CHAPTER XIII. LA PLACE DES VOSGES

HERE we are on the old Place Royale—the place where royalties dwelt and courtiers disported in the days of Louis XIII, whose statue we see still in the centre of the big, dreary garden square. That statue was put there by Napoleon to replace the original one, carted away and melted down in Revolutionary days when the ci-devant Place Royale became Place des Fédérés, then Place de l'Indivisibilité. Napoleon first named it Place des Vosges, a name confirmed after 1870 as a tribute of gratitude to the department which had first paid up its share of the war contribution. In the early centuries of the Bourbon kings the palace of the Tournelles had stood here. After its demolition the site was taken for a horse market, and there the famous duel was fought between the mignons of Henri II and the followers of the duc de Guise. Henri IV created the Place and had it parcelled out for building purposes. His idea was to make it the centre of a number of streets or avenues each bearing the name of one of the provinces of France. The King died and that project was not carried out, but the extensive site was soon the square of the fine mansions we see to-day, mansions fallen from their high estate, no longer the private abodes of the world of fashion, but standing unchanged in outward aspect.

We see the Pavillon du Roi on the south side facing Rue de Birague, once Rue du Pavillon du Roi, where at No. 11 was born Mme de Sévigné (1626); opposite it the Pavillon de la Reine. At No. 7 the petit hôtel Sully connected with the grand hôtel Sully of the Rue St-Antoine. Each house of the place was inhabited and known by the name of a great noble or a wealthy financier. Their enumeration would take too much space here. At No. 6 we see the house where Victor Hugo lived in more modern times—1833-48—now the Musée filled with souvenirs of his life and work and dedicated to his memory. Behind it, at the corner of Impasse Guénémée, is the hôtel once the dwelling of Marion Delorme. Théophile Gautier, and later Alphonse Daudet occupied a flat at No.. 8. Passing out of the place through Rue du'Pas de la Mule, in its day "petite Rue Royale," we turn into Rue St-Antoine, where modern buildings are almost unknown, and vestiges of bygone ages are seen on every side. At No. 5 an inscription tells us this was the site of the courtyard of the Bastille through which the populace rushed in attack on the 14th July, 1789. At No. 7 we remark an ancient sign "A la Renommée de la Friture." At No. 17 we see what remains of the convent built by Mansart in 1632, on the site of the hôtel de Cossé, where for eighteen years St. Vincent de Paul was confessor. The chapel, left intact, was given to the Protestants in 1802. Here Fouquet and his son, Mme de Chantai, and the Marquis de Sévigné were buried. No. 20 is l'hôtel de Mayenne et d'Ormesson, sixteenth or seventeenth century, on the site of an older hôtel sold to Charles V to enlarge his palace St-Pol. It passed through many hands, royal hands for the most part, and the building as we see it, or the previous structure, was for a time the hôtel de Diane de Poitiers. In modem times it became the Pension Favart, then in 1870, l'École des Francs-Bourgeois under the direction

of les Frères de la doctrine chrétienne. At No. 28 Impasse Guénémée, known in its fifteenth-century days as Cul-de-Sac du Ha! Ha! a passage connected with the hôtel Rohan-Guénémée in Place Royale. In the seventeenth century a convent was built here, a sort of reformatory for erring girls and women of the upper classes who were shut up here in consequence of lettres de cachet. At No. 62 stands the hôtel de Sully. Its first owner staked the mansion at the gambling table and lost. At No. 101 we are before the Lycée Charlemagne, built in 1804 on the site of two ancient mansions and of the old city wall, of which some traces still remain. At No. 133 we see the Maison Séguier, with its fine old door, balcony and staircase; another old house at No. 137; then this ancient thoroughfare becomes in these modern days, Rue François-Miron.

Rue des Tournelles in this earlier part of its course is chiefly interesting for the fine hôtel at No. 28, built in 1690, decorated with frescoes by Lebrun and Mignard, where the famous courtesan, Ninon de Lenclos, lived and died.

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