Benjamin Ellis Martin

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black-death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came marching on; the while la danse Macabre whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries.
On the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Hôtel Saint-Paul, stretched the grounds of the old hôtel of Pierre d'Orgemont, Bishop of Paris. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ It lifts and lightens the severe dignity of the façade. And, in the court—its centre not unworthily held by the bronze statue of Louis XIV., remarkable in its exquisite details, found in the old Hôtel de Ville—we linger in joy before the graceful flowing curves and the daylight directness of the Seasons of this French Phidias. The figures on the wings are from a feebler chisel than his. Of all the crowding memories of this spot, those of the Marquise de Sévigné and of Jean Goujon are the most vivid and the most captivating. ”

“ Setting Pierre Lescot at work on the lovely western wing of his new Louvre, he rushed over the land, building and beautifying at Saint-Germain, Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Blois, Chambord, posing always as the patron and prodrome of the Renaissance in France. At least, he could say truly of himself, "On verra qu'il y a un roi en France;" but besides the throne and his pet foolishnesses, he handed down nothing worth owning to his son—that Henri II. of heavy fist and light brain, slow of thought and of speech, cold, uncongenial, commonplace. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 104 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. ”

“ Here at No. 30 is a quaint low front, mostly taken up by a spacious entrance-porch, decorated with finely cut dragons; here at No. 31 is the superb portal of the Hôtel Jeanne d'Albret; all that is left of the noble residence of that niece of François I. who married the Duc de Clèves in 1541. It is more than a century from that date before this hôtel holds any history for us, when it became tenanted by César Phébus d'Albret, Marshal of France; a rich and frolicsome Gascon, a friend of Scarron, an especial friend of young Madame Scarron. It was he who killed the Marquis de Sévigné in a duel. ”

“ It is the Marais of to-day and of every day, the work-a-day Marais, whose heart is here in this street of the Temple and the old street of the Temple. In them, and in the streets that cross them, are numerous mansions of a bygone time, with little to say to us in architecture, nothing at all to say to us in history or letters. Side by side with them are tall buildings and huge blocks of modern construction ”

“ 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 133 with a fine massive head, intelligent and thoughtful. This was Victor Hugo, the man whose pen can now charm or terrify the world. ”