The Stones of Paris in History and Letters Volume Ii Part 4

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, Quelus--"_un des grands mignons du roy_"--lay for over a month, slowly dying of his nineteen wounds, in the Hotel 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 Sevigne--where stand new stone and brick structures--was the town house of the Comte de Monsoreau. To this house, says Brantome, 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 t.i.tle of the modern prisons, on the same site. It was a favorite resort of the wretched third Henry, that shameless compound of sensuality and superst.i.tion; and it was on his way there, at the end of Rue de la Roquette, that the vicious little lame d.u.c.h.esse 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 Prevot of the ile 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 Bateliere--where runs now the street of that name--washed down with the best of Burgundy, _la Romanee_.

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-Benoit, where the boy Francois 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 n.o.ble 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 _hotel_ of the Duc de Treville 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 Treville's head-quarters, have vanished.

The _hotel_ of his temporary enemy, Duc de La Tremouille, 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 Tremouille 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 Tremoille--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 Bethisy--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 mediaeval mansion, is a superbly carved stone mask of an old man with a once gilded beard.

It was the new Hotel La Tremouille, on the south side of the river, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, that was nearly wrecked by de Treville'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 Tremouille'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 Ca.s.sette; 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 Dechausses. A pair of these gentry, sent by Pope Paul V., had appeared in Paris in the year of the a.s.sa.s.sination 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 Ca.s.sette. 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'a.s.sas, 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 Ma.s.sacres.

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'a.s.sas and de Rennes and the Boulevard Raspail.

The narrow and untravelled lane, now become Rue Ca.s.sette, 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 fellows.h.i.+p, 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 Treville'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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Wall of the Carmelites.]

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 furnis.h.i.+ng, with a few relics of past splendor; notably, a daintily damascened sword of the time of Francois 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 pa.s.sed 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 "d.u.c.h.ess," 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 ou l'on cuit des oies_,"

between Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, has been partly cut away by Rue etienne-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 d.u.c.h.ess pa.s.s, 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, d.u.c.h.esse de Chevreuse, known as "_la Frondeuse d.u.c.h.esse_," 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 role 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 Hotel 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 s.p.a.cious, 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 role 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 Ca.s.sette, 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 Treville in command of the Guards, has left his memoirs, possibly written by another hand under his guidance. They are commonplace and coa.r.s.e, 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 Bearnais, 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 Treville'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 Hotel 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hotel de Picardie.]

To those of us who go through the short and stupid Rue de la Harpe of our Paris, it is puzzling to read of its re-echoing with the ceaseless clatter of troopers riding through. But in those old days, and up to a comparatively recent date, it was one of the important arteries of circulation between the southern side of the town and the Island; the most frequented road between the Louvre and the Luxembourg, when they were both royal residences. It started from the little open _place_, now enlarged and boasting its fountain, where Rue Monsieur-le-Prince comes out opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, and curved down to the river-bank, and to the first Pont Saint-Michel. It was the only long, unbroken thoroughfare to the west of Rue Saint-Jacques, that street leading to Pet.i.t-Pont, and so across the Island to Notre-Dame Bridge.

So Rue de la Harpe was a crowded highway, bordered by busy shops. Its western side was done wholly away with by the cutting of Boulevard Saint-Michel, and that broad boulevard has usurped the site of most of the old street; its eastern side saved only in that section along the Cluny garden.

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 Guenegaud; 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 pet.i.t 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 _soupcon_ of decency had been brought into his house by his young wife; the poor country girl of sixteen, Francoise d'Aubigne, 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 pa.s.sing 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 _chateau_, 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 Hotel de Treville, receiving the King at his own table. We prefer, rather, to hold him in memory just when Athos introduces his old comrade to the a.s.semblage 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, Eugene 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 Impa.s.se 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 Impa.s.se 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 clas.h.i.+ng relatives, is a vivid drawing of the att.i.tude, 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 Hotel 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 facade 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 friends.h.i.+p. It was this intimacy that made their home here the brightest spot in Hugo's boyish horizon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Hotel de Toulouse.]

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 Lycee Louis-le-Grand, the college of many another Frenchman who became famous in after life, notably of Moliere. These two youths saw the same buildings of the Lycee 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 College de France. It was something of a stretch for youthful legs by the roundabout way between college and home, but he plodded st.u.r.dily 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 Pet.i.ts-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 ecole 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 Moliere chapter, to save them from mutilation at the hands of the Revolutionary Patriots. On this queer a.s.semblage the boys' room looked down; their mother, from her front windows, looked down on the remains of the vast gardens of the Hotel 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 Hotel de Toulouse. While the boys sat silent, listening to the talk of their elders, Victor's eyes were busy, and they taught him that Adele 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.