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

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houses No. 27 Rue de Tournon and No. 30 Rue de Condé. And from here Marot went into exile, along with the well-to-do Huguenots, who clung together in this quarter outside the wall. "Nous autres l'appelons la Petite Genève," said d'Aubigné, and that appellation held for a long time. Its centre was the short, narrow lane in the marshes, named later Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, and now Rue Visconti, wherein the persecuted sect had their hidden place of worship. On its corner with the present Rue de Seine was the home of Jean Cousin, that gentleman-worker in stained glass—the sole handicraft allowed to men of birth—who has left for our joy that exquisite window in the Church of Saint-Gervais. At the western end of the lane was the residence built for himself by Baptiste du Cerceau, son of the illustrious Jacques Androuët, and as stanch as was his father for the faith. His great mansion took up the whole end of the block, on the ground covered now by the equally large building that makes 32 Rue Jacob, 21 Rue Bonaparte, and 23 and 25 Rue Visconti. A portion of this latter structure may be of the sixteenth century. Baptiste du Cerceau, a Huguenot by birth and bringing-up, had yet joined Henri III.'s famous "Forty-Five," in 1575, when he was only twenty years old. For ten years he served that King as soldier and architect, and then, rather than attend mass or conform against his convictions, he left King and court and home in 1585. He came back with Henri IV. as royal architect, to find that his elegant residence had fallen into ruin.

      Balcony over the Entrance of the Cour du Dragon.

      When Bernard Palissy, released from his dungeon in Bordeaux, came to Paris, he was made "Worker in Earth and Inventor of Rustic Figulines," for the new abode in the Tile Fields, beyond the Louvre, that was planned for the Queen-Mother, Catherine de' Medici. "Bernard of the Tuileries," as he was known, in order to be near his work, lodged on the northern side of Rue Saint-Honoré, just east of present Rue de Castiglione. Later he removed to Rue du Dragon, nearly opposite the little street now named in his honor, and so became one of the colony of "la Petite Genève." Here he worked as he worked always in his passion for perfection in ornamental pottery, giving to it all "my affection for pursuing in the track of enamels," in his own quaint words. For his single-mindedness in praising his Creator, and in making worthy images of His creations, he was looked on as a "huguenot opiniâtre," and hated by the powers of the Church and State, who, failing to burn him, because of the mercy of the Duke of Mayenne, cast him into the Bastille. With all Paris hungry, during the siege of the League by Henry of Navarre, the prisoners took their turn, and this old man renewed the experience of his youth, when he had starved himself for his beloved enamels. And so, at the age of eighty, in the year of the stabbing by Jacques Clément of the most Christian King, Henri III., Bernard Palissy died in his cell "naturally," the report said. 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. Appointed Curé of Pont l'Evêque, at the age of sixteen, he was induced by a daring relative to read the Bible, and the ultimate result was Calvinism, as it has been interpreted by his bigoted disciples. The immediate result was his persecution by the Sorbonne, and his flight to Ferrara, about the year 1534. There he met with welcome and protection, as did many a political fugitive of the time, from Renée, the reigning duchess, as kindly a creature as was her father, Louis XII. of France. But her goodwill could not prevail against the ill-will of the Church, and Calvin was forced to find his way finally to Switzerland, to live there for thirty useful years. Marot, who was with Calvin in Ferrara, went back to Paris, still countenanced at court; but no favor of king or king's sister could save a sinner who would eat meat during Lent; and in 1543 Marot was forced to flee to Italy, and died in Turin in 1544. He lives less in his special verse than in his general influence, along with Rabelais and Montaigne, in the formation of French letters. These three cleansed that language into literature, by purging it of the old Gallic chaos and clumsiness of form.

      So the Church made a desert, and called it peace, and "Little Geneva" was at last laid waste, and those leaders, who escaped the cell and the stake, were made refugees, because they had been insurgents against enslaved thought. But they left behind them him who has been styled the "Martyr of the Renaissance," Étienne Dolet. Here, in Place Maubert, this bronze figure on the high pedestal, which he somehow makes serve as a Protestant pulpit, looks all the martyr, with his long, stubborn neck, his stiff spine of unbending conviction, his entire attitude of aggressive devotion to principle. In life he was so strong and so genuine that he made friends almost as many as enemies. That glorious woman, Marguerite of Navarre—whose absurd devotion to her brother Francis is only a lovable flaw in her otherwise faultless nature—stood by Dolet as she stood by so many men who had the courage to study and think and speak. She saved him from execution, when he had killed a man in self-defence at Lyons, and she should have been allowed to sit at table with the friends who gave him a little dinner in the Pays Latin to celebrate his escape. Among those about the board were Marot, Rabelais, Erasmus, Melancthon, tradition says, and says no more. We are told nothing about the speechmakers, and we can only guess that they were terribly in earnest. Dolet was soon again in arrest for printing books forbidden by the Church; his trial resulted in an acquittal. Soon again he was arrested for importing the forbidden literature, and escaped from prison. Rearrested, he was speedily convicted, and on August 3, 1546, he was burned in Place Maubert, on the spot where they have put his statue.

      Clément Marot.

       (From the portrait by Porbus le Jeune, in a private collection.)

      It was during one of his visits in later life to Paris that Erasmus came to be among these convives; perhaps at the time he was considering, before declining, the offer of François I. to make him the head of the great Collége Royal, planned—and no more than planned—by the King on the site of the Hôtel de Nesle, where Mazarin afterward placed his College of the Four Nations, now the seat of the Institute. Many years before this visit, some time between 1492 and 1497, Erasmus had lived in Paris, a poor and unhappy student in the Collége Montaigu. It had earned the nickname of "Collége des Haricots," because of the Lenten fare lavished on its inmates—beans, stale eggs, spoiled fish, and that monotony broken by frequent fasts. Erasmus had a Catholic conscience, as he owns, but a Lutheran stomach withal, and this semi-starvation, with the filth and fleas in the rooms, sickened him and drove him home to cleanly and well-fed Flanders. From this college, he says in his "Colloquia," "I carried nothing but a body infected with disease, and a plentiful supply of vermin." A few years later young Rabelais suffered similar horrors at the same college, and has cursed its memories through Grangousier's capable lips. This "galley for slaves" was indeed used as a prison during the Revolution, and was torn down in 1845, to give place to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.

      From Place Maubert we walk up Rue Monge—named from the great savant of the First Empire—and down to the seventeenth century, to where, on the corner of Rue Rollin, we find the tablet that records the scene of Blaise Pascal's death in 1662. He lived and died in the house of his sister, in the fields just beyond Porte Saint-Marcel. 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.

      He gained the honor of being hated by the Church, and the Jesuits named him "Porte d'Enfer." His only answer was the philosophic question, "How can I prove that I am not the gate of Hell?" This many-sided genius invented the first calculating machine and the first omnibus. The line was started on March 18, 1662, and ran from the Palace of the Luxembourg to the Bastille. Its route was probably by Rue de la Harpe—almost all gone under Boulevard Saint-Michel—across Petit-Pont and the Island and Pont Notre-Dame, to Place de Grève, and thence by Rues François-Miron and Saint-Antoine, to the gate and the prison at the end.

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