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The Stones of Paris in History and Letters (Vol. 1&2). Benjamin Ellis Martin
Читать онлайн.Название The Stones of Paris in History and Letters (Vol. 1&2)
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4064066498672
Автор произведения Benjamin Ellis Martin
Жанр Документальная литература
Издательство Bookwire
It may have been while driving between this tower and his sister's house, that Pascal's carriage was overturned on Pont-Neuf, and he narrowly escaped death by falling or by drowning. From that day he gave up his service to science, and gave himself up solely to the service of God. Into his "Thoughts" he put all his depth of reflection and his intensity of feeling, all his force and finish of phrase. Yet, always behind this Christian philosopher, we are conscious of the man of feeling, who owns that he could be drawn down from his high meditations, and could be drawn up from his profound melancholy, by "un peu de bon temps, un bon mot, une louange, une caresse."
His body was laid in the Abbey Church of Sainte-Geneviève, and was removed, on the destruction of that edifice in 1807, to its successor in tradition and sentiment, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. It rests at the base of one of the outer pillars of the Lady Chapel, opposite the spot of Racine's final sepulture. The two tablets from their original tombs have been set in the pillars of the first chapel on the southern side of the choir, just behind the exquisite rood-screen.
When aged Rue Rollin was quite young it was christened Rue Neuve-Saint-Étienne, and it was bordered by cottages standing in their own gardens, looking down the slope across the town to the river, this being the highest street on the hill-side. Its length has been lessened by Rue Monge, and that portion left to the east of the new street is now Rue de Navarre. Rue Monge was cut through the crest of the hill, so that one must mount by stone steps to the old level of the western end of Rue Neuve-Saint-Étienne, named anew in honor of the scholar and historian, who has given his name also to the great college, since removed from this quarter to Boulevard Rochechouart, away off on the northern heights. Charles Rollin was an earnest student, an unusually youthful Rector of the University, and principal of the College of Beauvais in 1696, and a writer of history and belles-lettres of great charm but little weight. He was, withal, an honest soul, somewhat naïve, of simple tastes and of quiet life. So he came to this secluded quarter, when a little over seventy, and here he died in 1741. His cottage is numbered 8 in the street, and is occupied by the school of Sainte-Geneviève, whose demure maidens do no violence to his tranquil garden in which they stroll. For their use a small pavilion has been built in the rear of the garden, but there is no other change. The two Latin lines, inscribed by him in praise of his rural home within the town, remain on an inner wall of his cottage at your left as you enter.
Fifty years later another writer found a quiet home in this same street. Hidden behind the heavy outer door of No. 4, a roomy mansion built in 1623 by a country-loving subject of Louis XIII., is a tablet that tells of the residence here, from 1781 to 1786, of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. 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. This traveller in many lands, this adorer of nature, took keen delight in his outlook, from his third-story windows, over this garden and the gardens beyond, to the Seine. Here in 1784 he wrote "Studies from Nature," an instantaneous success, surpassed only by the success of "Paul and Virginia," published in 1786. Possibly no book has ever had such a vogue. It was after reading this work, in Italy, that the young Bonaparte wrote to Bernardin: "Your pen is a painter's brush." Yet his reading of the manuscript, before its publication, in the salon of Madame Necker, had merely bored his hearers, and the humiliated author had fled from their yawns to this congenial solitude.
The narrow street has suffered slight change since those days, or since those earlier days, when René Descartes found a temporary home, probably on the site of present No. 14, a house built since his day here. That was between 1613, when he first came from Brittany, and 1617, when he went to the Netherlands. But there can be found no trace of the stay in this street, nor of the secluded home in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, of the founder of Cartesian philosophy—the first movement in the direction of modern philosophy—the father of modern physiology, as Huxley claims, and of modern psychology, as its students allow. His wandering life, in search always of truth, ended in 1650, at the court of Christina of Sweden. His body was brought back to France by the ambassador of Louis XIV., and placed in the old Church of Sainte-Geneviève. In 1793, the Convention decreed its removal to the recently completed and secularized Panthéon, and from there it was carried for safe keeping, along with so many others, to the Museum of French Monuments. In 1819 it found final resting-place in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the third chapel on the southern side of the choir. The man himself lives for us on the wonderful canvas of Franz Hals in the gallery of the Louvre.
René Descartes.
(From the portrait by Franz Hals, in the Musée du Louvre.)
The Paris of the north bank has its slope, that looks across the Seine to this southern slope, and that has come to be its Scholarly Quarter. The high land away behind the lowlands stretching along the northern bank was taken early by the Romans for their villas, and then by nobles for their châteaux, and then by the bourgeoisie for their cottages. As la Ville grew, its citizens gave all their thought to honest industry and to the honest struggle for personal and municipal rights, so that none was left for literature. When its time came, the town had spread up and over these northern heights, and men of letters and of the arts were attracted by their open spaces and ample outlook. So large a colony of these workers had settled there, early in the nineteenth century, that some among them gave to their hill-side the name of "la Nouvelle Athènes." Its vogue has gone on growing, and it is crowded with the memories of dead pen-workers, and with the presence of living pen-workers. So, too, are the suburbs toward the west, and this Scholars' Quarter on the southern bank, which is barely touched on in this book, given so greatly as it is to history, archæology, architecture, and other arts. All this wide-spread district awaits the diligent pen that has given us "The Literary Landmarks of London," to give us, as completely and accurately, "The Literary Landmarks of Paris."
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