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. ”

“ In sharp contrast with all that newness, our old tower stands hemmed about by a medley of roofs of all shapes and all ages; their red tiles of past style, here and there, agreeably mellowing the dull dominant blue of the Paris slate. On these roofs below jut out dormers, armed with odd wheels and chains for lifting odd burdens; here on one side is an outer staircase that starts in vague shadow, and ends nowhere, it would seem; far down glimmers the opaque gray of the glass-covered courts at our feet. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some of them read their still unpublished works.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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of this villa only one wing still stands, and it is with unlooked-for delight that we find this admirable specimen of sixteenth-century architecture, of a style distinct from that of any other specimen in Paris. The façade, that is left in the court of the Boulangerie, is made up of an arcade of six semi-circular arches on heavy stone pillars, a story above of plum-colored brick cut into panels by gray stone, its square-headed windows encased with the same squared stone, and an attic holding two dormers with pointed hoods. ”

“ A white-robed sister graciously gives permission to enter, and leads the visitor across the spacious court, through the stately rooms and halls—all intact in their old-fashioned harmony of proportion and decoration—into the garden that stretches far along Rue de Rémusat, and that once spread away down the slope to the Seine. Here, amid the magnificent cedar trees, centuries old, stands a mutilated pavilion of red brick and white stone or stucco, showing only its unbroken porch with pillars and a fragment of the fabric, cut raggedly away a few feet behind, to make room for a new structure. ”

“ Beyond the cathedral square, over the bronze Charlemagne on his bronze horse, glints the untravelled narrower arm of the Seine; we turn our heads and look at its broader surface, all astir with little fidgetty bateaux-mouches and big, sedate barges. At both banks are anchored huge wash-houses and bathing establishments. From this island-centre all Paris spreads away to its low encircling slopes, to the brim of the shallow bowl in which it lies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And Dante liked the workman as well, his equal in genius, many of their contemporaries believed; and we shall not aggrieve history, if we insist on seeing the grim-visaged Florentine and the light-hearted Gaul over a bottle of petit vin de Vouvray or de Chinon—for the vineyards of this southern slope of Paris had been rooted up by the builder early in the twelfth century—in the low-browed living-room, discussing poetry and politics, the schism in the Church, the quarrel between the French King and his spiritual father of Rome. ”

“ Thomas Carlyle seems strangely placed in the stalls of the Théâtre Français, yet he sat there, at the end of his twelve-days' visit to Paris in 1825. "On the night before leaving," he writes, "I found that I ought to visit one theatre, and by happy accident came upon Talma playing there. A heavy, shortish, numb-footed man, face like a warming-pan for size, and with a strange, most ponderous, yet delicate expression in the big, dull-glowing black eyes and it. Incomparably the best actor I ever saw. Play was 'Œdipe'; place the Théâtre Français." ”

“ Hereabout was all country then, and a favorite summer resort of the wealthy citizens, whose modest cottages and showy villas clustered along the banks of the Bièvre; a free and wilful stream in the early years of the thirteenth century, often in revolt and sometimes 28 misleading the sedate Seine into escapades, to the disquiet of these faubourgs. From its gardens, portly meadows smiled townward to Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, crowded with its schools, and to the convent gardens, snuggling close under the shelter of the southern wall of Philippe-Auguste. ”

“ A medallion of the great potter may be seen over the entrance of a house in Rue du Dragon, and his statue stands in the little garden of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, not far away. He is in his workman's garb, gazing down at a platter on which he has stamped his genius in clay.
We have seen John Calvin, fresh from Picardy, a student at the Collége du Cardinal-Lemoine, in Rue Saint-Victor, and this is his only residence in Paris known to us. ”

“ The man who does this necessarily grows sad. Molière's sadness was mitigated by a humor of equal depth, a conjunction rare in the Latin races, and found at its best only in him and in Cervantes. This set him to writing and acting farces; and into them he put sentiment for the first time on the French stage. There is a gravity behind his buffoonery, and a secret sympathy with his butts. So, when he came to write comedy—that hard and merciless exposure of our common human nature, turned inside out for scorn—he left place for pity in his ridicule, and there is no cruelty in his laughter. ”

“ Their days, their ways, they themselves as they moved and worked, are made alive for us once more by their surroundings. Where these have been disturbed by improvements, "more fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea," we get curious suggestions from some forgotten name cut in the stone of a street corner, from a chance-saved sign, a neglected tourelle, or a bit of battered carving. And where the modern despoiler has wreaked himself at his worst—as with the Paris of Marot, Rabelais, Palissy—we may rub the magic ring of the archæologist, which brings instant reconstruction. ”

“ Not a stone remains of the old Sorbonne, not a stone of the rebuilt Sorbonne of Richelieu, except his chapel and his tomb; well worth a visit for the exquisite beauty of its detail. But the soul of the historic foundation lives on, younger than ever to-day, in its seventh century of 85 youth. Through Porte Saint-Jacques, Dante passes to the dwelling, just beyond, of Jean de Meung, its site now marked by a tablet in the wall of the house No. 218 Rue Saint-Jacques. ”

“ We forget its horrid memories in the sight of the new Hôtel de Ville, of no memories, good or bad, to dash our delight in this most nearly perfect of modern structures; perfect in design, execution, and material, a consummate scheme carried out to the last exquisite detail by architects, sculptors, and decorators, all masters of their crafts.
Our direct road takes us through the Halles, their huge iron and glass structures the lineal descendants of those heavy stone Halles, started in the twelfth century here in the fields, when the small market on the island no longer sufficed. ”

“ Thirty-one years before, he had left Auvergne for Paris, a precocious lad of eight, already so skilled in mathematics and geometry that he produced his famous treatises while still in his teens, and at the age of twenty-three was known for his abilities throughout Europe. No man dying, as he did, not yet forty years of age, has left so distinct and permanent an impress on contemporary, and on later, thought. ”

“ The inborn good-heartedness that made his comedy gracious and unhostile, made his relations with men and women always kindly and generous. You see that sympathy with humanity in Mignard's portrait, and in the bust in the foyer of the Comédie Française, made by Houdon from other portraits and from descriptions. Under the projecting brow of the observer are the eyes of the contemplator, shrewd and speculative, and withal infinitely sorrowful, with the sadness of the man who knew how to suffer acutely, mostly in silence and in patience; and this is the face of the man who made all France laugh! ”

“ By the courtesy of those in charge, we may pass within the spacious stone entrance arch of No. 18, and pick our way through the ordered confusion, past the admirable inner façade of the main fabric, with its stately steps and portal and its windows above, topped by tiny hoods, to a distant corner; where, in the gloom, we make out the base of a square tower and the foot of a corkscrew staircase. We mount it, spirally and slowly. ”

“ The choice spirits of the court, of the great world, of the greater world of literature, were glad to meet in fellowship around her generous and joyous table. Among them she found excuse for an occasional caprice, but her deepest and most lasting passion was given to the superb adventurer, Maurice de Saxe. His quarters, when home from the wars—for which her pawned jewels furnished him forth—were only a step down Rue Bonaparte from her house, on Quai Malaquais. They were at No. 5, the most ancient mansion left on the quay, with the exception of No. 1, hid behind the wing of the Institute. ”

“ Yet he was fond of court life, and, an adroit courtier, he knew how to sing royal prowess in the field and royal splendor in the palace. He had a way of carrying himself that gave seeming height to his slight stature. His noble and open expression, his fine wit, his dexterous address, his notable gifts as a reader to the King at his bedside, made him a favorite in that resplendent circle. And he was all the more unduly dejected when the Roi Soleil cooled and no longer smiled on him ”

“ 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. ”

“ In like manner, the walls, which have sheltered soldiers, statesmen, preachers, teachers, workers in art and letters, illustrious men and women of all sorts and conditions, will take on the personality of these impressive presences. When we stand beneath the roof of that favorite personage in history, that spoiled child of romance, who happens to be dear to each one of us, we are brought into touch with him as with a living fellow-creature. ”

“ All through the Middle Ages, this University was a world-centre for its teaching, and through all the ages it has been "that prolific soil in which no seeds, which have once been committed to it, are ever permitted to perish." While la Cité was the seat of a militant Church, and la Ville the gathering-place of thronging merchants, this hill-side swarmed with students, and their officials were put to it to house them properly and keep them orderly. They got on as best they might, ill-lodged, ill-fed, ill-clad, often begging, always roistering, in the streets. ”