THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES FROM THE LIBRARY OF JIM TULLY GIFT OF MRS. JIM TULLY THE STONES OF PARIS IN HISTORY AND LETTERS M.klaiiK' i.1e Sevii;ne. (I'Vom ihu portriut liy Miuiuinl.) 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 DPBECTORT PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY DC ' ; ,; .i5'5's CONTENTS Page The Southern Bank in the Nineteenth Century . 1 The Paris of Honore de Balzac 51 The Paris of Alexandre Dumas 89 The Paris of Victor Hugo 123 The Making of the Marais 163 The Women of the Marais 213 ^ B LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS From drawings by John Fiilleylove, Esq. The portraits from photographs by Messrs. Braiin, CWment et Cie. Madame de Sevigne (from the portrait by Mignard) . Frontispiece PAGE Alphonse de Lamartine (from a sketch by David d'Angers, " tin soir chez Hugo") . facing lo Madame Recamier (from the portrait by Gros) . facing 40 The Abbaye-aux-Bois ........ 43 Portal of Chateaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac ... 46 The Court of the Pension Vauquer .... facitig 5 2 Honore de Balzac (from the portrait by Louis Boulanger)y;zf/«^ 64 Les Jardies .......... 70 The Antiquary's Shop, and in the back-ground the house where Voltaire died ....... facing 78 The Pension Vauquer ........ 80 The Commemorative Tablet to Balzac . 84 The Figure of d'Artagnan (from the Dumas Monument by Gustave Dore) ...... facing 90 Alexandre Dumas ....... facitig 104 The Wall of the Carmelites . iit, Rue Tiquetonne, with the Hotel de Picardie . facing 118 The Hotel de Toulouse . .128 Alfred de Musset (from the sketch by Louis-Eugene ha.mi)facing 144 The Cemetery of Picpus . -153 Victor Hugo (from the portrait by Bonnat) . facing 160 The Hotel du Prevot . -175 Anne de Bretagne (from a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection) ...... facing 186 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Louis XII (from a water-color portrait by an unknown artist, in a private collection) ..... facing 190 Sully (from a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musee Conde at Chantilly) ...... facing 194 The Court of the Hotel de Bethune. Sully's Residence . 196 The Hotel de Mavenne. In the distance, the Temple Sainte- Marie, called the Church of the Visitation . facing 19S The Place des Vosges ...... facing 214 The Hotel de Beauvais . facing 238 The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de Brinvil- liers ..... ficing 246 The Hotel de Sens .... facing 254 Marguerite de Valois (from a portrait by an unknown artist, in the Musee de Montpellier) facing 258 The Hotel Lamoignon . facing 262 The Tourelle of the Hotel Barbette . 268 The Gateway of the Hotel de Clisson 276 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 Univer- sity 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 Pantaleon, 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 mediaeval 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 Pre-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 3 THE STONES OF PARIS brains was secluded within its courts. The bound- ary-Hne of the two quarters, almost exactly defined by the straight course from the Institute to the Pan- theon, speedily became blurred, and the debatable neu- tral 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 dwell- ers on the University hill ; we are now to turn our at- tention to those brilliant lights on the left bank who have helped to make Paris " la ville lumicre " during the forenoon of the nineteenth century. Through the heart of the faubourg curved the nar- row Rue Saint-Dominique, from Esplanade des Inva- lides to Rue des Saints-Peres. This eastern end, nearly as far west as Rue de Bellechasse, has been carried away by new Boulevard Saint-Germain, and with it the hotel of the de Tocqueville family, which stood at No. yy of the ancient aristocratic street. Here in 1820 lived the Comtesse de Tocqueville, with her son, Alcxis-Charles-Henri Clerel, 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 in- terest for the French Republicans of that time. His rcj)ort on those prisons appeared in 1832, and in 1835 he put forth the first volume of " De la Democratic en Ameriquc," its four volumes being completed in 1840. That admirable survey of the progress of democracy THE SOUTHERN BANK —whose ascendancy he predicted, despite his own pre- dilections— still carries authority, and at the time cre- ated a wide-spread sensation. It made its author famous, and promoted him to the place of first-as- sistant lion in the salon of Madame Recamier, whose head lion was always Chateaubriand. De Tocqueville had settled, on his return to Paris, in this same fau- bourg; 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, 185 1. His re- maining years, until his death at Cannes in 1859, were spent in retirement from all public aft'airs. A notable inhabitant of the University quarter, in the early years of the nineteenth century, was Fran- Qois-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 east- ern 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 Bou- levard Saint-Germain, next to the Hotel de Luynes, already visited with Racine. This latter period saw THE STONES OF PARIS 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 Crenelle, on the corner of Rue de Belle- chasse. 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 ofiice 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 Afifairs, where he remained until he was driven out in 1848. That an- cient 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-Honore. 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 opcra-houffc monarch with the pear-shaped face, un- der the guise of Mr. Smith, with a fat umbrella, slipped out of tile back door of the Tuileries and away to England ; Cuizot 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 THE sourHERN BANK 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 " Memoires," 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.