The Stones of Paris in History and Letters (Vol. 1&2). Benjamin Ellis Martin
started by the earnest confessor of Saint Louis, Robert de Sorbon. The foundations of his little chapel, built in 1276, were unearthed in 1899 during the digging for the new Sorbonne; and its walls are outlined in white stone in the gray pavement of the new court. 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 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. No doubt it was a sufficiently grand mansion in its own grounds, for it was the home of the well-to-do parents of the poet, whose lameness gave him the popular nickname of "Clopinel," preferred by him to the name by which he is best known, which came from his natal town. In this home, a few years earlier, he had finished his completion of "Le Roman de la Rose," one of the earliest of French poems, a biting satire on women and priests, begun by Guillaume de Lorris. "Clopinel" carried on the unfinished work to such perfection, that he is commonly looked on as the sole author. Dante admired the work as fully as did Chaucer, who has left a translation into English of a portion:—so admirable a version that it moved Eustace Deschamps to enthusiasm in his ballad to "le grand translateur, noble Geoffroi Chaucer." 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.
Behind us in Rue Saint-Jacques, beneath the new Sorbonne, we have left the site of the chapel of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné. The entrance to its cloisters and gardens was opposite Rue du Cimetière-Saint-Benoît, a short street, now widened, that retains a few of its ancient houses, the cemetery at its farther end being entirely builded over. This entrance-gate is standing in the gardens of the Cluny Museum, and we see it as it was first seen by the boy François Villon, and last seen when he fled under it, after killing a priest in the cloisters. He got his name from the worthy canon of Saint-Benoît, Guillaume de Villon, who took in the waif and gave him a roof and food, and tried to give him morals; and it is by his name that the poet is known in history rather than by the other names, real or assumed, that he bore during his shifty life. He lived here with his "more than father," as the young scamp came to own that the canon had been; whose house in the cloister gardens, named "la Porte Rouge," was not far from the house of the canon Pierre de Vaucel, with whose niece François got into his first scrape. Loving her then, he libelled her later in his verse.
Full of scrapes of all sorts were his thirty short years of life—he was born in the year of the burning of Joan the Maid, and he slips out of sight and of record in 1461—and it needed all his nimble wits to keep his toes from dangling above ground and his neck from swinging in a noose. They did not keep him from poverty and hunger and prison. Parliament, nearly hanging him, banished him instead from Paris, and the footsore cockney figure is seen tramping through Poitou, Berri, Bourbonnais. Louis XI. finds him in a cell at Meung and, sympathizing with rascality that was not political, sets him free and on foot again; so playing Providence to this starveling poet as he did to Gringoire. And from Meung, François Villon steals out of history, leaving to us his "Small" and "Large Testament," a few odes and sonnets, with bits of wholly exquisite song. No French poet before him had put himself into his verse, and it is this flavor of personality that gives its chiefest charm to his work. We are won by the graceless vagabond, who casts up and tells off his entire existence of merriment and misery, in the words of Mr. Henley's superb translation:
"Booze and the blowens cop the lot."
He seems to be owning to it, this slight, alert figure of bronze in Square Monge, as he faces the meeting-place of wide modern streets. The spaciousness of it all puzzles him, who prowled about the darkest purlieus, and haunted the uncleanest cabarets, of the old University quarter. He is struck suddenly quiescent in his swagger; his face, slightly bent down, shows the poet dashed with the reprobate; his expression and attitude speak of struggling shame and shamelessness. His right hand holds a manuscript to his breast, his left hand clasps the dagger in his belt. Behind, on the ground, lie the mandolin of the poet-singer and the shackles of the convict. It is a delightfully expressive statue of François Villon, by his own election one of the "Enfants sans Souci," and by predestination a child of grievous cares.
From Square Monge it is but a step to the tablet that marks the place of Porte Saint-Victor, on the northern side of the remnant left of the street of that name. It is but a step in the other direction to the tablet on the wall of No. 50 Rue Descartes, which shows the site of Porte Saint-Marcel, sometimes called the Porte Bordée. Through either of these gates of the great wall one might pass to the home of a poet, a hundred years after Villon had gone from sight; like him, born to true poetry, but unlike him who was born to rags, Pierre de Ronsard was born to the purple. He was a gentleman of noble lineage, he had been educated at the famous Collége de Navarre, the college at that period of Henri III. and of the Duke of Guise, le Balafré—its site and its prestige since taken by the École Polytechnique—he had entered the court of the Duke of Orleans as a page, he had gone to Scotland as one of the escort of Madeleine of France, on her marriage with James V. He was counted among the personal friends of Mary Stuart and of Charles IX., and by him was selected always as a partner in tennis. That King visited Ronsard here, and so, too, did his brother Henri III. Tasso found his way here, while in Paris in 1571, in the train of Cardinal Louis d'Este. It seems that nothing in all France was to Tasso's taste, except the windmills on Montmartre; easily in view, at that day, from the Louvre, at whose windows he watched the ceaseless whirling of their sails, which mitigated his boredom. Twenty years earlier, Rabelais was fond of ferrying across the river, from his home in Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, to prowl about his once familiar haunts in this quarter, and to drop in on Ronsard and Baïf, the leaders of the school of "learned poets." They lived in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor, the street formed over the outer ditch of the wall, now named Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Their house and grounds, just at the corner of present Rue des Boulangers, have been cut through and away by the piercing of Rue Monge. Here, Ronsard looked across the meadows to the Seine, while he strolled in the gardens, book in hand, eager "to gather roses while it is called to-day," in the words of Mr. Andrew Lang's version of the "Prince of Poets." For Ronsard's deafness, which had cut short his adroit diplomatic career, had given him quicker vision for all beauty; and his verse, Greek and Latin and French, trips to the music made in him by the sights and scents of summer, by roses and by women, by the memories of "shadow-loves and shadow-lips." And, still rhyming, this most splendid of that constellation—those singers, attuned to stately measure, called the Pleiades—died in the year 1585, soon after his sixtieth birthday.
Pierre de Ronsard.
(From a drawing by an unknown artist, in a private collection.)
From here we go straight away over the hill of Sainte-Geneviève and through Porte Saint-Michel—nearly at the meeting-place of Rues Soufflot and Monsieur-le-Prince and Boulevard Saint-Germain—to the house, also in the fields outside the wall, where dwelt Clément Marot, a poet who sang pleasantly of the graces of life, too, but who had a more serious strain deep down. The "Cheval d'Airan"—so was the house named—was a gift to the poet from François I. "for his good, continuous, and faithful services." These services consisted chiefly in the writing of roundelays and verses, in which "he had a turn of his own," says Sainte-Beuve; a turn of grace and of good breeding, and no passion that should startle the King's sister, good Marguerite of Navarre, who had made him her groom of the chamber. He had been a prisoner at Pavia with the King, and his life had been spent in the camp and the court. At Ferrara, in 1534, he had met his fellow-countryman Calvin, and returned to Paris to prove his strengthened convictions in the new heresies by those translations of the psalms, which carried comfort to Calvin and to Luther, and which have given to their writer his permanent place in French literature. During this period he lived in this grand mansion,