MOLIÈRE AND HIS FRIENDS

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 been a part of Queen Blanche's Paris, was torn down only in 1800, and a slice of its site has been cut off by Rue Sauval, the widened and renamed Rue des Vieilles-Étuves. The modern building on that corner, numbered 92 Rue Saint-Honoré, is so narrow as to have only one window on each of its three floors facing that street. Around the first story, above the butcher's shop on the entrance floor, runs a balcony with great gilt letters on its rail, that read "Maison de Molière." High up on its front wall is a small tablet, whose legend, deciphered with difficulty from the street, claims this spot for the birthplace of Molière. This is a veracious record. The exact date of the birth of the eldest son of Jacques Poquelin and Marie Cressé, his wife, is unknown, but it was presumably very early in January, 1622, for, on the fifteenth of that month, the baby was baptized "Jean Poquelin," in his father's parish church of Saint-Eustache—a new church not quite completed then. The name "Baptiste" was, seemingly, added a little later by his parents.

On this corner the boy lived for eleven years; here his mother died, ten years after his birth, and here his father soon married again; he removed, in 1633, to a house he had inherited, the ground floor of which he made his shop of upholstery and of similar stuffs, the family residing above. It was No. 3 Rue de la Tonnellerie, under the pillars of the Halles, possibly, but not certainly, on the site of the present No. 31 Rue du Pont-Neuf. In a niche, cut in the front wall of this modern building, has been placed a bust of Molière and an inscription asserting that this was his birthspot, a local legend that harms no one, and comforts at least the locataire.

Hereabout, certainly, the boy played, running forward and back across the market. On its northern side, near the public pillory, was another house owned by his father, on the old corner of Rue de la Réale, and its site is now covered by the pavement of modern Rue Rambuteau. It is pleasant to picture the lad in this ancient quarter, as we walk through those few of its streets unchanged to this day, notably that bit of Rue de la Ferronerie, so narrow that it blocked the carriage of Henri IV., a few years before, and brought him within easy reach of the knife of Ravaillac as he sprang on the wheel.

François Coppée, not yet an old man, readily recalls the square squat columns of the old Halles, and, all about, the solid houses supported by pillars like the arcades of Place des Vosges; all just as when young Poquelin played about them. Plays, as well as play, already attracted him; he loved to look at the marionettes and the queer side-shows of the outdoor fairs held about the Halles; and his grandfather, Louis Cressé, an ardent playgoer, often took him to laugh at the funny fellows who frolicked on the trestles of the Pont-Neuf, and at the rollicking farces in the Théâtre du Marais. No doubt he saw, too, the tragedies of the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and this observant boy may well have anticipated the younger Crébillon's opinion, that French tragedy of that day was the most absolute farce yet invented by the human mind. For this was a little while before the coming of Corneille with true tragedy.

This son of the King's upholsterer cared nothing for his father's trade, and not much for books. He learned, early, that his eyes were meant for seeing, and he not only saw everything, but he remembered and reflected; showing signs already of that bent which gave warrant, in later life, for Boileau's epithet, "Molière the Contemplator."

He was sent, in 1636, being then fourteen years old, to the Collége de Clermont, named a little later, and still named, Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Rebuilt during the Second Empire, it stands on its old site behind the Collége de France, in widened Rue Saint-Jacques. Here, during his course of five years, he was sufficiently diligent in such studies as happened to please him; and was prominent in the plays, acted by the scholars at each prize-giving. He made many friendships with boys who became famous men; with one, just leaving school as he came, who especially stood his friend in after life—the youthful Prince de Conti, younger brother of the great Condé. And this elder brother became, years after, the friend and protector of the young actor-playwright, just as he was of some others of that famous group, Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau. All these, along with all men eminent in any way, were welcomed to his grand seat at Chantilly, and were frequent guests at his great town-house, whose salon was a rival to that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. His mansion, with its grounds, occupied the whole of that triangular space bounded now by Rues de Vaugirard, de Condé, and Monsieur-le-Prince. At the northern point of that triangle, nearly on the ground now covered by the Second Théâtre Français, the Odéon, stood the prince's private theatre; wherein Molière, by invitation, played the rôles of author, actor, manager. Molière's customary rôle in this great house was that of friend of the host, who wrote to him: "Come to me at any hour you please; you have but to announce your name; you visit can never be ill-timed."

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin betook himself early to the boards for which he was born, from which he could not be kept by his course at college or at law. He studied law fitfully for a while; sufficiently, withal, to lay up a stock of legal technicalities and procedure, which he employed with precision in many of his plays. So, too, he took in, no doubt unconsciously, details of his father's business; and his references, in his stage-talk, to hangings, furniture, and costumes, are frequent and exact.

The father, unable to journey with the King to Narbonne in the spring of 1642, as his official duties demanded, had his son appointed to the place, and the young man, accompanying the court and playing tapissier on this journey, saw, it is said, the execution of Cinq-Mars and de Thou. In the provinces at this time, or it may have been in Paris earlier, he met, became intimate with, and soon after joined, a troupe of strolling players, made up of Joseph Béjart, his two sisters Madeleine and Geneviève, and other young Parisians.

This troupe was touring in Languedoc early in 1642, and was rather strong in its talent and fortunate in its takings; in no way akin to that shabby set of barnstormers satirized by Scarron in his "Roman Comique." We cannot fix the date of Poquelin's début in the company, but we know that—with the unhallowed ambition of the born and predestined comedian—he began in tragedy, and that he was greeted by his rural audiences with hootings, punctuated by the pelting of fried potatoes, then sold at the theatre door. And we know that the troupe came north to Rouen in the autumn of 1643, playing a night or two in the natal town of Corneille. It is a plausible and a pleasing fancy that sees the glory of French dramatic art of that day, at home on a visit to his mother, receiving free tickets for the show, with the respects of the young recruit to the stage, the glory of French dramatic art at no distant day. The troupe had gone to Rouen and to other provincial towns only while awaiting the construction of their theatre in the capital, contracted for during the summer. At last, on the evening of December 31, 1643, it raised its first curtain to the Parisian public, under the brave, or the bumptious, title of "l'Illustre Théâtre."

To trace, from his first step on Paris boards, the successive sites of Molière's theatres is a delightful task, in natural continuation of that begun in an earlier chapter, where those theatres in existence before his time were pointed out. In England, we know, stage-players were "strollers and vagabonds" by statute; not allowed to play within London's walls. All their early theatres were outside the City limits. The Globe, the summer theatre of Shakespeare and his "fellows"—"whereon was prepared scaffolds for beholders to stand upon"—was across the Thames, on Bankside, Southwark. So, too, were the Hope, the Rose, the Swan. The Curtain was in Shoreditch, Davenant's theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the Blackfriars theatre on Ludgate Hill, just without the old wall.

The early playhouses of Paris were built—but for another reason—on the outer side of the town wall of Philippe-Auguste, and their seemingly unaccountable situations are easily accounted for by following on either bank the course of that wall, already plainly mapped out in preceding pages.

This magnificent wall of a magnificent monarch had lost much of its old significance for defence with the coming of gunpowder, and a new use was found for it, in gentler games than war, as the town outgrew its encircling limits. In the Middle Ages, tennis—the oldest ball-game known—was a favorite sport of kings and of those about them. It was called le jeu de paume, being played with the hand until the invention of the racket; the players standing in the ditch outside the wall, against which the ball was thrown. Beyond the ditch was built the court for onlookers, the common folk standing on its floor, their betters seated in the gallery. When the game lost its vogue, these courts were easily and cheaply turned into the rude theatres of that day, with abundant space for actors and spectators; those of low degree crowding on foot in the body of the building, those who paid a little more seated in the galleries, those of high degree on stools and benches at the side of the stage, and even on the stage itself. This encroachment on the stage, within sight of the audience, grew to such an abuse that it was done away with in 1759, and the scene was left solely to the players.

Where a tablet is let into the wall of the present Nos. 12 and 14 Rue Mazarine, then named the Fossé-de-Nesle—the ancient outer ditch of the old wall—a roomy playhouse had been contrived from a former tennis-court owned by Arnold Mestayer, a solid citizen of the town, captain of the Hundred Musketeers of Henri IV.'s day. This was the theatre taken by the Béjart troupe and named "l'Illustre Théâtre." Here young Poquelin made his first bow to Paris. The building stood on the sites of the present Nos. 10, 12, and 14 Rue Mazarine, its only entrance for spectators reached by an alley that ran along the line between Nos. 14 and 16, and so through to Rue de Seine, to where the buildings extended over the ground now covered by Nos. 11 and 13. These latter houses are claimed by local legend for Molière's residence, and it may well be that the rear part of the theatre served as sleeping-quarters for the troupe. The interior of No. 11 is of very ancient construction, its front being of later date. In the wall between it and No. 9—a low wooden structure, possibly a portion of the original fabric—is hidden the well that served first the tennis-players and then the stage-players. There is no longer any communication between these houses in Rue de Seine and those in Rue Mazarine. These latter were built in 1830, when the street was widened, that portion of the old theatre having been demolished a few years earlier.

It was in June, 1644, that the name Molière first appears, signed—it is his earliest signature in existence—among the rest of the company, to a contract with a dancing man for the theatre. How he came to select this name is not known, nor was it known to any of his young comrades; for he always refused to give his reasons. What is known, is that it was a name of weight even then, proving that, within the first six months of the theatre's existence, his business ability had made him its controlling spirit. But his abilities as manager and as actor could not bring success to the theatre. Foreign and civil wars made the State poor; wide-spread financial troubles made the people poor; that cruelly cold winter froze out the public. "Nul animal vivant n'entra dans notre salle," are the bitterly true words, put into the mouth of the young actor-manager, by an unknown writer of a scurrilous verse.

He and the troupe were liberated from their lease within the year, and, early in 1645, they migrated over the river to the Jeu de Paume de la Croix-Noire. On either end of the long, low building at No. 32 Quai des Célestins is a tablet; the western one showing where stood the Tour Barbeau that ended the wall on this river-bank; that at the eastern end marking the site of this theatre, just without the wall. It had an entrance on the quay-front for the boatmen and other water-side patrons, another in Rue des Barrés for its patrons coming by coach. Molière lodged in the house—probably a portion of the theatre—at the corner of the quay and of Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul—that country lane wherein had died Rabelais, nearly a century earlier. Little Rue des Barrés, already seen taking its name from the barred or striped gowns of the monks who settled there, is now Rue de l'Ave-Maria, and at its number 15 you will find the stage entrance of this theatre, hardly changed since it was first trodden by the players from over the river. There is the low and narrow door, one of its jambs bent with the weight of the more modern structure above, and beyond is the short alleyway, equally narrow, by which they passed to the stage. At its inner end, where it opens into a small court, is the stone rim of a well, half hidden in the wall. It is the well provided in each tennis-court for the players, and handed on, with the court itself, for the use of the actors. Molière has leaned over this well-curb to wash away his rouge and wrinkles. It is an indisputable and attractive witness of his early days. In Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, where he knelt at the altar for his marriage and stood at the font with his son; in Saint-Eustache, where he carried his second son for baptism; in Saint-Roch, where he wrote his name as godfather of a friend's daughter—within these vast and dim aisles, his bodily presence is vaguely shadowed forth; here we can touch the man.

Stage Door of Molière's Second Theatre in Paris.

What sort of plays were presented at this house we do not know, the only record that remains referring to the production of "Artaxerxes" by one Mignon. Whatever they played, neither the rough men of the quay and of Port Saint-Paul, nor the bourgeoisie of the Marais, nor the fine folk of Place Royale, crowded into the new theatre.

During this disastrous season, the troupe received royal commands to play at Fontainebleau before the King and court, and later, by invitation of the Duc de l'Éperon, at his splendid mansion in Rue de la Plâtrière—that mansion in which lived and died La Fontaine, half a century later. Neither these fashionable flights, nor the royal and noble patronage accorded to the troupe, could save it from failure and final bankruptcy. Molière, the responsible manager, was arrested for the theatre's poor little debt for candles and lights. He was locked up for a night or two in the dismal prison of the Grand Châtelet, once the fortress of Louis "le Gros," torn down only in 1802, on whose site now sparkles the fountain of Place du Châtelet. From this lock-up, having petitioned for release to M. d'Aubray, Civil Lieutenant of the town and father of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, Molière was released by the quickly tendered purse of Léonard Aubry, "Royal Paver and Street Sweeper," who, when filling in the Fossé-de-Nesle and laying out over it the present Rue Mazarine a year before, had made fast friends with the young actor. "For his good service in ransoming the said Poquelin," the entire troupe bound itself to make Aubry whole for his debt.

Now they cross the river again to their former Faubourg Saint-Germain, taking for their house the Jeu de Paume de la Croix-Blanche, outside the wall on the south side of the present Rue de Buci, between the carrefour at its eastern end and Rue Grégoire-de-Tours. Here they played, still playing against disaster, from the end of 1645 to the end of 1646, and then they fled from Paris, fairly beaten, and betook themselves to the southern provinces. We cannot follow their wanderings, nor record their ups and downs, during the twelve years of their absence. In the old play-bills we find the names of Béjart aîné and of his brother Louis, of their sisters Madeleine and Geneviève. Toward the end of their touring they added to the family, though not to the boards, Armande, who had been brought up in Languedoc, and who was claimed by them to be their very young sister, and by others to be the unacknowledged daughter of Madeleine.

Molière, the leader and manager of the troupe from the day they started, was then only twenty-five years of age, not yet owning or knowing his full powers. These he gained during that twelve years' hard schooling and rude apprenticeship, so that he came back to the capital, in 1658, master of his craft, with a load of literary luggage such as no French tourist has carried, before or since.

Under princely patronage, won in the provinces, his troupe appeared before Louis XIV., the Queen-Mother, and the entire court, on October 24, 1658, in a theatre improvised in the Salle des Gardes of the old Louvre, now known as the Salle des Caryatides. The pieces on that opening night were Corneille's "Nicomède" and the manager's "Le Docteur Amoureux." In November, the "troupe de Monsieur"—that title permitted by the King's brother—was given possession of the theatre in the palace of the Petit-Bourbon. It stood between the old Louvre, with which it was connected by a long gallery, and the Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, and was torn down in 1660 to make place for the new colonnade that forms the present eastern face of the Louvre. The dainty Jardin de l'Infante covers the site of the stage, just at the corner of the Egyptian Gallery.

In this hall Molière's company played for two years, on alternate nights with the Italian comedians, presenting, along with old standard French pieces—for authors in vogue held aloof—his provincial successes, as well as new plays and ballets invented by him for the delectation of the Grand Monarque. From this time his remaining fifteen years of life were filled with work; his brain and his pen were relentlessly employed; honors and wealth came plentifully to him, happiness hardly at all.

While at this theatre Molière lived just around the corner on Quai de l'École, now Quai du Louvre, in a house that was torn away in 1854 for the widening of present Rue du Louvre. Many of the buildings left on the quay are of the date and appearance of this, his last bachelor home.

Driven from the Petit-Bourbon by its hurried demolition in 1660, Molière was granted the use and the privileges of the Salle of the former Palais-Cardinal, partly gone to ruin and needing large expenditure to make it good. It had been arranged by Richelieu, just before his death, for the presentation of his "Mirame." For the great cardinal and great minister thought that he was a great dramatist too, and in his vanity saw himself the centre of the mimic stage, as he really was of the world-stage he managed. He is made by Bulwer to say, with historic truth: "Of my ministry I am not vain; but of my muse, I own it." His theatre in his residence—willed at his death to the King, and thenceforward known as the Palais-Royal—was therefore the only structure in Paris designed especially and solely for playhouse purposes. It stood on the western corner of Rues Saint-Honoré and de Valois, as a tablet there tells us. During the repairs Molière took his troupe to various châteaux about Paris, returning to open this theatre on January 20, 1661. This removal was the last he made, and this house was the scene of his most striking successes.

It is not out of place here to follow his troupe for a while after his death, and so complete our record of those early theatres. His widow, succeeding to the control of the company, was, within three months, compelled to give up the Cardinal's house to Lulli, the most popular musician of that day, and a scheming fellow withal. The unscrupulous Florentine induced the King to grant him this Salle des Spectacles for the production of his music. The opera held the house until fire destroyed it in 1763, when a new "Academy of Music" was constructed on the eastern corner of the same streets; this, also, was burned in 1781. Above the tablet recording these dates on this eastern-corner wall is a fine old sun-dial, such as is rarely seen in Paris, and seldom noticed now.

The widow Molière, being dispossessed, found a theatre in Rue Mazarine, just beyond her husband's first theatre, "in the Tennis-Court where hangs a Bottle for a Sign." For it had been the Jeu de Paume de la Bouteille, and now became the Théâtre Guénégaud, being exactly opposite the end of that street. Within the structure at No. 42 Rue Mazarine may be seen the heavy beams of the front portion of its fabric, where was the entrance for the public. The space behind, now used for a workshop, with huge pillars around its four sides, served for the audience, and the stage was built farther beyond. On the court of this house, and on the contiguous court of No. 43 Rue de Seine, stood a large building, whose first floor was taken by Madame Molière, and in its rear wall she cut a door to give access to her stage. The entrance for the performers was in the little Passage du Pont-Neuf, and under it there are remains of the foundations of the theatre. Here, in May, 1677, the widow took the name of Madame Guérin on her marriage with a comedian of her company. And we feel as little regret as she seems to have felt for her loss of an illustrious name. In the words of a derisive verse of the time:

COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE 1680

This was the first theatre to present to the general public "lyric dramas set to music," brought first to France by Mazarin for his private stage in the small hall of the Palais-Royal, where they were presented as "Comédies en Musique, avec machines à la mode d'Italie." They bored everybody, the fashion for opera not yet being set. On October 21, 1680, by letters-patent from royalty, the troupe of the Théâtre Guénégaud was united to that of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and to the combined companies was granted the name of Comédie Française, the first assumption of that now time-honored title. The theatre became so successful that the Jansenists in the Collége Mazarin—the present Institute—made an uproar because they were annoyed by the traffic and the turmoil in the narrow street, and succeeded in driving away the playhouse in 1688. After a long search, the Comédie Française found new quarters in the Jeu de Paume de l'Étoile, built along the outer edge of the street made over the ditch of the wall, named Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, now Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie. At its present No. 14, set in the original front wall of the theatre, between the second and third stories, a tablet marks the site; above it is a bas-relief, showing a Minerva reclining on a slab. She traces on paper, with her right hand, that which is reflected in the mirror of Truth, held in her left hand. At the rear of the court stands the old fabric that held the stage. Since those boards were removed to other walls—the story shall be told in a later chapter—the building has had various usages. It now serves as a storehouse for wall-paper. During the Empire it was taken for his studio by the artist Antoine-Jean Gros, the successor of David and the forerunner of Géricault; so standing for the transition from the Classic to the Romantic school. It is not true that he killed himself in this studio. He went out from it, when maddened by the art critics, and drowned himself in the Seine in the summer of 1835.

It was a great bill with which the Comédie Française opened this house on the night of April 18, 1689, for it was made up of two masterpieces, Racine's "Phèdre" and Molière's "Le Médecin Malgré Lui." A vast and enthusiastic audience thronged, with joyous clatter, through narrow Rues Mazarine and Dauphine, coming from the river. The Café Procope, recently opened just opposite the theatre, was crowded after the performance, the drinkers of coffee not quite sure that they liked the new beverage. And so, at the top of their triumphs, we leave the players with whom we have vagabondized so long and so sympathetically.

Molière, at the height of his career, had married Armande Béjart, he being forty years of age, she "aged twenty years or thereabout," in the words of the marriage contract, signed January 23, 1662. No one knows now, very few knew then, whether the bride was the sister or the daughter of Madeleine Béjart, Molière's friend and comrade for many years, who doubled her rôle of versatile actress with that of provident cashier of the company. She was devoted to Armande, whom she had taken to her home from the girl's early schooling in Languedoc, and over whom she watched in the coulisses. She fought against the marriage, which she saw was a mistake, finally accepted it, and at her own death in 1672 left all her handsome savings to the wife of Molière.

In the cast of the "École des Maris," first produced in 1661, appears the name of Armande Béjart, and, three months after the marriage, "Mlle. Molière"—so were known the wives of the bourgeoisie, "Madame" being reserved for grandes-dames—played the small part of Élise put for her by the author into his "Critique de l'École des Femmes." Henceforward she was registered as one of the troupe, the manager receiving two portions of the receipts for his and her united shares. She was a pleasing actress, never more than mediocre, except in those parts, in his own plays, fitted to her and drilled into her by her husband. She had an attractive presence on the boards, without much beauty, without any brains. Her voice was exquisite, opulent in tones that seemed to suggest the heart she did not own. For she was born with an endowment of adroit coquetry, and she developed her gift. She was flighty and frivolous, evasive and obstinate, fond of pleasures not always innocent. Her spendthrift ways hurt Molière's thrifty spirit, her coquetry hurt his love, her caprices hurt his honor. His infatuation, a madness closely allied to his genius, brought to him a fleeting happiness, followed by almost unbroken torments of love, jealousy, forgiveness. In his home he found none of the rest nor comfort nor sympathy so much needed, after his prodigious work in composing, drill-work in rehearsing, and public work in performing at his theatre, and at Versailles and Fontainebleau. He got no consolation from his wife for the sneers of venomous rivals, enraged by his supremacy, and for the stabs of the great world, eager to avenge his keen puncturing of its pretence and its priggishness. And while he writhed in private, he made fun in public of his immitigable grief, and portrayed on the stage the betrayed and bamboozled husband—at once tragic and absurd—that he believed himself to be. These eleven years of home-sorrows shortened his life. On the very day of his fatal attack, he said to the flippant minx, Armande: "I could believe myself happy when pleasure and pain equally filled my life; but, to-day, broken with grief, unable to count on one moment of brightness or of ease, I must give up the game. I can hold out no longer against the distress and despair that leave me not one instant of respite."

The church ceremony of their marriage had taken place on February 20, 1662, at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, as its register testifies. He had already left his bachelor quarters on Quai de l'École, and had taken an apartment in a large house situated on the small open space opposite the entrance of the Palais-Royal, the germ of the present place of that name. His windows looked out toward his theatre, and on the two streets at whose junction the house stood—Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre and Saint-Honoré. The first-named street, near its end on Quai du Louvre, held the Hôtel de Rambouillet, which was a reconstruction of the old Hôtel de Pisani, made in 1618, after the plan and under the eye of the Marquise de Rambouillet. She is known in history, as she was known in the salons of her day, by her sobriquet of "Arthénice"—an anagram coined by Malherbe from her name Catherine. Hither came all that was brilliant in Paris, and much that pretended to be brilliant; and from here went out the grotesque affectations of the Précieuses Ridicules. The mansion—one of the grandest of that period—having passed into other hands, was used as a Vauxhall d'Hiver in 1784, as a theatre in 1792, and was partly burned in 1836. The remaining portion, which served as stables for Louis-Philippe, was wiped away, along with all that end of the old street, by the Second Empire, to make space for the alignment of the wings of the Louvre. The buildings of the Ministry of Finance cover a portion of the street, and the site of Molière's residence, in the middle of the present Place du Palais-Royal, is trodden, almost every day of the year, by the feet of American women, hurrying to and from the Museum of the Louvre or the great shop of the same name.

After a short stay in their first home, Molière and his wife set up housekeeping in Rue de Richelieu. It is not known if it was in the house of his later domicile and death. Their cook here was the famous La Forêt, to whom, it is said, Molière read his new plays, trying their effect on the ordinary auditor, such as made up the bulk of the audiences of that time. Servants were commonly called La Forêt then, and the real name of this cook was Renée Vannier. Within a year, domestic dissensions came to abide in the household, and it was moved back to its first home, where Madeleine had remained, and now made one of the ménage. To it came a new inmate in February, 1664, a boy, baptized at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, having the great monarch for a godfather, and for a godmother Henrietta of England, wife of the King's brother, Philippe d'Orléans, and poisoned by him or his creatures a few years later, it is believed. These royal sponsors were represented at the christening by distinguished State servants, the whole affair giving ample proof of this player's position at the time.

A little later, we have hints that the small family was living farther east in Rue Saint-Honoré, at the corner of Rue d'Orléans, still near his theatre, in a house swept away when that street was widened into Rue du Louvre. From this house was buried, in November, 1664, the child Louis, the burial-service being held at Saint-Eustache, their parish church, Molière's baptismal church, his mother's burial church. Here, too, in the following year, August, 1665, he brought to the font his newly born daughter, Esprit-Madeleine. In October of this same year he took a long lease of an apartment in their former house on the corner of Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, and there they stayed for seven years, removing once more, and for the last time, in October, 1672, to Rue de Richelieu.

Where now stands No. 40 of that street, René Baudelet, Tailor to the Queen by title, had taken a house only recently builded, and from him Molière rented nearly every floor. His lease was for a term of six years, and he lived only four and a half months after coming here. The first floor was set apart for his wife, whose ostentatious furnishing, including a bed fit for a queen, is itemized in the inventory made after her husband's death. He took for his apartment the whole second floor, spaciously planned and sumptuously furnished; for he, too, was lavish in his expenditure and loved costly surroundings. His plate was superb, his wardrobe rich, his collection of dramatic books and manuscripts complete and precious. His bedroom, wherein he died, was on the rear of the house, and its windows looked over the garden of the Palais-Royal, to which he had access from his terrace below, and thence by steps down to a gate in the garden wall. Thus he could get to his theatre by way of those trim paths of Richelieu's planning, as well as by going along the street and around the corner. You must bear in mind that the galleries of the Palais-Royal, with their shops, were not constructed until 1784, and that Rues de Valois and Montpensier were not yet cut; so that the garden reached, on either side, to the backs of the houses that fronted on Rues de Richelieu and des Bons-Enfants. Many of the occupants had, like Molière, their private doors in the garden wall, with access by stone steps. One of these staircases is still left, and may be seen in Rue de Valois, descending from the rear of the Hôtel de la Chancellerie d'Orléans, whose Doric entrance-court is at No. 19 Rue des Bons-Enfants.

The house now numbered 40 Rue de Richelieu and 37 Rue Montpensier was erected soon after 1767, when the walls that had harbored Molière were torn down to prevent them from tumbling down. The present building has an admirable circular staircase climbing to an open lantern in the roof. The houses on either side, numbered 37 bis and 35 Rue Montpensier, retain their original features of a central body with projecting wings, and so serve to show us a likeness of Molière's dwelling. Their front windows look out now on the grand fountain of the younger Visconti's design, erected to Molière's memory in 1844, at the junction of Rue de Richelieu and old Rue Traversière, now named Rue Molière. This fountain, flowing full and free always, as flowed the inspiration of his Muse, is surmounted by an admirable seated statue of the player-poet by Seurre, the figures of Serious and of Light Comedy, standing at his feet on either side, being of Pradier's design. And in Rue de Richelieu, a little farther south, at the present Nos. 23 and 23 bis—once one grand mansion, still intact, though divided—lived his friend Mignard, and here he died in 1795. The painter and the player had met at Avignon in 1657-8, and grew to be life-long friends, with equal admiration of the other's art. Indeed, Molière considered that he honored Raphael and Michael Angelo, when he named them "ces Mignards de leur âge." Certainly no such vivid portrait of Molière has come down to us as that on the canvas of this artist, now in the gallery at Chantilly. It shows us not the comedian, but the man in the maturity of his strength and beauty. His blond perruque, such as was worn then by all gallants, such as made his Alceste sneer, softens the features marked strongly even so early in life, but having none of the hard lines cut deeper by worry and weariness. The mouth is large and frank, the eyes glow with a humorous melancholy, the expression is eloquent of his wistful tenderness.

The Molière Fountain.

Early in 1667 we find Molière leasing a little cottage, or part of a cottage, at Auteuil, for a retreat at times. He needed its pure air for his failing health, its quiet for his work, and its distance from the disquiet of his home with Armande and Madeleine. He had laid by money; and his earnings, with his pension from the King—who had permitted to the troupe the title of "His Majesty's Comedians"—gave him a handsome income. He was not without shrewdness as a man of affairs, and not without tact as a courtier. Success, in its worst worldly sense, could come only through royal favor in that day, and no man, whatever his manliness, seemed ashamed to stoop to flatter. Racine, La Fontaine, the sterling Boileau, the antiquely upright Corneille, were tarred, thickly or thinly, with the same brush.

Auteuil was then a tranquil village, far away from the town's turmoil, and brought near enough for its dwellers by the silent and swift river. Now it is a bustling suburb of the city, and the site of Molière's cottage and grounds is covered by a block of commonplace modern dwellings on the corner of Rue Théophile Gautier and Rue d'Auteuil, and is marked by a tablet in the front wall of No. 2 of the latter street. It has been claimed that this is a mistaken localization, and that it is nearly opposite this spot that we must look for his garden and a fragment of his villa, still saved. The conscientious pilgrim may not fail to take that look, and will ring at the iron gate of No. 57 Rue Théophile Gautier. It is the gate of the ancient hôtel of Choiseul-Praslin, a name of unhappy memory in the annals of swell assassins. The ducal wearer of the title, during the reign of Louis-Philippe, stabbed his wife to death in their town-house in the Champs Élysées, and poisoned himself in his cell to save his condemnation by his fellow-peers of France. The ancient family mansion has been taken by "Les Dominicaines," who have devoted themselves for centuries to the education of young girls, and have placed here the Institution of Saint Thomas of Aquinas.

A white-robed sister graciously gives permission to enter, and leads the visitor across the spacious court, through the stately rooms and halls—all intact in their old-fashioned harmony of proportion and decoration—into the garden that stretches far along Rue de Rémusat, and that once spread away down the slope to the Seine. Here, amid the magnificent cedar trees, centuries old, stands a mutilated pavilion of red brick and white stone or stucco, showing only its unbroken porch with pillars and a fragment of the fabric, cut raggedly away a few feet behind, to make room for a new structure. Over the central door are small figures in bas-relief, and in the pediment above one reads, "Ici fut la Maison de Molière." It would be a comfort to be able to accept this legend; the fact that prevents is that the pavilion was erected only in 1855 by the owner of the garden, to keep alive the associations of Molière with this quarter!

It is in his garden, behind the wall that holds the tablet, that we may see the player-poet as he rests in the frequent free hours, and days withal, that came in the actor's busy life then. Here he walks, alone or with his chosen cronies: Rohault, his sympathetic physician; Boileau, a frequent visitor; Chapelle, who had a room in the cottage, the quondam schoolfellow and the man of rare gifts; a pleasing minor-poet, fond of fun, fonder of wine, friendly even to rudeness, but beloved by all the others, whom he teased and ridiculed, and yet counselled shrewdly. He sympathized with, albeit his sceptic spirit could not quite fraternize with, the sensitive vibrating nature of Molière, that brought, along with acutest enjoyment, the keenest suffering. In this day-and-night companionship, craving consolation for his betossed soul, Molière gave voice to his sorrows, bewailing his wife's frailties and the torments they brought to him—to him, "born to tenderness," as he truly put it, but unable to plant any root of tenderness in her shallow nature—loving her in spite of reason, living with her, but not as her husband, suffering ceaselessly.

This garden often saw gayer scenes of good-fellowship and feasting, and once a historic frolic, when the convives, flushed with wine, ran down the slope to the river, bent on plunging in to cool their blood, and were kept dry and undrowned by Molière's steadier head and hand. His ménage was modest, and his wife seldom came out from their town apartment, but his daughter was brought often for a visit from her boarding-school near by in Auteuil. He was beloved by all his neighbors, to whom he was known less by his public repute than by his constant kindly acts among them. It was not the actor-manager, but the "tapissier valet-de-chambre du Roi," then residing in Auteuil, who signed the register of the parish church, as god-father of a village boy on March 20, 1671; just as he had signed, in the same capacity, the register of Saint-Roch on September 10, 1669, at the christening of a friend's daughter, Jeanne Catherine Toutbel. These signatures were destroyed when all the ancient church registers, then stored in the Hôtel de Ville, were burned by the Commune.

On the night of Friday, February 16, 1673, while personating his Malade Imaginaire—its fourth performance—Molière was struck down by a genuine malady. He pulled through the play, and, as the curtain went down at last, he was nearly strangled by a spasm of coughing that broke a blood-vessel. Careful hands carried him around to his bedroom on the second floor of No. 40, where in a few days—too few, his years being a little more than fifty—death set him free from suffering.

This fatal crisis was the culmination of a long series of recurrent paroxysms, coming from his fevered life and his fiery soul, that "o'er informed the tenement of clay," in Dryden's phrase. And his heart had been crushed by the death of his second boy, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste-Armand, in October of the previous year. Then, on the physical side, he had been subjected throughout long years to constant exposure to draughts on the stage, and to sudden changes within and without the theatre, most trying to so delicate a frame. His watchful friend, Boileau, had often urged him to leave the stage before he should break down. Moreover, it distressed Boileau that the greatest genius of his time, as he considered Molière, should have to paint his face, put on a false mustache, get into a bag and be beaten with sticks, in his ludicrous rôle of comic valet. But all pleading was thrown away. The invalid maintained that nothing but his own management, his own plays, and his own playing, kept his theatre alive and his company from starvation; and so he held on to the end, dying literally in harness. His wife appeared too late on the last scene, the priest who was summoned could not come in time, and the dying eyes were closed by two stranger nuns, lodging for the time in the house.

The arm-chair, in which sat the Malade Imaginaire on the last night of his professional life, is treasured among the relics of the Théâtre Français. It is a massive piece of oak furniture, with solid square arms and legs; the roomy back lets down, and is held at any required angle by an iron ratchet; there are iron pegs in front for the little shelf, used by the sick man for his bottles and books. The brown leather covering is time-worn and stitched in spots. It is a most attractive relic, this simple piece of stage property. Its exact copy as to shape, size, and color is used on the boards of the Théâtre Français in the performances of "Le Malade Imaginaire." And, with equal reverence, they kept for many years in the ancient village of Pézénas, in Languedoc—where the strolling troupe wintered in 1655-6, playing in the adjacent hamlets and in the châteaux of the seigneurie about—the big wooden arm-chair belonging to the barber Gély, and almost daily through that winter occupied by Molière. Upon it he was wont to sit, in a corner, contemplating all who came and went, making secret notes on the tablets he carried always for constant records of the human document. It has descended to a gentleman in Paris, by whom it is cherished.

The curé of Saint-Eustache, the parish church, refused its sacrament for the burial of the author of "Tartufe." "To get by prayer a little earth," in Boileau's words, the widow had to plead with the King; and it was only his order that wrung permission from the Archbishop of Paris for those "maimed rites" that we all know. They were accorded, not to the player, but, as the burial register reads, to the "Tapissier valet-de-chambre du Roi." Carried to his grave by night, he was followed by a great concourse of unhired mourners, of every rank and condition; and to the poor among them, money was distributed by the widow. The grave—in which was placed the French Terence and Plautus in one, to use La Fontaine's happy phrase—was dug in that portion of the cemetery of the Chapel of Saint-Joseph, belonging to Saint-Eustache, that was styled consecrated by the priesthood. This cemetery going out of use, the ground, which lay on the right of the old road to Montmartre, was given to a market. This, in its turn, was cleared away between 1875 and 1880, and on the site of the cemetery are the buildings numbered 142 and 144 Rue Montmartre, 24 and 26 Rue Saint-Joseph. Over the grave, as she thought, the widow erected a great tombstone, under which, tradition says, Molière did not lie. Tradition lies, doubtless, and Armande's belated grief and posthumous devotion probably displayed themselves on the right spot. The stone was cracked—going to bits soon after—by a fire built on it during the terrible winter a few years later, when the poor of Paris were warmed by great out-of-door fires. The exact spot of sepulture could not be fixed in 1792, when the more sober revolutionary sections were anxious to save the remains of their really great men from the desecrations of the Patriots, to whom no ground was consecrate, nor any memories sacred. Then, in the words of the official document, "the bones which seemed to be those of Molière" were exhumed, and carried for safe keeping to the Museum of French Monuments begun by Alexandre Lenoir in 1791, in the Convent of the Petits-Augustins. Its site is now mostly covered by the court of the Beaux-Arts in Rue Bonaparte. Those same supposed bones of Molière were transferred, early in the present century, to the Cemetery of Père-Lachaise, where they now lie in a stone sarcophagus. By their side rest the supposed bones of La Fontaine, removed from the same ground to the same museum at the same time; La Fontaine having really been buried, twenty-two years after Molière's burial, in the Cemetery of the Innocents, a half-mile from that of Saint-Joseph!

Our ignorance as to whether these be Molière's bones, under the monument in Père-Lachaise, is matched by our unacquaintance with the facts of his life. And we know almost as little of Molière the man, as we know of the man called Shakespeare—the only names in the modern drama which can be coupled. We have no specimens of the actual manuscript, and few specimens of the handwriting, of either. The Comédie Française has a priceless signature of Molière given by Dumas fils, and there are others, it is believed, on legal documents in notaries' offices, but no one knows how to get at them.

His portraiture by pen, too, would have been lost to us, but for an old lady who has left a detailed and vivid description of "Monsieur Molière." This Madame Poisson was the daughter of Du Croissy, whose name appears in the troupe's early play-bills; and the wife of Paul Poisson, also an actor with Molière, and with his widow. Madame Poisson died in 1756, aged ninety-eight, so that she was an observant and intelligent girl of fifteen at the time of Molière's death. In her recollections, written in 1740, she says that he was neither stout nor thin; in stature he was rather tall than short, his carriage noble, his leg very fine, his walk measured, his air most serious; the nose large, the mouth wide, the lips full, his complexion dark, his eyebrows black and heavy, "and the varied movements he gave them"—and, she might have added, his whole facial flexibility—"made him master of immense comic expression."

"His air most serious," she says; it was more than that, as is proven by hints of his companions, and shown by strokes in the surviving portraits. All these go to assure us of his essential melancholy. Not only did he carry about with him the traditional dejection of the comic actor, but he was by character and by habit contemplative—observant of human nature—as well as introspective—peering into his own nature. The man who does this necessarily grows sad. Molière's sadness was mitigated by a humor of equal depth, a conjunction rare in the Latin races, and found at its best only in him and in Cervantes. This set him to writing and acting farces; and into them he put sentiment for the first time on the French stage. There is a gravity behind his buffoonery, and a secret sympathy with his butts. So, when he came to write comedy—that hard and merciless exposure of our common human nature, turned inside out for scorn—he left place for pity in his ridicule, and there is no cruelty in his laughter. His wholly sweet spirit could not be soured by the injustices and insolences that came into his life. If there was a bitter taste in his mouth, his lips were all honey. "Ce rire amer," marked by Boileau in the actor's Alceste, was only his stage assumption for that character. The inborn good-heartedness that made his comedy gracious and unhostile, made his relations with men and women always kindly and generous. You see that sympathy with humanity in Mignard's portrait, and in the bust in the foyer of the Comédie Française, made by Houdon from other portraits and from descriptions. Under the projecting brow of the observer are the eyes of the contemplator, shrewd and speculative, and withal infinitely sorrowful, with the sadness of the man who knew how to suffer acutely, mostly in silence and in patience; and this is the face of the man who made all France laugh!

Pierre Corneille stands in bronze on the bridge of his natal town, Rouen, where he stood in the flesh of his twenty-eight years, among other citizens who went to welcome Louis XIII. and his ruler, Richelieu, on their visit in 1634. The young advocate by profession and poet by predilection presented his verses in greeting and in honor of the King, and was soon after enrolled one of the small and select band of the Cardinal's poets. With the Cardinal's commission and a play or two, already written when only twenty-three, he made his way to Paris. For nearly thirty years, the years of his dramatic triumphs, Corneille lived alternately in Paris and in Rouen, until his mother's death, in 1662, left him free to make his home in the capital. In that year he settled in rooms in the Hôtel de Guise, now the Musée des Archives, whose ducal owner was a patron of the Théâtre du Marais, close at hand. At his death, in or about 1664, Corneille sent in a rhymed petition for rooms in the Louvre, where lodging was granted to men of letters not too well-to-do. His claim was refused, and he took an apartment in Rue de Cléry during that same year. It was a workman's quarter, and none of its houses were very grand, but that of Corneille is spoken of as one of the better sort, with its own porte-cochère. Pierre's younger brother, Thomas, came to live in the same house. And from this time on, the two brothers were never parted in their lives. They had married sisters, and the two families dwelt in quiet happiness under the common roof. This house in Rue de Cléry cannot be fixed. It may be one of the poor dwellings still standing in that old street, or it may no longer exist. It is the house famous in anecdotal history for owning the trap-door in the floor between the working-rooms of the brothers, which Pierre—at loss for an adequate rhyme—would lift up, and call to Thomas, writing in his room below, to give him the wished-for word.

This dull street formed the background of a touching picture, when, in 1667, Corneille's son was brought home, wounded, from the siege of Douai. The straw from the litter was scattered about the street as the father helped them lift his boy to carry him into the house, and Corneille was summoned to the Châtelet, for breaking police regulations with regard to the care of thoroughfares; he appeared, pleaded his own cause, and was cast in damages!

Here in 1671, Corneille and Molière, in collaboration, wrote the "tragedy-ballet 'Psyche'"; this work in common cementing a friendship already begun between the two men, and now made firmer for the two years of Molière's life on from this date. The play was begun and finished in a fortnight, to meet the usual urgency of the King in his amusements. Molière planned the piece and its spectacular effects, and wrote the prologue, the first act, and the first scenes of the second and third acts; Corneille's share being the rest of the rhymed dialogue and the songs. It was set to music by Lulli—"the incomparable Monsieur Lulli," as he was called by Molière—whose generous laudation of the musician was not lessened by his estimate of the man. For Lulli was not an honest man, and he prospered at the expense of his fellows. His magnificent home was built by money borrowed from Molière, whose widow was repaid as we have seen. Lulli's hôtel is still in perfect condition as to its exterior, at the corner of Rues des Petits-Champs and Sainte-Anne. This latter front is the finer, with its pilasters and composite capitals, its masks carved in the keystones of the low entresol windows, and the musical instruments placed above the middle window of the first grand floor.

They make a pretty picture, not without a touch of the pathetic—and M. Gèrôme has put it on canvas—as they sit side by side, planning and plotting their play: Molière at the top of his career, busy, prosperous, applauded; Corneille past his prime and his popularity, beginning to bend with age and to break in spirit. He had, by now, fallen on evil days, which saw him "satiated with glory, and famished for money," in his words to Boileau. Richelieu may not have done much for him, but he had been at least a power in his patronage, and his death, in 1642, had left the old poet with no friend at court, albeit the new minister, Mazarin, had put him on the pension list. His triumphs with "Le Cid" and "Les Horaces" had not saved him from—nor helped him bear—the dire failures of "Attila" and of "Agésilas." Poetry had proved a poor trade, royalty had forgotten him, Colbert's economies had left his pension in arrears along with many others, and finally, after Colbert's death, the new minister, Louvois, had suppressed it entirely. Against the earlier default he had made patient and whimsical protest in verse; each official year of delay had been officially lengthened to fifteen months; and Corneille's Muse was made to hope that each of the King's remaining years of reign might be lengthened to an equal limit!

The contrast between the two figures—the King of French Tragedy shabby in Paris streets, the King of French people resplendent at Versailles—is sharply drawn by Théophile Gautier in his superb verses, read at Corneille's birthday fête at the Comédie Française, on June 6, 1851. Gautier had not been able to find any motive for the lines, which he had promised to prepare for Arsène Houssaye, the director, until Hugo gave him this cue.

The faithful, generous Boileau—the man called "stingy," because of his exactness, which yet enabled him always to aid others—offered to surrender his own well-secured and promptly-paid pension in favor of his old friend; a transfer not allowed by the authorities, and the King sent a sum of money, at length, to Corneille. It came two days before the poet's death, when he might have quoted, "I have no time to spend it!" There is extant a letter from an old Rouen friend of his who, visiting Paris in 1679, describes a walk he took with Corneille, then aged seventy-three. In Rue de la Parcheminerie—that ancient street on the left bank of the Seine, which we have already found to be less spoiled by modern improvements than are its neighbors—Corneille sat down on a plank by a cobbler's stall, to have one of his worn shoes patched. That cobbler's stall, or its direct descendant, may be seen in that street, to-day. Corneille counted his coppers and found just enough to pay the cobbler's paltry charge; refusing to accept any coin from the proffered purse of his friend, who, then and there, wept in pity for such a plight for such a man.

The Door of Corneille's Last Dwelling. (From a drawing by Robert Delafontaine, by permission of M. Victorien Sardou.)

Age and poverty took up their abode with him—as well as his more welcome comrade, the constant Thomas—in his next dwelling. We cannot be sure when they left Rue de Cléry, and we find them first in Rue d'Argenteuil in November, 1683, the year of Colbert's death. That old road from the village of Argenteuil had become, and still remains, a city street absolutely without character or temperament of its own; it has not the merit even of being ignoble. And the Corneille house at No. 6, as it was seen just before its destruction, was a gloomy and forbidding building. It had two entrances—as has the grandiose structure now standing on its site—one in Rue d'Argenteuil, on which front is a tablet marking this historic scene of the poet's death, and the other in Rue de l'Évêque. That street was wiped out of existence by the cutting of Avenue de l'Opéra in 1877-8, which necessitated the demolition of this dreary old house. Its most attractive relic is now in the possession of M. Victorien Sardou, at his country house, at Marly-le-Roi, in the porte-cochère, with its knocker. Every guest there is proud to put his hand on the veritable knocker lifted so often by Corneille's hand.

That hand had lost its fire and force by this time, and the poet's last months were wretched enough in these vast and desolate rooms on the second floor, so vast and desolate that he was unable to keep his poor septuagenarian bones warm within them. Here came death to him on Sunday, October 1, 1684. They buried him in his parish church, Saint-Roch, a short step from his home; and on the western pillar within the entrance a tablet to his memory was placed in 1821. The church was so short a step, that, feeble and forlorn as he was, he had found his way there early of mornings during these last years. And in his earlier years, when living in Rue de Cléry, he had often hurried there, drawn by the strong and splendid Bossuet, whose abode was either in Rue Sainte-Anne hard by, or in the then new mansion still standing in Place des Victoires. Here in the church, as we stand between Corneille's tablet and Bossuet's pulpit, the contrast is brought home to us of the two forms of eloquence that most touch men: that of this preacher burning with ancient Hebraic fire, and that of this dramatist glowing with the white-heat of classicism.

After the burial, the bereft Thomas removed to rooms in Cul-de-sac des Jacobins, only a little way from his last home with Pierre. This blind alley has now been cut through to the market of Saint-Honoré, and become a short commonplace street, named Saint-Hyacinthe. Twenty years the younger of the two, Thomas was, during his life, and has been in his after-renown, unduly overshadowed by his imperishable brother. He had a rare gift of versification, and a certain skill in the putting together of plays. Of them he constructed a goodly lot, some few of them in collaboration. His "Timocrate," played for eighty consecutive nights at the Théâtre du Marais, was the most popular success on the boards of the seventeenth century. His knack in pleasing the public taste was as much his own as was his mastery of managers, by which he got larger royalties than any playwright of his day. He was a competent craftsman, too, in more weighty fabrications, and turned out, from his factory, translations and dictionaries, which have joined his plays in everlasting limbo.

All the early theatrical productions of Pierre Corneille were originally put on the stage of the Théâtre du Marais, which had been started by seceders from the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, as has been told in our first chapter. After a temporary lodgment in the quarter of the Hôtel de Ville, it was soon permanently housed in the recast tennis-court of the "Hôtel Salé." There it remained until 1728, when Le Camus bought the place and turned the theatre into stables. Where stands modern No. 90 in the widened Rue Vieille-du-Temple was the public entrance of the theatre. The "Hôtel Salé," the work of Lepautre, is still in perfect condition behind the houses of Rue Vieille-du-Temple. Its principal portal is at Rue Thorigny, 5, with a side entrance in Rue Saint-Gervais-des-Coutures. Known at first as the Hôtel Juigné, it was popularly renamed, in the seventeenth century, the "Hôtel Salé," because its rapacious owner, Aubray de Fontenay, had amassed his wealth by farming out the salt tax—that most exacting and irritating of the many taxes of that time.

Through a lordly arch in Rue Thorigny, we pass into the grand court, and find facing us the dignified façade, its imposing pediment carved with figures and flowers. Within is a stately hall, made the more stately by the placing at one end of a noble chimney-piece, a copy of one at Versailles. In the centre a superb staircase rises, wide and easy, through a sculptured cage, to the first floor; its old wrought-iron railing is of an exquisite pattern; nothing in all Paris is nearer perfection than this staircase, its railing, and its balustrade. In the rooms above, kept with reverence by the bronze-maker who occupies them, admirable panelling and carvings are found. The façade on the gardens—now shrunk from their former spaciousness to a small court—is most impressive, with ancient wrought-iron balconies; in its pediment, two vigilant dogs watch the hands that move no more on the great clock-face between them.

The Théâtre du Marais had been established here by the famous Turlupin, made immortal in Boileau's verse, who, with his two comic confrères—baker's boys, like the brothers Coquelin of our day—kept his audiences in a roar with his modern French farces farcied with old Gaulish grossness. It was he who invented the comic valet—badgered and beaten, always lying and always funny—who was subsequently elaborated into the immortal Sganerelle by Molière. He, while a boy, had sat in this theatre, watching Turlupin; and when he had grown into a manager, he is said to have bought some of the stage copies of these farces, when Turlupin's death disbanded his troupe.

These "Comédiens du Marais" were regarded with a certain condescension not unmingled with disdain by their stately confrères left at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, who were shocked when Richelieu, becoming bored by their dreary traditional proprieties, sent for Turlupin and his troupe to give a specimen of their acting in his palace. And the great cardinal actually laughed, a rare indulgence he allowed himself, and told the King's Comedians that he wished they might play to as good effect!

Still, the Théâtre du Marais was not entirely given over to farce, for it alternated with the tragedy of the then famous Hardy; and Mondory, the best tragedian of the day, was at one time the head of the troupe. Mondory had brought back from a provincial tour, in 1629, the manuscript of "Mélite," by a young lawyer of Rouen, named Corneille. This piece was weak, but it was not a failure. And so, when the author came to town, his tragedies were played at this theatre and drew crowds to the house. There they first saw the true tragic Muse herself on the French boards. Those rough, coarse boards of that early theatre he planed and polished, with conscience and with craft, and made them fit for her queenly feet; and through her lips he breathed, in sublime tirades, his own elevation of soul, to the inspiration of that shabby scene. For the first time in the French drama, he put skill into the plot, art into the intrigue, taste into the wit; in a word, he gave to dramatic verse "good sense"—"the only aim of poetry," Boileau claimed—and showed the meaning and the value of "reason" on the stage; and for the doing of this Racine revered him.

As to Corneille's personality, we are told by Fontenelle—his nephew, a man of slight value, a better talker than writer, an unmoved man, who prided himself on never laughing and never crying—that his uncle had rather an agreeable countenance, with very marked features, a large nose, a handsome mouth, eyes full of fire, and an animated expression. Others who saw Corneille say that he looked like a shopkeeper; and that as to his manner, he seemed simple and timid, and as to his talk, he was dull and tiresome. His enunciation was not distinct, so that in reading his own verses—he could not recite them—he was forcible but not graceful. Guizot puts it curtly and cruelly, when he writes that Corneille was destitute of all that distinguishes a man from his equals; that his appearance was common, his conversation dull, his language incorrect, his timidity ungainly, his judgment untrustworthy. It was well said, in his day, that to know the greatness of Corneille, he must be read, or be seen in his work on the stage. He has said so in the verse that confesses his own defects:

In truth, we must agree with Guizot, that the grand old Roman was irrevocably doomed to pass unnoticed in a crowd. And he was content that this should be. For he had his own pride, expressed in his words: "Je sais ce que je vaux." He made no clamor when Georges de Scudéry was proclaimed his superior by the popular voice, which is always the voice of the foolish. And when that shallow charlatan sneered at him in print, he left to Boileau the castigation that was so thoroughly given. His friends had to drive him to the defence of his "Cid" in the Academy, to which he had been elected in 1647. His position with regard to the "Cid" was peculiar and embarrassing; it was Richelieu, the jealous playwright, who attacked the successful tragedy, and it was Richelieu, the all-potent patron, who was to be answered and put in the wrong. The skirmish being ended, with honor to Corneille, he retired into his congenial obscurity and his beloved solitude. And there the world left him, alone with his good little brother Thomas, both contented in their comradeship. For in private life he was easy to get on with, always full of friendliness, always ready of access to those he loved, and, for all his brusque humor and his external rudeness, he was a good husband, father, brother. He shrank from the worldly and successful Racine, who reverenced him; and he was shy of the society of other pen-workers who would have made a companion of him. His independent soul was not softened by any adroitness or tact; he was clumsy in his candor, and not at home in courtier-land; there was not one fibre of the flunky in his simple, sincere, self-respecting frame; and when forced to play that unwonted rôle, he found his back not limber enough for bowing, his knees not sufficiently supple to cringe.

Pierre Corneille. (From the portrait by Charles Lebrun.)

And in what light he was looked upon by the lazy pensioned lackeys of the court, who hardly knew his face, and not at all his worth, is shown by this extract from one of their manuscript chronicles: "Jeudi, le 15 Octobre, 1684. On apprit à Chambord la mort du bonhomme Corneille."

Jean Racine came to Paris, from his native La Ferté-Milon in the old duchy of Valois—by way of a school at Beauvais, and another near Port-Royal—in 1658, a youth of nineteen, to study in the Collége d'Harcourt. That famous school was in the midst of the Scholars' Quarter, in that part of narrow, winding Rue de la Harpe which is now widened into Boulevard Saint-Michel. On the site of the ancient college, direct heir of its functions and its fame, stands the Lycée Saint-Louis. The buildings that give on the playground behind, seem to belong to the original college, and to have been refaced.

Like Boileau-Despréaux, three years his senior here, the new student preferred poetry to the studies commonly styled serious, and his course in theology led neither to preaching nor to practising. He was a wide and eager reader in all directions, and developed an early and ardent enthusiasm for the Greeks and the Latins.

As early as 1660 he had made himself known by his ode in celebration of the marriage of Louis XIV.; while he remained unknown as the author of an unaccepted and unplayed drama in verse, sent to the Théâtre du Marais.

Racine's Paris homes were all in or near the "Pays Latin," for he preserves its ancient appellation in his letters. On leaving college, in 1660-61, he took up quarters with his uncle Nicolas Vitart, steward and intendant of the Duchesse de Chevreuse, and secretary of her son the Duc de Luynes. Vitart lived in the Hôtel de Luynes, a grand mansion that faced Quai des Grands-Augustins, and stretched far back along Rue Gît-le-Cœur. It was torn down in 1671. La Fontaine had lodgings, during his frequent visits to Paris at this period, a little farther west on Quai des Grands-Augustins, and he and Racine, despite the eighteen years' difference of age, became close companions. La Fontaine made his young friend acquainted with the cabarets of the quarter, and Racine studied them not unwillingly. Just then, too, Racine doubtless met Molière, recently come into the management of the theatre of the Palais-Royal. An original edition of "Les Précieuses Ridicules," played a while before this time at the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, bears on its title-page "Privilège au Sr. de Luyne." This was Guillaume de Luyne, bookseller and publisher in the Salle des Merciers of the Palais de Justice; and at his place, a resort for book-loving loungers, we may well believe that the actor-manager made acquaintance with the young poet, coming from his home with the Duc de Luynes, within sight across the narrow arm of the river.

Not as a poet was he known in this ducal house, but as assistant to his uncle, and the probable successor of that uncle, who tried to train him to his future duties. Among these duties, just then, was the construction of the new Hôtel de Luynes for the Duchesse de Chevreuse. This is the lady who plays so prominent a rôle in Dumas's authentic history of "The Three Musketeers." The hôtel that was then built for her stands, somewhat shorn of its original grandeur, at No. 201 Boulevard Saint-Germain, and you may look to-day on the walls constructed under the eye of Jean Racine, acting as his uncle's overseer. This uncle was none too rigid of rule, nor was the household, from the duchess down, unduly ascetic of habit; and young Racine, "nothing loath," spent his days and eke his nights in somewhat festive fashion. His anxious country relatives at length induced him to leave the wicked town, and in November, 1661, he went to live at Uzés, near Nîmes, in Languedoc. Here he was housed with another uncle, of another kidney; a canon of the local cathedral, able to offer church work and to promise church preferment to the coy young cleric.

Racine was bored by it all, and mitigated his boredom, during the two years he remained, only by flirting and by stringing rhymes. The ladies were left behind, and the verses were carried to the capital, on his return in November, 1663. He showed some of them, first to Colbert and then to Molière, who received the verse with scant praise, but accepted, paid for, and played "La Thébaïde"—a work of promise, but of no more than promise, of the future master hand. It was at this period, about 1664, that Racine, of his own wish, first met Boileau, who had criticised in a kindly fashion some of the younger poet's verses. Thus was begun that friendship which was to last unmarred so many years, and to be broken only by Racine's death.

With Corneille, too, Racine made acquaintance, in 1665, and submitted to him his "Alexandre." He was greatly pleased by the praise of the author of the "Cid"; praise freely given to the poetry of the play, but along with it came the set-off that no talent for tragedy was shown in the piece. It was not long before the elder poet had to own his error, and it is a sorrow to record his growing discontent with the younger man's triumphs. Racine believed then and always, that Corneille was easily his master as a tragic dramatist; a belief shared with him by us of to-day, who find Corneille's tragedies as impressive, his comedies as spirited, as ever, on the boards of the Comédie Française; while Racine's tragic Muse seems to have outlived her day on those boards, and to have grown aged and out of date, along with the social surroundings amid which she queened it.

Racine's reverence for his elder and his better never wore away, and on Corneille's death—when, to his place in the Academy, his lesser brother Thomas was admitted—it fell to Racine, elected in 1673, to give the customary welcome to the new Academician, and to pay the customary tribute to his great forerunner. He paid it in words and in spirit of loyal admiration, and no nobler eulogy of a corrival has been spoken by any man.

On his return to town, in 1663, Racine had found his uncle-crony Vitart living in the new Hôtel de Luynes, and in order to be near him he took lodging in Rue de Grenelle. It was doubtless at the eastern end of that street, not far from the Croix-Rouge—a step from Boileau in Rue du Vieux-Colombier, and not far from La Fontaine on Quai Malaquais. Here he stayed for four years, and in 1667 he removed to the Hôtel des Ursins. This name had belonged to a grand old mansion on the north bank of Île de la Cité, presented by the City of Paris to Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Prévôt des Marchands under Charles VI. In the old prints, we see its two towers rising sheer from the river, and behind them its vast buildings and spacious grounds extending far away south on the island. According to Edouard Fournier, a painstaking topographer, all this structure was demolished toward the end of the eighteenth century, and over its site and through its grounds were cut the three streets bearing its name of des Ursins—Haute, Milieu, Basse. Other authorities claim that portions of the hotel still stand there, among them that portion in which Racine lived; his rooms having remained unaltered up to 1848. The street is narrow and dark, all its buildings are of ancient aspect, and on its south side is a row of antiquated houses that plainly date back to Racine's day and even earlier. It is in one of these that we may establish his lodgings.

The house at No. 5, commonly and erroneously pointed out as his residence, is of huge bulk, extending through to Rue Chanoinesse on the south. No. 7 would seem to be still more ancient. No. 9 is simply one wing of the dark stone structure, of which No. 11 forms the other wing and the central body, massive and gloomy, set back from the street behind a shallow court, between these wings. In the low wall of this court, under a great arch, a small forbidding door shuts on the pavement, and behind, in a recess, is an open stairway leading to the floor above. No. 13 was undoubtedly once a portion of the same fabric. All these street windows are heavily barred and sightless. These three houses evidently formed one entire structure at first, and this was either an outlying portion of the Hôtel des Ursins, or a separate building, erected after the demolition of that hôtel, and taking the old name. In either case, there can be no doubt that these are the walls that harbored Racine. The tenants of his day were mostly men of the law who had their offices and residential chambers here, by reason of their proximity to the Palais de Justice. With these inmates Racine was certainly acquainted—the magistrates, the advocates, the clerks, of whom he makes knowing sport in his delightful little comedy, "Les Plaideurs." It was played at Versailles, "by royal command," before King and court in 1668. This was not its original production, however; it had had its first night for the Paris public a month earlier, and had failed; possibly because it had not yet received royal approval. Molière, one of the audience on that first night, was a more competent critic of its quality, and his finding was that "those who mocked merited to be mocked in turn, for they did not know good comedy when they saw it." This verdict gives striking proof of his innate loyalty to a comrade in trade, for he and the author were estranged just then, not by any fault of Molière, and he had the right to feel wronged, and by this unasked praise he proved himself to be the more manly of the two.

The piece was an immediate success at Versailles. The Roi Soleil beamed, the courtiers smiled, the crowd laughed. The players, unexpectedly exultant, climbed into their coaches as soon as they were free, and drove into town and to Racine, with their good news. This whole quiet street was awakened by their shouts of congratulation, windows were thrown open by the alarmed burghers, and when they learned what it meant, they all joined in the jubilation.

Racine lived here from 1667 to 1677, and these ten years were years of unceasing output and of unbroken success. Beginning with his production of "Andromaque" in the first-named year, he went, through successive stage triumphs, to "Phèdre," his greatest and his last play for the public stage, produced on New Year's Day of 1677, at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. It was on these boards that almost all his plays were first given.

Then, at the age of thirty-seven, at the top of his fame, in the plenitude of his powers, he suddenly ceased to write for the stage. This dis-service to dramatic literature was brought about by his forthcoming marriage, by his disgust with the malice of his rivals, by his weariness of the assaults of his enemies, by his somewhat sudden and showy submission to the Church—that sleepless assailant of player and playwright. He hints at the attitude of the godly in his preface to "Phèdre," assuring them that they will have to own—however, in other respects, they may or may not esteem this tragedy—that it castigates Vice and punishes Badness as had no previous play of his. Doubtless he was hardened in this decision, already made, by the hurt he had from the reception of this play in contrast with the reception of a poorer play for which his own title was stolen, which was produced within three nights of his piece, and was acclaimed by the cabal that damned the original. Nor was it only his rivals and enemies who decried him. "Racine et le café passeront," was La Harpe's contemptuous coupling of the playwright with the new and dubious drink, just then on its trial in Paris. His mot has been mothered on Madame de Sévigné, for she, too, took neither to Racine nor to coffee. And a century later it pleased Madame de Staël to prove, to her own gratification, that his tragedies had already gone into the limbo of out-worn things.

Racine's whole life—never notably sedate hitherto, with its frequent escapades and its one grand passion—was turned into a new current by his love match with Catherine de Romenet. On his marriage in June, 1677—among the témoins present were Boileau-Despréaux and Uncle Vitart, this latter then living in the same house with his nephew—Racine ranged himself on the side of order and of domestic days and nights. He gave proof of a genuine devotedness to his wife; a good wife, if you will, yet hardly a companion for him in his work at home and in the world outside. It is told of her, that she never saw one of his pieces played, nor heard one read; and Louis, their youngest son, says that his mother did not know what a verse was.

The earliest home of the new couple was on Île Saint-Louis. Neither the house nor its street is to be identified to-day, but both may surely be seen, so slight are the changes even now since that provincial village, in the heart of Paris, was built up from an island wash-house and wood-yard under the impulse of the plans prepared for Henri IV., by his right hand, Sully. And in this parish church, Saint-Louis-en-l'Île—a provincial church quite at home here—we find Racine holding at the font his first child, Jean-Baptiste, in 1678.

Two years later he moved again, and from early in 1680 to the end of 1684 we find him at No. 2 Rue de l'Eperon, on the corner of Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. Here his family grew in number, and the names of three of his daughters, Marie-Catherine, Anne, and Élisabeth—all born in this house—appeared on the baptismal register of his parish church, Saint-André-des-Arts. This was the church of the christening of François-Marie Arouet, a few years later. The Place Saint-André-des-Arts, laid out in 1809, now covers the site of that very ancient church, sold as National Domain in 1797, and demolished soon after.

This residence of Racine was left intact until within a few years, when it was replaced by the Lycée Fénelon, a government school for girls. There they read their "Racine," or such portions as are permitted to the Young Person, not knowing nor caring that on that spot the author once lived.

From here he removed, at the beginning of the year 1685, to No. 16 Rue des Maçons. That street is now named Champollion, and the present number of his house cannot be fixed. It still stands on the western side of the street, about half way up between Rue des Écoles and Place de la Sorbonne; for none of these houses have been rebuilt, and the street itself is as secluded and as quiet as when Racine walked through it. Here were born his daughters Jeanne and Madeleine, both baptized in the parish church of Saint-Séverin—a venerable sanctuary, still in use and quite unaltered, except that it has lost its cloisters. And in this home in Rue des Maçons he brought to life two plays finer than any of their forerunners, yet, unlike them, not intended for public performance. "Esther" was written in 1689 to please Madame de Maintenon, and was performed several times by the girls at her school of Saint-Cyr; first before King and court, later before friends of the court and those who had sufficient influence to obtain the eagerly sought invitation. "Athalie," written for similar semi-public production, two years later, failed to make any impression, when played at Versailles by the same girls of Saint-Cyr. After two performances, without scenery or costumes, it was staged no more, and had no sale when published by the author. Yet Boileau told him that it was his best work, and Voltaire said that it was nearer perfection than any work of man. Indeed, "Athalie," in its grandeur and its simplicity, may easily outrank any production of the French pen during the seventeenth century. And, as literature, these two plays are almost perfect specimens of Racine's almost perfect art and diction; of that art, wherein he was so exquisite a craftsman; of that diction, so rich, so daring, so pliable, so passionate, yet restrained, refined, judicious.

In May, 1692, we learn by a letter to Boileau, Racine was still in Rue des Maçons, but he must have left it shortly after, for in November of this year he brought to be christened, in Saint-Sulpice, his youngest child, Louis. This is the son who has left us an admirable biography of his father, and some mediocre poems—"La Religion" and "La Grâce" being those by which he is best known. So that Saint-Sulpice was, already in November, 1692, the church of his new parish; and the house to which he had removed in that parish, wherein the boy was born, stands, quite unchanged to-day, in Rue Visconti. That street was then named Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, having begun life as a country lane cut through the low marshy lands along the southern shore. It extends only from Rue de Seine to Rue Bonaparte, then named Rue des Petits-Augustins. Near its western end, at the present number 21, the Marquis de Ranes had erected a grand mansion; and this, on his death in 1678, was let out in apartments. It is asserted that it is the house of whose second floor Racine became a tenant. Within the great concave archway that frames the wide entrance door is set a tablet, containing the names of Racine, of La Champmeslé, of Lecouvreur, and of Clairon, all of whom are claimed to have been inhabitants of this house. That tablet has carried conviction during the half-century since it was cut and set, about 1855, but its word is to be doubted, and many of us believe that the more ancient mansion at No. 13 of the street was Racine's home. Local tradition makes the only proof at present, and the matter cannot be absolutely decided until the lease shall be found in that Parisian notary's office where it is now filed away and forgotten. We know that Mlle. Lecouvreur lived in the house formerly tenanted by Racine, and that she speaks of it as being nearly at the middle of the street, and this fact points rather to No. 13 than to No. 21. And we know that Mlle. Clairon had tried for a long time to secure an apartment in the house honored by memories of the great dramatist and the great actress; for whose sake she was willing to pay the then enormous rental of 200 francs. But the tablet's claim to La Champmeslé as a tenant is an undue and unpardonable excess of zeal. Whatever Racine may have done years before in his infatuation for that bewitching woman, he did not bring her into his own dwelling!

Rue Visconti. On the right is the Hôtel de Ranes, and in the distance is No. 13.

She had come from Rouen, a young actress looking for work, along with her husband, a petty actor and patcher-up of plays; for whose sake she was admitted to the Théâtre du Marais. How she made use of this chance is told by a line in a letter of Madame de Sévigné, who had seen her play Atalide in "Bajazet," and pronounced "ma belle fille"—so she brevets her son's lady-love—as "the most miraculously good comédienne that I have ever seen." It was on the boards of the Hôtel de Bourgogne that she showed herself to be also the finest tragédienne of her time. She shone most in "Bajazet," and in others of Racine's plays, creating her rôles under his admiring eye and under his devoted training. He himself declaimed verse marvellously well, and had in him the making of a consummate comedian, or a preacher, as you please. La Champmeslé was not beautiful or clever, but her stature was noble, her carriage glorious, her voice bewitching, her charm irresistible. And La Fontaine sang praises of her esprit, and this was indeed fitting at his age then. She lived somewhere in this quarter, when playing in the troupe of the widow Molière at the Théâtre Guénégaud. When she retired from those boards, she found a home with her self-effacing husband in Auteuil, and there died in 1698.

The first floor in the right wing of the court of both 13 and 21 is said to be the residence of Adrienne Lecouvreur. She had appeared in 1717 at the Comédie Française, in Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, and had won her place at once. The choice spirits of the court, of the great world, of the greater world of literature, were glad to meet in fellowship around her generous and joyous table. Among them she found excuse for an occasional caprice, but her deepest and most lasting passion was given to the superb adventurer, Maurice de Saxe. His quarters, when home from the wars—for which her pawned jewels furnished him forth—were only a step down Rue Bonaparte from her house, on Quai Malaquais. They were at No. 5, the most ancient mansion left on the quay, with the exception of No. 1, hid behind the wing of the Institute. He died at Chambord on November 30, 1750, and at this house, May 17, 1751, there was an auction of his effects.

There came a time when the meetings of these two needed greater secrecy, and he removed to Rue de Colombier, now named Rue Jacob. The houses on the north side of this ancient street had—and some of them still have—gardens running back to the gardens of the houses on the south side of Rue Visconti. These little gardens had, in the dividing fence, gates easily opened by night, for others besides Adrienne and Maurice, as local legend whispers. Scribe has put their story on the stage, where it is a tradition that the actress was actually poisoned by a great lady, for the sake of the fascinating lover. He stood by her bedside, with Voltaire and the physician, when she was dying in 1730, at the early age of thirty-eight, in one of the rooms on this first floor over the court. Voltaire had had no sneers, but only praise for the actress, and smiles for the woman whose kind heart had brought her to his bedside, when he was ill, where she read to him the last book out, the translation of the "Arabian Nights." He was stirred to stinging invective of the churlish priest of Saint-Sulpice, who denied her church-burial. In the same verse he commends that good man, Monsieur de Laubinière, who gave her body hasty and unhallowed interment. He came, by night, with two coaches and three men, and drove with the poor body along the river-bank, turning up Rue de Bourgogne to a spot behind the vast wood-yards that then lined the river-front. There, in a hole they dug, they hid her. The fine old mansion at No. 115 Rue de Grenelle, next to the southeast corner of Rue de Bourgogne, covers her grave. In its garret, thrown into one corner and almost forgotten, is a marble tablet, long and narrow, once set in a wall on this site, to mark the spot so long ignored—as its inscription says—where lies an actress of admirable esprit, of good heart, and of a talent sublime in its simplicity. And it recites the efforts of a true friendship, which got at last only this little bit of earth for her grave.

Yet a few years further on, the same wing on the court of this dingy old house sparkled with the splendid personality of Hippolyte Clairon, who outshines all other stars of the French stage, unless it be Rachel. Here she lived the life of one of those prodigal princesses, in whose rôles she loved to dazzle on the boards of the Comédie Française, where she first appeared in 1743. It was her public and not her private performances that shocked the sensitive Church into a threat of future terrors for her. When, in the course of a theatrical quarrel, she refused to play, she was sent to prison, being one of "His Majesty's Servants," disobedient and punishable. She preferred possible purgatory to present imprisonment, and went back to her duty.

To this house again came Voltaire, as her visitor this time, along with Diderot and Marmontel and many such men. Garrick came, too, when in Paris—came quietly, less eager to proclaim his ardent admiration for the woman than his public and professional acclamation of the actress in the theatre. Her parts all played, she left the stage when a little past forty, and, sinking slowly into age and poverty and misery, she died at the age of eighty in 1803.

All these flashing fireworks are dimmed and put to shame by the gentle glow and the steadfast flame of the wood-fire on Racine's home hearthstone. It lights up the gloomy, mean street, even as we stand here. He was, in truth, an admirable husband and father, and it is this side of the man that we prefer to regard, rather than that side turned toward other men. Of them he was, through his over-much ambition, easily jealous, and, being sensitive and suspicious as well, and given to a biting raillery, he alienated his friends. Boileau alone was too big of soul to allow any estrangement. These two were friends for almost forty years, in which not one clouded day is known. The letters between them—those from 1687 to 1698 are still preserved—show the depth of Racine's manly and delicate feeling for his friend, then "in his great solitude at Auteuil." They had been appointed royal historiographers soon after Racine's marriage in 1677, and, in that office, travelled together a good deal, in the Ghent campaign of 1678 and again with the army in other fields. They worked together on their notes later, and gathered great store of material; but the result amounted to nothing, and they were posthumously lucky in that their unfinished manuscript was finally burned by accident in 1726.