Molière THE STONES OF PARIS IN HISTORY AND LETTERS BY BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN AND CHARLOTTE M. MARTIN IN TWO VOLUMES Vol. I ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS MDCCCXCIX Copyright, 1899, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK TO W. C. BROWNELL IN CORDIAL TRIBUTE TO HIS "FRENCH TRAITS"...

This book has been written for those who seek in Paris something more than a city of shows or a huge bazaar, something better than the cabaret wherein François I. found entertainment, and yet not quite—still in Hugo's phrase—the library that Charles V. esteemed it. There are many lovers of this beautiful capital of a great people, who, knowing well her unconcealed attractions, would search out her records and traditions in stone, hidden and hard to find. This legitimate curiosity grows more eage

THREE TIME-WORN STAIRCASES We are to see a Paris unknown to the every-day dweller there, who is content to tread, in wearied idleness, his swarming yet empty boulevards; a Paris unseen by the hurried visitor, anxious to go his round of dutiful sight-seeing. This Paris is far away from the crowd, bustling in pursuit of pleasure, and hustling in pursuit of leisure; out of sound of the teasing clatter of cab-wheels, and the tormenting toot of tram-horns, and the petulant snapping of whips; out of s

The Church of Saint-Séverin. THE SCHOLARS' QUARTER OF THE MIDDLE AGES 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

MOLIÈRE AND HIS FRIENDS In the early years of the seventeenth century there stood a low, wide, timbered house on the eastern corner of Rues Saint-Honoré and des Vieilles-Étuves. To the dwellers in that crowded quarter of the Halles it was known as " la Maison des Singes ," because of the carved wooden tree on its angle, in the branches of which wooden monkeys shook down wooden fruit to an old wooden monkey at its foot. This house, that dated from the thirteenth century surely, and that may have

Voltaire. (From the statue by Houdon in the foyer of the Comédie Française.) FROM VOLTAIRE TO BEAUMARCHAIS " Dans la cour du Palais, je naquis ton voisin ," wrote Voltaire to Boileau, in one of those familiar rhymed letters that soften the austere rhetoric of the French verse of that day. The place of Voltaire's birth, nearly sixty years after that of Boileau, was in the same Street of Jerusalem, at its corner with the Street of Nazareth, and it was only thus as a baby that he came ever in touch

Madame de Sévigné. (From the portrait by Mignard.) THE STONES OF PARIS IN HISTORY AND LETTERS BY BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN AND CHARLOTTE M. MARTIN IN TWO VOLUMES Vol. II ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS MDCCCXCIX Copyright, 1899, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK...

THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY In preceding chapters we have come upon the small beginnings of the Scholars' Quarter; we have had glimpses of the growth of the great mother University and of her progeny of out-lying colleges; and we have trodden, with their scholars and students, the slope of "the whole Latin Mountain," as it was named by Pantaléon, that nephew of Pope Urban IV., who extolled the learning he had acquired here. Looking down from its crest, over the hill-side to the S

The Court of the Pension Vauquer. THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC [1] Set in the front wall of a commonplace house, in the broad main street of sunny Tours, a tablet records the birth of Balzac in that house, on the 27 Floréal, An VII. of the Republic—May 16, 1799—the day of Saint-Honoré, a saint whose name happened to hit the fancy of the parents, and they gave it to their son. Many a secluded corner of the town, many a nook within and about its Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, many a portrait of its p

The Figure of d'Artagnan. (From the Dumas Monument, by Gustave Doré.) THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS It was in 1823 that Alexandre Dumas, in his twenty-first year, took coach for Paris from his boyhood-home with his widowed mother, at Villers-Cotterets. He was set down at the principal landing-place of the provincial diligences in Place des Victoires, and found a room near by in an inn at No. 9 Rue du Bouloi. Its old walls are still there on the street and in the court, and the Hôtel de Blois stil

THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO When Madame Hugo brought her two younger boys, Eugène and Victor, to Paris in 1808, she took a temporary lodging in Rue de Clichy, until she found an apartment with a garden, on the southern side of the Seine. In this part of the town, where gardens, such as she needed, are plentiful even yet, she sought all her future abodes. Her first home in this quarter was near the old Church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. Victor, then six years old, could never recall its exact site

THE MAKING OF THE MARAIS The prehistoric savages, who settled, for safety from onslaught, on the largest of the islands in the Seine, known to us as Île de la Cité; the rabble of Gaulish fisherfolk, who came to camp here in after-years; the little tribe of Parisii who later builded a fortified hamlet on this sure ground, and bridged it with the mainland: all these, looking, through the centuries, northwardly across the transparent and unsullied stream, saw the flat river-bank opposite, over beyo

The Place des Vosges. THE WOMEN OF THE MARAIS " Dans cet hôtel est née, le 6 Fevrier, 1626, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné :" so reads the tablet set in that wall, which fronts on the square, of the house numbered 1 Place des Vosges, having its entrance at No. 11 Rue de Birague. There is no name more closely linked with the Marais than that of this illustrious woman. Born in this house, baptized in its parish church of Saint-Paul-et-Saint-Louis, she here grew up to girlhood; she w