You are here

قراءة كتاب The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume II (of 2)

تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"

‏اللغة: English
The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume II (of 2)

The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, Volume II (of 2)

تقييمك:
0
No votes yet
المؤلف:
دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 2

tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">175

Anne de Bretagne (from a portrait by an unknown artist in a private collection) facing 186 Louis XII (from a water-color portrait by an unknown artist, in a private collection) facing 190 Sully (from a portrait attributed to Quesnel, in the Musée Condé at Chantilly) facing 194 The Court of the Hôtel de Béthune. Sully's Residence 196 The Hôtel de Mayenne. In the distance, the Temple Sainte-Marie, called the Church of the Visitation facing 198 The Place des Vosges facing 214 The Hôtel de Beauvais facing 238 The Staircase of the Dwelling of the Marquise de Brinvilliers facing 246 The Hôtel de Sens facing 254 Marguerite de Valois (from a portrait by an unknown artist, in the Musée de Montpellier) facing 258 The Hôtel Lamoignon facing 262 The Tourelle of the Hôtel Barbette 268 The Gateway of the Hôtel de Clisson 276

THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE SOUTHERN BANK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In preceding chapters we have come upon the small beginnings of the Scholars' Quarter; we have had glimpses of the growth of the great mother University and of her progeny of out-lying colleges; and we have trodden, with their scholars and students, the slope of "the whole Latin Mountain," as it was named by Pantaléon, that nephew of Pope Urban IV., who extolled the learning he had acquired here. Looking down from its crest, over the hill-side to the Seine, we have had under our eyes the mediæval Pays Latin, filling up the space within its bounding wall, built by Philippe-Auguste and left untouched by Charles V.; we have seen that wall gradually obliterated through the ages, its gate-ways with their flanking towers first cut away, its fabric picked to pieces, stone by stone; while, beyond its line, we have watched the building up, early in the seventeenth century, of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, over the Pré-aux-Clercs, and in the fields beyond, and along the river-bank toward the west. In the centre of this new quarter the nobility of birth was soon intrenched behind its garden-walls, and in the centre of the old quarter the aristocracy of brains was secluded within its courts. The boundary-line of the two quarters, almost exactly defined by the straight course from the Institute to the Panthéon, speedily became blurred, and the debatable neutral ground between was settled by colonists from either region, servants of the State, of art, of letters. In our former strollings through long-gone centuries, we have visited many of these and many of the dwellers on the University hill; we are now to turn our attention to those brilliant lights on the left bank who have helped to make Paris "la ville lumière" during the forenoon of the nineteenth century.

Through the heart of the faubourg curved the narrow Rue Saint-Dominique, from Esplanade des Invalides to Rue des Saints-Pères. This eastern end, nearly as far west as Rue de Bellechasse, has been carried away by new Boulevard Saint-Germain, and with it the hôtel of the de Tocqueville family, which stood at No. 77 of the ancient aristocratic street. Here in 1820 lived the Comtesse de Tocqueville, with her son, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, a lad of fifteen. Here he remained until the events of 1830 sent him to the United States, with a mission to study their prison systems; a study extended by him to all the institutions of the Republic, which had a profound interest for the French Republicans of that time. His report on those prisons appeared in 1832, and in 1835 he put forth the first volume of "De la Démocratie en Amérique," its four volumes being completed in 1840. That admirable survey of the progress of democracy—whose ascendancy he predicted, despite his own predilections—still carries authority, and at the time created a wide-spread sensation. It made its author famous, and promoted him to the place of first-assistant lion in the salon of Madame Récamier, whose head lion was always Châteaubriand. De Tocqueville had settled, on his return to Paris, in this same faubourg; residing until 1837 at 49 Rue de Verneuil, and from that date to 1840 at 12 Rue de Bourgogne. Elected Deputy in 1839, he soon crossed the Seine, and we cannot follow him to his various residences in the quarter of the Madeleine. For a few months in 1849 he served as Minister for Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of the Prince-President, and was among the Deputies put into cells in December, 1851. His remaining years, until his death at Cannes in 1859, were spent in retirement from all public affairs.

A notable inhabitant of the University quarter, in the early years of the nineteenth century, was François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot, a young professor at the Sorbonne. His classes were crowded by students and by men from outside, all intent on his strong and convincing presentation of his

Pages