floor overlooking Boulevard Morland, have been thrown into the library, and are now its reading-rooms. They have kept their old-time panelling, carvings, mouldings, but their walls, once decorated en grisaille, have been toned to a uniform delicate gray-white.

This library was begun in 1785 by the Comte d'Artois, who purchased the valuable books and manuscripts of Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d'Argenson, and of the Duc de la Vallière. Rooms in the Arsenal were arranged for this collection, and it was named the "Librairie de Monsieur;" the Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI. and of Louis XVIII., having been the last "Monsieur" in France. His library has grown to be the grandest in Paris after the Bibliothèque Nationale. It contains the original archives of the Bastille—such as were saved, when so many were scattered and destroyed at its taking—and it is especially rich in dramatic literature and in manuscripts.

Here, above our heads as we stand in Rue du Petit-Musc, is the tasteful, unspoiled side wall of the Hôtel de Lavallette, formerly the Hôtel Fieubet. It was built by the younger Mansart, on the corner of Saint-Paul's grounds, for the Chancellor of Maria Theresa, Gaspard de Fieubet, and it became a gathering-place of the writers of those days. They were courted by its owner, whose name is frequent in the letters of Madame de Sévigné, and he himself turned his hand to rhyming, at odd hours. Nearly two hundred years after he had gone, his mansion was rescued from the sugar-refiners, who had degraded it to their uses, by the Lavallette who has given it his name, and who "restored" it beyond the recognition of its great architect, could he see it now. Its façade behind the little court is overloaded with carvings, buttressed by caryatides, surmounted by campaniles; it is a debauch of sculpture, an orgy of ornamentation, under which the stately lines of the original fabric are almost lost. They are quite hidden, on one side, by a modern wing that has been thrust in on the court. All this dishonor to architecture does not trouble the boys, whose big school fills the building now, and who troop about the court in their black jackets and trousers, their wide, white collars, their big, white ties, pulling on reluctant gloves, as they line up on their unwilling way to some church function.

We pass along the quay, glancing at the homelike and homely house numbered 4, whose quiet dignity behind its court is in pleasing contrast with the place just left. Here were the home and the studio of Antoine-Louis Barye, and here he died on June 25, 1875.

On the quay at the corner of Rue Saint-Paul there stood until very lately the entire and unspoiled hôtel built for young Charles, Duc de La Vieuville, in the last days of the Valois men. It was an admirable specimen of the architecture of their time, as we may still assure ourselves by a glance at the wing that is left within the court entered from Rue Saint-Paul; a stone side wall toned to the glorified grayness of age, pierced by tall, slender windows of graceful proportions, and, above, the picturesque brick dormers of that period.

The last of the Valois women, Marguerite, had her home hard by here, and its story begins just on this spot. When Charles V., to round out and make entire his Saint-Paul estate, was taking in neighboring hôtels and outlying bits of land, he found, here where we find the Hôtel de La Vieuville, the Paris seat of the archbishops of Sens. Their palace on this corner, and its grounds extending along the river-front and back along the east side of Rue Saint-Paul, up beyond present Rue des Lions, cut out a goodly slice from this angle of the royal domain. The King took this property, giving in exchange, to the archbishop, the feudal fortress, the Hôtel d'Éstoménil, a little farther west on the river-bank, at the meeting-place of several country roads. Those roads are now the streets named Hôtel-de-Ville, Figuier, Fauconnier, de l'Ave-Maria; and where they meet stands the Hôtel de Sens, in almost the same state, as to its walls, as when they were finished by the archbishop Tristan de Salazar. This soldier-priest had rebuilt the old structure in the last years of the fifteenth and the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and it remains an authentic and authoritative document of the domestic architecture of that period. The delicate ornamentation of its façade has suffered, some few mutilations have despoiled the fabric, its gardens are built upon, their great trees are gone, yet it stands, time-stained and weather-worn, a most impressive example of that Gothic strength and beauty whose frozen lines were just beginning to melt under the fire of the upspringing Renaissance.

The noble arch of the ogival portal is, by a touch of genius, pinched forward at its topmost point, and is there sliced away, so as to make a snub-nosed protuberance that seems to lift up the whole front. Its two high-peaked bartizan turrets are a trifle heavy, as we see them hemmed in by other buildings, but their panelling and moulding plead for pardon for any slight disproportion; and the one on the corner is perfect in situation and in effect. The few windows of the front have lost their stone-crossed mullions, some broken, some bricked up. The great dormer window above, possibly of later construction, is a prediction of the loveliness that was to come to dormers, such as we see in the roofs of Rouen's Hôtel de Ville and of the château of Blois. The fine effect of the chimneys, once entirely of stone, has been marred by cheap patching. As to the rest, the oddities and irregularities of this façade are yet all in good taste and all captivating. Within the groined porch we see, across the small court, the main building meant for the archbishop's dwelling, and the solid square tower meant for defence and for watching. Its entrance-door tells, in its size and shape, the entire tale of feudal days. Away up on one angle of this tower is an imitation sentry-box, battlemented and supported by corbelled brackets. The interior of the buildings has been defaced and degraded by the base usages to which it has been subjected, yet traces are left of its past grandeur in some of the rooms and halls.