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THE STONES OF PARIS
IN HISTORY AND LETTERS

Madame de Sévigné.
(From the portrait by Mignard.)

THE STONES OF PARIS
IN HISTORY AND LETTERS

BY
BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN
AND
CHARLOTTE M. MARTIN

IN TWO VOLUMES
Vol. II

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
MDCCCXCIX

Copyright, 1899, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

From drawings by John Fulleylove, Esq. The portraits from photographs by Messrs. Braun, Clément et Cie.

THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In preceding chapters we have come upon the small beginnings of the Scholars' Quarter; we have had glimpses of the growth of the great mother University and of her progeny of out-lying colleges; and we have trodden, with their scholars and students, the slope of "the whole Latin Mountain," as it was named by Pantaléon, that nephew of Pope Urban IV., who extolled the learning he had acquired here. Looking down from its crest, over the hill-side to the Seine, we have had under our eyes the mediæval Pays Latin, filling up the space within its bounding wall, built by Philippe-Auguste and left untouched by Charles V.; we have seen that wall gradually obliterated through the ages, its gate-ways with their flanking towers first cut away, its fabric picked to pieces, stone by stone; while, beyond its line, we have watched the building up, early in the seventeenth century, of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, over the Pré-aux-Clercs, and in the fields beyond, and along the river-bank toward the west. In the centre of this new quarter the nobility of birth was soon intrenched behind its garden-walls, and in the centre of the old quarter the aristocracy of brains was secluded within its courts. The boundary-line of the two quarters, almost exactly defined by the straight course from the Institute to the Panthéon, speedily became blurred, and the debatable neutral ground between was settled by colonists from either region, servants of the State, of art, of letters. In our former strollings through long-gone centuries, we have visited many of these and many of the dwellers on the University hill; we are now to turn our attention to those brilliant lights on the left bank who have helped to make Paris "la ville lumière" during the forenoon of the nineteenth century.

Through the heart of the faubourg curved the narrow Rue Saint-Dominique, from Esplanade des Invalides to Rue des Saints-Pères. This eastern end, nearly as far west as Rue de Bellechasse, has been carried away by new Boulevard Saint-Germain, and with it the hôtel of the de Tocqueville family, which stood at No. 77 of the ancient aristocratic street. Here in 1820 lived the Comtesse de Tocqueville, with her son, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, a lad of fifteen. Here he remained until the events of 1830 sent him to the United States, with a mission to study their prison systems; a study extended by him to all the institutions of the Republic, which had a profound interest for the French Republicans of that time. His report on those prisons appeared in 1832, and in 1835 he put forth the first volume of "De la Démocratie en Amérique," its four volumes being completed in 1840. That admirable survey of the progress of democracy—whose ascendancy he predicted, despite his own predilections—still carries authority, and at the time created a wide-spread sensation. It made its author famous, and promoted him to the place of first-assistant lion in the salon of Madame Récamier, whose head lion was always Châteaubriand. De Tocqueville had settled, on his return to Paris, in this same faubourg; residing until 1837 at 49 Rue de Verneuil, and from that date to 1840 at 12 Rue de Bourgogne. Elected Deputy in 1839, he soon crossed the Seine, and we cannot follow him to his various residences in the quarter of the Madeleine. For a few months in 1849 he served as Minister for Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of the Prince-President, and was among the Deputies put into cells in December, 1851. His remaining years, until his death at Cannes in 1859, were spent in retirement from all public affairs.

A notable inhabitant of the University quarter, in the early years of the nineteenth century, was François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot, a young professor at the Sorbonne. His classes were crowded by students and by men from outside, all intent on his strong and convincing presentation of his favorite historical themes. He lived, near his lecture-room, at No. 10 Rue de la Planche, a street that now forms the eastern end of Rue de Varennes, between Rues du Bac and de la Chaise. From 1823 to 1830 his home was at 37 Rue Saint-Dominique, where now is No. 203 Boulevard Saint-Germain, next to the Hôtel de Luynes, already visited with Racine. This latter period saw Guizot, after a temporary dismissal from his chair by the Bourbon King, at the height of his powers and his prestige as a lecturer. He carried his oratory to the Chamber of Deputies in 1830, and there compelled equal attention. In 1832 we find him, Minister of Public Instruction, installed in the official residence at 116 Rue de Grenelle, on the corner of Rue de Bellechasse. His work while there still lasts as the basis of the elementary education of France, and it is to him that she owes her primary schools. Pushed out from this office in 1836 by the pushing Thiers, he went to England as Ambassador for a few months in 1840, and in the autumn of that year he took up his abode in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he remained until he was driven out in 1848. That ancient mansion, no longer in existence, stood on the triangle made by Boulevard and Rue des Capucines. With his desertion of this Southern Bank, we lose sight of his dwellings, always thereafter in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Guizot and Louis-Philippe failed in their fight against a nation, and the men of February, 1848, revolted against the Prime Minister as well as against the King of the French. That opéra-bouffe monarch with the pear-shaped face, under the guise of Mr. Smith, with a fat umbrella, slipped out of the back door of the Tuileries and away to England; Guizot got away to the same safe shores in less ludicrous disguise. He returned to his own land in 1849, and lived until 1874, always poor, always courageous, and always at work. Among his many volumes of these years, all marked by elevation of thought and serenity of style, as well as by absence of warmth and color, were his "Mémoires," wherein he proves, to the satisfaction of his austere dogmatism, that he had always been in the right throughout his public career.

The Revolution of 1830, that sent de Tocqueville on his voyage, and that started Guizot in political life, brought Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine to the public ear as an orator. He had filled the public eye as a poet since 1820, when his "Méditations Poétiques" appeared. In 1830, his "Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses" had made it sure that here was a soul filled with true harmony. And while he sang the consolations of religion, as Châteaubriand had sung its splendors, he gave proof of his devotion to the Church and throne. But he bore the Revolution of 1830, and the flight of the Bourbons, with the same equanimity he always summoned for the reverses of others, as well as for his own. When a literary genius is out of work, says Sainte-Beuve, he takes to politics and becomes an Illustrious Citizen, for want of something better to do. Lamartine was elected a Deputy soon after the upset of 1830, and sprang at once into the front rank of parliamentary orators. His speeches in the Chamber, and his "History of the Girondists"—enthralling and untrustworthy—helped to bring on the Revolution of 1848, quite without his knowing or wishing it. It was his superb outburst of rhetoric, as he stood alone on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, on February 25th, backed by no colleague and clad in no authority, that saved to France her Tricolor—"that has swept all around the world, carrying liberty and glory in its folds"—in place of the white flag of the Bourbons that had gone, and the red rag of the mob that was near coming. Between that month of February and June of that same year, Lamartine had been on the crest of his highest wave, and had sunk to his lowest level in the regard of his Parisians. Their faith was justified in his genius and his rectitude, but a volcano is not to be squirted cold by rose-water, and the new republic could not be built on phrases. After his amazing minority in the election for president, Lamartine sank out of sight, accepting without complaint his sudden obscurity, as he had accepted without intrigue his former lustre. The conspiracy of December, 1851, sent him into retirement, and he lived alone with his pen, his only weapon against want—a pathetically heroic figure during these last years. George Sand had seen a good deal of Lamartine in the days of 1848, and he struck her as "a sort of Lafayette without his shrewdness. He shows respect for all men and all ideas, while believing in no ideas and loving no man." A more just and complete judgment is that of Louis Blanc: "He is incessantly laboring under a self-exalting hallucination. He dreams about himself marvellous dreams, and believes in them. He sees what is not visible, he opens his inward ear to impossible sounds, and takes delight in narrating to others any tale his imagination narrates to him. Honest and sincere as he is, he would never deceive you, were he not himself deceived by the familiar demon who sweetly torments him."

For twenty years he had been a resident of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Indeed, when he came to Paris for a while, in 1820, to see to the publication of his first poems, he found rooms on Quai d'Orsay. From there he went to make that call on young Hugo, to be narrated later. From 1835 to 1855 his apartment was in the grand mansion, "between court and garden," No. 82 Rue de l'Université. His reception-room was decorated with portraits and busts of Alphonse de Lamartine, we are told by Frederick Locker-Lampson, who visited him there. His host was a handsome and picturesque figure, he says, albeit with an over-refinement of manner. No keener criticism of the poet and his poetry, at this period, has been made than that by Locker-Lampson, in one curt sentence. His sane humor is revolted by that "prurient chastity, then running, nay, galloping, to seed in an atmosphere of twaddle and toadyism."

The desolate fallen idol was rescued from oblivion and poverty by the Second Empire, whose few honorable acts may not be passed over. In 1867, in its and his dying years, that government gave him money, and the municipality gave him a house. These gifts came to him in Rue Cambacérès, in a small hotel now rebuilt into No. 7 of that street. Where it meets with Rue de Penthièvre, just above, you will find the attractive old mansion, with its ancient number 43 cut in the stone over the doorway, in which, during the years after leaving the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he carried on his courageous struggle with his pen against debt and poverty. He had but few months' enjoyment of his last home, the gift of the people of Paris, for he died there in 1869. It was at Passy, not far from the square in Avenue Henri-Martin, named for him and holding his statue. The chair in which he is seated might be a theatrical property, perhaps humorously and fittingly so suggested by the sculptor; who has, however, done injustice to his subject, in robbing him of his natural grace and suavity, and in giving him a pedantic angularity that was never his.

When Lamartine writes to Sainte-Beuve, "I have wept, I who never weep," we are amused by the poet's naïve ignorance of his persistent lachrymose notes. The "smiling critic" accepted them simply as a pardonable overflow of the winning melancholy of that nature, in which he recognized all that was genuine and laudable. This wide-minded tolerance is perhaps the secret of Sainte-Beuve's strength as a critic. With his acute discernment of the soul of a book and of its author, his subtle appreciation of all diverse qualities, he was splendidly impartial. He could read anything and everything, with a keenness of appraisement that did not prejudice his enjoyment of that which was alive, amid much that might be dead. "A pilgrim of ideas, but lacking the first essential of a pilgrim—faith"—he gave all that he was to literature through all his life, and when near its end, he had the right to say: "Devoted with all my heart to my profession of critic, I have tried to be, more and more, a good and—if possible—a skilful workman."

Alphonse de Lamartine.
(From a sketch by David d'Angers. "un soir chez Hugo.")

He devoted himself so entirely to his profession, that his life was like a mill, as he said, perpetually feeding and grinding. On the Monday morning, he would shut himself in with the new volumes, which he was to feed into himself and assimilate, during the twelve hours of each of the five following days; on Saturday he was ready to grind out the result. His Sunday holiday was given to the proof-reading of his next day's "Causerie du Lundi." On that evening he took his only relaxation, in the theatre. His work-room was bare of all superfluities, and his daily life went in a round, with simple diet, no wine, nor coffee, nor tobacco.

At the age of twenty-five, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was living, with his mother, in a small apartment on the fourth floor of No. 19—now 37—Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He had given himself to letters instead of medicine, for which he had studied, and had become a regular contributor of critical papers to the press. His name was already spoken along with the names of Victor Cousin, Villemain, Guizot, Mérimée. He had produced his "Historical and Critical Pictures," his "French Poetry and French Theatre of the Sixteenth Century," and the "Poems of Joseph Delorme"—his selected pen-name. The poet in him had abdicated to the critic, handing down many choice gifts. In this apartment he received for review a volume of poems, "by a young barbarian," his editor wrote. This was the "Odes et Ballades" of Victor Hugo, with whom the critic soon made acquaintance, and at whose house, a few doors away in the same street, he became a constant visitor. From here Madame Sainte-Beuve removed, with her son, in 1834, to Rue du Mont-Parnasse, and in that street he had his home during his remaining years. His official residence, from 1840 to 1848, as a Keeper of the Mazarin Library, was in that building now occupied by the Institute. He found installed there, among the other Keepers, Octave Feuillet. The upheaval of February, 1848, drove Sainte-Beuve into Belgium. On his return in the following year, he settled in the house left him by his mother, and there he died in 1869. This two-storied, plaster-fronted, plain little No. 11 Rue du Mont-Parnasse, saw his thirty years of colossal work. From here, he went to take his chair of Latin poetry in the Collège de France, where he was hissed by the students, who meant to hiss, not the critic and lecturer, but the man who had accepted the Second Empire in accepting that chair. He was no zealous recruit, however, and preserved his entire independence; and when he consented to go to the Senate in 1865, it was for the sake of its dignity and its salary. He was always poor in money.

To his workroom in this house, came every French writer of those thirty years, anxious to plead with or to thank that Supreme Court of Criticism. Among those who bowed to its verdicts and who have owned to its influence, Edmond de Goncourt has given us the most vivid sketch of the critic in conversation: "When I hear him touch on a dead man, with his little phrases, I seem to see a swarm of ants invading a body; cleaning out all the glory, and in a few minutes leaving a very clean skull of the once illustrious one." And, in his written reviews, Sainte-Beuve had the supreme art of distilling a drop of venom in a phial of honey, so making the poison fragrant and the incense deadly. There is no more constant presence than his on this southern hill-side, where all his days and nights were spent. We seem to see there the short, stout figure, erect and active, the bald head covered with a skull-cap, the bushy red eyebrows, the smooth-shaven face, redeemed from ugliness by its alert intelligence. His walks were down this slope of Mont-Parnasse, which he thought of as the pleasure-ground of the mediæval students of the University, to the quays, where he hunted among the old-book stalls. And he loved to stroll in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens. In the Poets' Corner, now made there, you will find his bust along with those of Henri Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, and Paul Verlaine.

Crossing the street from Sainte-Beuve's last home to No. 32, we find a modest house set behind its garden-wall, in which is a tablet containing the name of Edgar Quinet. More than passing mention of his name is due to this fine intellect and this great soul. His mother thought that "an old gentleman named M. Voltaire"—whom she might have seen in her childhood, as her village crowded about his carriage on its way to Paris—was the cleverest man who ever lived. She brought up her boy to think for himself, after that philosopher's fashion, and the boy bettered her teachings. He spent his life in looking into the depths of beliefs and institutions, in getting at the essence of the real and the abiding, in letting slip that which was shallow and transitory; so that, towards the end, he could say: "I have passed my days in hearing men speak of their illusions, and I have never experienced a single one." He became, in Professor Dowden's apt phrase, "a part of the conscience of France," and as such, his influence was of higher value than that exerted by his busy pen in politics, history, poetry. Indeed, his enthusiasms for the freedom and progress of his fellow-beings carried his pen beyond due restraint. Of course he was honored by exile during the Second Empire, and when it tumbled to pieces, he returned to Paris, and soon went to Versailles as a Deputy. At his grave, in 1875, Hugo spoke of him as living and dying with the serene light of truth on his brow, and he can have no happier epitaph.

Quinet had outlived, by only a few months, his life-long friend Jules Michelet, who died in 1874. He, too, had his homes and did his work, private and public, on this same hill-side. His birth-place, far away on the northern bank, on the corner of Rues de Tracy and Saint-Denis, is now given over to business. It was a church, built about 1630 in the gardens of "Les Dames de Saint-Chaumont," and had been closed in 1789, along with so many other churches. Going fast to ruin, it was fit only for the poverty-stricken tenant, who came along in the person of the elder Michelet, a printer from Laon. He set up his presses in the nave and his household gods in the choir, where the boy Jules was born on August 22, 1798. The building is unchanged as to its outer aspect, with its squat columns supporting the heavy pediment of the façade, except that two stories have been placed above its main body. In these strange surroundings for a child, and in the shelters equally squalid, to and from which his father removed during many years, the boy grew up, haunted and nervous, cold, hungry and ill-clad, and always over his books when set free from type-setting.

He got lessons and took prizes at the Lycée Charlemagne, but the pleasantest lesson and the dearest prize of his youth did not come in school. They were his first sight, from his father's windows in Rue Buffon, of the sun setting over beyond the trees, tuneful with birds, of the Jardin du Roi. Grass and foliage, and a sky above an open space, had been unknown to his walled-in boyhood. When he became able to choose a home for himself, it had always its garden, or a sight of one. At an early age he went to tutoring; in 1821 he was appointed lecturer on history in the Collège Rollin, then in its old place on the University hill; soon after 1830 he succeeded to Guizot's chair in the Sorbonne, and in 1838 the Collège de France made him its professor of History and Moral Science. In that institution, he and his colleague Quinet caused immense commotion by their assaults on the Church intrenched in the State, and from their halls the hootings of the clericals, and the plaudits of the liberals, re-echoed throughout France. The priesthood complained that "the lecturer on history and morals gave no history and no morals," and it began to be believed—rightly or wrongly—that he was using his professor's platform as a band-stand, and was beating a big drum for the gratification of the groundlings. He was speedily dismissed, he was reinstated soon after 1848, and was finally thrown aside by the Second Empire.

At this period only, he disappears from the Scholars' Quarter for a while. His earliest residence there was, soon after his marriage in 1827, at 23 Rue de l'Arbalète, a street named from the "Chevaliers de l'Arbalète," who had made it their archery grounds in mediæval days. The site of Michelet's residence is fittingly covered by a large school, on the corner of that street and of the street named for Claude Bernard. After a short stay in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor—that street nearly all gone now—he returned to this neighborhood, and settled in Rue des Postes, which, in 1867, received the name of the grammarian Lhomond. Otherwise, no change has come to this quiet street, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century buildings, among which is the Hôtel Flavacourt, set in the midst of gardens. On its first floor Michelet lived from 1838 to 1850. At No. 10 is the arched gateway through which he went, in its keystone the carved head of a strong man with thick beard and curling locks. Above the long yellow-drab wall shows the new chapel of the priests, who, with unknowing irony, have taken his favorite dwelling for their schools.

Absent from this quarter during the early years of the Second Empire, and absent from Paris during part of that time, it was in 1856 that Michelet settled in his last abode. It was at 44 Rue de l'Ouest, and his garden here was the great Luxembourg Garden. In 1867, the street was renamed Rue d'Assas, and his house renumbered 76. After his death in the south of France in 1874, his widow lived there until her own death in 1899, and kept that modest home just as he had left it. She was his second wife, and had been of great help to him in his work, and had done her own work, aided by his hand, which sprinkled gold-dust over her manuscript, as she prettily said. That hand had not been idle for over fifty years. He gave forty years of labor, broken only by his other books, to his "History of France," which at his death was not yet done, as he had meant that it should be done. It is a series of pictures, glowing and colored by his sympathetic imagination, which let him see and touch the men of every period, and made him, for the moment, the contemporary of every epoch. And Taine assures us, contrary to the general belief, that we may trust its accuracy. His style has a magic all its own. He had said: "Augustin Thierry calls history a narration, Guizot calls it an analysis; I consider that history should be a resurrection." This idea is translated into durable marble on his striking tombstone in Père-Lachaise, done in high relief by the chisel of Mercié.

The life of Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littré, a few years longer than that of Michelet and equally full of strenuous labor, was passed on this same slope and ended in this same Street of Assas. Born on February 1, 1801, in the plain house of three stories and attic at No. 21 Rue des Grands-Augustins, he got his schooling at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where we have seen other famous scholars. He appears for a day and a night on the barricades of 1830, and then settles quietly at No. 11 Rue du Colombier, now Rue Jacob. On his marriage, in 1835, he removed to No. 21 Rue des Maçons, now Rue Champollion, once Racine's street, in the heart of the University. In 1838 he made his home in Rue de l'Ouest, and in that home he remained until his death on June 2, 1881. His apartment took up the entire second floor of present 44 Rue d'Assas—the new name of Rue de l'Ouest—at the corner of Rue de Fleurus, and its windows on the curve opened on ample light and air.

Like Sainte-Beuve, Littré gave up medicine, to which he had been trained, for journalistic work; some of which, in his early days, was done for the Gazette Médicale, and much of it all through life for the political press. He was an ardent Liberal, and after the fall of the Empire, was elected a Deputy, and later a Senator, of the Third Republic. Nothing in the domain of literature seemed alien to this catholic mind, equally at ease in science and philosophy, philology and history. The enduring achievement of his life is his Dictionary of the French Language. It was begun in 1844 and completed in 1872, and a supplement was added in 1877. In his fortieth year, he was attracted by the teachings of Comte, and became a leader of the Positivists and a copious contributor to their review. His career is that of an earnest and a self-denying student; a teacher of unfettered thinking in science, religion, politics; a modest and disinterested fellow-worker in letters.

His master in the cult that won him solely by its scientific fascinations, Auguste Comte, had lived for the last fifteen years of his life at No. 10 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and there he died in 1857. We can but glance at the tablet in passing, and we cannot even glance at the altered residences, in this quarter, of the gifted Amédée Thierry and of his more gifted brother, Augustin, the historian "with the patience of a monk and the pen of a poet." He died, in 1856, in Rue du Mont-Parnasse, in the house that had been Quinet's, it is said. We look up, as we go, at the sunny windows, facing full south over the Luxembourg Gardens, of the home of Jules Janin, in his day "the prince of critics." They are on the first floor at the corner of Rues Rotrou and de Vaugirard, alongside the Odéon, the theatre in which he had his habitual seat. He died at Passy in 1874.

This faubourg has had no more striking figure than that of Prosper Mérimée, tight-buttoned in frock-coat, and of irreproachable starchedness; with a curiously round, cold eye behind glasses, a large nose with a square end, a forehead seamed with fine wrinkles. It was his pride to pass as an Englishman in his walk. In his work, in romance equally with archæology, the gentleman prevails over the author, so that he seems to stand aloof, reserved, sceptical, correct; never showing emotion, never giving way to his really infinite wit and frisky mockery. He began his working-life in 1825, as a painter with his father, alongside the École des Beaux-Arts, at No. 16 Rue des Petits-Augustins, now 12 Rue Bonaparte. In 1840 he moved around the corner to No. 10 Rue des Beaux-Arts, half way between the school and his other place of work in the Institute, as Inspector of the Historical and Artistic Monuments of France. From 1848 to 1851 he was to be found at 18 Rue Jacob, and close at hand he found "l'Inconnue," at 35 of the same street. In 1852 he removed to his last residence at 52 Rue de Lille, on the corner of Rue du Bac. The Commune burned that house along with others adjacent, and until rebuilding began, long after, there stood in the ruins a marble bust on its pedestal, unharmed except for the stain of the flames. It was all that was left of Mérimée's great art-collection, with which, and with his books and cats, he had lived alone since his mother's death. He had gone away to Cannes to die in 1870. So that he did not see the ruins of the Empire, to which he had rallied, altogether from devotion to the Empress, whom he had known in Spain when she was a child. He accepted nothing from the Emperor except the position of Librarian at Fontainebleau, and was as natural and sincere with the Empress, as he had been with Eugenie Montijo playing about his knee. In his other office he was a loyal servant of the State, and to his alert, artistic conscience France owes the preservation of many historic structures.

There are those who claim that the influence of Taine on modern thought has been deeper and will be more durable than that of Renan. They base their belief on the groundless notion that men are most profoundly impressed by pure reason, forgetful of that well-grounded experience, which proves that all men are touched and moved and persuaded rather by sentiment than by conviction. And the writer is irresistible, who, like Renan, appeals to our emotional as well as to our thinking capacities. We are captivated by those feminine qualities in his strain that are disapproved of by his detractors; his refined fancy and his undulating grace seduce us. We are convinced by his zest in the search for truth, by his courage in speaking it as he found it; we recognize his sincerity and sobriety that do not demand applause; we respect the magnanimity that looked on curses as oratorical ornaments of his enemies, and that took no return in kind. And so we stand in the peaceful court of homelike No. 23 Rue Cassette, on whose first floor Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine died in 1893, in respectful memory of the man who has helped us all by his dissections, his cataloguing, and his array of facts. The structure of the philosophy of history, that he raised, stands imposing and enduring on the bank of the stream of modern thought, and yet it may be that Edmond de Goncourt was not wholly wrong, in his characterization of Taine as "the incarnation of modern criticism; most learned, most ingenious, and most frequently unsound." We turn away and follow eagerly the steps of sympathetic Joseph-Ernest Renan.

We have already seen the country boy coming to school, at Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, in 1838. After four years' tuition there, he passed on to higher courses in the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice. That renowned school faces the place of the same name, which it entirely covered, when built in the early years of the seventeenth century. When the Revolution demolished the old structure, it destroyed the parloir where the young student, the Chevalier des Grieux, gave way before the beguilements of his visitor, Manon Lescaut. The fountain in this open space flashes with that adorable creation of the Abbé Prévost; the original of two creations as immortal, says Jules Janin: "For who is the Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre but Manon made pure; and who is Châteaubriand's Atala but Manon made Christian?"

Once a week, while at the seminary, young Renan took an outing with the other pupils to its succursale at Issy. It is a dreary walk, along the wearisome length of Rue de Vaugirard, to the village to which Isis gave her name, when that goddess, once worshipped in Lutetia, was banished to this far-away hamlet. There "Queen Margot" had a hunting-lodge and vast grounds, and when these were taken by the brothers of Saint-Sulpice, they saved the grounds and transformed the cupids on the walls of the lodge into cherubs, and the Venus into a Madonna. Now their new structures in Caen stone face the street named for Ernest Renan. In the gardens is a chapel built around the grotto, roofed with shells, wherein Bossuet and Fénelon used to meet, toward the end of the eighteenth century. There they doubtless began that controversy over the mystical writings of Madame Guyon, which ended in Fénelon's dismissal from the court through the influence of the imperious Bossuet. Under these trees that shaded them, walked Renan in his long and cruel conflict between his conscience and his traditions, most dreading the pain he would give his mother by the step he felt impelled to take. He took that step in October, 1845, when he laid aside the soutane—to be adorned and glorified by him, his teachers had hoped—and walked out from the seminary to a small hôtel-garni on the opposite side of Place Saint-Sulpice. Supported at first only by the savings of his devoted sister, Henriette, he started as a tutor, and began his life's pen-work, in a cheap pension, in one of the shabby houses just west of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, in Rue des Deux-Églises, now renamed Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Épée.

His future dwellings, befitting his modest gains, were all in quiet streets of this scholarly quarter. The site of that one occupied from 1862 to 1865, at 55 Rue Madame, is covered by Collége Bossuet, where priests teach their dogmas. Old Passage Sainte-Marie, where he lodged for a while in 1865, is now Rue Paul-Louis-Courier, and his lodging is gone. During the ten years from 1866 to 1876, he lived in the plain house numbered 29 of retired Rue Vaneau. Then for three years, he had an apartment at No. 16 Rue Guillaume; "a short street of provincial aspect," says Alphonse Daudet, "grass-grown, with never a wheel; of silent mansions and unopened gates, and of closed windows on the court; faded and wan after centuries of sleep." This mansion was built for Denis Talon, an advocate-general at the end of the seventeenth century, and described by Germain Brice, writing in 1684, as having "most agreeable apartments, with outlook on neighboring gardens, and a large court, and great expense in building." He did not mention the entrance-door, which is monumental, nor the knocker, worth a pilgrimage to see. In 1880 Renan removed to No. 4 Rue de Tournon, so finding himself between No. 6, once occupied by Laplace, and No. 2, once occupied by Balzac. In 1883 he was made Administrator of the Collége de France, and there took up his official residence. His appointment to the chair of Hebrew in that institution, on his return from the Orient in 1861, had so perturbed the Church behind the State that he was dismissed after he had given but one lecture.

The Second Empire gone, he came back, mainly through the action of Jules Simon, a wise and learned statesman and a most lovable man. Renan the administrator remained the lecturer as well, and has left ineffaceable memories with those who saw and heard him in his declining years; when, his body disabled by maladies, he still went singing on his way, as he manfully put it. It was a gross and clumsy body; to use Edmond de Goncourt's words, an ungraceful, almost disgraceful body, full of the moral grace of this apostle of doubt, this priest of science. His lectures were rather readings of the scriptures, interspersed with his own exegesis. On chairs about a large table, and against the wall, in a small room of the college, were seated the few intent listeners. Renan sat at one end of the table, his head—"an unchurched cathedral"—bent over a bulky copy of the scriptures as he read; then, as he talked, he would raise his head and throw back the long hair that had tumbled over his brow, the subtle humor of his mobile mouth and his dreamy eyes effacing the effect of his big nose and fat cheeks, his beardless face luminous with an exalted intellectual urbanity. His interpretations and illustrations were spoken with his perfect art of simple and limpid phrase, and in those tones that told of his dwelling with the saints and prophets of all the ages, and with the elusive spirits of mockery of our own day.

He died, on October 2, 1892, in his official residence in the Collége de France, an apartment on the second floor of the main structure facing the front court. The austere simplicity of this Breton interior was leavened by the books and the equipment of the scholar. The window of his death-chamber is just under the clock.

The "touch of earth" demanded by Tennyson's Guinevere was a need of the nature of George Sand. The three stages of her growth, shown in her work, reveal the three inspirations of her life, each most actual: the love of man, the love of humanity, the love of nature. The woman's heart in her made her, said Renan, "the Æolian harp of our time"; and Béranger's verse well fits her:

"Son cœur est un luth suspendu;

Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne."

It vibrated to the touch of outrages on woman and of injustice to man, and it pulsated with equal passion for her children and for the rural sights and scents of her birth-place. And we feel her heart in her phrases, that stir us, as Thackeray puts it, like distant country-bells. This half-poet, half-mystic, came fairly by her fantastic inheritance; for she was, in the admirable phrase of Mr. Henry James, "more sensibly the result of a series of love affairs than most of us." On the other side, we may accurately apply to her Voltaire's words concerning Queen Elizabeth: "And Europe counts you among her greatest men." There were masculine breadth and elevation in her complex, ample nature, with divine instincts and ideal purities, that left no room for vulgar ambitions and mean avidities. Balzac, of kindred qualities, wrote, after having learned to know her a little: "George Sand would speedily be my friend. She has no pettiness whatever in her soul; none of the low jealousies that obscure so many contemporary talents. Dumas resembles her in this."

When Madame Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant, a young woman of twenty-six, came, in 1830, to Paris to stay—she had already, while a girl, been a pensionnaire in the convent of the "Augustines Anglaises," where, under its ancient name, we have met with Mlle. Phlipon—she found her only acquaintance in the capital, Jules Sandeau, living on Quai Saint-Michel. He had known M. Dudevant and his wife during his visit to Nohant, a year or so earlier. She rented a garret in the same house, one of the old row on the quay, just east of Place Saint-Michel. Here she discovered that she could use a pen; at first with scant success and for small pay in the columns of the "Figaro," and then, with not much greater power, in a romance, written conjointly with Sandeau. They named it "Rose et Blanche," and its authors' pseudonyme was Jules Sand. Here she assumed the male costume which enabled her to pass for a young student, unmolested in her walks in all weathers and with all sorts and conditions of men, whom she delighted to scrutinize. In a letter written in July, 1832, she says that she is tired of climbing five long flights so many times a day, and is seeking new quarters. She found them, with the same superb outlook over the Seine as that she had left, on a third floor of Quai Malaquais.

It may have been, for she always dwelt on her royal ancestry, in the house now No. 5, which had been the home of Maurice de Saxe. That son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and of the Countess of Königsmark was the father of a natural daughter, who became the grandmother and guardian of Mlle. Lucile-Aurore. Madame Dudevant gave his name to her son, and this young Maurice, and his sister Solange, were now brought to their mother's new home. She devoted hours to their amusement and instruction, and hours to her pen-work; writing far into the night when daylight did not suffice. She improvised a study in the ground floor on the court, cool when the westering sun flooded her windows above, and quiet when too many visitors disturbed her. For she had sprung into fame with her "Indiana"—its author styled George Sand—and after only two months' interval with her "Valentine." Naturally inert, she had to push herself on to work, and then her "serene volubility" knew no pause. She had now to be reckoned with in the guild of letters, and its members met in the "poets' garret," as she termed her little salon.

Balzac came—he who discouraged her in the beginning, on Quai Saint-Michel—and Hugo and Dumas and Sainte-Beuve and young de Musset. With this last-named she went from here to Italy, having persuaded his mother that his infatuation would reform the wayward youth. All the world knows, from the books on both sides, the story of the short-lived liaison. She returned to this home in August, 1834, hungry for her children. Then we lose sight of her for many years, in her visits to her beloved provincial scenes, and her journeys to other lands, and her temporary residences on the right bank of the Seine. In the winter of 1846 and 1847 she had a pied-à-terre in her son's studio, in the secluded square of Cours d'Orléans, its entrance now at 80 Rue Taitbout. There she was visited by Charles Dickens, who describes her as "looking like what you'd suppose the queen's monthly nurse would be; chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed; a singularly ordinary woman in appearance and manner." Others describe her, at this period, when she had just passed her fortieth year, as having a wearied, listless bearing, her only notable feature being her dull, mild, tranquil eyes. In February, 1852, she was found by Mr. and Mrs. Browning in the small apartment attached to her son's studio, at No. 3 Rue Racine. It is at the top of the house, and can be rented to-day. A curious picture of her and her surroundings is given by the Brownings. She was a constant attendant at this time at the Odéon—on whose stage her plays were produced—and at the restaurant in the place in front of the theatre. There she used to sit among her male friends, smoking "those horrid big cigars" which so revolted Rachel that she would never meet the smoker.

George Sand's last Paris home was in Rue Gay-Lussac, and she was one of the earliest tenants in that street, opened in 1868. She had three or four small rooms in the entresol of No. 5, the lease of which, after her death in 1876, was sold by her son to a Roumanian lady, along with some of his mother's furniture. This lady is delighted to chatter about her illustrious predecessor in this apartment, and allows the favored visitor to sit on the broad couch, covered in dingy and worn leather, whereon George Sand was fond of reclining in her last tranquil days, at rest after stormy and laborious years.

There is a hospitable little inn in the Faubourg Saint-Germain endeared to many of us by memories, joyous or mournful. The Hotel de France et de Lorraine, in narrow Rue de Beaune, just south of the quay, was one of the earliest hotels in Paris, and was an approved resort of the Royalists, before emigration and after Restoration. They seem still to haunt its court and halls, where there lingers that atmosphere of decayed Bourbonism, which James Russell Lowell humorously hits off in a letter written when he was a guest here. The pervading presence is that of Châteaubriand, and our amiable hosts have a pride in keeping his apartment—on the first floor, in plain wood panelling of time-worn gray—much as it was when he wrote, in its salon, his letter of resignation of his post in the Diplomatic Service, to the First Consul, to be Emperor within two months. Châteaubriand was in Paris on leave of absence at the time of the shooting of the Duc d'Enghien, in the ditch of Vincennes on the night of March 20, 1804, and he refused to serve any longer the man whom he regarded as an assassin. Just seventeen years earlier these two men had arrived in Paris, both sub-lieutenants, of nearly the same age, equally obscure and ambitious, equally without heart. Napoleon Bonaparte, coming from Corsica, took a room in the Hôtel de Cherbourg, as we have seen; François-Auguste, Vicomte de Châteaubriand, coming from his natal town of Saint-Malo, found lodging in the Hôtel de l'Europe in Rue du Mail. This street, between Porte Saint-Denis, by which the coaches entered, and Place des Victoires, where they put up, was full of hôtels-garnis for travellers. Installed there, Châteaubriand hunted up the great Malesherbes, a friendly counsellor who put him in the way of meeting men of note; among others Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, at the top of them all, just then, with his "Paul et Virginie." These two, the one just fifty, the other not yet twenty, then in 1787, strolled together in the Jardin du Roi, forgetting their old world and its worries, in their talks of the new world and its glories.

During the next two or three years, Châteaubriand came frequently to Paris, an intent and disgusted onlooker at its doings. He stood, with his sisters, at their windows in Rue de Richelieu, open on that September day, when the mob surged by holding aloft on pikes the heads of Foulon and Berthier. His Royalist stomach revolted, and he joined his regiment at Rouen, to retire soon from the service, and to sail in 1791 for the new United States, with dreams of distinction as the discoverer of the Northwest Passage. He dined with George Washington, to whom he carried a letter from a French officer, who had served in the colonial army. The President waved aside Châteaubriand's florid compliments, and advised him to give up his futile quest. The young Breton wandered far into the new country, and while resting in a clearing on the Scioto, where now is Chillicothe, Ohio, he read in an old newspaper of the royal flight to Varennes, and of the enforced return.

At once he started for France, to offer his sword to his King, arriving in January, 1792, and in the summer of that year he joined the growing train of émigrés to England. For eight years he toiled and starved in London, and returned to Paris in 1800. His passport bore the name of "Lassague," and he posted, in company, as far as Porte de l'Étoile. Thence he went on foot down the Champs Élysées, finding none of the silence and desolation his fancy had pictured, but, on either hand, lights and music. On the spot where the guillotine had stood he stopped, provided with the proper emotions. He crossed Pont Royal, then the westernmost bridge, and betook himself to lodgings in Rue de Lille, in an entresol of one of the dignified mansions, that seem still to stand aloof from their bourgeois neighbors. From here, he stole out to his meals, hiding his face behind his journal, in which he had been reading impassioned praise of the new book, "Atala," and listened to the other guests speculating as to the unknown genius who had written it. The picture is to be cherished, for it is the only known portrait of Châteaubriand, modest and shrinking. He had brought the manuscript of "Atala" to Paris in his pocket, and had sought long before securing a publisher. The book found a public eager for novelty. It came in a period of sterility in letters, when all the virility of France had been spent in her colossal wars, and the new century was alert to greet the serene light of science and literature. That came from all points of the horizon, but the resplendent figures of these years were Madame de Staël and Châteaubriand.

These two had nothing in common, but they were not inimical, and Châteaubriand was one of the minor lions at Madame de Staël's receptions. For this was a little earlier than 1803, when a more beneficial air than that of Paris was ordered for her by the First Consul, whom she bored. This "cyclone of sentiment" must have bored Mr. Pitt, also, when she visited England during the Terror; for he seemed to think that the lady did protest too much about the absence of an equivalent in English for the French word "sentiment," and he replied: "Mais, Madame, nous l'avons; c'est 'My eye and Betty Martin.'" And when she got to Germany she bored Goethe, not only with her sloppy sentimentality, but with her shapely arms, too lavishly displayed. There could be no sympathy between the woman, who, in Sainte-Beuve's words, "could not help being even more French than her compatriots," and the stuff of whose dreams was a union of the theories of the dead and of the newly born centuries; and Châteaubriand, the hard-headed opponent of every revolutionary idea, who pompously labelled himself "a Bourbon by honor, a Royalist by reason, and still by taste and nature a Republican"!

A year after his "Atala," in 1802, his "Génie du Christianisme" had placed him, in the estimation of his country and of himself, on a literary throne level with the military throne of Bonaparte. The rhetorical fireworks of this book, corruscating around the Catholic Church, lighted up the night of scepticism, when worship had been abolished and God had been outlawed. Yet, as he poetized beyond recognition the North American savages in his "Atala," so now he prettified the sanctuary and "gilded the Host." The First Consul, welcoming any aid in his scheme to use the Church for his own ends, sent the author to the legation at Rome. We have seen his return. After this, he moves about Paris, lodging, for a while, he says, "in a garret" offered him by Madame la Marquise de Coislin, a stanch friend and stanch Royalist. "Hotel de Coislin" may still be read above the doorway of the stately mansion that faces Place de la Concorde, at the western corner of Rue Royale, and aggressive Bourbonism speaks from its stone pillars and pediment. His garret there was no squalid lodging. On his return from the Holy Land in 1807, Châteaubriand planted the Jerusalem pines and cedars of Lebanon he had brought back, in the garden of "Vallée-aux-Loups," a little place he then purchased near Aulnay, on the south of the city. Here, while the Empire lasted, he passed years of quiet content, with his wife, his plants, and his books, but writing no more romance after 1809. In 1817, having a town residence, and finding himself too poor to keep this country place, he sold it, and new buildings cover the site of his cottage and garden.

Recalled to active life by the Restoration, Châteaubriand posed as one who was more Royalist than the King, with a mental reservation of his platonic fancy for a republic. He was a pretentious statesman, none too sincere. His pamphlet, "De Buonaparte et des Bourbons," had been worth an army to the cause, said Louis XVIII., who placed him in the Chamber of Peers, and in 1822, after a short stay at the Berlin Embassy, in the Ambassador's residence in London. Lording it there, in all "the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power," he recalled his former years of obscurity and privation in London streets, and began his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." In writing about himself he was at his ease, feeling that he had a subject worthy of his best powers, and these memoirs have little of the inflated and fantastic mannerisms of his romances about other people. As to the rest, they are a colossal monument to his conceit and selfishness. Dismissed suddenly and indecently by Louis XVIII., from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Châteaubriand was made Ambassador to Rome on the accession of Charles X., in 1828. He refused to recognize the younger branch of the Bourbons in 1830, and when the crown was given to Orleans, he strode out of the Chamber of Peers, and stripped himself of his peer's robe, with great theatric effect. Appearing no more in public life, he was active in pamphlets and in the press as an opponent of the new royalty, which would lead to a republic, he predicted.

"Châteaubrillant, Vicomte de, Rue de l'Université 25," is his address in the Bottin of 1817; a record of interest in its antiquated spelling of his name, and because this is the house, on the corner of Rue du Bac, which we shall visit later with Alexandre Dumas. This three years' lease expiring in 1820, he removed to the fine old mansion, where he gave reception to young Victor Hugo, to be described later, at No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique. Its site is covered by the modern building numbered 197 in Boulevard Saint-Germain, whose southern side, just here, replaces the same side of Rue Saint-Dominique, as has been already told. He kept other town addresses, to which we need not follow him, during his absences on diplomatic duty. From 1827 to 1838 we find him and Madame de Châteaubriand in their retired home, in the southern outskirts of the city. Their 84 Rue d'Enfer is now 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, the old street name thus punningly extended, in homage to the heroic defender of Belfort.

The dingy yellow front of the long wall and the low building is broken by a gate-way, and within is a small lodge on the left, wherein sits a woman in the costume of a sisterhood. She permits entrance into the cottage on the right, and you are in Châteaubriand's small salon, the remaining portion of the cottage being now in possession of the Institution des Jeunes Filles Aveugles, alongside. His portrait in pencil, and a water-color sketch of his wife, hang on the wall. Her face shows the boredom and patience that were put into it by her life with this man of irascible genius and of frequent infidelities. She is buried behind the altar of the chapel of the Marie-Thérèse Infirmary, which she founded and carried on, in the devoutness that dwelt in her soul for the Church, whose appeal to him was in its artistic endowments. A portion of the revenue that supports this institution comes from the sale of chocolate, made first to her liking by her chef, and made after his rule ever since. As Sœur Marie shows you out from the salesroom, alongside this little reception-room, you see the group of trees in the circular lawn, that was planted by husband and wife; on the farther side are the dilapidated buildings of their day, now used for the chocolate fabrique; behind the great court rise the walls of the Infirmary for aged and invalid priests. Châteaubriand had known, while in Kensington during his exile, many of the impoverished curés who were, like himself, refugees from the Revolution; and some of them had followed him here, and had become domesticated pets of the household, together with the big gray cat given him by the Pope. To them and their successors in poverty and illness, he bequeathed this comfortable retreat.

There is an episode of these years that shows a kindly side of Châteaubriand, that he seldom allows us to see. He was suggested for the presidency of the republic, adventured by the political clubs for a year or two after the unwelcome accession of Louis-Philippe. Châteaubriand did not join the plotters, but he was arrested, along with many of them, and locked up for two weeks or so. Now, when the Bourbons had put Béranger in prison, in 1828, Châteaubriand had been one of the many sympathizers who had flocked to the cell of the courageous singer. In 1832 the rôles were reversed, and Béranger came in, from his cottage in Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne, to visit the imprisoned statesman. And after Châteaubriand's release, he wrote a charming letter to Béranger, thanking him for that token of fellow-feeling, and begging him not to "break his lyre," as the veteran chansonnier had threatened to do, and urging him to go on "making France smile and weep; for, by a secret known only to you, the words of your chansons are gay and the airs are plaintive." Béranger's songs touch no chord now, their plaintiveness is commonplaceness, his philosophy has no loftiness, his sentimentality is of the earth earthy, and his lyre is, to us, a tinkling hurdy-gurdy.

When the young Breton officer walked through Rue du Mail first in 1787, his gaze might have turned, as our gaze turns to-day, to two striking façades in that street: that of No. 7, built by Colbert, whose emblematic serpents are carved high up in the capitals of the heavy columns; and that of No. 12, as stolid as the other is fantastic, its heaviness not lightened by the two balconies, and their massive supports, on the wide stone front. It was erected in 1792 by Berthault, the architect whose work we see at Malmaison and in the Palais-Royal. Châteaubriand might well have been attracted by this house, for it was soon to shelter the woman who became later the lasting influence of his life.

In 1793, at the very top of the Terror, Jacques Récamier brought to this house his bride not yet sixteen, who had been Mlle. Jeanne-Françoise-Julie-Adélaïde Bernard. Here they lived for five years. Their house is unaltered as to fabric, and the original heavy, circular, stone staircase still mounts to the upper floors. These are now divided by partitions into small rooms, and the lofty first story is cut across by an interposed floor; all for the needs of trade. The ceiling of the grand salon retains its admirable cornice. Like other mansions on the south side of Rue du Mail, this Récamier house extended, behind a large court, now roofed over with glass, through to Rue d'Aboukir, where its rear entrance is at No. 11. On the first floor of this wing, in the oblong ceiling of a small room, is a deeply sunk oval panel, that holds a painting of that time, in good preservation.

From here Jacques Récamier, just then wealthy, removed to the newest fashionable quarter of which the centre was Rue du Mont-Blanc, now Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, whose No. 7 covers the site of his magnificent mansion. It was then a street of small and elegant hôtels, each in its own grounds, and M. Récamier bought the one that had belonged to Necker, and had been confiscated by the State. He bought also the adjoining house, and rebuilt the two into one. Its furniture, fittings, bronzes, and marbles were all especially designed for this new palace of a prosperous financier. Here was the scene of those balls that were the wonder of Paris during the Consulate and the early years of the Empire. The costumes of the period, both for men and women, were picturesque in cut and coloring. Among the guests shone Caroline Bonaparte, later to marry Murat, the youngest of the sisters and most resembling her great brother in face and character. M. and Mme. Récamier spent their summers in a château owned by him in the suburbs of Clichy; and to it every man of note in the State and the army found his way. Napoleon said he, too, would be glad to go to Clichy, if the fair châtelaine would not come to court, and sent Fouché to arrange it, but with no success. She fought shy of Napoleon, the man and the Emperor, as Madame de Staël itched for his attention, personal and political. Nor did Madame Récamier like his brother Lucien, who languished about her, to the ridicule of his equally love-lorn rivals.

His justification, and that of all her other adorers, speaks from David's unfinished canvas in the Louvre. Yet this shows only the outer shell of her loveliness; within was a lovely nature, simple and kindly, sympathetic and loyal, that made her generous in her friendships with men and women, and devoted to the welfare of her friends. The single passion of her life was her passion for goodness. Her modesty kept her unconscious of her attractions of mind and body, and thus she held, almost unaware, the widest dominion of any woman of her day. The Duchess of Devonshire put it daintily: "First she's good, next she's spirituelle, and after that, she's beautiful." And so, as we come to know her, we learn infinite respect for the woman, who "with an unequalled influence over the hearts and wills of men, scorned to ask a favor, and endured poverty and ... exile, which fell with tenfold severity on one so beloved and admired, without sacrifice of dignity and independence."

Madame Récamier.
(From the portrait by Gros.)

Comparative poverty, hurried by the Emperor, came in 1806, and the town house and the château were sold, along with her plate and jewels. In 1811 she was exiled from Paris on the pretext that her salon was a centre of Royalist conspiracy, and she passed the years until the Restoration in the south of France, in Italy, and in Switzerland with her beloved Madame de Staël.

Just beyond the Boulevards de la Madeleine and des Capucines, which show the line of the rampart levelled by Louis XIV., and along the course of its outer moat, a new street had started up at the end of the eighteenth century, and was completed in the early years of the nineteenth century. It began at present Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and ended at the Church of the Madeleine, then in course of construction; it was built up in the best style of that period, and it was named Rue Basse-du-Rempart. That untouched section, to the west of Rue Caumartin, shows us the admirable architecture of the early Empire in the stately fronts, that shrink back behind the boulevard in stony-faced protest against its turmoil. Eastwardly from Rue Caumartin, the northern side of Boulevard des Capucines has trampled out nearly the whole of the old street. The stones of Place de l'Opéra lie on the site of the modest house, at 18 Rue Basse-du-Rempart, taken by M. Récamier after his first business reverses, and occupied by him during his wife's exile; and the florist's shop, under the Grand Hôtel, is on the spot of their stately residence at No. 32 of the same street, after her return and until 1820. In that year, his fortune regained, he moved farther west in the same street to a more sumptuous home at No. 48. This house has been happily saved for us, and is now numbered 18 of Boulevard des Capucines; one of the three structures of the old street, which stand back from the line of modern frontage, and lower than the level of modern paving. The present No. 16 is the Récamier coach-entrance, and the huge stabling in the rear is built on the Récamier gardens. Their house preserves its wrought-iron balconies, and within is the circular staircase mentioned in her "Mémoires." Down these stairs, for the last time, she came in 1827, leaving M. Récamier to his disastrous speculations, which had at last swallowed up her own fortune, and drove to the Abbaye-aux-Bois. There was her home until her death in 1849.

The venerable mass of the convent is in sight behind the railed-in court at No. 16 Rue de Sèvres. One portion that we see was built in 1640 for the "Annonciades," and from them bought by Anne of Austria, in 1654, for the sisterhood of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, who had been driven from their convent near Compiègne by the civil wars of the Fronde. That wing which was burned in 1661 was speedily rebuilt, and forms part of the structure before us. Convents had then, and have still, rooms and apartments which are let or sold to lone spinsters and widows, and to "decayed gentlewomen who have seen better days." This Abbaye-aux-Bois, during the Bourbon Restoration, "when the sky had no horizon," was a favorite retreat for fashionable dévotes, mending their reputations by a temporary retirement. The life there is pleasantly described in the early letters of Mary Clarke—later Madame Julius Mohl—who lived there with her mother. M. Bernard, the father of Madame Récamier, had bought one of its grandest apartments for his daughter, after the first bankruptcy of her husband. When she came here it was occupied, and she rented a shabby upper floor for two or three years, and then went down to her own apartment on the first floor, to which she added another in the rear of the same floor. It is in the western wing, of modern construction, with windows on Rue de Sèvres, and on the terrace that overlooks the garden, now shorn of a goodly slice by Boulevard Raspail. We know all about this salon, famous for twenty years, the roll of whose frequenters holds every illustrious name in France during that period, as well as those of many charlatans and bores.

The Abbaye-aux-Bois.

It is reported that Madame Récamier and Châteaubriand met first, in the earliest years of the century, at the receptions of Madame de Staël. Whenever they met to become mutually attracted, this attraction grew in him until it became the dominant sentiment of his life. With all his elevation of soul and his breadth of mind, he had no depth of feeling. "I have a head, good, clear, cold," he wrote; "and a heart that goes jog-trot for three-and-one-half quarters of humanity." The other one-eighth was Madame Récamier, and she outcounted all the rest of the world in stirring such heart as he had. "You have transformed my nature," he tried to make her believe, and he may have believed it himself. Sick with conceit as he was, spoiled by flattery, morbid from introspection, her companionship lifted him out of his melancholy and raised him into serenity. As for her, so long as Madame de Staël lived, she had no other affection to spare for anyone, and perhaps this incomparable creature never gave to Châteaubriand more than homage to her hero, tenderness to the isolated man, and medicine to a mind diseased. He may well have written, toward the last: "I know nothing more beautiful nor more good than you."

The "chemin des vaches" of the sixteenth century became a country road by the passage of the drays that carted stone, from the Vaugirard quarries to the ferry on the southern shore, for the building of the Tuileries. The Pont Royal of Mansart has taken the place of the wooden bridge built above that ferry, and the ferry has given the name to that road, now Rue du Bac. Along its line, on both sides, seigneurs and priests took land and built thereon. There are yet, behind the huge stone blocks of houses, immense tracts of grounds and of woodland, unsuspected by the wayfarer through the narrow, noisy street. One of the most extensive of these open spaces is owned by the Seminary of the Missions Étrangères, whose church is near the corner of Rue de Babylone. For two bishops, who had charge here in the time of Louis XIV., were erected two houses, exactly alike without and within, and these are now numbered 118 and 120 Rue du Bac. In the latter in the apartment on the ground floor, M. and Mme. de Châteaubriand installed themselves in 1838; having left their cottage and its domain in Rue d'Enfer, to the needy priests there. Here, in an angle of the front court, are the low stone steps that mount to their apartment.

Portal of Châteaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac.

Its dining-room and a chapel, arranged by them, gave on this court. The chapel has been thrown into, and made one with, the dining-room, but this is the only alteration since their time. His bedroom, and that of his wife—with her huge bird-cages behind—and the salon between the two rooms, looked out on their garden, and beyond it on the vast grounds of the Missions Étrangères. The enchanting seclusion was dear to him in these last years, during which his only work was the completion and touching-up of his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." Select extracts from the manuscript were sometimes read by him to the group that assembled in the drawing-room at the abbaye, between four and six o'clock of every afternoon. The hostess sat on one side of the fireplace, her form grown so fragile that it seemed transparent for the gentle spirit shining out, like a radiant light within a rich vase. Châteaubriand "pontificated" in his arm-chair opposite, toying with the household cat, the while he tried to listen to the lesser men; "a giant bored by, and smiling pitifully down on, a dwarf world," is Amiel's phrase. When Châteaubriand spoke or read, it was with sonorous tones, and with attitude and gesture of a certain stateliness. He was always an artist in all details. His costume was simple and elegant. Short of stature, he made himself shorter by his way of sinking his head—"an Olympian head," says Lamartine—between his shoulders. Under his thick-clustering locks rose a noble forehead, power shone from his eyes, pride curled his lips—too often—and his expression gave assurance of a glacial reserve.

The day came when he found himself too feeble for the short walk between his house and the abbaye. Then his friend came to him. She and Madame de Châteaubriand had been sufficiently friendly, but that good lady gave her days to her prayer-books, and to reading her husband's books; which she never understood, albeit she had the finest mind of any woman he had known, he always asserted. She died in the winter of 1846-47, and her body was carried to the Infirmary, the care of which had been the occupation and the happiness of her later years. Jacques Récamier, when in mortal illness in 1830, had been brought to his wife's rooms in the abbaye, at her request and by special favor of the Mother Superior, and there he had died.

And now, Châteaubriand offered marriage to Madame Récamier, and she refused what she might have accepted, could it have come a few years earlier. "But, at our age," she asked, "who can question our intimacy, or prevent me taking care of you?" She was prevented only by the cataract that slowly blinded her, and she sat by his bedside, helpless, while Madame Mohl—who had remained Mary Clarke until the summer of 1847—wrote his necessary letters. That sympathizing woman, one of the few congenial to him, had only to come down from the apartment she had taken on the third floor of this house, overlooking the gardens; the apartment which she and her learned husband, Julius Mohl, made the social successor of the Récamier salon, through many years. Châteaubriand's death took place on July 4, 1848. He had lived to see the Orleans throne, which he hated, overthrown as he had foretold by the republic, which he did not love. His faithful lady stood by his deathbed, with Béranger, equally faithful to old friends, old customs, and old clothes, clad as we see him in his statue of Square du Temple.

Châteaubriand's funeral service, attended by all that was best in France, was solemnized in the Church of the Missions Étrangères, next door, and his body was laid in a rock of the harbor of Saint-Malo. Madame Récamier went back to her now desolate rooms. On May 10, 1849, she drove over to the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, on a visit to her niece, whose husband, M. Lenormant, was its librarian and had his apartment there. That night she died in that building, in a sudden seizure of cholera.

THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Court of the Pension Vauquer.

THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC[1]

Set in the front wall of a commonplace house, in the broad main street of sunny Tours, a tablet records the birth of Balzac in that house, on the 27 Floréal, An VII. of the Republic—May 16, 1799—the day of Saint-Honoré, a saint whose name happened to hit the fancy of the parents, and they gave it to their son. Many a secluded corner of the town, many a nook within and about its Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, many a portrait of its priests, has been brought into his books. And he has portrayed, with his artist hand, the country round about of the broad Loire and of bright Touraine, always vivid in his boyish reminiscences. In his life and his work, however, he was, first and always, a Parisian. To the great town, with all its mysteries and its possibilities, his favorite creations surely found their way, however far from it they started, drawn thither, as was drawn and held their creator, by its unconquerable authority.

His father had been a lawyer, forced for safety during the Revolution into army service, and when he was ordered from Tours, in 1814, to take charge of the commissariat of the First Division of the Army in Paris, he brought his family with him. Their abode was in Rue de Thorigny, one of the old Marais streets, and the boy, nearly fifteen, was put to school in the same street, and later in Rue Saint-Louis, hard by. Transformed as is this quarter, there yet remain many of the magnificent mansions with which it was built up in the days of its grandeur, and their ample halls and rooms and gardens serve admirably now as schools for boys and for girls. The young Honoré and his Louis Lambert are one in their pitiful memories of these schools and of their earlier schooling at the Seminary of Vendôme.

To please his father, the boy, when almost eighteen, went through the law course of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France. To please himself he listened, for the sake of their literary charm, to the lectures of Villemain and Cousin and Guizot, and would rehearse them with passion when he got home. But he had no love for the arid literature of the law, and was wont to linger, in his daily walks along the quays and across the bridges to and from his lecture-rooms, over the bookstalls, spending his modest allowance for old books, which he had learned already to select for their worth.

These studies ended, he entered the law office of M. de Merville, a friend of his father, with whom Eugène Scribe had just before finished his time, and to whom Jules Janin came for his training a little later. And these three, unknown to one another, were, as it happened, of the same mind in their revolt against the drudgery of the desk, and against the servitude of the attorney, coupled with certain competence as it might be; and in their preference for that career of letters, which might mean greater toil, but which brought immediate freedom and promised not far-off fame, and perhaps fortune, too.

The elder Balzac, severely practical, dreamed no dreams, and was horrified by his son's refusal to pursue the profession appointed for him. He foretold speedy starvation, and—perhaps to prepare Honoré for it—allowed him to try his experiment, for two years, on a hundred francs or less a month. So, the family having to leave Paris early in 1820, a garret—literally—was rented for the young author, and poorly furnished by his mother; a painstaking, hard-working, fussy old lady, who looked on him as a little boy all her life long, who drudged for him to his last days, and who felt it to be her duty to discipline him to hardship in these early days! This attic-room was at the top of the old house No. 9 Rue Lesdiguières, which was swept away by the cutting of broad Boulevard Henri IV. in 1866-67, its site being in the very middle of this new street. To wax sentimental—as has a recent writer—over the present No. 9 as Balzac's abode is touching, but hardly worth while, that house having no interest for us beyond that of being of the style and the period of Balzac's house, and serving to show the shabbiness of his surroundings. These did not touch the young author, whose garret's rental was within his reach, as was the Librairie de Monsieur; for he gives it the old Bourbon name, and how it got that name shall be told in our last chapter. It was the Library of the Arsenal, still open to students as in his days there, in the building begun by François I. for the casting of cannon, which he made lighter and easier of carriage, and the casting of which exploded the Arsenal within twenty years, and with it part of the adjacent Marais. The Valois kings rebuilt it, Henri IV. enlarged it, and gave it for a residence to his Grand Master of artillery, Sully, for whom he decorated the salons as we see them to-day. You may climb the grand staircase, and stand in the rooms—their gildings fresh, their paintings bright—occupied by the great minister. In the cabinet that contains his furniture and fittings is an admirable bust of the King. And you seem to see the man himself, as he enters, his debonair swagger covering his secret shamefacedness for fear of a refusal of his stern treasurer to make the little loan for which he has again come to beg, to pay his last night's gambling or other debt of honor!

In this library by day, and in his garret by night, Balzac began that life of terrific toil from which he never ceased until death stopped his unresting hand. The novels he produced during these years were hardly noticed then, are quite unknown now; showing no art, giving no promise. He never owned them, and put them forth under grotesque pen-names, such as "Horace de Saint-Aubin," "Lord R'hoone"—an anagram of Honoré—and others equally absurd, all telling of his fondness for titles.

This garret, in which he lived for fifteen months, is vividly pictured in "La Peau de Chagrin," written in 1830, as Raphael's room in his early days, before he became rich and wretched. Balzac's letters to his sister Laure (Madame Laure de Surville) detail, with delightful gayety, his exposure to wind and wet within these weather-worn walls; and his ingenious shifts in daily small expenditure of sous to make his income serve. He relates how he shopped, how he brought home in his pockets his scant provender, how he fetched up from the court-pump his large allowance of water. For he used it lavishly in making his coffee, that stimulation supplying the place of insufficient food, and carrying him through his nights of pen-work. Excessive excitation and excessive toil, begun thus early, went on through all his life, and he dug his too early grave with his implacable pen. His only outings, by day or by night, were the long walks that gave him his amazing acquaintance with every corner of Paris, and his solitary strolls through the great graveyard of Paris, near at hand. "Je vais m'égayer au Père-Lachaise," he writes to his sister; and there he would climb to the upper slopes, from which he saw the vast city stretched out. For he was fond of height and space, and we shall see how he sought for them in his later dwelling-places.

And in this storm-swept attic he had his first dreams of dwelling in marble halls. Extreme in everything, he could imagine no half-way house between a garret and a palace; he began in the one, he ended in the other, unable to find pause or repose in either!

Dreaming the dreams of Midas, he loved to plunge his favorite young heroes into floods of sudden soft opulence, and his longings for luxury found expression in those unceasing schemes for instant wealth which made him a kindly mock to his companions. His first practical project was started in 1826, during a temporary sojourn for needed rest and proper food at his father's new home in Villeparisis, eighteen miles from Paris, on the edge of the forest of Bondy. He speedily hurried back to Paris and turned printer and publisher; bringing out, among other reprints, the complete works of Molière and of La Fontaine, each with his own introduction, each in one volume—compact and inconvenient—and, at the end of the year which saw twenty copies of either sold, the entire editions were got rid of, to save storage, at the price by weight of their paper. This and other failures left him in debt, and to pay this debt and to gain quick fortune, he set up a type-foundry in partnership with a foreman of his printing-office. The young firm took the establishment at No. 17 Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, now Rue Visconti; named for the famous archæologist who had lived, and in 1818 had died, in that venerable mansion hard by on the corner of Rue de Seine and Quai Malaquais. We have already found our way to this short and narrow Rue Visconti, to visit Jean Cousin and Baptiste du Cerceau, and, last of all, the rival houses of Racine.

Balzac's establishment, now entirely rebuilt, was as typical a setting of the scene as any ever invented by that master of scene-setting in fiction. It may be seen, as it stood until very lately, in its neighbor No. 15, an exact copy of this vanished No. 17. Its frowning front, receding as it rises, is pierced with infrequent windows, and hollowed out by a huge, wide doorway, within which you may see men casting plates for the press, albeit the successors of "Balzac et Barbier" no longer set type nor print.

"Balzac H. et Barbier A., Imprimeurs, Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, 17;" so appears the firm in the Paris directory for 1827. The senior partner had not yet assumed the particle "de," so proudly worn in later years when, too, he is labelled in the directory "homme-de-lettres," the title of "imprimeur," on which he prided himself because it meant wealth, having lasted only until the end of 1827 or the beginning of 1828. Printing-office and type-foundry were sold at a ruinous sacrifice, and Balzac was left with debts of about 120,000 francs; a burden that nearly broke his back and his heart for many years. He never went through that narrow street without groaning for its memories; and for a long time, he told his sister, he had been tempted to kill himself, as was tempted his hero of "La Peau de Chagrin." In his "Illusions Perdues" he has painted, in relentless detail, the cruel capacity of unpaid, or partially paid, debts for piling up interest. But the helpless despair of David Séchard was, in Balzac himself, redeemed by a buoyant confidence that never deserted him for long. To pay his debts, he toiled as did Walter Scott, whom Balzac admired for this bondage to rectitude, as he admired his genius. All through the "Comédie Humaine" he dwells on the burden of debt, the ceaseless struggle to throw it off, by desperate, by dishonorable, expedients.

On an upper floor of his establishment, Balzac had fitted up a small but elegant apartment for his living-place, his first attempt to realize that ideal of a bachelor residence such as those in which he installed his heroes. This was furnished, of course, on credit, and when failure came, he removed his belongings to a room at No. 2 Rue de Tournon, a house quite unchanged to-day. Here his neighbor was the editor of the "Figaro," Henri de la Touche—his intimate friend then, later his intimate enemy; a poor creature eaten by envy, whose specialty it was to turn against former friends and to sneer at old allies.

Here Balzac finished the book begun in his former room over his works, "Les Chouans." It was published in 1829, and was the first to bear his real name as author, the first to show to the reading world of what sterling stuff he was made. That stuff was not content with the book, good as it was, and he retouched and bettered it in after years. It brought him not only readers but editors and publishers; and before the end of 1830, he had poured forth a flood of novels, tales, and studies; among them such works as "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote," "Physiologie du Mariage," "Gobseck," "Étude de Femme," "Une Passion dans le Désert," "Un Épisode sous la Terreur," "Catherine de Médicis," "Lettres sur Paris"—with "Les Chouans," seventy in all!

Werdet, one of Balzac's publishers—his sole publisher from 1834 to 1837—lived and had his shop near by, at No. 49 Rue de Seine. To his house, just as it stands to-day, the always impecunious young author used to come, morning, noon, and night for funds, in payment of work unfinished, of work not yet begun, often of work never to be done.

From Rue de Tournon he removed, early in 1831, to Rue Cassini, No. 1, as we find it given in the Paris Bottin of that year. It is a short street of one block, running from Avenue de l'Observatoire to Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, and takes its name appropriately from the Italian astronomer, who was installed in the Observatory, having been made a citizen of France by Colbert, Louis XIV.'s great Finance Minister. It is a secluded quarter still, with its own air of isolation and its own village atmosphere. In 1831 it was really a village, far from town, and these streets were only country lanes, bordered by infrequent cottages, dear to the weary Parisian seeking distance and quiet. Three of them, near together here, harbored famous men at about this period, and all three have remained intact until lately for the delight of the pilgrim—that of Châteaubriand, No. 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, that of Victor Hugo, No. 27 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and this one of Balzac. His house, destroyed only in 1899, was on the southwest corner of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques and Rue Cassini. It was a little cottage of two stories, with two wings and a small central body, giving on a tiny court. A misguided Paris journal has claimed, with copious letterpress and illustrations, the large building at No. 6 Rue Cassini for Balzac's abode. This is a lamentable error, one of the many met with in topographical research, by which the traditions of a demolished house are transplanted to an existing neighbor. This characterless No. 6 carries its own proof that Balzac could never have chosen it, even were we without the decisive proof given by the cadastre of the city, lately unearthed by M. G. Lenôtre among the buried archives of the Bureau des Contributions Directes.

In the sunny apartment of the left wing dwelt Balzac and his friend, Auguste Borget; in the other wing, Jules Sandeau lived alone and lonely in his recent separation from George Sand. Their separation was not so absolute as to prevent an occasional visit from her, and an occasional dinner to her by the three men. She has described one of these wonderful dinners with much humor; telling how Balzac, when she started for her home—then on Quai Malaquais—arrayed himself in a fantastically gorgeous dressing-gown to accompany her; boasting, as they went, of the four Arabian horses he was about to buy; which he never bought, but which he quite convinced himself, if not her, that he already owned! Says Madame Dudevant: "He would, if we had permitted him, have thus escorted us from one end of Paris to the other." He so far realized his vision as to set up a tilbury and horse at this period—about 1832—and exulted in the sensation created by his magnificence as he drove, clad in his famous blue coat with shining buttons, and attended by his tiny groom, "Grain-de-mil."

This equipage and that gorgeous dressing-gown were but a portion of the bizarre splendor with which Balzac loved to relieve the squalor of his debt-ridden days. Here, his creditors forgetting, by them forgotten, as he fondly hoped, hiding from his friends the furniture he had salvaged from his wreck, he wantoned in silver toilet-appliances, in dainty porcelain and bric-à-brac; willing to go without soup and meat—never without his coffee—that he might fill, with egregious bibelots, his "nest of boudoirs à la marquise, hung with silk and edged with lace," to use George Sand's words; boudoirs which he has described in minute detail, placing them in the preposterous apartment of "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or."

In his work-room, apart and markedly simple and severe, he began that series of volumes, amazing in number and vigor, with which he was resolute to pay his enormous debts. Here, in this little wing, in the years between 1831 and 1838, he produced, among over sixty others of less note, such masterpieces as "La Peau de Chagrin," "Le Chef d'Œuvre Inconnu," "Le Curé de Tours," "Louis Lambert," "Eugénie Grandet," "Le Médecin de Campagne," "Le Père Goriot," "La Duchesse de Langeais," "Illusion Perdues" (first part only), "Le Lys dans la Vallée," "L'Enfant Maudit," "César Birotteau," "Cent Contes Drôlatiques" (in three sections), "Séraphita," "La Femme de Trente Ans," and "Jésus-Christ en Flandres."

In addition to his books, he did journalistic writing, chiefly for weekly papers; and in 1835 he bought up and took charge of the "Chronique de Paris," aided by a gallant staff of the cleverest men of the day. It lived only a few months. In 1840 he started "La Revue Parisienne," written entirely by himself. It lived three months.

When once at work, Balzac shut himself in his room, often seeing no one but his faithful servant for many weeks. His work-room was darkened from all daylight, his table lit only by steady-flamed candles, shaded with green. A cloistered monk of fiction, he was clad in his favorite robe of white cashmere, lined with white silk, open at the throat, with a silken cord about the waist, as we see him on the canvas of Louis Boulanger. He would get to his table at two in the morning and leave it at six in the evening; the entire time spent in writing new manuscript, and in his endless correction of proofs, except for an hour at six in the morning, for his bath and coffee, an hour at noon for his frugal breakfast, with frequent coffee between-times. At six in the evening he dined most simply, and was in bed and asleep by eight o'clock.

Honoré de Balzac.
(From the portrait by Louis Boulanger.)

With no inborn literary facility, with an inborn artistic conscience that drove him on in untiring pursuit of perfection, he filled the vast chasm between his thought and its expression with countless pen-strokes, and by methods of composition all his own: the exact reverse of those of Dumas, writing at white heat, never rewriting; or of Hugo, who said: "I know not the art of soldering an excellence in the place of a defect, and I correct myself in another work." Balzac began with a short and sketchy and slip-shod skeleton, making no attempt toward sequence or style, and sent it, with all its errors, to the printer. Proofs were returned to him in small sections pasted in the centre of huge sheets; around whose wide borders soon shot from the central text rockets and squibs of the author's additions and corrections, fired by his infuriated fist. The new proofs came back on similar sheets, to be returned to the printer, again like the web and tracks of a tipsy spider. This was repeated a dozen or, it is said, a score of times, always with amplifications, until his type-setters became palsied lunatics. He overheard one of them, as he entered the office one day, say: "I've done my hour of Balzac; who takes him next?" Type-setter, publisher, author were put out of misery only when the last proof came in, at its foot the magic "Bon à tirer."

This stupendous work had been preceded and was accompanied by as stupendous preparation of details. He dug deep to set the solid foundations for each structure he meant to build. "I have had to read so many books," he says, referring to his preliminary toil on "Louis Lambert." So real were his creations to him—more alive to his vision than visible creatures about—that he must needs name them fittingly, and house them appropriately. Invented nomenclature gave no vitality to them, in his view, and he hunted, on signs and shop-fronts wherever he went, for real names that meant life, and a special life. "A name," as he said, "which explains and pictures and proclaims him; a name that shall be his, that could not possibly belong to any other." He revelled in his discovery of "Matifat," and "Cardot," and like oddities. He dragged Léon Gozlan through miles of streets on such a search, refusing every name they found, until he quivered and colored before "Marcas" on a tailor's sign; it was the name he had dreamed of, and he put "Z" before it, "to add a flame, a plume, a star to the name of names!"

His scenes, too, were set for his personages with appalling care, so that, as has been well said, he sometimes chokes one with brick and mortar. He knew his Paris as Dickens knew his London, and found in unknown streets or unfrequented quarters the scenes he searched long for, the surroundings demanded by his characters. If his story were placed in a provincial town, he would write to a friend living there for a map of the neighborhood, and for accurate details of certain houses. Or, he would make hurried journeys to distant places: "I am off to Grenoble," or, "to Alençon"—he wrote to his sister—"where So-and-so lives:" one of his new personages, already a living acquaintance to him. In his artistic frenzy for fitting atmosphere he has, unconsciously, breathed his spirit of unrest into much of his narrative, and the reader plunges on, out-of-breath, through chapterless pages of fatiguing detail.

These excursions were not his only outings in later years. He got away from his desk during the summer months, for welcome journeys to his own Touraine, and to other lands, and for visits to old family friends. Always and everywhere he carried his work with him.

And he began to see the world of Paris, and to be seen in that world, notably in the famous salon of Emile de Girardin and his young wife, Delphine Gay de Girardin, where the watchword was "Admiration, more admiration, and still more admiration." He met well-bred women and illustrious men, whose familiar intercourse polished him, whose attentions gratified him. The pressure of his present toil removed for a while, he was fond of emerging from his solitude, and of flashing in the light of publicity. He was an interested and an interesting talker, earnest and vehement and often excited in his utterances; yet frank and merry, and vivid with a "Herculean joviality." His thick fine black hair was tossed back like a mane from his noble, towering brow; his nose was square at the end, his lips full and curved, and hidden partly by a small mustache. His most notable features were his eyes, brown, spotted with gold, glowing with life and light—"the eyes of a sovereign, a seer, a subjugator." A great soul shone out of them, and they redeemed and triumphed over all that was heavy in face and vulgar in body; for, with a thickness of torso like Mirabeau, and the neck of a bull, he had his own corpulence. Lamartine says that the personal impression made by Balzac was that of an element in nature; he gripped one's brain when speaking, and one's heart when silent. Moreover, it was an element good as well as strong, unable to be other than good; and his expression, we know from all who saw it, told of courage, patience, gentleness, kindliness.

He was commonly as careless of costume as a vagrant school-boy in outgrown clothes. He would rush from his desk to the printer's or race away in search of names, clad in his green hunting-jacket with its copper buttons of foxes' heads, black and gray checked trousers, pleated at the waist, and held down by straps passing under the huge high-quartered shoes, tied or untied as might happen, a red silk kerchief cord-like about his neck, his hat, shaggy and faded, crushed over his eyes—altogether a grotesque creature! In contrast, he was gorgeous in his gala toilet of the famous blue coat and massive gold buttons, and the historic walking-stick, always carried en grande tenue, its great knob aglow with jewels sent him by his countless feminine adorers.

When Balzac removed with Sandeau, in 1838, to new quarters, he kept this apartment in Rue Cassini for an occasional retreat, perhaps for a friendly refuge against the creditors, who became more and more clamorous in their attentions. The two comrades furnished the lower floor of their new home most handsomely; mainly with the view of dazzling urgent publishers, who, as said Balzac, "would give me nothing for my books if they found me in a garret." Coming to drive a bargain, these guileless gentry found themselves too timid to haggle with the owners of such luxury. They could not know that that luxury was merely hired under cover of a friend's name, and lit up only by night to blind and bewilder them, while the haughty authors lived by day in bare discomfort, on a half-furnished upper floor.

Of this mansion only the site remains. It was at No. 17 Rue des Battailles, on the heights of Chaillot—the suburb between Paris and Passy—and that street and the Balzac house have been cut away by the modern Avenue d'Iéna. Retired and high as it was, with its grand view over river and town, it was not high enough nor far enough away for this lover of distance and height. He soon tried again to realize his ideal of a country home by buying, in 1838, three acres of land at Ville d'Avray, a quarter near Sèvres, on the road to Versailles. On the ground was a small cottage called, in Louis XIV.'s time, "Les Jardies," still known by that name, and notable in our time as the country-home of Léon Gambetta, wherein he died. That home remains exactly as he left it, at No. 14 Rue Gambetta, Ville d'Avray, and has been placed among the National Monuments of France. It is a shrine for the former followers of the great tribune, who visit it on each anniversary of his death. The statue they have erected to their leader, alongside the house, may be most kindly passed by in silence.

Les Jardies.

The glorious view from this spot—embracing the valley of Ville d'Avray, the slopes opposite, the great city in the distance—was a delight to Balzac. Les Jardies was a tiny box, having but three rooms in its two stories, which communicated by a ladder-like staircase outside. He had tried to improve the place by a partial rebuilding, and the stairs were forgotten until it was too late to put them inside. A later tenant has enclosed that absurd outer staircase within a small addition. His garden walls gave him even more trouble, for they crumbled and slid down on the grounds of an irate neighbor. The greater part of that garden has been walled off. Yet the poor little patch was a domain in his eyes; its one tree and scattered shrubs grew to a forest in his imagination, and his fancy pictured, in that confined area, a grand plantation of pineapples, from which he was to receive a yearly income of 400,000 francs! He had fixed on the very shop on the boulevards where they were to be sold, and only Gautier's cold sense prevented the great planter, as he saw himself, from renting it before he had grown one pineapple!

His rooms were almost bare of furniture, and this was suggested by his stage directions charcoaled on the plaster walls: "Rosewood panels," "Gobelins tapestries," "Venetian mirror," "An inlaid cabinet stands here," "Here hangs a Raphael." Thus he was content to camp for four or five years, hoping his house would yet be furnished, and perhaps believing it was already furnished.

At this time, and for many years, Balzac rented a room over the shop of his tailor Buisson, at the present No. 112 Rue de Richelieu. His letters came here always, and he used the place not only for convenience when in town, but, in connection with other shelters, for his unceasing evasion of pursuing creditors. A tailor still occupies that shop, and seems to be prosperous; probably able to collect his bills from prompter customers than was Balzac.

In 1843, forced to sell Les Jardies, he came back into the suburbs, to a house then No. 19 Rue Basse, at Passy, now No. 47 Rue Raynouard of that suburb. On the opposite side of the street, at No. 40, is a modest house, hiding behind its garden-wall. This was the unpretending home of "Béranger, poète à Passy," to quote the Paris Bottin. No. 47 is a plain bourgeois dwelling of two stories and attic, wide and low, standing on the line of the street; in the rear is a court, and behind that court is the pavilion occupied by Balzac. He had entrance from the front, and unseen egress by a small gate on the narrow lane sunk between walls, now named Rue Berton, and so by the quay into town. This was a need for his furtive goings and comings, at times.

Balzac's work-room here looked out over a superb panorama—across the winding Seine, over the Champ-de-Mars, and the Invalides' dome, and all southern Paris, to the hills of Meudon in the distance. This room he kept austerely furnished, as was his way; while the living apartments were crowded with the extraordinary collection of rare furniture, pictures, and costly trifles, which he had begun again to bring together. To it he gave all the money he could find or get credit for, and as much thought and labor and time as to his books, although with little of the knowledge that might have saved him from frequent swindlers. It was only his intimates who were allowed to enter these rooms, and they needed, in order to enter them, or the court or the house on the street, many contrivances and passwords, constantly changed. He himself posed as "la Veuve Durand," or as "Madame de Bruguat," and each visitor had to ask for one of these fictitious persons; stating, with cheerful irrelevancy: "The season of plums has arrived," or, "I bring laces from Belgium." Once in, they found free-hearted greeting and full-handed hospitality, and occasional little dinners. The good cheer was more toothsome to the favored convives, than were the cheap acrid wines, labelled with grand names, made drinkable only by the host's fantastic fables of their vintages and their voyages; believed by him, at least, who dwelt always in his own domain of dreams.

These dinners were not extravagant, and there was no foolish expenditure in this household at Passy. Balzac wrote later to his niece, that his cooking there had been done only twice a week, and in the days between he was content with cold meat and salad, so that each inmate had cost him only one franc a day. For this man of lavish outlay for genuine and bogus antiques, this slave to strange extravagances and colossal debts—partly imaginary—was painfully economical in his treatment of himself. He thought of money, he wrote about money. Before him, love had been the only passion allowed in novels; he put money in its place and found romance in the Code. All through his life he worked for money to pay his debts, intent on that one duty. In October, 1844, he wrote two letters, within one week, to the woman who was to be his wife; in one of them he says that his dream, almost realized, is to earn before December the paltry twenty thousand francs that would free him from all debt; in the other he gloats over recent purchases of bric-à-brac, amounting to hundreds of francs. He saw nothing comically inconsistent in the two letters.

In all his letters, the saddest reading of all letters, there is this curious commingling of the comic and the sordid. Those, especially, written to his devoted sister and to the devoted lady who became his wife at the last, give us most intimate acquaintance with the man; showing a man, indeed, strong and vehement, steadfast and patient; above all, magnanimous. Self-assertive in his art, eager and insistent concerning it, he was quite without personal envy or self-seeking. Said Madame Dudevant: "I saw him often under the shock of great injustices, literary and personal, and I never heard him say an evil word of anyone." Nor was there any evil in his life—a life of sobriety and of chastity, as well as of toil. At the bottom of his complex nature lay a deep natural affection. This giant of letters, when nearly fifty years old, signed his letters to his mother, "Ton fils soumis"; so expressing truly his feeling for her, from the day she had installed him in his mean garret, to that later day, when she fitted up his grand last mansion. In his letters to those dear to him, amid clamorous outcries about debts and discomforts, comes a deeper cry for sympathy and affection. Early in life, he wrote to his sister: "My two only and immense desires—to be famous and to be loved—will they ever be satisfied?" To a friend he wrote: "All happiness depends on courage and work." So, out of his own mouth, we may judge this man in all fairness.

From this Passy home one night, Balzac and Théophile Gautier went to the apartment of Roger de Beauvoir, in the Hôtel de Lauzun-Pimodan, on the Island of Saint-Louis; and thence the three friends took a short flight into a hashish heaven. Their strange experiences have been told by their pens, but to us, Balzac's night of drugged dreams is not so strange as his days of unforced dreams. That which attracts us in this incident is its scene—one of the grandest of the mansions that sprang up from the thickets of Île Saint-Louis, as le Menteur has put it. Built in the middle years of the seventeenth century, it stands quite unchanged at No. 17 Quai d'Anjou, bearing, simply and effectively, every mark of Mansart's hand in his later years. Its first owner followed his friend Fouquet to the Bastille and to Pignerol; its next tenant came to it from a prison-cell, and went from it to the very steps of the throne. He was the superb adventurer, Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Duc de Lauzun, and his family name clings still to the place, and is cut in gold letters on the black marble tablet above the door. On that prettiest balcony in Paris, crowded the prettiest women of Paris, on summer nights, to look at the river fêtes got up by their showy and braggart Gascon host. Through this portal have passed Bossuet and Père Lachaise, going in to convert the plain old Huguenot mother of de Lauzun, who lived retired in her own isolated chamber through the years of her son's ups and downs. When her family had gone, came the Marquis de Richelieu, great-nephew of the great Richelieu, with the bride he had stolen from her convent at Chaillot—the daughter of Hortense Mancini, niece of Mazarin, and of her husband, it is alleged. Then came the Pimodan, who was first of that name, and who gave it to his hôtel. It is an admirable relic; its rooms, with their frescoed ceilings and their panelled walls, are as remarkable as those of the château of Fontainebleau, and are not surpassed by any in Paris. The mansion is well worth a visit for itself and for its memories.

Balzac's Paris—the Paris for which his pen did what Callot and Meryon did for it with their needles—has been almost entirely pickaxed out of sight and remembrance. The Revolution, wild-eyed in its mad "Carmagnole," gave itself time to raze a few houses only, after clearing the ground of the Bastille, although it had meant much more destruction; the Empire cut some new streets, and planned some new quarters; the Bourbons came back and went away again, leaving things much as they had found them. It remained for Louis-Philippe to begin "works of public utility," an academic phrase, which being interpreted signified the tearing down of the old and the building up of the new, to gratify the grocers and tallow-chandlers whose chosen King he was, and to fill his own pocket. Yet much of Balzac's stage-setting remained until it was swept away by Haussmann and his master of the Second Empire. Such was the wretched Rue du Doyenné, that "narrow ravine" between the Louvre and Place du Carrousel, where Baron Hulot first saw la Marneffe, and where la Cousine Bette kept guard over her Polish artist in his squalid garret; doubtless the very garret known to Balzac in his visits there, when it was tenanted by Arsène Houssaye, Gautier, Gavarni, and the rest of "Young France, harmless in its furies." That house, one of a block of black old eighteenth-century structures, stood where now is the trim little garden behind the preposterous statue of Gambetta.

History and fiction meet on the steps of Saint-Roch. There César Birotteau, the ambitious and unlucky perfumer, was "wounded by Napoleon," on the 13 Vendémiaire, the day that put the young Corsican's foot into the stirrup, and gave to the sham-heroic César that sounding phrase, always thereafter doing duty on his tongue. He was carried to his shop in Rue Saint-Honoré, on its northern side near Rue de Castiglione, and hid and bandaged and nursed in his entresol. This part of Rue Saint-Honoré and its length eastward, with its narrow pavement and its tall, thin houses, is still a part of the picture Balzac knew and painted; but the business district hereabout has greatly changed since his day. The Avenue de l'Opéra, and all that mercantile quarter dear to the American pocket, the Bourse and the banking-houses about, date from this side of his Paris. Nucingen would be lost in his old haunts, and Lucien de Rubempré could not recognize the newspaper world of our day.

The hôtels of the Faubourg Saint-Germain—the splendid mansions of the splendid eighteenth century, where his Rastignac and his lesser pet swells lorded it—are now, in many cases, let out in apartments, their owners content with the one floor that is in keeping with their diminished fortunes. Undiminished, however, are their traditions and their prejudices, albeit "Le Faubourg" exists no longer, except as an attitude of mind. Yet, here on the left bank, are still to be found some of the scenes of the "Comédie Humaine." On Quai Voltaire, alongside the house in which Voltaire died, is the very same shop of the antiquary, from whom Raphael de Valentin bought the peau de chagrin. Balzac knew it well, doubtless was swindled there, and to-day you will find it as crowded with curiosities, as begrimed with dust, as suggestive of marvels hid in its dusky corners, as when he haunted it.

Raphael de Valentin lived in the hôtel-garni Saint-Quentin, Rue des Cordiers. Long before his day, Rousseau had been a tenant of a dirty room in the same dirty hôtellerie, going there because of the scholarly neighborhood of the place and of its memories, even at that time. Leibnitz, in 1646, had found it a village inn in a narrow lane, hardly yet a street. Gustave Planche lived there, and Hégésippe Moreau died there in 1838—a true poet, starved to death. The old inn and all its memories and the very street are vanished; and the new buildings of the Sorbonne cover their site.

The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the house where Voltaire died.

"One of the most portentous settings of the scene in all the literature of fiction. In this case there is nothing superfluous; there is a profound correspondence between the background and the action." Such is the judgment of so competent a critic as Mr. Henry James, concerning the house in which is played the poignant tragedy of "Père Goriot." You will, if you love Balzac, own to the truth of this statement, when you look upon this striking bit of salvage. It stands, absolutely unchanged as to externals, at No. 24 Rue Tournefort; a street named in honor of the great botanist who cleared the track for Linnæus. In Balzac's day, this street was known by its original name of Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève; one of the most ancient and most isolated streets on the southern bank. Once only, through the centuries, has its immemorial quiet been broken by unseemly noise, when, in the days of François I., a rowdy gambling-den there, the "Tripôt des 11,000 Diables," did its utmost to justify its name. The street seems to creep, in subdued self-effacement, over the brow of Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, away from the Paris of shops and cabs and electric light. The house stands narrow on the street, its gable window giving scanty light to poor old Goriot's wretched garret; framed in it, one may fancy the patient face of the old man, looking out in mute bewilderment on his selfish, worldly daughters. The place no longer holds the "pension bourgeoise de deux sexes et autres" of the naïve description on the cards of Madame Vauquer, née Conflans; and is now let out to families and single tenants. Its gate-way stands always open, and you may enter without let or hindrance into the court, and so through to the tiny garden behind, once the pride of Madame Vauquer, no longer so carefully kept up. You peep into the small, shabby salle-à-manger, on the entrance floor of the house, and you seem to see the convict Vautrin, manacled, in the clutch of the gens-d'armes, and, cowering before him, the vicious old maid who has betrayed him. That colossal conception of the great romancer had found his ideal hiding-place here, as had the forlorn father his hiding-place, in his self-inflicted poverty. All told, there is no more convincing pile of brick and mortar in fiction; sought out and selected by Balzac with as much care and as many journeys as Dickens gave to his hunt for exactly the right house for Sampson and Sally Brass.

The Pension Vauquer.

While Balzac was still at Passy, after long searching for a new home, he made purchase, as early as 1846, in the new quarter near the present Parc Monceaux. That name came from an estate hereabout, once owned by Philippe Égalité; and his son, the King of the French, and the shrewdest speculator among the French, was just at this time exploiting this estate, in company with lesser speculators. The whole suburb was known as the Quartier Beaujon, from a great banker of the eighteenth century, whose grand mansion, within its own grounds, had been partly demolished by the cutting of new streets, leaving only out-buildings and a pavilion in a small garden. This was the place bought by Balzac; the house and grounds, dear as they were, costing much less, as he found, than his furniture, bronzes, porcelains, and pottery, paintings and their frames—all minutely described in the collection of le cousin Pons. He made a museum, indeed, of this house, bringing out all his hidden treasures from their various concealments here and there about town. There was still a pretence of poverty regarding his new home; he would say to his friends, amazed by the display: "Nothing of all this is mine. I have furnished this house for a friend, whom I expect. I am only the guardian and doorkeeper of this hôtel."

The pretty mystery was resolved within a few months, and its solution explained Balzac's frequent and long absences from Paris after the winter of 1842-43. These months had been passed at the home of Madame Ève de Hanska, the Polish widow who was to be his wife. Her home was in the grand château of Wierzchownie, in the Ukraine, whose present owner keeps unchanged the furniture of Balzac's apartment, where is hung his portrait by Boulanger, a gift to Madame de Hanska from her lover. And from there he brought his bride to Paris in the summer of 1850, their marriage dating from March of that year, after many years of waiting in patient affection. She had made over—with Balzac's cordial consent—nearly the whole of her great fortune to her daughter, her only child, and to that daughter's husband, retaining but a small income for herself. It was—and the envious world owned that it was—truly a love-match. They came home to be welcomed, first of all, by Balzac's aged mother; who had, during his absence, taken charge of all the preparations, with the same anxious, loving care she had given to the fitting-up of his garret thirty years before. She had carried out, in every detail, even to the arrangement of the flowers in the various rooms, the countless directions he had sent from every stage of the tedious journey from Wierzchownie.

"And so, the house being finished, death enters," goes the Turkish proverb. This undaunted mariner, after his stormy voyage, gets into port and is ship-wrecked there. His premonition of early years, written to his confidant Dablin in 1830, was proven true: "I foresee the darkest of destinies for myself; that will be to die when all that I now wish for shall be about to come to me." As early as in the preceding summer of 1849, he had ceased to conceal from himself any longer the malady that others had seen coming since 1843. The long years of unbroken toil, of combat without pause, of stinted sleep, of insufficient food, of inadequate exercise, of the steady stimulation of coffee, had broken the body of this athlete doubled with the monk. Years before, he had found that the inspiration for work given by coffee had lessened in length and strength. "It now excites my brain for only fifteen days consecutively," he had complained; protesting that Rossini was able to work for the same period on the same stimulus! So he spurred himself on, listening to none of the warnings of worn nature nor of watchful friends. "Well, we won't talk about that now," was always his answer. "In the olden days," says Sainte-Beuve, "men wrote with their brains; but Balzac wrote, not only with his brains, but with his blood." And now, he went to pieces all at once; his heart and stomach could no longer do their work; his nerves, once of steel and Manila hemp, were torn and jangled, and snapped at every strain; his very eyesight failed him. The most pitiful words ever penned by a man-of-letters were scrawled by him, at the end of a note written by his wife to Gautier, a few weeks after their home-coming: "Je ne puis ni lire ni écrire."

"On the 18th August, 1850"—writes Hugo in "Choses Vues"—"my wife, who had been during the day to call on Madame Balzac, told me that Balzac was dying. My uncle, General Louis Hugo, was dining with us, but as soon as we rose from table, I left him and took a cab to Rue Fortunée, Quartier Beaujon, where M. de Balzac lived. He had bought what remained of the hôtel of M. de Beaujon, a few buildings of which had escaped the general demolition, and out of them he had made a charming little house, elegantly furnished, with a porte-cochère on the street, and in place of a garden, a long, narrow, paved court-yard, with flower-beds about it here and there."

It was to No. 14, Allée Fortunée, that Hugo drove. That suburban lane is now widened into Rue Balzac, and where it meets Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré there is a bit of garden-wall, and set in it is a tablet recording the site of this, Balzac's last home. The house itself has quite vanished, but one can see, above that wall, the upper part of a stone pavilion with Greek columns, built by him, it is believed.

"I rang," continues Hugo; "the moon was veiled by clouds; the street deserted. No one came. I rang again. The gate opened; a woman came forward, weeping. I gave my name, and was told to enter the salon, which was on the ground floor. On a pedestal opposite the fireplace was the colossal bust by David. A wax-candle was burning on a handsome oval table in the middle of the room.... We passed along a corridor, and up a staircase carpeted in red, and crowded with works of art of all kinds—vases, pictures, statues, paintings, brackets bearing porcelains.... I heard a loud and difficult breathing. I was in M. de Balzac's bedroom.

"The bed was in the middle of the room. M. de Balzac lay in it, his head supported by a mound of pillows, to which had been added the red damask cushions of the sofa. His face was purple, almost black, inclining to the right. The hair was gray, and cut rather short. His eyes were open and fixed. I saw his side face only, and thus seen, he was like Napoleon.... I raised the coverlet and took Balzac's hand. It was moist with perspiration. I pressed it; he made no answer to the pressure...."

The bust that Hugo saw was done by David d'Angers; a reduced copy surmounts Balzac's tomb. His portrait, in water-color, painted, within an hour after his death, by Eugène Giraud, is a touching portrayal of the man, truer than any made during life, his widow thought. While long suffering had wasted, it had refined, his face, and into it had come youth, strength, majesty. It is the head of the Titan, who carried a pitiable burden through a life of brave labor.

Balzac's death was known in a moment, it would seem, to his creditors, and they came clamoring to the door, and invaded the house—a ravening horde, ransacking rooms and hunting for valuables. They drove the widow away, and she found a temporary home with Madame de Surville, at 47 Rue des Martyrs. This house and number are yet unchanged. Cabinets and drawers were torn open, and about the grounds were scattered his letters and papers, sketches of new stories, drafts of contemplated work—all, that could be, collected by his friends, also hurrying to the spot. They found manuscripts in the shops around, ready to enwrap butter and groceries. One characteristic and most valuable letter was tracked to three places, in three pieces, by an enthusiast, who rescued the first piece just as it was twisted up and ready to light a cobbler's pipe.

"He died in the night," continues Hugo. "He was first taken to the Chapel Beaujon.... The funeral service took place at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. As I stood by the coffin, I remembered that there my second daughter had been baptized. I had not been in the church since.... The procession crossed Paris, and went by way of the boulevards to Père-Lachaise. Rain was falling as we left the church, and when we reached the cemetery. It was one of those days when the heavens seemed to weep. We walked the whole distance. I was at the head of the coffin on the right, holding one of the silver tassels of the pall. Alexandre Dumas was on the other side.... When we reached the grave, which was on the brow of the hill, the crowd was immense.... The coffin was lowered into the grave, which is near to those of Charles Nodier and Casimir Delavigne. The priest said a last prayer and I a few words. While I was speaking the sun went down. All Paris lay before me, afar off, in the splendid mists of the sinking orb, the glow of which seemed to fall into the grave at my feet, as the dull sounds of the sods dropping on the coffin broke in upon my last words."

Yes, stretched before his grave, lies all Paris, as his Rastignac saw it, when he turned from the fosses-communes, into which they had just thrown the body of Père Goriot, and with his clinched fist flung out his grand defiance toward the great, beautiful, cruel city: "À nous deux, maintenant!"

THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS

The Figure of d'Artagnan.
(From the Dumas Monument, by Gustave Doré.)

THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS

It was in 1823 that Alexandre Dumas, in his twenty-first year, took coach for Paris from his boyhood-home with his widowed mother, at Villers-Cotterets. He was set down at the principal landing-place of the provincial diligences in Place des Victoires, and found a room near by in an inn at No. 9 Rue du Bouloi. Its old walls are still there on the street and in the court, and the Hôtel de Blois still awaits the traveller. Thence he started on foot, at once, for No. 64 Rue du Mont-Blanc, the home of the popular Liberal spokesman in the Chamber of Deputies, General Foy, an old comrade-in-arms of General Dumas, to whom his son brought a letter of introduction.

About that house, two years later, a few days after November 28, 1825, all Paris assembled, while all France mourned, for the burial of this honest man, whose earnest voice had been heard only in the cause of freedom and justice. Marked by a tablet, his house still stands, and is now No. 62 Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin—the renamed Rue du Mont-Blanc—on the corner of Rue de la Victoire.

Besides this letter, young Dumas carried only a meagre outfit of luggage, and such meagre education as may be picked up by a clever and yet an idle lad, in a notary's office in a provincial town. Indeed, when he was made welcome by General Foy, he was questioned, too; and, to his chagrin, he was found to be without equipment for any sort of service. On the strength, however, of his "belle écriture," he obtained, through the influence of the general, a petty clerkship in the household of the Duc d'Orléans, coming naturally enough to the boy from Villers-Cotterets, the country-seat of the Orleans family. Its stipend of 1,200 francs a year was doubtless munificent in the eyes of Orleans thrift, and was certainly sufficient for the needs then of the future owner of Monte-Cristo's millions. He earned his wage and no more; for his official pen—at his desk in the Palais-Royal—while doing its strict duty on official documents, was more gladly busied on his own studies and his own paper-spoiling. For the author within him had come to life with his first tramping of the Paris streets and his first taking-in of all that they meant then.

The babies, begotten by French fathers and mothers during the Napoleonic wars, and during those tremendous years at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, breathed, full-lunged, an air of instant and intense vitality. Now, come to stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, eager to speed the coming of red-blooded Romanticism and the going of cold and correct Classicism, showed itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in literature and the arts, after the sterility of so many years.

When Dumas came to Paris, Lamartine had already, in 1820, charmed the public by the freshness and grace of his "Méditations." His admirers were content with the sonorous surface of his vague, spiritual exaltations, satisfied not to seek for any depth below. Hugo, barely twenty, had thrilled men with the sounding phrases of his "Odes et Ballades." These two, coming behind Chénier the herald and Châteaubriand the van-courier, were imposing pioneers of the great movement. Even more popular than these two Royalist poets, as they were regarded, was Casimir Delavigne—already installed over Dumas as Librarian at the Palais-Royal—rather a classicist in form, yet hailed as the poet and playwright of the Liberal Opposition. Soulié, not so well known now as he merits, won his first fame in 1824 by his poems and plays. De Vigny had brought out his earliest poems in 1822; and now, "isolated in his ivory tower," he was turning the periods of his admirable "Cinq-Mars." De Musset was getting ready to try his wings, and made his first open-air flight in 1828; a flight alone, for the poet of personal passion joined no flock, ever. Gautier was serving his apprenticeship to that poetic art, to whose service he gave a life-long devotion and the most perfect craftsmanship in all France.

"They all come from Châteaubriand," said Goethe, of these and of other rhymesters of that time. Châteaubriand himself had closed his career as poet and as imaginative writer as far back as 1809, and had by now taken his rank as a classic in literature, and in life as a Peer of France and a Minister of the Bourbons.

But of all the singers of that day it was to Béranger that the public ear turned most quickly and most kindly; even though he, then forty-three years of age, might also seem to be of an earlier generation. Those others touched, with various fingers, the lyre or the lute; he turned a most melodious hand-organ, with assured and showy art, and around it the captivated crowd loved to throng, with enraptured long ears. His cheaply sentimental airs were hummed and whistled all over France, and, known to everybody everywhere, there was really no need of his putting them in type on paper, and no need of his being sent to prison for that crime by Charles X. Yet he had his turn, soon again, and his chansons, as much as any utterance of man, upset the Bourbon throne and placed Louis-Philippe on that shaky seat. That most prosaic of monarchs was sung up to the throne, and the misguided poet soon found him out for what he was.

In prose, during these years, Nodier, Librarian at the Arsenal, was plying his refined and facile pen. Mérimée showed his hand in 1825, not to clasp, with any show of sympathy, the hand of any fellow-worker, yet willing to take his share of the strain. Guizot, out of active politics for a time, did his most notable pen-work between 1825 and 1830. His untiring antagonist, Thiers, not yet turned into the practical politician, produced, between 1823 and 1827, his "History of the French Revolution," voluminous and untrustworthy; its author energetically earning Carlyle's epithet, "a brisk little man in his way." His life-long crony, Mignet, was digging vigorously in dry, historic dust. Sainte-Beuve left, in 1827, his medical studies for those critical studies in which he soon showed the master's hand; notably with his early paper on Hugo's "Odes et Ballades." Michelet was finding his métier by writing histories for children. The two Thierry brothers, Augustin and Amédée, proved the genuine historian's stuff in them as early as 1825. Balzac was working, alone and unknown, in his garret; and young Sue was handling the naval surgeon's knife, before learning how to handle the pen.

And nearly all of these, nearly all the fine young fellows who made the movement of 1830, had got inspiration from Villemain, who had spoken, constantly and steadfastly, from his platform in the Sorbonne during the ten years from 1815 to 1825, those sturdy and graphic words which gave cheer and courage to so many.

There were a similar vitality and fecundity in painting and music and their sister arts, and the brilliant host stirring for their sake might be cited along with the unnumbered and unnamable pen-workers of this teeming decade.

Less aggressive was the theatre. Scribe had possession, flooding the stage with his comedies, vaudeville, opera-librettos, peopling its boards with his pasteboard personages. There was call for revolt and need of life. Talma, near his end, full of honors, devoted to his very death to his art, longed to fill the rôle of a man on the boards, after so many years' impersonation of bloodless heroes. So he told Dumas, who had come to see him only two weeks before his death, in 1826, when the veteran thought he was recovering from illness—an illness acceptable to the great tragedian, for it gave him, he pointed out with pride, the lean frame and pendent cheeks, "beautiful for old Tiberius"—the new part he was then studying. Death came with his cue before that rôle could be played.

This wish for a real human being on the boards came home to Dumas, when he saw the true Shakespeare rendered by Macready and Miss Smithson at the Salle Favart in 1826. It was Shakespeare, in the reading before and now in the acting, that helped Dumas more than any other influence. No Frenchman has comprehended more completely than Dumas the Englishman's universality, and he used to say that, after God, Shakespeare was the great creator. His first attempt to put live men and women on the stage, in "Christine," was crowded out by a poorer play of the same name, pushed by the powers behind the Comédie Française. But on its boards, on the evening of February 16, 1829, was produced his "Henri III. et sa Cour," an instantaneous and unassailable success. He might have said, in the words of Henri IV. at Senlis, "My hour has struck"; for from that hour he went on in his triumphant dramatic career. The Romantic drama had come at last, with its superb daring, its sounding but spurious sentiment, its engorgement of adjectives, and its plentiful lack of all sense of the ludicrous. Perhaps if it had not taken itself so seriously, and had been blessed with a few grains of the saving salt of humor, it had not gone stale so soon.

Dumas had removed, soon after coming to town, from the inn in Rue du Bouloi to another of the same sort just around the corner, Hôtel des Vieux-Augustins, in the street of the same name—now widened and renamed Rue Hérold. In the widening they have cut away his inn, at present No. 12, and that of "La Providence," next door at No. 14, where Charlotte Corday had found a room on coming to Paris, thirty years before, to visit Monsieur Marat. The sites of the two hotels are covered by the rear buildings of the Caisse d'Epargne, which fronts on Rue du Louvre. One ancient house, which saw the arrival of both these historic travellers, has been left at No. 10; in it was born, on January 28, 1791, the musician Hérold, composer of "Zampa" and "Pré-aux-Clercs." Dumas lived for a while later at No. 1 Place des Italiens, now Place Boïeldieu. In the summer of 1824 he brought his good mother to town, and took rooms on the second floor of No. 53 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, next door to the old cabaret, "Au Lion d'Argent." Mother and son soon after moved across the river, where he found for her a home in Rue Madame, and found for himself an apartment at No. 25 Rue de l'Université, on the southeastern corner of Rue du Bac. There had been an illustrious tenant of this house, in 1816 and 1817, who was named Châteaubriand. Dumas, in his "Mémoires," gives both the third and the fourth floors for his abode, as he happens to feel like fixing them. He had windows on both streets, and he fitted up the rooms "with a certain elegance." Shoppers at the big establishment, "Au petit Saint-Thomas," may explore its annex and mount to Dumas's rooms in the house that now hides its stately façade and its entrance perron in the court behind modern structures. Here he remained from 1824 to 1833, making a longer stay than in any of the many camping-places of his migratory career. And here he gave his name to his most memorable endowment to the French drama, in the person of his only son, born on July 29, 1824, at the home of the mother, Marie-Catherine Lebay, a dressmaker, living at No. 1 Place des Italiens, where Dumas had had his rooms. On March 17, 1831, the father formally owned the son by l'acte de reconnaissance, signed and recorded at the office of the mayor of the Second Arrondissement, May 6, 1831. So came into legal existence "Alexandre Dumas, fils."

Portions of the child's early life were passed with his father, but separations became more frequent and more prolonged, as the boy developed his own marked character—in striking contrast with that of the elder. Their mutual attitude came, before many years, to be as queer and as tragi-comic as any attitudes invented by either of them for the stage. The son used to say, in later life, that he seemed to be the elderly guardian and counsellor of the father—a happy-go-lucky, improvident, chance child. For the son of the Parisienne had inherited her hard shrewdness along with his father's dramatic range, and this happy commingling of the stronger qualities of the parents gave him his special powers.

The doings of the elder Dumas during the famous three days of July, 1830, would make an amusing chapter. Eager to play the part of his own boisterous heroes, he flung himself, with hot-headed and bombastic ardor, into throne-upsetting and throne-setting-up. Of course he allied himself with the opponents of Louis-Philippe—possibly in keen memory of his monthly hundred francs worth of drudgery—and of course the success of the Orleanists left him with no further chance for place or patronage.

So his pen was his only ally, and it soon proved itself to be no broken reed, but a strong staff for support. Strong as it was and unresting, no one pen could do even the manual labor required by the endless volumes he poured forth. In 1844, having finished "Monte-Cristo," he followed it by "The Three Musketeers," and then he put out no less than forty volumes in that same year; each volume bearing his name as sole author. But this sturdy and undaunted toiler was no laborious recluse, like Balzac, and he was surrounded by clerks for research, secretaries for writing, young and unknown authors for collaborating; reserving, for his own hand, those final telling touches that give warmth and color to the canvas signed by him. His "victims," as they are described in the "Fabrique de Romans, Maison Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie," a malicious exposure, are hardly subjects for sympathy; they earned money not otherwise within their power to earn, and not one of them produced, before or after, any work of individual distinction. In his historical romances, their work is evident in the study and research that give an accuracy not commonly credited to Dumas and about which he never bothered. The belle insouciance of his touch is to be seen in the dash of the narrative, and above all in the dialogues, not only in their dramatic force and fire, but in their growing long-windedness. For he was paid by the line at a royal rate, and he learned the trick of making his lines too short and his dialogues too long, his paymasters complained. And, as he went on, it must be owned that he used his name in unworthy ways, not only for books of no value and for journalistic paltriness, but for shameless signature to shopkeepers' puffs, composed for coin.

As the volumes poured out, money poured in, and poured out again as freely. For he was a spendthrift of the old régime, spending not only for his own caprices, but for his friends and flatterers and hangers-on. He made many foolish ventures, too, such as building his own theatre and running it; and he squandered fabulous sums in his desire to make real, at Saint-Gratien, his dream of a palace fit for Monte-Cristo himself. The very dogs abused his big-hearted hospitality, quartering themselves on him there, until his favorite servant, under pretence of fear of the unlucky number thirteen, to which they had come, begged to be allowed to send some of them away. He gave up his attempt toward reformatory thrift when Dumas ordered him to find a fourteenth dog! He would have drained dry a king's treasury, and have bankrupted Monte-Cristo's island of buried millions. Yet with all his ostentatious swagger and his preposterous tomfoolery, he had a childlike rapture in spending, and a manly joy in giving, that disarm stingy censure. The lover of the romancer must mourn for the man, growing poorer as he grew older, and must regret the degrading shifts at which he snatched for money, by which he sank to be a mountebank in his declining years. Toward the last his purse held fewer sous than it held when he came to Paris to hunt for them.

From his eight years' home in Rue de l'Université, Dumas crossed the Seine, preferring always thereafter the flashily fashionable quarters of the northern side; and none of his numerous dwellings henceforward are worth visiting for their character or color. For nearly two years he lived in a great mansion, No. 40 Rue Saint-Lazare, in other rooms of which George Sand lived a little later. His next home, from 1835 to 1837, at 30 Rue Bleue, has been cut away by Rue Lafayette. From 1838 to 1843 he had an apartment, occasionally shared by his son, at No. 22 Rue de Rivoli, between Place des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Roch.

Twenty-five years after the death of the father, when the son, as he says, was older and grayer than his father had ever grown to be, a letter to him was written by that son. It is an exquisite piece of literature. He brings back their life in this apartment, when, twenty-two years apart in their birth, they were really of the same age. He tells how he, a young man going early to his studies, left the elder at his desk, already at work at seven in the morning, clad only in trousers and shirt, the latter with open neck and rolled-up sleeves. At seven in the evening his son would find him planted there still at work, his mid-day breakfast often cold at his side, forgotten and untouched! Then these two would dine, and dine well, for the father loved to play the cook, and he was a master of that craft. All the while he was preparing the plats he would prattle of his heroes, what they'd done that day, and what he imagined they might do on the next day. And then the letter calls back to the father that evening, a little later, when he was found by his son sunk in an armchair, red-eyed and wretched, and mournfully explained: "Porthos is dead! I've just killed him, and I couldn't help crying over him!" It must have been at this period that the romancer tried to secure his son as his permanent paid critic, offering him 25,000 francs a year, and "you'll have nothing to do but to make objections." The offer was declined, and rightly declined.

It was in this and in his succeeding residences—Rue de Richelieu, 109, in 1844, and Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, 45, in 1845—that he brought out in newspaper feuilletons "The Count of Monte-Cristo," and "The Three Musketeers," these amazing successes written from day to day to keep pace with the press. In 1846, while his address was at No. 10 Rue Joubert, he was in Spain with the Duc de Montpensier, one of his many companions among princes. They, along with other cronies, male and female, more or less worthy, found Dumas at Saint-Germain from 1847 to 1854. Then, suddenly, he disappeared into Belgium, "for reasons not wholly unconnected with financial reverses," as he and his only peer in fiction, Micawber, would have put it. He was in town again in 1856, at No. 77 Rue d'Amsterdam, and there remained until 1866, when he rushed off to the head-quarters of the "Dictator of Sicily," Garibaldi, to whom Dumas appointed himself aide and messenger. Between 1866 and 1870 his residence was at 107 Boulevard Malesherbes. On the coming of the Prussians, he was carried, ailing and feeble, to his country-place at Puys, near Dieppe, where he died December 5, 1870. His public burial was delayed until the close of the war, and then, in 1872, was solemnized in the presence of all that was notable in French art and literature, at his birthplace and his boyhood-home, Villers-Cotterets.

When Dumas was asked how a monument might be erected in memory of a dead pen-worker, who in life had been misunderstood and maligned, he replied: "Use the stones thrown at him while he lived, and you'll have a tremendous monument." The lovers in all lands of the great romancer could well have brought together more telling stones than those that make Doré's monument in Place Malesherbes, near his last Paris home. And yet, curiously weak in its general impression, its details are effective. The group in front is well imagined: a girl is reading to a young student, and to an old, barefooted workman; on the other side is our hero d'Artagnan. The seated statue of Dumas, on too tall a pedestal, is an admirable portrait, with his own vigorous poise of head and gallant regard.

In 1864 the American Minister to France, Mr. John Bigelow, breakfasted with Dumas at Saint-Gratien, near Paris, where the romancer was temporarily sojourning. It was toward the close of our Civil War, and he had a notion of going to the United States as war-correspondent for French papers, and to make another book, of course. Mr. Bigelow gives an accurate and admirable description of the host, as he greeted him at the entrance of his villa; over six feet in height, corpulent, but well proportioned; a brown skin, a head low and narrow in front, enlarging as it receded, covered with crisp, bushy hair growing gray, thick lips, a large mouth, and enormous neck. Partly African and wholly stalwart, from his negress grandmother, he would have been a handsome creature but for his rapidly retreating forehead. But in his features and his expression nothing showed that was sordid or selfish, and his smile was very sweet.

Alexandre Dumas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 furnishing, with a few relics of past splendor; notably, a daintily damascened sword of the time of François I., its jewelled hilt alone worth a fortune. The vainglorious Porthos would have given ten years of his life for that sword, but it was never sold nor pledged by Athos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hôtel 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 Petit-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 Guénégaud; a street bearing still its old name, but the inn has gone. So, too, has gone the sign of The Fox, in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, where he found quarters for himself and his son Bragelonne, twenty years after. He brought the youth here, to the scenes of his own youth, hoping to launch him in a like career of arms.

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

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

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

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

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

THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO

THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alfred de Musset.
(From the sketch by Louis-Eugène Lami.)

Yet there were others, by way of contrast: Dumas, fresh from his romance-factory, full-blooded, stalwart, sane; Gautier, dropping in from his rooms near by, at No. 8 in the square, ship-shape inside his skull for all its mane of curling locks, and for all his eccentric costume; Barye, coming from his simple old house at No. 4 Quai des Célestins, sitting isolated and silent, dreaming of the superb curves of his bronze creatures; Nodier, escaping from his Librarian's desk in the Arsenal, the flâneur of genius, with no convictions about anything, and with generous friendships for everybody; Delacroix, impetuous chief of the insurgents in painting, most mild-mannered of men, his personal suavity disarming those who were going gunning for him, because of his insurrectionary brush; Mérimée, frock-coated, high-collared, buttoned-up, self-contained, cold and correct, of formal English cut.

Among the guests were occasional irreverent onlookers, not deemed worthy of admission to the inner circle, who sat outside, getting much fun out of its antics. Such a one was Madame Ancelot, whose graphic pen is pointed with her jealousy as a rival lion-hunter, who had outlived her vogue of the early Restoration. Daudet's sketch of her blue-stockinged salon, a faded survival of its splendors under Louis XVIII., is as daintily malicious as is her sketch of Hugo's evenings. Through those evenings, Madame Ancelot says, Madame Hugo reclined on a couch, as if over-wearied by the load of glory she was helping to carry. That lady had one relief in this new home, its doors being shut against the ugly face of Sainte-Beuve, at the urging of the indignant young wife. This happened in 1834, and within a few years Sainte-Beuve gave to the world his "Book of Love," a book of hatred toward Hugo, with its base suggestion of the wife's complaisance for the writer. Him it hurt more than it hurt Hugo. He had taken, and he still keeps, his unassailable place in the affection, as in the admiration, of his countrymen. There can be no need to summon them as witnesses, yet it may be well to quote the words of two foreign fellow-craftsmen.

The Englishman, Swinburne, in his wild and untamed enthusiasm, acclaims Hugo as a healer and a comforter, a redeemer and a prophet; burning with wrath and scorn unquenchable; deriving his light and his heat from love, while terror and pity and eternal fate are his keynotes. No great poet, adds Swinburne, was ever so good, no good man was ever so great. Heine, German by birth, scoffs at Hugo, claiming that his greatest gift was a lack of good taste, a condition so rare in Frenchmen that his compatriots mistook it for genius. He sees merely a studied passion and an artificial flame in Hugo's specious divine fire; and the product is nothing but "fried ice." And Heine sums him up: "Hugo was more than an egoist, he was a Hugoist."

Charles Dickens describes Madame Hugo as "a little, sallow lady, with dark, flashing eyes." Making the round of Paris with John Forster, in the winter of 1846-47, they came to this "noble corner house in the Place Royale." They were struck by its painted ceilings and wonderful carvings, the old-gold furniture and superb tapestries; and, more than all, by a canopy of state out of some palace of the Middle Ages. It is worthy of note here that Hugo was almost the first man of his period—a deplorable period for taste in all lands—to value and collect antiques of all sorts. They were a fit setting for these rooms, and for the youth and loveliness that crowded them, up to the open windows on the old square. The young smokers among the men were driven forth to stroll under its arcades, recalling the strollers of Corneille's and Molière's time, albeit these were painfully ignorant of tobacco bliss, so loud were the papal thunders against its temptations then.

Dickens and Forster found Hugo the best thing in that house, and the latter records the sober grace and self-possessed, quiet gravity of the man, recently ennobled by Louis-Philippe, but whose nature was already written noble. "Rather under the middle size, of compact, close buttoned-up figure, with ample dark hair falling loosely over his close-shaven face. I never saw upon any features, so keenly intellectual, such a soft and sweet gentility, and certainly never heard the French language spoken with the picturesque distinctness given it by Victor Hugo."

Within the portal of the Church of Saint-Paul and Saint-Louis, in Rue Saint-Antoine, on either side, is a lovely shell holding holy-water, given by Hugo in commemoration of the first communion of his eldest child, Léopoldine. In this church she and young Charles Vacquerie were married in February, 1842. Both were drowned in August of that year. And this is the church selected by Monsieur Gillenormand for the marriage of Marius and Cosette, because the old gentleman considered it "more coquettish" than the church of his parish. For he lived much farther north in the Marais, at No. 6 Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, where a new block of buildings has taken the place of his eighteenth-century dwelling. For this marriage, after playing the obdurate and irascible godfather so long, he was suddenly transformed into a fairy godmother.

Toward the end of 1848, after the escape of Louis-Philippe, Hugo moved to Rue d'Isly, No. 5, for a short period, and then to No. 37, now No. 41 Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne, where he remained until 1851. In the Paris Bottin during these years he is entitled—considering it, strangely to us, his especial distinction—"Représentant du Peuple." The youthful Royalist poet, the friend of Charles X., the friend later of Louis-Philippe, had become an oracle of Democracy. He added nothing to his honestly earned fame by his long-winded bombast in the Tribune; and however genuine his attitude may have been, it appealed almost entirely to the groundlings.

They came in crowds about this house, with flaming torches and blaring bands, howling their windy homage. They are remembered, with mute disapproval, by the old concierge of the house, Lagoutte Armand. With real pleasure does he recall "Monsieur Hugo," and prattle memories of his friends like Béranger, and of his family. There were two sons, Charles and François-Victor, the former known as "Toto," a "très gentil garçon." In his loge, pointed out with pride by the concierge, to whom it was given by Hugo, is a rare engraving of the poet, which makes him serious, almost stern, of aspect, his mouth showing its strength in the beardless face, his hair plastered down about the superb brow. His head was carried always well bent forward, and he went gravely, the old man tells us. The house is unaltered, but the street has grown commonplace since the days when its half-countryfied cut attracted Hugo and Béranger and Alphonse Karr. This witty editor of "Les Guêpes," something of a poseur with his pen, had a genuine love of flowers and of women, on whom he lavished his pet camelias and tulips. He cultivated them in the garden of the house, now numbered 15, which he occupied in this street from 1839 to 1842. The sculptor Carrier-Belleuse is now in possession of Karr's old rooms, and his studio covers the one-time garden. Béranger came, in 1832, to No. 31, then a small cottage behind a garden, where he lived for three years. The bare walls of the communal school, numbered 35, now cover the site of his home, and there are no more cottages nor gardens in the street.

From 1851, when the coup-d'état of December drove him first into hiding and then into exile, through all the years of the empire, we find in each year's Bottin: "Hugo, Victor, Vicomte de, de l'Institut, . . . . ." These dots represent a home unknown to the Paris directory; no home indeed, for there can be none for a Frenchman beyond his country's borders. Of Hugo's dwellings during these years nothing need be said here, save that his long residence in Guernsey gave him his characters and colors for "Les Travailleurs de la Mer," and such slight acquaintance with seafaring and ships as is shown in "Quatre-Vingt-Treize." Where he got the fantastic English details of "L'Homme-qui-rit," no man shall ever know.

Here, too, he finished "Les Misérables," writing it, he said, with all Paris lying before him in his mind's eye; or, as he puts it, with the exile's longing, "on regarde la mer, et on voit Paris." His topographical memory was none too accurate, and errors of slight or of real importance may be detected in "Les Misérables." It is really in his poetry that he has done for his "maternal city" what Balzac did for her in prose; singing in all tones the splendor and the squalor of "la ville lumière," to use his swelling phrase. Despite some errors, and despite the pulling-about of Paris since Valjean's day, we may still trace his flight through nearly all that thrilling night, when Javert and his men hunted him about the southern side of the town, and across the river from the Gorbeau tenement. This tenement, so striking a set in many scenes of the drama, was an historic mansion run to seed, standing just where Hugo places it—on the site of Nos. 50 and 52 Boulevard de l'Hôpital, almost directly opposite Rue de la Barrière-des-Gobelins. Facing that street—renamed Rue Fagon in 1867—on the northern side of Boulevard de l'Hôpital, the little market of the Gobelins replaces the squalid old shanty which gave perilous shelter to Valjean and Cosette, and later to Marius.

From here, driven by a nameless terror after his recognition of Javert in the beggar's disguise, the old convict started, leading Cosette by the hand. He took a winding way to the Seine, through the deserted region between the Jardin des Plantes and Val-de-Grâce, turning strategically on his track in streets through which we can follow him as easily as did Javert. He was not certain that he was followed, until, turning in a dark corner, he caught full sight of the three men under the light before the police-station. Hugo places this station in Rue de Pontoise, and this is a mistake; it was then and is still in the next parallel street, Rue de Poissy, at No. 31.

Now, Valjean turns away from the river, carrying the tired child in his arms, and makes a long circuit around by the Collége Rollin—long since removed to the northern boulevards—and by the lower streets skirting the Jardin des Plantes—no longer the Jardin du Roi—and so along the quay. He is bent, as Javert guessed, on putting the river between himself and his pursuers. He crosses Pont d'Austerlitz, and plunges into the maze of roads and lanes, lined with woodyards and walls, on the northern side of the river. There Javert loses the trail; while for us, that trail is hidden under new streets laid out along those lanes, and under railway tracks laid down on those roads. We come in sight of the fugitive again, as he climbs the convent wall, drawing up Cosette by the rope taken from the street lantern. Here is that high gray wall, stretching along the eastern side of old Rue de Picpus, and the southern side of the new wide Avenue Saint-Mandé. This wall—of stone, covered with crumbling plaster—is as old as the garden of "Les Religieuses de Picpus," which it surrounds, and as the buildings within, which it hides from the street. We may enter the enclosure by the old gate at No. 35 Rue de Picpus, the very gate through which Cosette was carried out in a basket, and Valjean borne alive in the nun's coffin to his mock burial. About the court within, the red-tiled low roofs of the ancient foundation peep out among more modern buildings. Behind all these and beyond the court stretches the garden, a portion still set aside for vegetables, and we look about for Fauchelevent's protecting glasses for his cherished melons. What we do find is the very outhouse, in an angle of the wall, on which Valjean dropped; it is a shanty nearly gone to ruin, but serving still to store the garden tools of Fauchelevent's successor.

The Cemetery of Picpus.

"Near the old village of Picpus, now a part of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, under the walls of the garden which belonged to the Canoness of Saint-Augustin, in a bit of ground not more than thirty feet in length, repose thirteen hundred and six victims beheaded at Barrière du Trône, between 26 Prairial and 9 Thermidor, in the second year of the republic." This extract, from the "Mémorial Européen" of April 24, 1809, is a fitting introduction to the small cemetery, hid away at the very end of this convent garden. In this snug resting-spot sleep many illustrious dead. On the wall, alongside the iron-railed gate, under a laurel-wreath, is a tablet inscribed with the name of "André de Chénier, son of Greece and of France," who "servit les Muses, aima la sagesse, mourut pour la verité." He and his headless comrades were carted here and thrown into trenches, when the guillotine was busy at the Barrière du Trône, now Place de la Nation, only a step away, in the early summer of 1794, up to the day of Robespierre's arrest. Their mothers, widows, children, dared not visit this great grave nor, indeed, ask where it was. In that time of terror, grief was a crime and tears were no longer innocent. It was only in after years that this bit of ground was bought, and walled in, and cared for, by unforgetting survivors. Some few among them, of high descent or of ancient family, planned for their own graves and those of their line to come and to go, within touch of this great common grave that held the clay of those dear to them. They bought, in perpetuity, this bit of the convent garden on the hither side of the gate, through which we have been looking, and it is dotted with many a cross and many a slab. And this tiny burial-ground draws the American pilgrim as to a shrine, for in it lies the body of Lafayette.

The sisters of the Séminaire de Picpus, who inherited the duties, along with the domain of "Les Religieuses" of the eighteenth century, devote themselves to the instruction and the training of their young pensionnaires. The story of the establishment is told in "Les Misérables," in detail that allows no retelling.

Fauchelevent had planned to carry off his tippling crony of the Vaugirard Cemetery to the tap-room, "Au bon Coing," and so get Valjean out of his coffin. To his horror, he found the drunkard replaced by a new grave-digger, who refused to drink, and Valjean was nearly buried alive. We will, if it please you, visit the "Good Quince," no longer in its old quarters, for it quitted them when the historic Cemetery of Vaugirard was closed forever. On its ground, at the corner of Rue de Vaugirard and Boulevard Pasteur, has been built the Lycée Buffon. To be near the then newly opened burial-ground of Mont-Parnasse, "Au bon Coing" put up its sign on the front of a two-storied shanty, at the corner of Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and Rue de la Gaieté, a street strangely misguided in title in this joyless neighborhood. About the bar on this corner crowd the grave-diggers and workmen from the near-at-hand graves, and at the tables sit mourners from poor funerals, all intent on washing the smell of fresh mould from out their nostrils. This den is the assommoir of this quarter, swarming, noisy, noisome.

On those summer days, when Hugo used to stroll from his cottage in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs out to the southern slopes, he discovered the Champ de l'Alouette—a fair field bordering the limpid Bièvre, just beyond the factory of the Gobelins. It had borne that name from immemorial time, and was the field, as the man told Marius, where Ulbach had killed the shepherdess of Ivry. Marius came to this green spot that he might dream about "The Lark," after he had heard, from his peep-hole in the wall of the Gorbeau tenement, the Thénardiers so name his unknown lady. We, too, may walk in the Field of the Lark, its ancient spaciousness somewhat shrunken, as with all those erstwhile fields hereabout, of which we get glimpses along Boulevard Saint-Jacques and other distant southern boulevards. There is a wide gateway in the high wall that runs along stony Rue du Champ-de-l'Alouette, and we pass through it and the court within to the bright little garden beyond, where children are playing, guileless as Cosette. This is her field, now shut in by great tanneries, its air redolent of leather, its Bièvre sullied by the stains and the scum of the dye-works above. Yet, hid away in this dreary quarter—where the broad and cheerless streets are sultry in summer, bleak in winter, and gritty to the feet all the year round—it is still, as Hugo aptly says, the only spot about here where Ruysdael would have been tempted to stop, and sit, and sketch.

Among the countless American feet that tread Rue du Bac and Rue de Babylone, on their way to the shop that is a shrine at the junction of those two streets, there may be some few that turn into Rue Oudinot. It is well worth the turning, if only because it has contrived to keep that village aspect given by gardens behind walls, and cottages within those gardens. It still bore its old name, Plumet, when General Hugo came to live in it, that he might be near his son in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and here he died suddenly in January, 1828. In this house, well known to Hugo, he installed Valjean and the girl Cosette. From this house, by its back door and by the lane between high parallel walls, Valjean slips out unseen into Rue de Babylone. In its front garden, under a stone on her bench, Cosette finds her wonderful love-letter; and here is the scene of that exquisite love-making, when Marius appears in the moonlight.

The trumpery tumults of 1832—in hopeless revolt against the Orleans monarchy and in impotent adventure for the republic—give occasion for grandiose barricade-building and for melodramatic combats. Hugo takes us, with Marius and his fellow-students, to that labyrinth of narrowest lanes, twisting about high bluffs of houses, that was then to be found between the churches of Saint-Leu and Saint-Eustache. It was a most characteristic corner of mediæval Paris, and it has, only recently and not yet entirely, been cut away by Rue Rambuteau, and built over by the business structures around the Halles. The street of la Grande-Truanderie is for the most part respectabilized, that of la Chanverie is reformed quite out of life, and la Petite-Truanderie alone remains narrow and malodorous. But "Corinthe" has been carted clean away. This was the notorious tavern, of two-storied stone, in front of which Enjolras defended his barricade, within which Grantaire emptied his last bottle, and in whose upper room these two stood up against the wall to be shot. Grantaire was doubtless sketched from his illustrious precursor and prototype, the poet, Mathurin Régnier, who tippled and slept at a table of this squalid drinking-den during many years, until the year 1615, when debauchery killed him too young. His colossal and abused body carried the soul, original, virile, and fiery, which he has put into his verse, although he has over-polished it a bit. When this tavern—in the fields near the open markets—was his favorite resort, it bore the sign and name, "Pot-aux-Roses"; it was dedicated later "Au Raisin de Corinthe"; and this was soon popularly shortened to "Corinthe." Forty years after his death, another true poet was born in the tall house that rose alongside this tavern, its windows looking out over the waste lands of the Marais, as Jean-François Regnard says in his verse. Like young Poquelin, thirty years before, this boy played about the Halles; then he went away to strange adventures in foreign lands with pirates and with ladies; and came home here to write comedies, that have the gayety and sparkle, yet not the depth, of those of Molière. Indeed, Voltaire asserts that he who is not pleased with Regnard is not fit to admire Molière. The seventeenth-century mansion, in which he was born, befitted the position of his father, a rich city merchant, and it has luckily escaped demolition, albeit brought down to base uses, as you shall see on looking at No. 108 Rue Rambuteau. And if you hurry to this neighborhood, you may yet find some few reminders of the scenes of 1832. In Rue de la Petite-Truanderie is just such a tavern as was "Corinthe," in its worst days. Its huge square pillars will hardly hold up, much longer, the aged stone walls. Just here is the dark corner where Valjean set Javert free; and in Rue Mondétour, at that end not yet shortened and straightened into a semblance of respectability, you may see a small sewer-mouth, direct descendant of the grated hole, down which Valjean crawled, with Marius on his back, to begin that almost incredible march through the tortuous sewers to their outlet on the Seine, under Cours-la-Reine. He came out on a spit of sand, "not very far distant from the house brought to Paris in 1824," says Hugo, who should have said 1826. His reference is to the house popularly named "la maison de François I^er." It was built by that monarch, at Moret on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, for his beloved sister, Marguerite de Navarre, it is believed. It was removed, stone by stone, and re-erected on its present site in Cours-la-Reine, where it is a delight to the lover of French Renaissance.

Hugo was one of the earliest, among the exiles of the Empire that ended worthily in the shame of Sedan, to be welcomed by the new Republic on his hastening to Paris. There he remained through l'Année Terrible of the Prussian siege, with his friend Paul Meurice, a hale veteran of letters, still in the youth of age in 1899. Paris being once more opened, Hugo went to and fro between Brussels and Guernsey and his own country for awhile. In 1873 he had quarters in the Villa Montmorenci at Auteuil, we learn by a letter from him dated there. In 1874 he settled in an apartment at No. 66 Rue de La Rochefoucauld, an airy spot at the summit of the slope upward toward Montmartre. Here he remained a year, and in 1875 removed a little farther along this same slope, to No. 21 Rue de Clichy, on the corner of Rue d'Athènes. His apartment on the third floor was bright and sunny, having windows quite around the corner on both streets, and here he lived for four years. Much of the last two years was taken up by his new duties as Senator, so that scant leisure was left him for literary labor; and it was in this house that he sadly told a favorite comrade that the works he had dreamed of writing were infinitely more numerous than those he had found time to write. Driven from here by the unremitting invasion of friends, admirers, strangers, men and women from all quarters of the globe, bent on a sight of or an autograph from the only Hugo, he took refuge in Avenue d'Eylau, away off at the other end of the town, where only real friendship would take the trouble to follow him. He made this last removal in 1880. This final home was as modest as any of his childhood homes, and had just such a garden as theirs. Here he passed five happy years, with cherished companionship within, and all about him "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends."

Victor Hugo.
(From the portrait by Bonnat.)