Benjamin Ellis Martin

“ Through a lordly arch in Rue Thorigny, we pass into the grand court, and find facing us the dignified façade, its imposing pediment carved with figures and flowers. Within is a stately hall, made the more stately by the placing at one end of a noble chimney-piece, a copy of one at Versailles. In the centre a superb staircase rises, wide and easy, through a sculptured cage, to the first floor; its old wrought-iron railing is of an exquisite pattern; nothing in all Paris is nearer perfection than this staircase, its railing, and its balustrade. ”

“ At each end of our walk are the two small rivulets which bounded the old parish east and west; one is now arched over and flows unseen beneath the tread of busy feet; the other serves as a railway cutting and carries rattling trains: so the old-time memories of the place now either flow underground, or are modernised and become part of its daily life.
In the extreme north-eastern corner as we enter Chelsea we find Hans Place, a secluded green oval, built about with old-time two-storied brick houses. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To find this Paris we must explore remote quarters, lose ourselves in untrodden streets, coast along the alluring curves of the quays, cruise for sequestered islands behind the multitudinous streams of traffic. We shall not push ahead just to get somewhere, nor restlessly "rush in to peer and praise." We shall learn to flâner, not without object, but with art and conscience; to saunter, in the sense of that word, humorously derived by Thoreau from Sainte-Terre, and so transform ourselves into pilgrims to the spots sacred in history and legend, in art and literature. ”

“ Outside, the tiny graveyard is crowded with slabs and monuments, many of them ugly, some curious, a few fine: from the stately stone tomb of Sir Hans Sloane and his wife—a marble urn entwisted with Æsculapian serpents, under a marble canopy—to the simple slab, worn with wind and weather, of Dr. Chamberlayne and his family; of whom the daughter, Anne, more famous than any of the others, “long declining wedlock, and aspiring above her sex and age, fought under her brother with arms and manly attire, in a fire-ship against the French, on the 30th June, 1690: a maiden heroine!” ”

“ In all these streets, we are treading on the ground he loved.
After the wretched mad king died here in 1422, royalty came no more to the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and the place ran to waste. It was no home for the new Dauphin, come to his kingdom as Charles VII., by the grace of Joan of Arc and of God. His boyish memories were of a dreary childhood, between a mad father, a devilish mother who had hated him from his birth, and princely relatives raging and wrestling over those two for the power to misgovern France. Outside the royal madhouse, Paris was a butcher-shop. ”

“ François Coppée, not yet an old man, readily recalls the square squat columns of the old Halles, and, all about, the solid houses supported by pillars like the arcades of Place des Vosges; all just as when young Poquelin played about them. Plays, as well as play, already attracted him; he loved to look at the marionettes and the queer side-shows of the outdoor fairs held about the Halles; and his grandfather, Louis Cressé, an ardent playgoer, often took him to laugh at the funny fellows who frolicked on the trestles of the Pont-Neuf, and at the rollicking farces in the Théâtre du Marais. ”

“ They came from all about the Marais, it has been said. At the time of her death, in the first year of the eighteenth century, this quarter had become the chosen abode of the real swells of Paris, and so the only possible residence for all those who wished to be so considered. Long before, a new member of the body politic had been born—the bourgeois—and a place had to be found for him. The leisure he had gained from bread-getting need no longer be given to head-breaking, and for his vision there was a horizon broader than that of his father, of dignity in man and comeliness in life. ”

“ For others were invited at times, men of the world, the court, and the camp. And Boileau was the common centre of these excentric stars, and when each, in his own special atmosphere of coolness, swayed from the others' vicinage, Boileau alone let no alienation come between him and any one of them. For each, he was what Racine had found him, "the best friend and the best man in the world."
The house was near a noted cabaret, to which they sometimes resorted, at the Saint-Sulpice end of the street. The cabaretier was the illustrious Cresnet, made immortal in Boileau's verse. ”

“ Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, has been aptly dubbed the valet-de-place of history; and yet a valet has the merit of looking out of his own eyes from his own point of view. It was for him that Marguerite wrote her "Mémoires," and to him she left them. In after days, when exiled from the court he loved, able only to lick the chops of memory, he wrote her éloge in these glowing words: "If there has ever been anyone in the world perfect in beauty, it is the Queen of Navarre. All who have been, or shall be, near her, are ugly beside her. ”

“ It is with surprise that we realize, stepping out on the tower-roof, that our standing-place is only five floors from the ground; and yet from this modest height, overtopped by the ordinary apartment house of 19 Paris, we find an outlook that is unequalled even by that from Notre-Dame's towers. For, as we come out from the sheltering hood of our stair-way top, the great cathedral itself lies before us, like some beautiful living creature outstretched at rest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some of them read their still unpublished works. The patron enjoys it all, and the waiters are the most depressed in all Paris.
Denis Diderot gives the effect in his work, as Gambetta did in the flesh, of a living force of nature. When, at that same table, Diderot opened the long-locked gate, the full and impetuous outflow swept all before it, submerged and breathless. In his personality, as vivid as that of Mirabeau, we see a fiery soul, a stormy nature, a daring thinker, a prodigious worker. ”

“ A man of finer qualities and subtler charm than Rollin, his work is of no greater weight in our modern eyes, for with all the refinement of imagination and the charm of description that made his pen "a magic wand" to Sainte-Beuve, his emotional optimism grows monotonous, and his exuberant sensibility flows over into sentimentality. In the court of his house is an ancient well, and behind lies a lovable little garden, with a rare iron rail and gateway. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Windows and balconies are deserted now; there is no clash of steel in the square, whose silence is in striking contrast with the sordid strife of neighboring Rue Saint-Antoine; and these stately mansions, dignified in their unimpaired old age, seem to await in patience the return of their noble occupants. There has been no change in them since, on their completion in 1630, they were regarded as the grandest in all Paris, and there is hardly any change in their surroundings. ”

“ The fine old mansion at No. 115 Rue de Grenelle, next to the southeast corner of Rue de Bourgogne, covers her grave. In its garret, thrown into one corner and almost forgotten, is a marble tablet, long and narrow, once set in a wall on this site, to mark the spot so long ignored—as its inscription says—where lies an actress of admirable esprit, of good 164 heart, and of a talent sublime in its simplicity. And it recites the efforts of a true friendship, which got at last only this little bit of earth for her grave. ”

“ This was the whole of Gallic Lutetia, the centre of Roman Lutetia, the heart of mediæval Paris, the "Alsatia" of modern Paris; surviving almost to our time, when the Second Empire let light and air into its pestilent corners. Every foot of this ground has its history. Down there, Villon, sneaking from the University precincts, stole and starved and sang; there Quasimodo, climbing down from his tower, foraged for his scant supplies; there Sue's impossibly dark villany and equally impossible virtue found fitting stage-setting ”

“ The design of the Hôtel de Beauvais, by Antoine Lepautre, is most daring and original in its great interior oval court, embellished with pilasters that are topped with finely carved stone masks. Despite the unhallowed devotion to cleanliness which, with its whitewash, has robbed it of its former lovely bloom of age, this court remains one of the most impressive specimens of seventeenth-century domestic architecture in all Paris. From the street we pass through an ample gateway, its curved top surmounted by a great shell. ”

“ Louis Racine, owning to the lovable nature of the man, has to own, too, that he gave poor account of himself in society, and adds that his sisters, who in their youth had seen the poet frequently at their father's table in Rue Visconti, recalled him only as a man untidy in dress and stupid in talk. He gave this impression mainly because he was forever dreaming, even in company, and so seemed distant and dull; but, when drawn out of his dreams, no man could be more animated and more delightful. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are many lovers of this beautiful capital of a great people, who, knowing well her unconcealed attractions, would search out her records and traditions in stone, hidden and hard to find. This legitimate curiosity grows more eager with the increasing difficulties of gratifying it in that ancient Paris that is vanishing day by day; and, in its bewilderment, it may be glad to find congenial guidance in these pages. In them, no attempt is made to destroy that which is new in order to reconstruct what was old. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”