her son: ‘This Ninon is a real danger! If you knew how dogmatic she was about religion, it would horrify you . . . we are making every effort, Mme de la Fayette and I, to extricate him from such a dangerous commitment.’ Virtuous intellectuals could also be found: Mlle de Scudéry, a précieuse if ever there was one, was at home every Saturday in her small hôtel on Rue de Beauce, its courtyard adorned with an acacia – still rare – and an aviary. This was where she wrote, along with her brother, Le Grand Cyrus and Clélie, illustrated with the famous Carte du Tendre. Mme de Sévigné spent her entire Parisian life in the Marais. She was born in the house of her grandfather, on the corner of the Place Royale and Rue de Birague. As an orphan, she lived at her uncle’s, first on Rue Barbette and then on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois. After her marriage to Saint-Gervais, she established herself on Rue des Lions. Soon widowed, she moved with her two children to Rue de Thorigny, opposite the Venetian embassy, then to Rue des Trois-Pavillons (now Elzévir), and finally to the Hôtel Carnavalet: ‘It is an admirable affair, we shall all stay here and enjoy the fine air. Since it is impossible to have everything, we shall have to dispense with parquet floors and fashionable little stoves; but at least we have a fine courtyard, a beautiful garden, and nice little blue girls who are most convenient.’81
Each major residence on the Place Royale, wrote Scarron, hid ‘its sumptuous interior, its wondrous panelling, its rich ornaments and priceless paintings, its rare cabinets, canopies and balustrades’. The Duc de Richelieu, great-nephew of the cardinal, built up in his hôtel (now no. 21) a collection with more than ten paintings by Poussin, including Eliezer and Rebecca – subject of a famous lecture that Philippe de Champaigne gave to the Académie – and Moses Rescued from the Waters, which was later bought by Louis XIV and is now in the Louvre. Bernini, a great admirer of Poussin, visited the duke during his stay in Paris, as he would visit Chantelou to see the Seven Sacraments. After selling the Poussins, the duke bought several works by Rubens, including The Massacre of the Innocents and The Lion Hunt which is now in Munich. President Amelot de Gournay lived at no. 10. His son’s tutor was Roger de Piles, whose theoretical writings lay at the origin of a famous controversy between the supporters of Poussin – the majority of the Académie – and those of Rubens, defenders of colouring who were denounced as corruptors of the visual arts, as they had ‘introduced by their plotting all kinds of libertine painting that were quite released from all the constraints that formerly rendered this art so admirable and difficult’.82
Many artists chose to live in the Marais, close to their secular or religious patrons. There were painters such as Quentin Varin, whose workshop was on Rue Saint-Antoine at the corner with Rue de Birague; Claude Vignon, on the same street near the Visitation; La Hyre, who lived on Rue d’Angoumois (now Charlot) and painted a Nativity for the church of his neighbours, the Marais Capuchins, at the corner of his street and Rue du Perche. A little later, all the great names of French architecture were concentrated in the Marais: François Mansart, who had a very simple house built on Rue Payenne (now no. 5); his nephew by marriage, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who lived on Rue des Tournelles in an hôtel decorated by Mignard, Le Brun et La Fosse; Libéral Bruant, on Rue Saint-Louis (now de Turenne);83 Le Vau in the same street, and Jacques II Gabriel on Rue Saint-Antoine.
The Marais quarter had its theatre, the most popular in Paris, challenging the Comédiens du Roi of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. It was inaugurated in 1629 in a tennis court on the Impasse Berthaud – behind the Centre Beaubourg – with Mélite ou les Fausses Lettres, the work of a young and unknown provincial, Pierre Corneille. The success was immediate, thanks to the talent of the troupe’s leading actor, Montdory. When the theatre moved to another tennis court, the Maretz on Rue Vieille-du-Temple,84 Montdory would interpret the title role of Le Cid. After the first few performances, he wrote to Guez de Balzac: ‘Le Cid has charmed the whole city. He is so good-looking that the most well-mannered ladies have fallen in love with him, their passion breaking out several times in the public theatre . . . The crowd at our doors was so large that the nooks and crannies of the theatre that usually served as places for pages became favoured spots for blue-ribonned guests, and the stage has regularly been bedecked with knights of the Order.’85
In the second half of the seventeenth century, the momentum of baroque Paris quietened down, and the great hôtels in cut stone that were subsequently constructed in the Marais, with courtyard in front and garden behind, no longer followed Italian fantasies. The Hôtel d’Aumont on Rue de Jouy (architect: Le Vau), the Hôtel Guénégaud de Brosses on Rue des Archives (François Mansart), the Hôtel de Beauvais on Rue Saint-Antoine (Le Pautre), the Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil on Rue Vieille-du-Temple (Cottard), the Hôtel d’Avaux on Rue du Temple (Le Muet), the Hôtel Salé on Rue de Thorigny (de Bourges): everything here now represented the classical French hôtel.
Towards the end of Louis XIV’s reign, however, Farmers-General and councillors of the Parlement, marshals, dukes and peers of France, felt hemmed in by the dense construction of the Marais and began to spread out into the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and especially the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where there was still a great deal of land to build on. This migration had definite consequences on the city’s physiognomy, with the elegant residential sector shifting in the space of a few years from east to west, where it would remain. Balzac was aware of this change many years later: ‘The noblesse began to find themselves out of their element among shopkeepers, left the Place Royale and the centre of Paris for good, and crossed the river to breathe freely in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where palaces arose already around the great hôtel built by Louis XIV for the Duc de Maine – the Benjamin among his legitimate offspring.’86 The decline of the Marais was completed by the end of the ancien régime, by which time Mercier could write in Le Tableau de Paris:
Here at least you rediscover the century of Louis XIII, both in its manners and in its outdated opinions. The Marais is to the brilliant quarter of the Palais-Royal what Vienna is to London. It is not poverty that holds sway there, but the full complement of old prejudices: those with a modest fortune take refuge there. That is where you find grumbling old men, gloomy enemies of all new ideas, and highly imperious ladies who denounce without having read them those authors whose names they have heard of: the philosophes are referred to here as ‘people to be burned’.
During the Revolution, emigration emptied this quarter of such aristocracy as still remained. In La Comédie humaine this is where Balzac situates the déclassés, the worthy, isolated and humble misfits. As early as the ‘Prolegomena’ to his Treatise on Elegant Life, he explains how ‘the petty retailer, the second lieutenant, the sub-editor . . . if they do not save like casual workers in order to ensure their board and lodging in old age, the hope of their bee-like life scarcely goes beyond this: possession of a very cold room on the fourth floor, in Rue Boucherat’ (now de Turenne). Comte Octave, in Honorine, who ‘occupied one of the highest legal appointments’, led a life of ‘hermit-like simplicity’, as ‘his house was in the Marais, on Rue Payenne, and he hardly entertained’. Cousin Pons, Balzac’s most important Marais figure, whose character and condition were identified with the quarter, lived on Rue de Normandie, ‘one of the old-fashioned streets that slope towards the middle; the municipal authorities of Paris as yet have laid on no water supply to flush the central channel which drains the houses on either side, and as a result a stream of filthy ooze meanders among the cobblestones, filters into the soil, and produces the mud peculiar to the city’.87
Fortunate to escape Haussmann’s demolitions – by a hair: the baron planned to extend Rue Étienne-Marcel as far as Boulevard Beaumarchais – the Marais remained out of fashion until the mid twentieth century. In the immediate postwar years it was still a poor quarter, the courtyards of its great hôtels clogged up with vans, lean-tos with galvanized metal roofs, piles of pallets, and carts with iron-trimmed wooden wheels. The years of de Gaulle, Malraux and Pompidou soon put paid to this anachronism. Property developers realized the profit they could make on these edifices – so historical, so down-at-heel, and inhabited by a population so little able to defend itself. In the space of twenty years the Marais became unrecognizable, and the
