The Stones of Paris in History and Letters Volume I Part 8

It is no part of the province of this book to reconstruct the Paris of the Revolution, nor is there room for such reconstruction, now that M.

G. Lenotre has given us his exhaustive and admirable "Paris Revolutionnaire." Despite the destruction of so much that was worth saving of that period, there yet remain many spots for our seeing. The cyclone of those years had two centres, and one of them is fairly well preserved. It is the Cour du Commerce, to which we have already come in search of the tower and wall of Philippe-Auguste. Outside that wall, close to the Porte de Buci, there had been a tennis-court, which was extended, in 1776, into a narrow pa.s.sage, with small dwellings on each side. The old entrance of the tennis-court was kept for the northern entrance of the new pa.s.sage, and it still remains under the large house, No. 61 Rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts. The southern entrance of the pa.s.sage was in the western end of Rue des Cordeliers, now Rue de l'ecole-de-Medecine. In 1876, exactly one hundred years after the construction of this Cour du Commerce, its southern half and its southern entrance were cut away by modern Boulevard Saint-Germain, on the northern side of which a new entrance to the court was made. At the same time the houses on the northern side of Rue de l'ecole-de-Medecine were demolished, and replaced by the triangular s.p.a.ce that holds the statues of Danton and Paul Broca among its trees.

Those houses faced, across the street, whose narrowness is marked by the two curbstones, the houses, of the same age and the same style, that are left on the southern side of this section of the modern boulevard. One of the houses then destroyed had been inhabited by Georges-Jacques Danton. It stood over the entrance of the court, and his statue--a bronze of his own vigor and audacity--has been placed exactly on the spot of that entrance, exactly under his dwelling-place. The pediment of this entrance-door is now in the grounds of M. Victorien Sardou, at Marly-le-Roi. Danton's apartment, on the first floor above the _entresol_, had two _salons_ and a bedroom looking out on Rue des Cordeliers, while the dining-room and working-room had windows on the Cour du Commerce. Here in 1792 he had his wholesome, peaceful home, with his wife and their son; and to them there sometimes came his mother, or one of his sisters, for a visit.

In the _entresol_ below lived Camille Desmoulins and his wife in 1792.

The two young women were close friends, and M. Jules Claretie has given us a pretty picture of them together, in terrified suspense on that raging August 10th. Lucile Desmoulins knew, on the next day, that the mob had at least broken the windows of the Tuileries, for someone had brought her the sponges and brushes of the Queen! And on the 12th, Danton carried his wife from here to the grand _hotel_ in Place Vendome, the official residence of the new Minister of Justice. His short life in office being ended by his election to the Convention in the autumn of that year, he returned to this apartment; to which, three months after the death of his first wife in that same year, he brought a youthful bride. And here, on March 30, 1794, he was arrested. Before his own terrible tribunal his reply, to the customary formal questions as to his abode, was: "My dwelling-place will soon be in annihilation, and my name will live in the Pantheon of history." He spoke prophetically. The clouds of a century of calumny have only lately been blown away, and we can, at last, see clearly the heroic figure of this truest son of France; a "Mirabeau of the _sans-culottes_," a primitive man, unspoiled and strong, joyous in his strength, ardent yet steadfast, keen-eyed for shams, doing when others were talking, scornful of phrasemongers, and so genuine beside the petty schemers about him that they could not afford to let him live.

Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist Desmoulins had, in his queer and not unlovable composition, a craving for a hero and a clinging to a strong nature. His first idol was Mirabeau. That colossus had died on April 2, 1791, and Desmoulins had been one of the leaders in the historic funeral procession that filled the street and filed out from it four miles in length. Mont-Blanc was then the street's name, and for a few days it was called Rue Mirabeau, but soon took its present name, Chaussee-d'Antin, from the gardens of the Hotel d'Antin, through which it was cut. The present No. 42, with a new front, but otherwise unchanged, is the house of Mirabeau's death, in the front room of its second floor. Mirabeau's worthy successor in Camille's wors.h.i.+p was Danton, near whom he lived, as we have seen, and with whom he went as secretary to the Ministry of Justice. After leaving office, Camille and his wife are found in his former bachelor home in Place du Theatre-Francais, now Place de l'Odeon. The corner house there, that proclaims itself by a tablet to have been his residence, is in the wrong; and that tablet belongs by right to the house on the opposite corner, No. 2 Place de l'Odeon and No. 7 Rue Crebillon. From his end windows in this latter street, when he had lived there as a bachelor, Camille could look slantwise to the windows of an apartment at No. 22 Rue de Conde, and he looked often, attracted by a young girl at home there with her parents. There is still the balcony on the front, on which Lucile Duplessis ventured forth, a little later, to blow kisses across the street. At the religious portion of their marriage, in Saint-Sulpice on December 29, 1790, the _temoins_ of the groom were Brisson, Petion, Robespierre. The last-named had been Camille's schoolfellow and crony at Lycee Louis-le-Grand, and remained his friend as long as it seemed worth while. The wedding party went back to this apartment--on the second floor above the _entresol_--for the _diner de noces_. Everything on and about the table--it is still shown at Vervins, a village just beyond Laon--was in good taste, we may be sure, for Desmoulins was a dainty person, for all his tears over Marat; his desk, at which he wrote the fiery denunciations of "Le Vieux Cordelier," had room always for flowers. It was here that he was arrested, to go--not so bravely as he might--to prison, and then to execution with Danton, on April 5, 1794. His Lucile went to the scaffold on the 12th of the same month, convicted of having conspired against the Republic by wandering about the gardens of the Luxembourg, trying to get a glimpse of her husband's face behind his prison window. To us he is not more visible in this garden than he was to her, but in the garden of the Palais-Royal he leaps up, "a flame of fire," on July 12, 1789, showing the Parisians the way they went to the Bastille on the 14th.

In the same section with Danton and Desmoulins, and equally vivid with them in his individuality, we find Jean-Paul Marat. His apartment, where lived with him and his mistress, Simonne Evrard, his two sisters, Albertine and Catherine--all three at one in their devotion to his loathsome body--was in a house a little easterly from Danton's, on the same northern side of Rue de l'ecole-de-Medecine. It was at this house that Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday d'Armans, on July 13, 1793, presented herself as "_l'ange de l'a.s.sa.s.sination_," in Lamartine's swelling phrase. She had driven across the river, from the Hotel de la Providence. In our Dumas chapter we shall try to find her unpretending inn, and shall find only its site. In the Musee Grevin, in Paris, you may see the _baignoire_ in which Marat sat when he received Charlotte Corday and her knife--a common kitchen-knife, bought by her on the day before at a shop in the Palais-Royal. The bath is shaped like a great copper shoe, and on its narrow top, through which his head came, was a shelf for his papers.

The printing-office of Marat's "L'Ami du Peuple," succeeded in 1792 by his "Journal de la Republique Francaise," was in that noisiest corner of Paris, the Cour du Commerce. It was in that end of the long building of two low stories and attic, numbered 6 and 8, now occupied by a lithographer. After Marat's death, and that of his journal, the widow Brissot opened a modest stationer's shop and reading-room in the former printing-office, we are told by M. Sardou. It is an error that places the printing-office at the present No. 1 of the court, in the building which extended then through to No. 7 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comedie.

These two lots do, indeed, join in their rear, but Marat has no a.s.sociation with either. In Rue de l'Ancienne-Comedie, certainly, the "Friend of the People" had storage room in the cellar and an office on an upper floor, but it was in one of the tall houses on the western side of the street, just north of the old theatre.

The only claim to our attention of No. 1 Cour du Commerce--a squalid tavern which aspires to the t.i.tle of "_La Maison Boileau_"--comes from the presence of Sainte-Beuve. The great critic is said to have rented a room, under his pen-name of "Joseph Delorme," for a long time in this then cleanly _hotel-garni_, for the ostensible purpose of working in quiet, free from the importunate solicitors of all sorts who intruded on his home in Rue du Mont-Parna.s.se, No. 11.

Marat's death was frantically lamented by the rabble, that was quite unable to recognize the man's undeniable abilities and attainments, and that had made him its idolized leader because of his atrocious taste in saying in print exactly what he meant. They carried his body to the nave of the church, and later to its temporary tomb in the garden, of the Cordeliers, a step from his house. In the intervals of smiling hours spent in watching heads fall into the basket, in new Place de la Revolution, they crowded here to weep about his bedraped and beflowered bier. The remains were then placed, with due honors, in the Pantheon. Then, within two years, the same voices that had glorified him shrieked that his body and his memory should be swept into the sewer. It was the voice of the people--the voice of Deity, in all ages and in all lands, it is noisily a.s.serted.

When the Franciscan monks, who were called Cordeliers because of their knotted cord about the waist, came to Paris early in the thirteenth century, they were given a goodly tract of ground just within the Saint-Germain gate, stretching, in rough outlines, from Rues Antoine-Dubois and Monsieur-le-Prince nearly to Boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel. The church they built there was consecrated by the sainted Louis IX. in 1262, and when burned, in 1580, was rebuilt mainly by the accursed Henri III. New chapels and cloisters were added in 1672, and there were many other structures pertaining to the order within these boundaries. Of all these, only the Refectory remains to our day. The site of the church, once the largest in Paris, is covered by Place de l'ecole-de-Medecine and by a portion of the school; something of the shape and some of the stones of the old cloisters are preserved in the arched court of the Clinique; bits of the old walls separate the new laboratories, and another bit, with its strong, bull-nosed moulding, may be seen in the grounds of the water-works behind No. 11 Rue Racine, this street having been cut through the monks' precincts, so separating the Infirmary, to which this wall belonged, and that stretched nearly to the rear walls of Lycee Saint-Louis, from the greater portion of "_Le Grand Couvent de l'Observance de Saint Francois_."

Turn in at the gateway in the corner of Place de l'ecole-de-Medecine, and the Refectory stands before you, a venerable fabric of Anne of Brittany's building, with sixteenth and seventeenth century adornments, all in admirable preservation. The great hall, filled with the valuable collection of the Musee Dupuytren, attracts us as a relic of ancient architecture, and as the last existing witness of the Revolutionary nights of the Cordeliers Club. That club had its hall just across the garden alongside the Refectory, in one of the buildings of the cloisters, which, with the church, had been given over to various uses and industries. Hence the name of the club, enrolled under the leaders.h.i.+p of Danton, on whom the men of his section looked as the incarnation of the Revolution. To him Robespierre and his republic were shams, and to his club the club of the Jacobins was at first distinctly reactionary. It took but little time, in those fast-moving days, for the Cordeliers, in their turn, to be suspected for their unpatriotic moderation!

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Refectory of the Cordeliers.]

We must not leave our Cour du Commerce, without a glance at the small building on the northern corner of its entrance from Rue de l'Ancienne-Comedie. It was here that the first guillotine was set up for experiments on sheep, by Dr. Antoine Louis, Secretary of the Academy of Surgeons, and the head of a committee appointed by the National a.s.sembly on October 6, 1791. On that day a clause in the new penal code made death by decapitation the only method of execution, and the committee had powers to construct the apparatus, which was to supersede Sanson's sword. It was not a new invention, for the mediaeval executioners of Germany and Scotland had toyed with "the Maiden," but for centuries she had lost her vogue. On December 1, 1789, Dr.

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had tried to impress on the a.s.sembly the need of humane modes of execution, and had dwelt on the comfort of decapitation by his apparatus until he was laughed down. That grim body could find mirth only in a really funny subject like the cutting off of heads! After two years and more, the machine, perfected by Dr.

Louis, and popularly known as "_La Louisette_," was tried on a malefactor in the Place de Greve on April 25, 1792. Three days later the little lady received her official t.i.tle, "_La Guillotine_."

Dr. Guillotin had made his model and his experiments at his residence, still standing, with no external changes, at No. 21 Rue Croix-des-Pet.i.ts-Champs. It was already a most ancient mansion when he came here to live, and perhaps to remain until his death--in bed--in 1814. It had been known as the Hotel de Bretagne, and it is rich in personal history. To its shelter came Catherine de Lorraine, the young widow of the Duc de Montpensier, the "lame little devil" whom Henri III. longed to burn alive, for her abuse of him after the murder of her brother Guise. Within its walls, Anne of Austria's treasurer, the rich and vulgar Bertrand de la Baziniere--whom we have met on Quai Malaquais--h.o.a.rded the plunder which he would not, or dared not, spend. Louis XIV. gave him, later, lodgings in the Bastille, in that tower named Baziniere always after. In this same Hotel de Bretagne, Henrietta of France, widowed queen of England, made her temporary home in the winter of 1661, near her daughter, lately installed as "Madame," wife of the King's brother, in the Palais-Royal. Returning from England in 1665, this unhappy queen went to the last refuge of her troubled life in the convent she had founded on the heights of Chaillot. From that farther window of the first story on the right of the court, the Comte de Maulevrier, Colbert's nephew, threw himself down to his death on the pavement on Good Friday, 1706. In time the stately mansion became a _hotel-garni_, was appropriated as National Domain in the Revolution, and sold in a lottery.

"_La Guillotine_," having proved the sharpness of her tooth, was speedily promoted from Place de Greve to a larger stage in Place de la Reunion, now Place du Carrousel, and thence in May, 1793--that she might not be under the windows of the Convention--to Place de la Revolution, formerly Place de Louis XV., at present Place de la Concorde. This wide s.p.a.ce, just beyond the moat of the Tuileries gardens, had in its centre, where now is the obelisk of Luxor, a statue of the late "well-beloved," then altogether-detested, King for whom the place had been named; and a little to the east of that point the scaffold was set up. Lamartine puts it on the site of the southern fountain, for the effect he gets of the flowing of water and of blood; this is one of his magniloquent phrases, which scorn exactness. On January 21, 1793, for the execution of Louis XVI., the guillotine was removed to a spot just westward of the centre, that it might be well protected by the troops deploying about the western side of the _place_, and into the Champs elysees and Cours la Reine. For a while in 1794, the guillotine was transferred to the present Place de la Nation--where we shall find it in a later chapter--to come back to Place de la Revolution in time to greet Robespierre and his friends.

Standing here, we are near the other centre of Revolutionary Paris, made so by the Club of the Jacobins, that met first in the refectory, later in the church of the monastery from which it took its name. The site of these buildings is covered by the little Marche Saint-Honore and by the s.p.a.ce about. The club of the more moderate men, headed by Bailly and Lafayette, had its quarters in the monastery of the Feuillants, which gave its name to the club, and which extended along the south side of Rue Saint-Honore, eastwardly from Rue de Castiglione; this street being then the narrow Pa.s.sage des Feuillants, leading from Rue Saint-Honore to the royal gardens, and to the much-trodden Terra.s.se on the northern side of those gardens facing the Manege. This building had been erected for the equestrian education of the youth who afterward became Louis XV., and was converted into a hall for the sitting of the a.s.sembly, after that body had been crowded for about three weeks, on coming to Paris from Versailles, into the inadequate hall of the Archbishop's palace, on the southern sh.o.r.e of the City Island, alongside Notre-Dame. The Convention took over the Manege from the a.s.sembly, and there remained until May, 1793, when it removed to the more commodious quarters, and more befitting surroundings, of the Tuileries. The old riding-school, whose site is marked by a tablet on the railing of the garden opposite No. 230 Rue de Rivoli, was swept away by the cutting of the western end of that street, under the Consulate in 1802.

When Maximilien Robespierre came up from Arras--where he had resigned his functions in the Criminal Court, because of his conscientious objections to capital punishment--he found squalid quarters, suiting his purse--which remained empty all through life--in Rue Saintonge.

That street, named for a province of old France, remains almost as he saw it, one of the few Paris streets that retain their original buildings and ancient atmosphere. The high and sombre house, wherein he lodged from October, 1789, to July, 1791, is quite unaltered, save for its number, which was then 8 and is now 64. From here, Robespierre was s.n.a.t.c.hed away, suddenly and without premeditation on his part, and planted in the bosom of the Duplay family. They had wors.h.i.+pped him from afar, and when, from their windows, they saw him surrounded by the acclaiming crowd, on the day after the so-called ma.s.sacres of the Champ-de-Mars of July 17, 1791, the peaceful carpenter ran out and dragged the shrinking great man into his court-yard for temporary shelter. The house was then No. 366 Rue Saint-Honore. If any reader wishes to decide for himself whether the modern No. 398 is built on the site of the Duplay house, of which no stone is left, as M. Ernest Hamel a.s.serts; or whether the present tall structure there is an elevation on the walls of the old house, every stone of which is left, as M. Sardou insists; he must study the pamphlets issued by these earnest and erudite controversialists. There is nothing more delightful in topographical sparring. The authors of this book can give no aid to the solicitous student; for they have read all that has been written concerning the subject, they have explored the house, and they have settled in silence in the opposing camps!

In the Duplay household, to which he brought misery then and afterward, Robespierre was wors.h.i.+pped during life and deified after death. To that misguided family, "this cat's head, with the prominent cheekbones, seamed by small-pox; his bilious complexion; his green eyes rimmed with red, behind blue spectacles; his harsh voice; his dry, pedantic, snappish, imperious language; his disdainful carriage; his convulsive gestures--all this was effaced, recast, and transformed into the gentle figure of an apostle and a martyr to his faith for the salvation of men." From their house, it was but a step to the sittings of the a.s.sembly. It was but a few steps farther to the garden of the Tuileries and to the "_fete de l'etre Supreme_," planned by him, when he had induced the Convention to decree the existence of G.o.d and of an immortal soul in man. He cast himself for the role of High Priest of Heaven, and headed the procession on June 8, 1794, clad in a blue velvet coat, a white waistcoat, yellow breeches and top-boots; carrying in his hand flowers and wheat-ears. He addressed the crowd, in "the scraggiest prophetic discourse ever uttered by man," and they had games, and burned in effigy Atheism and Selfishness and Vice! Such of the stage-setting of this farce as was constructed in stone remains intact to-day, for our wonder at such childishness, and our admiration of the architectural perfection of the out-of-door arena.

From this Duplay house, Robespierre used to go on his solitary strolls, accompanied only by his dogs, in the woods of Monceaux and Montmorenci, where he picked wild-flowers. From this house he went to his last appearance in the Convention on the _9 Thermidor_, and past it he was carted to the scaffold, on the following day, July 28, 1794.

He had followed Danton within a few months, as Danton had predicted.

They were of the same age at the time of their death, each having thirty-five years; the younger Robespierre was thirty-two, Saint-Just was twenty-six, Desmoulins thirty-four, when their heads fell.

Mirabeau died at the age of forty-two, Marat was forty-nine when stabbed. Not one of the conspicuous leaders of the Revolution and of the Terror had come to fifty years!

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Carre d'Atalante in the Tuileries Gardens.]

When the tumbrils and their burdens did not go along the quays to Place de la Revolution, they went through Rue Saint-Honore, that being the only thoroughfare on that side of the river. From the Conciergerie they crossed Pont au Change, and made their way by narrow and devious turnings to the eastern end of Rue Saint-Honore, and through its length to Rue du Chemin-du-Rempart--now Rue Royale--and so to the scaffold. Short Rue Saint-Florentin was then Rue de l'Orangerie, and was crowded by sightseers hurrying to the _place_.

Those of the victims not already confined in the Conciergerie were sent to the condemned cells there, for the night between sentence and execution. The trustworthy history of the prisons of Paris during the Revolution remains to be written, and there is wealth of material for it. There were many smaller prisons not commonly known, and of the larger ones that we do know, there are several, quite unchanged to-day, well worth unofficial inspection. The Salpetriere, filling a vast s.p.a.ce south of the Jardin des Plantes, was built for the manufacture of saltpetre, by Louis XIII.; and, by his son, was converted into a branch, for women, of the General Hospital. A portion of its buildings was set apart for young women of bad character, and here Manon Lescaut was imprisoned. The great establishment is now known as the Hopital de la Salpetriere, and is famous for its treatment of women afflicted with nervous maladies, and with insanity.

The present Hospice de la Maternite was also perverted to prison usages during the Revolution. Its formal cloisters and steep tiled roofs cl.u.s.ter about its old-time square, but its ancient gardens, and their great trees, are almost all buried beneath new masonry. The facade of the chapel, the work of Lepautre, is no longer used as the entrance, and may be seen over the wall on Boulevard de Port-Royal.

Another prison was that of Saint-Lazare, first a lazar-house and then a convent, whose weather-worn roofs and dormers show above the wall on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. On the dingy yellow plaster of the arched entrance-gate one may read, in thick black letters: "_Maison d'Arret et de Correction._" Unaltered, too, is the prison in the grounds of the Carmelites, to be visited later in company with Dumas; and the Luxembourg, that was reserved for choice captives. The prison of the Abbey of Saint-Germain was swept away by the boulevard of that name.

Its main entrance for wheeled vehicles was through Rue Sainte-Marguerite, the short section left of that street being now named Gozlin. Of the other buildings of the abbey, there remain only the church itself, the bishop's palace behind in Rue de l'Abbaye, and the presbytery glued to the southern side of the church-porch. Its windows saw the ma.s.sacres of the priests and the prisoners, which took place on the steps of the church and in its front court. When you walk from those steps across the open _place_, to take the tram for Fontenay-aux-Roses, you step above soil that was soaked with blood in the early days of September, 1792. Some few of the abbey prisoners were slaughtered in the garden, of which a portion remains on the south side of the church, where the statue of Bernard Palissy, by Barrias, stands now. In other chapters, the destruction of the Grand-and the Pet.i.t-Chatelet has been noted.

La Force has gone, and Sainte-Pelagie is soon to go. And the Conciergerie has been altered, almost beyond recognition, as to its entrances and its courts and its cells. Only the Cour des Femmes remains at all as it was in those days.

There are three victims of the Terror who have had the unstinted pity of later generations, and who have happily left traces of their presence on Paris brick and mortar. The last of these three to die was Andre-Marie de Chenier, and we will go first to his dwelling. It is an oddly shaped house, No. 97 Rue de Clery--Corneille's street for many years--at its junction with Rue Beauregard; and a tablet in its wall tells of de Chenier's residence there. Born in Constantinople in 1762, of a French father--a man of genius in mercantile affairs--and a Greek mother, the boy was brought to Paris with his younger brother, Joseph-Marie, in 1767. They lived with their mother in various streets in the Marais, before settling in this final home. Here Madame de Chenier, a poet and artist in spirit, filled the rooms with the poets and artists and _savants_ of the time, the friends of her gifted sons.

Hither came David, gross of body, his active mind busied with schemes for his annual exhibitions of paintings, the continuation of those begun by Colbert, and the progenitor of the present _Salons_; Alfieri, the poet and splendid adventurer; Lavoisier, absorbed in chemical discovery. Here in his earlier years, and later, when he hurried home from the French Emba.s.sy in London on the outbreak of the Revolution, Andre de Chenier produced the verse that revived the love of nature, dead in France since Ronsard, and brought a lyric freshness to poetry that shamed the dry artificialities so long in vogue. That poetry was the forerunner of the Romantic movement. In his tranquil soul, he hoped for the pacific triumph of liberty and equality, and his delicate spirit abhorred the excesses of the party with whose principles he sympathized. He was taken into custody at Pa.s.sy, early in 1794, while visiting a lady, against whose arrest he had struggled, locked up in Saint-Lazare for months, convicted, and sent to the Conciergerie. He was guillotined in Place de la Nation on July 26, 1794, only the day before Robespierre's fall, and was one of the last and n.o.blest sacrifices to the Terror. We shall look on his burial-place in our later rambles. Muller has made Andre de Chenier the central figure of his "Roll-Call," now in the Louvre. He sits looking toward us with eyes that see visions, and his expression seems full of the thought to which he gave utterance when led out to execution: "I have done nothing for posterity, and yet," tapping his forehead, "I had something here!"

In 1795 this little house was surrounded by a great crowd of citizens come to bury Louis de Chenier, the father. The Section of Brutus guarded the bier, draped with blue set with silver stars, to suggest the immortality of the soul! And they gave every honor they could invent to the "_Pompe funebre d'un Citoyen Vertueux_," whose worthy son they had beheaded.

Joseph-Marie de Chenier lived for many years under suspicion of having given his a.s.sent if not his aid to his brother's death, albeit the mother always a.s.serted that he had tried to save Andre. Joseph was a fiery patriot, and a man of genius withal. He wrote the words of the "Chant du Depart" which, set to music by Mehul, proved almost as stirring as the "Ma.r.s.eillaise" to the pulses of the Patriots. Music was one of the potent intoxicants of the time, and the Revolution was played and sung along to the strains of these two airs, and of "ca ira" and the "Carmagnole." The cla.s.sic style, which had hitherto prevailed, gave way before the paltry sentimentality and the tinkling bombast of the music adored by the mob. David planned processions marching to patriotic airs, and shallow operas were performed in the streets. Yet Rouget-de-l'Isle, the captain of engineers who had given them the "Ma.r.s.eillaise," was cas.h.i.+ered and put into a cell; being freed, he was left to starve, and no aid came to him from the Empire or the Bourbons, naturally enough. Louis-Philippe's government found him in sad straits, in that poor house No. 21 of the poor Pa.s.sage Saulnier, and ordered a small pension to be paid to him during his life. His death came in 1836.

Joseph-Marie de Chenier was a playwright, also, and in 1798 he had created a sensation by his "Charles IX.," produced at the Comedie Francaise, now the Odeon. In the part of the King, wonderfully made up and costumed, Talma won his first notable triumph. "This play," cried Danton from the pit, "will kill royalty as 'Figaro' killed the n.o.bility." Joseph-Marie lived, not too reputably, but very busily, until January 10, 1811; a fussy politician, a member of the Convention, of the Council of Five Hundred, and of the Inst.i.tute, Section of the French Tongue and Literature, always detested by his a.s.sociates, by the Emperor, and by the common people.

When the Place Dauphine of Henri IV. was finished, the new industry of the spectacle-makers established itself in the same buildings we see to-day, and gave to the place the name of Quai des Lunettes. Later came the engravers, who found all the light they needed in these rooms, open on three sides. Among them was a master-engraver, one Phlipon, bringing his daughter, Marie-Jeanne--her pet name being Manon--from the house of her birth, in 1754, in Rue de la Lanterne, now widened into Rue de la Cite. It is not known whether the site of that house is under the Hotel-Dieu or the Marche-aux-Fleurs. Their new home stood, and still stands, on the corner of the northern quay, and is now numbered 28 Place Dauphine and 41 Quai de l'Horloge. The small window of the second floor lights the child's alcove bedroom, where this "daughter of the Seine"--so Madame Roland dubs herself in her "Memoirs"--looked out on the river, and up at the sky, from over Pont au Change to beyond the heights of Chaillot, when she could lift her eyes from her Plutarch, and her thoughts from the altar she was planning to raise to Rousseau. It must be owned that this all too-serious girl was a prig; a creature over-fed for its size, the word has been happily defined. At the age of eleven, she was sent to the school of the "_Dames de la Congregation_," in the Augustinian convent in Rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne. It has been told how that ancient street was cut in half by Rue Monge. In its eastern section, now named Rue de Navarre, was Manon's school, directly above the Roman amphitheatre, discovered only of late years in the course of excavations in this quarter. The portion that is left of this impressive relic is in good preservation and in good keeping. Her school-days done, the girl spent several years in this house before us, until her mother's death, and her father's tipsiness, sent her back to her convent for a few months. Then, having refused the many suitors who had thronged about her in her own home, she found the philosopher she wanted for a husband in Jean-Marie Roland de la Platriere, a man much older than she; lank, angular, yellow, bald, "rather respectable than seductive," in the words of the girl-friend who had introduced him. But Manon Phlipon doubtless idealized this wooden formalist who adored her, as she idealized herself and all her surroundings, including The People, who turned and rent her at the last. She gave to her husband duty and loyalty, and it was not until she counted herself dead to earth and its temptations, in her cell at Sainte-Pelagie, that she addressed her last farewell to him, whom "I dare not name, one whom the most terrible of pa.s.sions has not kept from respecting the barriers of virtue." This farewell was meant for Francois-Leonard-Nicolas Buzot, Girondist member of the a.s.sembly and later of the Convention. He remained unnamed and unknown, until his name and their secret were told by a bundle of old letters, found on a book-stall on Quai Voltaire in 1864. She had met him first when her husband came from Lyons, with pet.i.tions to the a.s.sembly, in February, 1791, and took rooms at the Hotel Britannique, in Rue Guenegaud. Her _salon_ soon became the gathering-place of the Girondists, where those austere men, who considered themselves the sole salvation of France, were austerely regaled with a bowl of sugar and a _carafe_ of water. Their hostess could not bother with frivolities, she, who in her deadly earnestness, renounced the theatre and pictures, and all the foolish graces of life! The Hotel Britannique was the house now numbered 12 Rue Guenegaud, a wide-fronted, many-windowed mansion of the eighteenth century. Its stone steps within are well worn, its iron rail is good, its second floor--the Roland apartment--still shows traces of the ancient decorations.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Girlhood Home of Madame Roland.]

Buzot lived at No. 3 Quai Malaquais, an ancient mansion now replaced by the modern structure between the seventeenth-century houses numbered 1 and 5. For when the Convention outlawed the Girondists, and Buzot fled, it was decreed that his dwelling should be levelled to the ground, and on its site should be placed a notice: "_La fut la maison du roi Buzot._" So that it would seem that his colleagues of the Convention had found him an insufferably Superior Person.

Leaving this apartment on his appointment to office in 1792, Roland took his wife to the gorgeous _salons_ of the Ministry of the Interior, in the _hotel_ built by Leveau for the Comte de Lionne, and beautified later by Calonne. It occupied the site of the present annex of the Bank of France just off Rue des Pet.i.ts-Champs, between Rues Marsollier and Dalayrac. Here, during his two terms of office in 1792 and 1793, Roland had the aid of his wife's pen, as well as the allurements of her personal influence, in the cause to which she had devoted herself. The masculine strength of her pen was weakened, it is true, by too sharp a feminine point, and she embittered the Court, the Cordeliers, the Jacobins, all equally against her and her party. For "this woman who was a great man," in Louis Blanc's true words, was as essentially womanly as was Marie Antoinette; and these two most gracious and pathetic figures of their time were yet unconscious workers for evil to France. The Queen made impa.s.sable the breach between the throne and the people; Madame Roland hastened on the Terror. And each of them was doing exactly what she thought it right to do!

On January 23, 1793, two days after the King's death, Roland left office forever and removed to a house in Rue de la Harpe, opposite the Church of Saint-Cosme. That church stood on the triangle made by the meeting of Rues de l'ecole-de-Medecine and Racine with Boulevard Saint-Germain. On the eastern side of that boulevard, once the eastern side of Rue de la Harpe, where it meets modern Rue des ecoles, stood the Roland house. The students and studentesses, who sip their coffee and beer on the pavement of Vachette's, are on the scene of Madame Roland's arrest, on the night between May 31st and June 1st. On the former day, seeing the end so near, Roland had fled. His wife was taken to the prison of the Abbaye, and given the cell which was to be tenanted, six weeks later, by Charlotte Corday. Released on June 22d and returned to her home in Rue de la Harpe, she was re-arrested on the 24th and locked up in Sainte-Pelagie. It was an old prison, long kept for the detention of "_femmes et filles, dont la conduite est onereuse_," and its character had not been bettered by the character of the female prisoners sent there by the Terror. This high-minded woman, subjected to infamous sights and sounds, preserved her serenity and fort.i.tude in a way to extort the "stupefied admiration" of her fellow-prisoners, as one of these has testified. It was only in her cell that the great heart gave way. There she found solace, during her four months' confinement, with Thomson's "Seasons," "done into choice French," with Shaftesbury and an English dictionary, with Tacitus, and her girlhood companion, Plutarch. And here she busied herself with her "Memoirs," "writing under the axe," in her own phrase. In the solitude of her cell, indeed, she was sometimes disturbed by the unseemly laughter of the ladies of the Comedie Francaise, at supper with the prison-governor in an adjacent cell. We shall see, later, how these ladies came to be here. More acceptable sounds might have come almost to her ears; that of the hymn-singing or of the maiden laughter of the girls in her old convent, only a few steps away. The prison-register contains her description, probably as accurate as matter-of-fact: "Height, five feet; hair and eyebrows, dark chestnut; brown eyes; medium nose; ordinary mouth; oval face, round chin, high forehead." From Sainte-Pelagie she went to the Conciergerie on November 1st, the day after the guillotining of the Girondists, and thence in eight days to her own death. It has been told, by every writer, that she could look over at her girlhood home, as her tumbril crossed Pont au Change. It has not been told, so plainly as it deserves, that her famous utterance on the platform was made fine for historic purposes, as was done with Cambronne's magnificent monosyllable at Waterloo. She really said: "_O Liberte, comme on t'a jouee!_" With these words, natural and spontaneous and without pose, she is, indeed, "beautiful, amazonian, graceful to the eye, more so to the mind."

Within a few days of her death died her husband and her lover. Roland, on hearing of her execution, in his hiding-place near Rouen, thrust his cane-sword into his breast; Buzot, wandering and starving in the fields, was found half-eaten by wolves. She had confided her daughter Eudora and her "Memoirs" to the loyal friend Bosc, who hid the ma.n.u.script in the forest of Montmorenci, and in 1795 published it for the daughter's benefit. The original is said to be in existence, on coa.r.s.e gray paper, stained with her tears. Sainte-Beuve speaks of them as "delicious and indispensable memories," deserving a place "beside the most sublime and eloquent effusions of a brave yet tender philosophy." When he praises that style, clearer and more concise than that of Madame de Stael, "that other daughter of Rousseau," he does not say all; he might have added that, like Rousseau, she occasionally speaks of matters not quite convenient to hear.

It is difficult to refrain from undue admiration and pity, to remain temperate and modest, when one dwells on the character and qualities, the blameless life and the ignominious death, of Marie-Jean-Antoine- Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. We may look up at his thoughtful face in bronze on Quai Conti, alongside the Mint, where he lived in the _entresol_ of the just completed building, when appointed Director of the Hotel de la Monnaie by his old friend Turgot, in 1774.

We may look upon the house in Rue Servandoni where he hid, and from which he escaped to his death. His other Paris homes have no existence now. His college of Navarre--oldest of all those in the University--has been made over into the ecole Polytechnique; and the house he built for himself in Rue Chantereine, which was afterward owned by Josephine Beauharnais, has long since disappeared. When only twenty-two years of age he wrote his famous essay on the Integral Calculus, when twenty-six he was elected to the Academy of Sciences.

Made Perpetual Secretary of that body in 1777, it came in the course of his duties to deliver eulogies on Pascal, d'Alembert, Buffon, and Franklin, and others of the great guild of science. These are more than perfunctory official utterances, they are of an eloquence that shows his lovable character as well as his scientific authority. He contributed largely to Diderot's Encyclopaedia, and put forth many astronomical, mathematical, and theological treatises during his busy life. He wrote earnestly in favor of the independence of the American colonies, and was one of the earliest advocates of the people's cause in France. But he was much more than a man of science and of letters; he was a man with a great soul, "the Seneca of the modern school,"

says Lamartine; the most kindly and tolerant friend of humanity, and protector of its rights, since Socrates. He believed in the indefinite perfectibility of the human race, and he wrote his last essay, proving its progress upward, while hiding in a garret from those not yet quite perfect fellow-beings, who were howling for his head! He was beloved by Benjamin Franklin and by Thomas Paine. Members of the Convention together, he and Paine prepared the new Const.i.tution of 1793, in which political doc.u.ment they found no place for theological dogma.

Robespierre prevented the adoption of this Const.i.tution, having taken G.o.d under his own protection. Condorcet made uncompromising criticism, and was put on the list of those to be suspected and got rid of. Too broad to ally himself with the Girondists, he was yet proscribed with them, on June 2, 1793. His friends had forced him to go into hiding, until he might escape. They had asked Madame Vernet--widow of the painter Claude-Joseph, mother of Carle, grandmother of Horace--to give shelter to one of the proscribed, and she had asked only if he were an honest man. This loyal woman concealed him in her garret for nearly one year, and would have kept him longer, but that he feared for her safety, and for that of his wife and daughter, who might be tracked in their visits to him by night. He had finished his "Esquisse d'un Tableau historique des Progres de l'Esprit humain," full of hope for humanity, with no word of reproach or repining, and then he wrote his last words: "Advice of one proscribed, to his Daughter." This is to be read to-day for its lofty spirit. He gives her the names of certain good men who will befriend her, and among them is Benjamin Franklin Bache, the son of our Franklin's daughter Sally, who had been in Paris with his grandfather.

Then, this letter finished, early on the morning of April 5, 1794, he left it on his table and slipped out, unseen by the good widow Vernet, from the three-storied plaster-fronted house now No. 15 of Rue Servandoni, and still unaltered, as is almost the entire street.

Through it he hurried to Rue de Vaugirard, where he stood undecided for a moment, the prison of the Luxembourg on his left, and the prison of the Carmelites on his right, both full of his friends. And on the walls, all about, were placards with big-lettered warning that death was the penalty for harboring the proscribed. Here at the corner, he ran against one Sarret, cousin of Madame Vernet, who went with him, showing the way through narrow streets to the Barriere du Maine, which was behind the present station of Mont-Parna.s.se. Safely out of the town, the two men took the road to Fontenay-aux-Roses, and at night Sarret turned back. Condorcet lost his way, and wandered about the fields for two days, sleeping in the quarries of Clamart, until driven by hunger into a wretched inn. Demanding an omelet, he was asked how many eggs he would have; the ignorant-learned man ordered a dozen, too many for the working-man he was personating, and suspicions were aroused. The villagers bound and dragged him to the nearest guardhouse at Bourg-la-Reine. He died in his cell that night, April 7, 1794, by poison, it is believed. For he wore a ring containing poison; the same sort of poison, it is said, that was carried by Napoleon, with which he tried--or pretended to try--to kill himself at Fontainebleau. In the modern village of Bourg-la-Reine, five and a half miles from Paris, the princ.i.p.al square bears the name of Condorcet, and holds his bust in marble.

"_La Veuve Condorcet_" appears in the Paris _Bottin_ every year until 1822, when she died. She had been imprisoned on the identification of her husband's body, but was released after Robespierre's death. She pa.s.sed the Duplay house every day during those years, going to her little shop at 232 Rue Saint-Honore. There she had set up a linen business on the ground floor, and above, she painted portraits in a small way. She was a woman of rare beauty and of fine mind, with all womanly graces and all womanly courage. Married in 1786, and much younger than her husband, timorous before his real age and his seeming austerity, she had grown up to him, and had learned to love that "volcano covered with snow," as his friend d'Alembert had said he was. She had a pretty gift with her pen, and her translation into French of Adam Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" is still extant.

Her little _salon_ came to be greatly frequented in her beautiful old age.

Condorcet's famous fellow-worker in science, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, was guillotined in May, 1794, the two men having the same number of years, fifty-one. He was condemned, not for being a chemist, albeit his enlightened judges were of the opinion that "the Republic has no need of chemists," but because he had filled, with justice and honesty, his office of Farmer-General under royalty. Their contemporaries of nearly equal age, Gaspard Monge and Claude-Louis Berthollet, escaped the guillotine, and were among the _savants_ in the train of General Bonaparte in his Italian and Egyptian campaigns.

After many years of useful labors, they died peacefully under the Restoration.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, of almost equal years with these four, lived to a greater age, and received higher honors from the Emperor and the Bourbons. Coming from his birth-place in Calvados in 1767, his first Paris home to be found is in Rue des Noyers; one side of which ancient street now forms that southern section of Boulevard Saint-Germain opposite Rue des Anglais, its battered houses seeming to shrink back from the publicity thrust upon them. In that one now numbered 57 in the boulevard, formerly No. 33 Rue des Noyers, Alfred de Musset was born in 1810; and in the same row lived Laplace in 1777. In 1787 we find him in Rue Mazarine, and in 1790 in Rue Louis-le-Grand, and this latter residence represents his only desertion of the University side of the Seine. He returned to that bank when placed by the Consuls in the Senate, and made his home in 1801 at No. 24 Rue des Grands-Augustins, and in the following year at No. 2 Rue Christine.

These stately mansions of that period, only a step apart, remain as he left them. When Laplace was made Chancellor of the Senate, in 1805, his official residence was in the Luxembourg, and there it continued until 1815, the year of the Restoration. His private residence, from 1805 to 1809, was at No. 6 Rue de Tournon, a house still standing in all its senatorial respectability. He gave this up, and again took up his quarters in the Luxembourg, when made a Count of the Empire and Vice-President of the Senate.

From the Medician palace, which appears in the _Bottin_ of those years as simple No. 19 Rue de Vaugirard, Laplace removed to No. 51 of that street, when the returned Bourbons made him a Peer of France. This house, near Rue d'a.s.sas--named for the Chevalier Nicolas d'a.s.sas, the heroic captain of the regiment of Auvergne during the Seven Years'

War--is unaltered since his time. His last change of abode was made in 1818, to Rue du Bac, 100, where he died in 1827. It is a mansion of old-fas.h.i.+oned dignity, with a large court in front and a larger garden behind, and is now numbered 108. The growing importance of his successive dwellings, every one of which may be visited to-day, mark his growth in importance as a man of state. The growth of the man of science is represented by his colossal "La Mecanique Celeste," which first appeared in 1799, and was continued by successive volumes until its completion in 1825. Its t.i.tle, rather than his t.i.tles, should be inscribed on his monument.

A little later than these famous _confreres_, Georges Cuvier appears in Paris--in Hugo's half-truth--"with one eye on the book of Genesis and the other on nature, endeavoring to please bigoted reaction by reconciling fossils with texts, and making the mastodons support Moses." His first home, at the present 40 Rue de Seine, is a fine old-fas.h.i.+oned mansion. He removed to the opposite side of that street in 1810, and there remained until 1816, his house being now replaced by the new and characterless structure at No. 35. Full of character, however, is his official residence as Professor in the Jardin des Plantes, which took again its ancient t.i.tle of Jardin du Roi during the Restoration. "_La Maison de Cuvier_" is a charming old building near the garden-entrance in Rue Cuvier, and within is the bust of this most gifted teacher of his time. His genuine devotion to science and his tolerance for all policies carried him through the several changes of government during his life. He completed the Napoleonic conquest of Italy and Holland by his introduction of the French methods of education, perfected by him. The Bourbons made him Baron and Chancellor of the University, and the Orleans king elevated him to the Peerage of France. He died in 1832.

Paul-Francois-Jean-Nicolas, Comte de Barras--soldier, adventurer, a power in the Convention, the power of the Directory, practically dictator for a while--has added to the hilarity of the sceptical student of history by his "Memoirs," kept concealed since his death, in 1829, until their publication within a few years. Splendidly mendacious in these pages as he was in life, Barras posed always as the man on horseback of _his "13 Vendemiaire_." On that day, unwittingly yet actually, he put into the saddle--where he stayed--his young friend Buonaparte, whose qualities he had discovered at the siege of Toulon. This artillery officer, while planting his batteries to cover every approach to the Tuileries, where cowered the frightened Convention, took personal command of the guns that faced Saint-Roch.

The front of that church still shows the scars of the bullets that stopped the rush of the Sections in that direction. This battery was placed at the Rue Saint-Honore end of the narrow lane leading from that street to the gardens of the Tuileries--there being then no Rue de Rivoli, you will bear in mind. This lane was known as Rue du Dauphin, because of the royal son who had used it, going between the Tuileries and the church; after that day, it was popularly called Rue du 13-Vendemiaire, until it received its official appellation of Rue Saint-Roch, when widened and aligned in 1807. At this time there were only two houses in the street, near its southern end, and one of them was a _hotel-garni_, in which young Buonaparte caught a short sleep on that night of October 5, 1795. The oldest structure in Rue Saint-Roch to-day is that with the two numbers 4 and 6, and it is known to have been already a _hotel-garni_ in the first years of the nineteenth century, when it was refaced. So that it is well within belief that we have found here Buonaparte's head-quarters for that one night.