The Stones of Paris in History and Letters (Vol. 1&2) - Benjamin Ellis Martin

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How he brought his comedies and his company to the capital; how he put them both up in rivalry with the two old stock houses; how he won his way against all their opposition, and much other antagonism—this is told in our chapter on Molière.

      In the cutting up of the ancient domain of Robert of Artois, after the royal sale, a short street was run north and south through the grounds, and named François, since feminized into Rue Française. It lay between the tower, whose lower wall may be seen in the rear of the court of No. 8, and the theatre buildings, which covered the sites of present Nos. 7 and 9 of this street and extended over the ground that now makes Rue Étienne Marcel. The main entrance of the theatre was about where now hangs the big gilt key on the northern side of that fragment of Rue Mauconseil, still left after its curtailment by many recent cuttings. Gone now is every vestige of the theatre and every stone of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, except this tower of "Jean-sans-Peur."

      The Tower of "Jean-sans-Peur."

      By happy chance, or through pious care, this precious fragment has survived the centuries that looked with unconcern on things of the past, and has come into the safe keeping of our relic-loving age. It is an authentic document from the archives of the earliest architecture of the fifteenth century, convincing in its proof of the strength for defence of ducal homes in that day. Its massive stones are scrupulously shaped and fitted, the grim faces of its quadrangular walls are softened by wide ogival windows, its top is crowned all around by a deep cornice. Above, the former corbelled machiolations, heavy yet elegant, are debased into water-spouts, and a new roof has been added. Only the southern and eastern sides of the oblong are wholly disengaged, the other faces being mostly shut in by crowding buildings. On the angle behind is a tourelle supported by corbels, and in the ogival door is a tympanum, in whose carvings we make out a plane and a plumb-line. This was the device of John of Burgundy, worn on his liveries, painted and carved everywhere. Louis of Orleans had chosen a bunch of knotted fagots as his emblem, with the motto "Je l'ennuie;" and Burgundy's arrogant retort was the plane that cut through all that was not in plumb-line with his measurements, and the motto in Flemish "Ik houd," meaning "Je le tiens."

      The great hall within has been partitioned off into small rooms, fit for the workingmen and their families formerly installed here; so that its ancient aspect of amplitude and dignity is somewhat marred. We "must make believe very much," to see either the sinner John mustering here his assassins, who file out through that door to their rendezvous with Orléans, or the saint Vincent gathering here his herd of hungry children. Happily, the grand stairway, on one side, is unmutilated, and it serves to bring home to us the ample magnificence of these Burgundian dukes. Dagobert's stair crawls, through twisting darkness, within its tower; Blanche's stair modestly suggests a venture toward ease and elegance in life; here we mount the stairway of a feudal château, broad and easy and stately, fitting frame for bejewelled courtiers and iron-clad men-at-arms. Its one hundred and thirty-eight steps, each a single stone, turn spaciously about the central column, which does not reach to the tower top. Its upper section is carved into a stone pot, from which springs a stone oak-tree to the centre of the vaulted ceiling of the broad platform that ends the stairway, the ribs of the vaulting outlined by carved branches and foliage. On each floor below, a large chamber, deserted and dreary, opens on the landing-place; from this upper stage a narrow staircase leads, through the thickness of the wall and up through the tourelle on the angle, to the tiny chamber occupied by John of Burgundy, tradition tells us. Here in his bedroom, that was an arsenal, at the top of his impregnable tower, the fearless one found safety and sleep. We peep out from his one small window, and far down we see the swarming length of Rue Étienne Marcel, and hear the low pervasive murmur of Paris all astir, accented by the shrill cries of the boys from the adjoining school, at play in the courtyard of our tower. Their voices chase back to their shadowy haunts all these companions of our stroll through the ages, and call us down to our own time and to our Paris of to-day.

      THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER OF THE MIDDLE AGES

       Table of Contents

      The Church of Saint-Séverin.

      On that river-bank of the City-Island which is called Quai aux Fleurs, you will find a modern house numbered 11; and you will read, in the gold letters of the weather-stained stone slab set in the front wall, that here, in 1118, dwelt Héloise and Abelard. Their ideal heads are carved over the two entrance doors. This is the site of the pleasant residence occupied by Canon Fulbert, looking across its own garden and the beach to the river—one of the dwellings in the cloisters that were set apart for the clergy and clerks of the cathedral, and of the many parish churches clustering about it. The chapter of Notre-Dame owned nearly all this end of the island eastwardly from the boundaries of the old Palace, and had built up this clerical village of about three dozen small houses, each within its garden and clump of acacias, all sequestered and quiet. You may see one of these houses, still owned by the cathedral, and happily left unchanged, at No. 6 Rue Massillon. Its low two stories and tiled roof on the court keep their old-time look, and within is a good staircase, with a wooden railing of the days before wrought iron came into use. Boileau-Despréaux has mounted this staircase, for he certainly visited this abode of the Abbé Ménage, who had literary and scientific salons here, on Wednesday evenings. Boileau himself lived in these cloisters for many years, and here he died; and here had died Philibert Delorme and Pierre Lescot. These and many another, not connected with the Church, sought this quarter for its quiet. It was quiet enough, shut in as it was by its own walls, that made of it a cité inside the City of the Island. The two gates at the western ends of present Rues du Cloître-Notre-Dame and Chanoinesse, with two others on the shore, were safely closed and barred at nightfall, against all intrusion of the profane and noisy world without. So greedy for quiet had the dwellers grown, that they would not permit the bridge—the Pont-Rouge, the seventeenth-century predecessor of Pont Saint-Louis—to step straight out from Saint Louis's island to their own, lest the speed of traffic should perturb them; they made it turn at an angle, until it set its twisted foot on the retired spot where now Rues des Ursins and des Chantres meet in a small open space. The southern shore by the side of the cathedral was given up to the Archbishop's palace and garden; and the piece of waste land, behind the cathedral and outside the wall, known as Le Terrain, was in 1750 banked up into the quay at the end of the present pretty garden. All around the northern and eastern sides of the original Notre-Dame, stretched the Gothic arched cloisters, and in them the Church taught what little it thought fit its scholars should learn.

      Here, toward the end of the eleventh century, Pierre Abelard was an eager pupil of Guillaume de Champeaux; and early in the next century, here and in the gardens of Saint-Geneviève, he was a honey-tongued teacher. He lodged in the house of Canon Fulbert, in whose niece of seventeen—less than half his own age—he found an ardent learner, not alone in theology. Here, on this spot, she taught herself that devotion to the poor-spirited lover who was so bold-spirited a thinker; a devotion, that, outlasting his life by the twenty years of her longer life, found expression in her dying wish, put into verse by Alexander Pope:

      "May one kind Grave unite each hapless Name,

      And graft my Love immortal on thy Fame."

      He died at the Priory of Saint-Marcel near Châlons, whose prior sent the body, at her request, to Héloise, then Abbess of the Convent at Nogent-sur-Seine, and famed as a miracle of erudition and piety. She was buried in the grave she there dug for him, and in 1800, when her convent was destroyed, leaving no stone, the tomb and its contents were removed to the Museum of French Monuments in Paris, and in 1817 they were placed in Père-Lachaise.

      We willingly lose sight of Abelard's sorry story in face of his splendid powers. These came into play at a period of mental and spiritual awakening, brought about by unwonted light from all quarters of the sky. Theological questions filled the air; asked, not only by priests and clerks, but by the silly crowd and by wistful children, and by gray-headed men sitting

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