Into A Paris Quartier

by Diane Johnson

  No more do I know about La Rochefoucauld’s religion. Having become interested in Huguenots, despite the mysterious silence about which historical figures were and weren’t Protestants, I still find myself wondering who was who in this respect. Even in accounts of, for instance, the Fronde, the rebellions against Louis XIV and Mazarin that La Rochefoucauld fought in, though the Fronde involved many of the same families as in the former Huguenot period, no religious concerns are implied, at least that are apparent to the casual reader. (Leonard Tancock, introducing his translation of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, says of the Fronde: “Its events were industriously obscured by the memoirs and special pleadings of many of the participants, and no attempt has been made here to unravel the skein.”) Yet La Rochefoucauld’s great-grandfather died in the massacre of St.-Bartholomew’s Day. That earlier La Rochefoucauld was certainly a Huguenot, chief henchman of Jeanne d’Albret, the mother of Henri IV. Would not his memory be alive in the La Rochefoucauld family a mere hundred years later? Several at least of the leading Frondists were raised as Protestants, yet lurking religious rancor is not seen as having anything to do with their opposition to the two influential cardinals or any royal personages. At the least, people like La Rochefoucauld, if not any longer Protestant, were associated with the more individualistic pieties of Jansenism; but many things are unclear.

  We can more easily imagine the rooms these people had. The decorative style in the seventeenth century was still more or less sumptuous, and more or less Italianate, with carved wood-paneled walls, sometimes painted, and dark wooden furniture in the style we associate with the Three Musketeers, or Romeo and Juliet: velvet or brocade upholstery, fringes, square-seated chairs with spiral-turned legs. This decor would give way in the eighteenth century to lighter woods, chairs upholstered in silk brocades, pastels and gilding—the style we associate with Louis XV.

  Sometimes I dare to go into the antiques shops around the corner on the Quai Malaquais or the Quai Voltaire, just to look at the furniture and objets d’art being sold for ferocious prices. Though many now trade in the glamorous art deco furniture of the 1930s, eighteenth-century Louis XV and XVI (the default styles of the French aristocracy to this day) have their purveyors as well.

  Whoever was living in our Paris apartment at the beginning of the eighteenth century (possibly Bernard Germain-Étienne de la Ville, Comte de Lacépède, the great eighteenth-century biologist) decided to update the decor, and had mirrors installed on all four walls of the salon in carved gold frames. In this way, the crystal chandelier is reflected in infinite regression in whichever direction you turn, and you see in the mirrors an immensely long corridor lit with dozens of chandeliers, a sort of metaphor for the Enlightenment, the mood during nearly a century, seemingly so civilized and wise, before the Deluge.

  Mirrors, an Italian technology, were everywhere in Paris by the eighteenth century, a festival of glitter and glamour, reflecting fashionable beauties, everything was doré, gilded. People wore silk and began to powder their hair. The short rounded breeches, ruffled collars, and gartered stockings for men gave way to longer coats with deep cuffs and longer curls, and wavy wide-brimmed hats. The women wore wide skirts and higher necklines and decorous head coverings—hoods and lace caps with little trains down the back. What hadn’t been built in St.-Germain-des-Prés in the seventeenth century was being built now—the handsome mint, the Hôtel de la Monnaie, for instance—so everything assumed very much the look it has today.

  THE CENTURY OF VOLTAIRE

  He who has not the spirit of his times has all their misery.

  Voltaire, STANCES

  If the seventeenth century had been La Rochefoucauld’s, the eighteenth would be Voltaire’s, the tone witty, acerbic, analytic, angry. The spate of Louises, from Louis XIII, who came to the throne in 1610, to Louis XVI, who fell in 1792, had dragged France into debt, corruption, and continued sectarian strife. Voltaire foresaw

  the signs of a revolution which must infallibly come. I shall not have the pleasure of beholding it. The French reach everything late, but they do reach it at last. Young people are lucky. They will see great things. I shall not cease to preach tolerance upon the housetops until persecution is no more. The progress of the right is slow. The roots of prejudice are deep. I shall never see the fruits of my efforts, but their seeds must one day germinate.

  One wonders whether Voltaire would have survived the Revolution? Probably not; his mockery would have offended the earnest revolutionaries. On the other hand, his consummate cynicism may have directed him to a prudent escape. Would the Duc de La Rochefoucauld have survived? At any rate, in 1778 Voltaire died a natural death a few minutes’ walk from here on what is now called the Quai Voltaire, only steps from where d’Artagnan had lived a century before him, and didn’t live to see the revolution he had predicted.

  Benefiting from the St.-Germain-des-Prés tradition of welcoming strangers, many of our famous American founders were here in Voltaire’s day. Brian N. Morton, in his invaluable book Americans in Paris, tells about many of them: Benjamin Franklin, a great favorite with the French, lived in a hotel at 52 Rue Jacob, and, with John Jay and John Adams, signed the treaty recognizing American independence at number fifty-six; Thomas Paine, Jefferson, of course, and writers like Washington Irving (and later, James Baldwin) were also on Rue Jacob, and James Fenimore Cooper was nearby. Franklin and Voltaire were introduced to each other at a scientific meeting at the Louvre, and according to John Adams, stood awkwardly til the gathering crowd insisted they embrace in the French style; so they did, kissing each other’s cheeks, neither quite knowing what he was supposed to say.

  The American Revolution was behind them, and the French upheaval was still to come. I remember my surprise when I learned that the French today still view their revolution as glorious, despite all the gruesome things their ancestors did—leaving the last little Louis, Marie-Antoinette’s boy, to starve and die alone in prison, for example, as if the guillotine executions weren’t brutal enough. America does have some things on its conscience, but not as many things, at least until recently; it hasn’t had time to run them up, though Guantanamo Bay will surely be mentioned by history, and Abu Ghraib, and the Japanese internment, too.

  But even there, the Japanese citizens did not have their heads chopped off. (True, we had the Civil War; by now, which American, whether Yankee or Rebel, has not secretly wondered whether it might have been better to let the South secede? The two halves of our nation seem to feel so differently about everything.) But we aren’t yet hardened to violence as a means of social change, or only as a last resort, while the French seem to believe that actual or symbolic violence is a necessary prelude to revolution, acted out each day in the endless numbers of demonstrators marching (cheerfully these days) every day about something—elementary school reform, gas and electrical workers’ salaries, war—with festive banners and music. Is it paradoxical that with its origins in violence, theirs is a safe society and, even with our peaceful gradualism, ours is dangerous and gun-ridden?

  There have been a number of bloody events in St. Germain over the centuries, and the shadows lie over it still. It was near here, at the corner of Rue de Buci, where I shop for groceries, and what is now Boulevard St.-Germain, that Protestants Nicolas de Cène and Pierre Gavart had their tongues pulled out and were burned in 1557, dangling from a pillory so their limbs would be painfully charred before they were dead. (Louis XIII abolished this pillory in 1636.) It was around here that the Protestants were massacred on St. Bartholomew’s Day, still one of the most scurrilous events of French history, though there was apparently a huge gate at the Buci end of Rue Visconti, which, by someone’s keeping it closed during the massacre, helped to save some of the residents of Rue Visconti. History doesn’t record who it was who kept it closed. I have mentioned the massacre near the church of St. Germain-des-Prés during the Revolution.

  And it was nearby, in the Cour de Commerce St. André, which lies at the St.-Germain end of the Rue d
e Buci, between St.-Germain and St.-André-des-Arts, that Dr. Guillotin experimented on sheep to perfect his instrument, at first called La Louisane, or Louisette. In the cour, also, the revolutionary Marat published his newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple, before meeting his fate at the hands of Charlotte Corday, who in turn would be executed at the guillotine. His house was torn down eventually, but photographs exist, for instance in Leonard Pitt’s excellent Promenades dans le Paris disparu. And it was even nearer to home that the mob slaughtered sundry aristocrats and criminals being detained in the court of the prison of the abbey.

  The Revolution, the Terror, are now bewildering, especially the way all the former colleagues turned on one another; one misstep and your friends would guillotine you the next day, the ultimate demonstration of the effects of political correctness. However, the most illustrious tenant of our apartment, Monsieur Lacépède, managed to keep his head; here he was, unscathed when it all ended. He had prudently left town during the Reign of Terror, when other prominent scientists, like Antoine Lavoisier, were beheaded without pity. Yet, with all the slaughter, life went on. Restaurant Le Procope, on the Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie, which also gives into the Cour de Commerce, had been opened in 1686, was open during the Revolution, and thrives still.

  PART TWO

  ÉCOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS

  The years that a woman deducts from her age are never lost. They are added to other women’s.

  Diane de Poitiers

  If you walk toward Boulevard St.-Germain on our side of Rue Bonaparte, in a few steps you come to the École des Beaux-Arts, the national graduate school of art and architecture. Behind a handsome grille you see a large courtyard with buildings on three sides. On the left, various architectural elements are preserved against the wall; on the right you’ll see Queen Margot’s church, Église des Petits-Augustins, with its facade taken from Anet, the château that belonged to Diane de Poitiers.

  By the time of Queen Margot’s birth in 1553, there had been a long tradition of powerful mistresses and female rulers in France—Queen Margot is only one of the remarkable women associated with this quarter. The constellation of names also leads back to an earlier century, the fifteenth century, to Diane de Poitiers. Standing in the courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts, you feel that Diane de Poitiers is a personage at least as present as Queen Margot. This interesting lady, influential mistress of Queen Margot’s father, Henri II, had as a young woman been at the court of Queen Margot’s grandfather, François I. She was in fact twenty years older than her royal lover his son. Even before coming to France, I had always been fascinated with this namesake Diane, and, especially, would have liked to know the secrets of her unusually long career as femme fatale. (She was said to have bathed in milk, for one thing.)

  Facade of the church of the École des Beaux-Arts

  Someone, possibly Queen Margot herself, commented about her father, that he “had all the faults of his father [François I], with a weaker mind,” implying that France during her father’s reign was really ruled by this “ancient mistress,” who had wrested control of him from another, “the pious and learned Anne d’Étampes.” Both these mistresses had to contend, of course, with Catherine de Médicis, the legal wife, but wife and mistress seemed not to have interfered with each other too much, at least during Henri II’s lifetime. The minute he was dead, Catherine sent Diane back to her country place, where she died, at sixty-seven, of a fall from her horse. If you count Diane as a de facto queen, she is the fifth queen to be associated with this neighborhood, only by association with the facade of her château, as she really didn’t live here. But she was in a way the fifth female ruler of France in this period, with Catherine and Marie de Médicis, Queen Margot, and Anne of Austria. (There have been not a few female military figures as well, including Joan of Arc, Duchesse de Montpensier, and Henri IV’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret.)

  There was also a long tradition for the courtesan—the word originally referred to members of the court rather than to kept women. Queen Margot tells of at least two episodes when her husband Henri fell in love with a lady of the court. One was a Madame de Sauves, one a woman referred to as “Fosseuse.” Both times Henri fell in love at the same moment that the eye of the reigning king fell upon the same lady, so that the rivalry between Protestant Henri and Catholic Queen Margot’s brothers played itself out in the bedroom as well as on the field of battle.

  Henri IV was capable of good-natured behavior but more often got into a snit, as once when he thinks Queen Margot is not nice enough to his mistress Fosseuse when Fosseuse gets pregnant. Queen Margot, not having much choice, tries to be nice to this young woman, and offers to take her away to a remote spot during the last stages of her pregnancy, to quiet any scandal under the pretext of withdrawing to avoid an epidemic.

  But Fosseuse refuses. “So far from showing any contrition, or returning thanks for my kindness,” complains Margot, “she replied with the utmost arrogance.” According to Margot, Fosseuse rants that:

  she would prove all those to be liars who had reported [that she was pregnant by the King], that, for my part, I had ceased for a long time to show her any marks of regard, and she saw that I was determined upon her ruin. These words she delivered in as loud a tone as mine had been mildly expressed; and, leaving me abruptly, she flew in a rage to the King my husband. He was very angry upon the occasion, and declared he would make them all liars who had laid such things to her charge. From that moment until the hour of her delivery, which was a few months after, he never spoke to me.

  One feels a little sorry for Fosseuse in this story, although she seems to have been somewhat undiplomatic. Because apparently one did not lightly say no to a king, and could only hope to gain some advantage from compliance.

  Henri was a determined womanizer; Queen Margot recounts how one night he had some sort of fit, and lay for an hour in a coma:

  …occasioned, I supposed, by his excesses with women, for I never knew anything of the kind to happen to him before. However, as it was my duty so to do, I attended him with so much care and diligence that, when he recovered, he spoke of it to everyone, declaring that, if I had not perceived his indisposition and called for the help of my women, he should not have survived the fit.

  In fact, it behooved Margot to have had a little charity, given her own numerous lovers. But the point is that the long-established conventions of sexual freedom that have attracted not only the French, and not only back then, were also attractive to our American forebears and all the American travelers to Paris since then.

  As I said, I feel a kind of affinity with Diane de Poitiers on account of having her name. My friend Michelle, an American married to a Frenchman, thinks that American women who find themselves living in France are apt to have been given Frenchified first names at birth, as she was, and as was I. Maybe destiny steers the Tammys and Wendys elsewhere. It was evidently some Francophilia on the part of my parents that made them think of this name, and spell it Diane in the French way, not with the more English form, Diana. I came upon a list among my mother’s papers of other names she and my father were considering, and these were also French: Charlotte, Margot, and Anne.

  After Queen Margot’s death in 1615, the new queen, Anne of Austria, continued the building of a church and convent for the Petits-Augustins—themselves an order of Augustinians called “petits” to distinguish them from the Grands Augustins, who had a convent of their own on the street of that name a few minutes away. Anne gave the credit to Margot for the finished church. The inscription on the chapel reads: “Le 21 Mars 1608, la Reine Marguerite, Duchesse de Valois, petite-fille du grand roi François, soeur de trois rois, et seule restée de la race des Valois, ayant été visitée et secourue de Dieu, comme Job et Jacob…elle a bati et fondé ce Monastère.”

  Anne of Austria was the wife of Louis XIII, the monarch d’Artagnan faithfully served; her portrait hung in his rooms. By d’Artagnan’s day, the little Chapel of Praises that had stood alone before then had been inc
orporated into the church of the Petits-Augustins we see today. Queen Anne’s new church was a handsome, large structure that served the monks until the Revolution nearly two hundred years later and now sits within the precincts of the École des Beaux-Arts.

  You enter the courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts from Rue Bonaparte through gates topped with out-sized, almost postmodern-looking stone busts of Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Puget, two seventeenth-century painters, the former much admired today, the other more or less forgotten. The courtyard is itself a classé space, listed on the register of buildings that mustn’t be altered or torn down. It is wide and cobbled, with a mythological figure—is she Art herself, or maybe France?—standing in the middle on her twenty-foot plinth, with archaeological morsels of pilasters and cornices stuck on the buildings to the right and left, and a handsome Palladian nineteenth-century building across the back, containing classrooms, the library, and an amphitheater where a giant mural pays homage to the great artists of history.

  (Who was it who pointed out that in every frieze of great men across the face of an old building, some of the figures will be completely unfamiliar to modern eyes? And so it is with the pantheon of painters in the École des Beaux-Arts amphitheater mural, painted 1836–1841. Holbein le Jeune, certainly, but Arnolfo di Lapo? Vignole? Peruzzi? I have a lot of architectural history to learn. The immortalized figures are overwhelmingly French and Italian, of course. There is only one Englishman—Inigo Jones—and no American.)