The Stones of Paris in History and Letters (Vol. 1&2). Benjamin Ellis Martin
the abbey of Petit-Saint-Antoine. There were no side-paths, and they who went afoot were pushed to the wall and splashed with mud, by the mules and palfreys of those who could ride. They rode, the man in front, his lady behind, en croupe. Open trenches, in the middle of the roadway, served for drainage, naked and shameless; the graveyards were unfenced amid huddled hovels; and the constant disease and frequent epidemics that came from all this foulness were fathered on a convenient Providence! This solution of the illiterate and imbecile could not be accepted by the shining lights of science, who showed that the plague of the middle of the sixteenth century came from maleficent comets, their tails toward the Orient, or from malign conjunctions of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. Ambroise Paré, the most enlightened man of his day, had the courage to suggest that there were human and natural causes at work, in addition to the divine will. And the common-sense Faculty of Medicine, toward the close of the sixteenth century, indicted the drains and cesspools as the principal origin of all maladies then prevalent.
The only street-lighting was that given fitfully by the forlorn lanterns of the patrol, or by the torches of varlets escorting their masters, on foot or on horse. Now and then, a hole was burned in the mediæval night by a cresset on a church tower or porch, or shot out from a cabaret's fire through an opened door. When tallow candles got cheaper, they were put into horn lanterns, and swung, at wide intervals, high above the traffic. There, wind or rain put an untimely end to their infrequent flicker, or a "thief in the candle" guttered and killed it, or a thief in the street stoned it dead, for the snug plying of his trade. The town, none too safe in daylight, was not at all safe by night, and the darkness was long and dreary, and every honest man and woman went to bed early after the sunset angelus. Country roads were risky, too, and those who were unable to travel in force, or in the train of a noble, travelled not at all; so that the common citizen passed his entire existence within the confines of his compact parish. Nor could he see much of his Paris or of his Seine; he looked along the streets on stone walls on either side, and along the quays at timbered buildings on the banks. These rose sheer from the river-brink, and from both sides of every bridge, barring all outlook from the roadway between; their gables gave on the river, and from their windows could be seen only a little square of water, enclosed between the buildings on both banks and on the neighboring bridge. So that the wistful burgher could get glimpses of his river only from the beach by the Hôtel de Ville, or from the occasional ports crowded with boats discharging cargo.
These cargoes were sold in shops on ground floors, and the tenants were thick on the upper floors, of dwellings mostly made of timber and plaster, their high-fronted gables looking on the street. This was the custom in all towns in the Middle Ages, and it is a striking change that has, in our day, turned all buildings so that their former side has come to the front. The old Paris streets, in which shops and houses shouldered together compactly, already dark and narrow enough, were further narrowed and darkened by projecting upper floors, and by encroaching shop-signs, swinging, in all shapes and sizes, from over the doorways. Each shop sold its specialty, and the wares of all of them slopped over on the roadway. Their owners bawled the merits and prices of these wares in a way to shock a certain irritable Guillaume de Villeneuve, who complains in querulous verse, "They do not cease to bray from morning until night." With all its growth in coming years, the city's squalor grew apace with its splendor, and when Voltaire's Candide came in, by way of Porte Saint-Marcel here on the southern side, in the time of Louis XV., he imagined himself in the dirtiest and ugliest of Westphalian villages. For all its filth and all its discomfort, this mediæval Paris—portrayed, as it appeared three hundred years later, in the painful detail and inaccurate erudition of Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris"—was a picturesque town, its buildings giving those varied and unexpected groupings that make an architectural picture; their roofs were tiled in many colors, their sky-lines were wanton in their irregularity, and were punctuated by pointed turrets and by cone-shaped tower-tops; and over beyond the tall town walls, broken by battlements and sentry-boxes, whirled a grotesque coronet of windmill sails.
Turning from this attractive "Maison de la Reine Blanche," from this quarter where her son Louis learned to ride and to tilt, and glancing behind at the famous tapestry works, the Gobelins, of whose founder and director we shall have a word to say later, we follow the avenue of that name to Rue du Fer-à-Moulin. This little street, named for a sign that swung there in the twelfth century, is most commonplace until it opens out into a small, shabby square, that holds a few discouraged trees, and is faced by a stolid building whose wide, low-browed archway gives access to the court of the Boulangerie générale des Hôpitaux et Hospices. This was the courtyard of the villa of Scipio Sardini, whose name alone is kept alive by this Place Scipion—all that is left of his gardens and vineyards. Yet his was a notable name, in the days when this wily Tuscan was "écuyer du Roi Henri II.," and in those roaring days of swift fortunes for sharp Italian financiers, under the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici. This man amassed scandalous riches, and built his villa, mentioned by Sauval as one of the richest of that time, here amid the country mansions that dotted this southern declivity. Of this villa only one wing still stands, and it is with unlooked-for delight that we find this admirable specimen of sixteenth-century architecture, of a style distinct from that of any other specimen in Paris. The façade, that is left in the court of the Boulangerie, is made up of an arcade of six semi-circular arches on heavy stone pillars, a story above of plum-colored brick cut into panels by gray stone, its square-headed windows encased with the same squared stone, and an attic holding two dormers with pointed hoods. Set in the broad band between the two lower floors, were six medallions, one over the centre of each arch; of these six, only four remain. These contain the heads of warriors and of women, boldly or delicately carved, and wonderfully preserved; yet time has eaten away the terra-cotta, wind and wet have dulled the enamel that brightened them. The buildings about this court and behind this unique façade are commonplace and need not detain us. It was in 1614 that the General Hospital took the villa and enlarged it; in 1636, to escape the plague, the prisoners of the Conciergerie were installed here; and it has served as the bakery for the civil hospitals of Paris for many years.
We go our way toward our third staircase, not by the stupidly straight line of Rue Monge, but by vagrant curves that bring us to the prison of Sainte-Pélagie, soon to disappear, and to the Roman amphitheatre just below, happily rescued forever. Here, in Rue Cardinal-Lemoine, we slip under the stupid frontage of No. 49 to the court within, where we are faced by the hôtel of Charles Lebrun. We mount the stone steps that lead up to a wide hall, and so go through to a farther court, now unfortunately roofed over. This court was his garden, and this is the stately garden-front that was the true façade, rather than that toward the street; for this noble mansion—the work of the architect Germain Boffrand, pupil and friend of Hardouin Mansart—was built after the fashion of that time, which shut out, by high walls, all that was within from sight of the man in the street, and kept the best for those who had entry to the stiff, formal gardens of that day.
Pupil of Poussin, protégé of Fouquet, friend of Colbert, Lebrun was the favorite court painter and decorator, and the most characteristic exponent of the art of his day; his sumptuous style suiting equally François I.'s Fontainebleau, and Louis XIV.'s Versailles. He aided Colbert in the founding of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and in the purchase by the State of the Gobelins. This factory took its name from the famous dyer who came from Rheims, and tinted the clear Bièvre with his splendid scarlet, says Rabelais; so that it took the name of la Rivière des Gobelins, of which Ronsard sings. The statesman and the artist in concert built up the great factory of tapestries and of furniture, such as were suitable for royal use. Made Director of the Gobelins and Chancellor of the Academy, and making himself the approved painter of the time to his fellow-painters and to the buying public, Lebrun's fortune grew to the possession of this costly estate, which extended far away beyond modern Rue Monge. The death of Colbert—whose superb tomb in Saint-Eustache is the work of his surviving friend—left him to the hatred of Louvois, who pushed Mignard, Molière's friend, into preferment. And Lebrun, genuine and honest artist, died of sheer despondency, in his official apartment on the first floor of the factory, facing the chapel. His rooms have been cut up and given over to various usages, and no trace can be found in the Gobelins of its first director.
His body rests in his parish church, a few steps farther on, through ancient Rue Saint-Victor, now curtailed and mutilated. Along its line, before