Nooks and Corners of Old Paris Part 5

[Ill.u.s.tration: VIEW FROM THE LOUVRE QUAY _Noel, pinxit_]

On the one bank, the Louvre, the green foliage of the Tuileries, and the Champs-Elysees, with the minarets of the Trocadero and the heights of Chaillot on the horizon; on the other, all old Paris, a series of monuments haloed with souvenirs--the Palais de Justice, the Conciergerie, the Sainte-Chapelle, Notre-Dame; the churches of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, Saint-Gervais, Saint-Paul; the Pointe de la Cite.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PARIS FROM THE POINTE DE LA CITe _Photographed by Richebourg_]

At night, these n.o.ble, suggestive silhouettes a.s.sume a still more imposing majesty--modern blemishes, glaring colourings, shameless advertis.e.m.e.nts are blotted out.

The moon spreads its delicate white light over the old walls, and a silvern Paris rears itself in the darkness. At times, too, underneath a storm-red sky, an entirely sombre town arises, made known only as a tragic vision in successive flashes of lightning.

Either we have a Paris of sunny mirth or a Paris bathed in night's gloom.

Descending once again towards the Seine, through the picturesque streets that surround the Inst.i.tute--the Rue Dauphine, the Rue de Nesles, the Rue Mazarine--we discover in the Rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine--at present the Rue Mazet--the remains of the old White Horse Inn. The stables, with their ancient mangers and quaint eaves, still exist. They date back to Louis XIV. In that time, every week the huge inn-yard was filled with travellers going to Orleans and Blois; and the unwieldy coach started in a cloud of dust, amidst crackings of whip, trumpetings, adieus, and shakings of handkerchiefs; horses pranced, women wept, dogs barked, postilions swore. To-day the animation has disappeared, but the scene has remained, age-stricken, impressive, still charming, so much so that Ma.s.senet, moved by it, murmured one morning: "It must be here that Manon[2] alighted from the diligence!"

The neighbouring house was once the Magny restaurant, at which those celebrated dinners were given that Goncourt speaks of so often in his Memoirs, dinners shared by Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Georges Sand, Flaubert, Theophile Gautier, Gavarni, and many others.

Not far away, and connecting the Rue Mazarine--where Moliere and his company played--with the Rue de Seine, let us go through the Pa.s.sage du Pont-Neuf, occupying the site of the ancient entrance to the theatre, and being the scene of Zola's terrible novel _Therese Raquin_.

It is a typical nook--sordid, dingy, and malodorous, but strangely attractive, with its fried-potato sellers and Italian modellers. The shops in it seem to belong to another century; some months back, one only was frequented by customers, that of a drawing-paper dealer. The artist, Bonnat, told us he had bought his "Ingres paper" there, when he was a pupil at the School of Fine Arts, of which to-day he is the eminent head. The shop had not altered for sixty years, and the saleswoman a.s.serted that the "stomping-rags she sold were exactly similar to those used by Monsieur Flandrin." In front of us is the Inst.i.tute, and it is impossible to walk along the interminable black-looking wall enclosing it, on the side of the Rue Mazarine, without thinking of the painful paragraph in the preface of the _Fils Naturel_, wherein the younger Dumas, speaking of his childhood, recalls the souvenir of the return from the first performance, at the Odeon, of _Charles VI. chez ses grands va.s.saux_, on the 20th of October 1831.

The evening had been a stormy one, and the success of the play was doubtful. Consequently, a continuation of their poverty was to be expected. Alexandre Dumas had heavy burdens to support--his mother, a household, a child. He had to live himself and to keep his family on the meagre salary his situation under the Duke d'Orleans procured him. It was not of his talents but of his star that he doubted; and the younger Dumas always remembered his father's broad shadow cast by the moon on the dark, gloomy wall of the Inst.i.tute, and himself timidly guessing at his father's anxieties and endeavouring, with his little eight-year-old legs, to follow and keep up with the studies of the good-natured giant.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RUE DES PReTRES-SAINT-SeVERIN IN 1866 _Drawn by A. Maignan_]

It was in the Rue Guenegaud, in the Hotel Britannique, that Madame Roland took up her quarters in 1791. There, joyous and confident in the future, she opened her political _salon_. What a pleasure for the little Manon to show to all the Pont-Neuf neighbourhood, where her childhood had been spent, that she had become a lady and received people of mark.

Brissot, Buzot, Petion, Robespierre, Danton himself, were pleased to come, between two sittings, and talk at this amiable woman's house; and I fancy what attracted them was far more the pretty Parisian's qualities than the virtues of the austere husband, who must have been a great bore! On the 26th of March 1792, Dumouriez came to Roland's door and rang to tell him that he was appointed Minister. On the morrow, the little Manon of the Quai des Lunettes settled in triumph at the Calonne mansion. It was the way to the scaffold.

Skirting the quays, we reach the Saint-Michel Square, then the Rue Galande. In spite of recent demolitions, this old street still contains some ancient abodes; but it has lost the singular house called the _Red Castle_, or more prosaically, "the Guillotine."

In what was, during the seventeenth century, a sumptuous dwelling--the mansion, 'tis said, of Gabrielle d'Estrees--behind the huge, tall front steps at the back of the courtyard, was the dingy, smoky habitation, stinking of wine, dirt, debauch, and vice.

One had to step over the bodies of male and female drunkards to get inside the dens where such poor wretches came seeking some sort of lodging and an hour of forgetfulness. It was at once hideous and lugubrious. Amateurs of ugly sights might continue their studies hard by, on the premises of "Gaffer" Lunette, in the Rue des Anglais. The inhabitants were similar; a prison population--"b.e.s.t.i.a.lity in all its horror," as Mephistopheles sings in the _d.a.m.nation of Faust_. Recent building and sanitary improvements have done away with the "Red Castle."

The Rue Saint-Severin is a picturesque medley of old houses round the ancient Gothic church--"that flora of stone"--one of the most curious perhaps in Paris; one of those that best preserve the traces of a past of art, devotion, and prayer.

The sublime artists who, in several centuries, knew how to create the forest of fine carvings with which the apse is adorned, have, alas! left but sorry successors. By the side of old painted gla.s.s windows, brought from the church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, other cold, modern stained windows of loud colour have taken from Saint-Severin's the religious, poetical mysteriousness, the inviting half-obscurity that appeal to the soul of the believer; and their crude light renders only too visible the marks of successive mutilations inflicted on this fine church. In the next street, the present clergy-house is built on the old graveyard, where, in 1641--as the erudite Monsieur de Rochegude informs us--the first operation for gravel was publicly performed on a criminal condemned to death, who, happy man, was cured, and pardoned by Louis XI.

The whole of the quarter is one of the busiest in Paris. It would seem as if the vagabonds, the lewd and their lemans, the tatterdemalions of bygone centuries, had left there a direct line of descendants. People live in the street, eat sc.r.a.ps in low drink-shops; a smell of spirits floats in the air at the corners of the various cross-roads; bars and petty restaurants are thronged with customers. Part of the money begged or stolen in Paris is spent there.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE Pa.s.sAGE DES PATRIARCHES _Etching by Martial_]

Saint-Medard's church is quite close, with its small, dusty, quaint Square, and its round tower at the end of the Rue Monge and the corner of the Rue Mouffetard. It is a gloomy, rat-gnawed, poverty-stricken church, looking as if worn-out with age; and is blocked in by old houses covered with gaudy-coloured advertis.e.m.e.nts. It has left, far behind in the past, the days when the tomb of the Deacon Paris in it performed its miracles, when the townsfolk and courtfolk crowded in the small graveyard, a door of which still exists, the one perhaps whereon was written the famous couplet:--

"In the King's name, forbid is G.o.d To work a wonder on this sod."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RUE MOUFFETARD _Charcoal Drawing by P. L. Moreau_]

The Rue Mouffetard pa.s.ses in front of the church porch, overflowing with life and activity. A hundred petty trades are exercised in it; the house doors themselves--old eighteenth-century doors--shelter women-sellers of flowers, milk, fried potatoes, cooked mussels; children play about the middle of the road; carriage traffic is rare. Housewives gossip on their doorsteps, people live together--and in the street. The Pa.s.sage des Patriarches, which opens at No. 99, was famous in days of yore. The Calvinists, who used to preach there, had b.l.o.o.d.y quarrels with the Catholics of Saint-Medard's. To-day, it is nothing but a dank, dirty, melancholy alley, inhabited by bric-a-brac dealers, old-iron sellers, and petty hucksters; and smells of rags, old lead, and cauliflower!

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RUE GALANDE _Lansyer, pinxit_ (Carnavalet Museum)]

Maubert Square is the converging centre of these strange streets. At present, modernised and rearranged--adorned, if I may say so, with a wretched statue of Etienne Dolet, who was burnt there in 1546--the Square only vaguely resembles the "Plac' Maub'," still visible six or seven years ago, ill-famed, narrow, bordered with old steep-roofed houses, a den of vagabonds, full of suspicious lurking-corners where the police might be sure of making good hauls. Near at hand, in the Maubert Blind Alley, Sainte-Croix used to dwell; and it was in the same mysterious retreat that Madame de Brinvilliers, the sorry heroine of the Poisons drama so well told by our witty friend, F. Funck-Brentano, used to meet her accomplice and with him prepare the terrible "succession powder," composed, according to her avowal, of "vitriol, toad's venom, and rarefied a.r.s.enic," which she made use of to poison her father, her two brothers, and to try to make away with her sisters and husband.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PLACE MAUBERT _Lansyer, pinxit_]

In 1304, Dante attended, hard by, one of the numerous schools of the Rue du Fouarre; and, at the corner of the Colbert-Mansion Street, the Faculty of Medicine had its amphitheatre. This curious building is still almost intact with its ancient cupola, and would supply an admirable piece of decoration to some retrospective museum of surgery.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OLD AMPHITHEATRE OF SURGERY At the corner of the Colbert Mansion _Etching by Martial_]

Not far from this spot, the Rue Maitre-Albert--which up to 1844 was called the Rue Perdue--owes its present name to the Dominican Maitre Albert who, in the thirteenth century, taught in the open air in Maubert Square. It contains curious houses, to-day dens for tramps, who spend the night in them. In 1819, an old negro of miserable appearance and strange manners used to go down this dark street every evening, trying his best to escape observation, and used to seek food and shelter in one of its sorry eating-houses. People pointed him out as he went, whispering that he was formerly Dubarry's black servant, Zamore, whom Louis XV. had played with; Zamore who became a power, petted and courted by n.o.ble lords, fine ladies, and princes of the Church that emulously strove to gain the favourite's good graces. Later, having been appointed a munic.i.p.al officer under the Terror, he vilely, ungratefully, and in a cowardly way, betrayed his benefactress, gave her up, and cast her beneath the knife of the guillotine. At length, sinking lower and lower, Zamore came and hid himself at No. 13, on the second courtyard floor of this gloomy Rue Perdue, and died there on the 7th of February 1820.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CHURCH OF SAINT-NICOLAS-DU-CHARDONNERET, AND THE RUE SAINT-VICTOR _Drawn by Heidbrendk_ (Carnavalet Museum)]

The two churches nearest the spot are those of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonneret and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Connected with the former is a dismal little seminary, in which, under the guidance of the Abbe Dupanloup, the eminent philosopher Ernest Renan went through part of his theological studies. Every one should read in the _Souvenirs of my Childhood and Youth_ the admirable pages this marvellous writer has devoted to his stay in this studious home. "The parish, which derived its name from the field of thistles well known of the students at the Paris University in the Middle Ages, was then the centre of a rich quarter inhabited chiefly by the legal profession. The boarding-school _regime_ weighed heavily upon me. My best friend, a young man from Coutances, I think, like myself, full of enthusiasm, and of excellent heart, held himself aloof, refused to reconcile himself, and died. The Savoy students showed themselves still less acclimatisable. One of them, older than I, owned to me that, each evening, he measured with his eye the height of the three-storey dormitory above the pavement of the Rue Saint-Victor. I fell ill; apparently I was doomed. My Breton soul lost itself in an infinite melancholy. The last angelus of evening I had heard resound over our dear hills, and the last sunset I had watched over the tranquil landscape came back to my memory like sharp arrows. In the ordinary course of things I ought to have died. Perhaps it would have been better if I had...."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RUE SAINT-JULIEN-LE-PAUVRE _Etching by Martial_]

The artist Le Brun's mother is buried in the Saint-Charles chapel of the church of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonneret, and also Pierre de Chamousset, the inventor of the petty Postal service. Parisian ladies, bless his memory!

The church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre is set apart for the Greek ritual.

Enclosed on its sides and rear by the ancient buildings of the Hotel-Dieu, this melancholy-looking chapel is falling to ruin; a stopped-up well with meagre weeds growing from its border-stones seems to guard the door, which opens on a dirty, rubbish-strewn courtyard where a few half-starved fowls peck their scanty meal. It is a nook of poverty and suffering. The walls are damp and dingy; in these sombre yards, where a few sickly trees barely exist, all is solitude and abandon. Only three years ago, stretchers or ambulance carriages still stopped from time to time in it, and from them were taken victims of crime, disease, or accident, that had fallen in the street. Through the vast Paris, busy and indifferent, monopolised by its pleasures or its cares, one or another human wreck was brought to the a.s.sistance Publique in this dismal Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre with its suggestive name.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE JARDIN DES PLANTES--THE CEDAR OF LEBANON AND THE LABYRINTH _Water-colour by Hilaire_ (National Library)]

To refresh ourselves after so painful a spectacle, let us come back to the lovely Parisian quays, and walk along the fair river, quivering in the daylight or in the moon's nightly rays; let us pa.s.s by the beautiful mansions of the Miramionnes, of Nesmond, of Judge Rolland, in front of the wine market--"catacombs of thirst," and pause at the old Jardin des Plantes, dear to Buffon. A touch of the charm of things past, but not entirely vanished, lingers yet!

The trees are centuries old, the ornamental hornbeams have not been altered; there are aviaries and goat-pens which are the same as when Daubigny and Charles Jacques sketched them in 1843, to ill.u.s.trate the handsome work published by Curmer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE JARDIN DES PLANTES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY _Water-colour by Hilaire_ (National Library)]

The reptiles are better housed than in our childhood; but the hippopotamus wallows in the same basin; the giraffe stretches his neck over the same enclosures, and the elephant holds through the same railings his gluttonous trunk in search of rolls.

The bear-pit has not changed; and the crowd of idlers continue to tempt the eternal "Martin" to climb up the same tree. Still to the noisy children the delightful labyrinth offers its capricious meandering; and the cedar of Lebanon (_Cedrus Libani_) [Linnaeus], which tradition tells us Monsieur Jussieu brought back in his hat, has not ceased to wave its ample branches over dreamers, loungers, workers, or grisette--the grisette that comes and sits beneath its venerable shade to read the exciting magazine story which fills with sweet emotion her heart athirst for the ideal!

And, in fine, is there anything nattier than the tiny rooms of the Louis XVI. buildings? which once formed Buffon's natural history cabinet, and whose delicate grey wood carvings made such a suitable framework for the admirable b.u.t.terfly collections brought from every country.

Within these finely decorated and cosy rooms there was, so to speak, an ideal a.s.semblage of blossoms, a fairy scene of exquisite colours, an enchantment wrought by a brilliant palette.

There they were, all of them, beautiful b.u.t.terflies, with their metallic l.u.s.tres from India and Brazil, French b.u.t.terflies of a thousand tints, both the great death's-head sphynx and the little blue creature of the meadows.

Perhaps time had powdered and somewhat dimmed the marvellous brightness of their first colouring; but it was better so. Their pristine l.u.s.tre would have been too great a contrast in the quaint surroundings, and it was an extra charm to see such gems of the air thus lightly decked with the dust of the past! To-day, alas! these rooms, flowering with sculpture, are closed and forsaken; a part of their wainscoting has disappeared.... Where have decorations so pleasing gone?... Why these everlasting, culpable mutilations, which I know are a grief to Monsieur Perier, the eminent Director of the Museum? The collections of b.u.t.terflies are now transferred to the vast and sumptuous central hall of the new pavilion devoted to natural history. I liked them better in the charming rooms which once contained them and suited them so well!

The water-flowers bloom, as of yore, in the same low, stifling hot-houses, near the bizarre-shaped orchids; and it was in the old amphitheatre, where so many ill.u.s.trious scholars taught, that the n.o.ble artist Madame Madeleine Lemaire,--the only "woman professor" that has ever held a post at the Museum,--initiated her attentive, spell-bound audience into the divine beauty of flowers!

In all periods, artists have come and installed their light easel or their modelling-stands in front of the lions' cages, or in the Garden itself, on the gra.s.s, opposite the antelopes, hinds, walla-birds, or the goats of Thibet.

We remember, my brother and I, having, as little boys, accompanied our father, who was modelling from life the tigers and lions in the wild beasts' corridor. The odour was pungently alkaline, the heat sultry; we heard the hissing of polecats in the entrance and exit rotundas; sometimes a terrible roar, a complaint of anger, pain, or ennui, arose and shook the panes.

Most of these unfortunate animals, deprived of air and light, shut up in the horrible, narrow, stinking cages, died a lingering death of consumption. Indeed, they quickly grew familiar with those who spent whole weeks studying them; and their huge heads rubbed caressingly against the thick cage-bars, while their eyes became soft and almost tender.

Often we went, inquisitive, ferreting school-boys, to the reptiles'