It may
be of interest to those who desire to study with some particularity the
personal history of Danton to know where are to be found in modern Paris the
places with which we have found him personally connected in this book.
His
first offices were in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles. This street has
disappeared in the improvements which included the prolongation of the Rue de
Rivoli. This office in the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles occupied almost exactly
the same spot, which can be recognised to-day in the following manner. As you
go along the northern side of the Rue de Rivoli going east, you come to a point
500 yards or so from the Louvre, from whence you begin to see the Tour St. Jacques
just peering round the southern side of the street. The shops which are then
upon your left hand and the pavement upon which you stand correspond to the
position of the old mansard house in which Danton served his apprenticeship. It
was here that he had his first offices; it was from this that he bought the
business of Monsieur M. de Paisy in the Rue de la Tissanderie.
Concerning
the position of these offices in the Rue de la Tissanderie, which he moved
into, I have been able to learn nothing. There is a curious little record in
the police archives of Paris—Danton complaining that he could not work on
account of the noise that a saddle-maker made in the exercise of his trade in
the same house. In this little document, which is quoted by Monsieur Claretie
in his “Life of Camille Desmoulins.” the house is mentioned as being “just
opposite the Rue des Deux Fortes”; but as an inference to be drawn from the
same record is that he left immediately after for some other lodging in the
same street, this does not help us much.
I have
said in the text that Danton lived, during the six years which were those of
his active political life, in a house of the Passage du Commerce. I have also
mentioned in the text the fact that Dr. Robinet mentions a short residence in
the Rue des Fossé’s Saint Germains. I have given, moreover, in the same passage
my reasons for following M. Aulard in rejecting this first address. It seems
proved that, after he left the Rue de la Tissanderie, he moved with his wife to
the corner house of the Passage du Commerce. This was his home during the whole
of the Revolution, and it is worth while to describe its position and character
with some care.
In the
first place, it has disappeared; the construction of the Boulevard St. Germains
destroyed all that end of the Cour du Commerce. If you are going along the
Boulevard St. Germains from the west towards the University, you pass on the
right the statue of Danton. It is erected on an open triangle of ground, formed
by the junction of the Boulevard and of the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine. The
apex of this triangle, not twenty yards from the statue, marks the site of the
old house in which Danton and Desmoulins lived, and in which they were arrested
before their trial.
The old
quarter was a network of narrow streets, and where the Boulevard St. Germain
now stands, an intricate block of houses, with courtyards and passages, not
unlike the similar intricate masses which you will find in the City of London,
formed the northern side of the Rue des Cordeliers (that is to say, the modern
Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine). A narrow alley, known as the Cour de Commerce,
joined this Rue des Cordeliers by a still narrower passage. Danton’s house was
the corner house, as is proved by the mention in the inventory that some rooms
looked upon this passage and some upon the Rue des Cordeliers.
Of
course he did not occupy the whole of it but, in the Parisian custom, which had
already obtained for more than a century, he took a flat, and two rooms (used
as a lumber and as a servant’s bedroom) were added from the entresole below.
This flat was just such an apartment as a similar bourgeois householder would
have in Paris to-day: a dining-room, two bedrooms, a study, a little library, a
drawing-room, a kitchen, and offices, built round the staircase and courtyard
or well of the house.
I have
been unable to find any mention of the rental which was paid, but a guess at
something like £150 a year in that quarter at that time for such a flat would,
I think, not be extravagant The corresponding flat above, Desmoulins took after
his romantic marriage in December 1790, but he did not begin to occupy the
house until the early part of 1791. It waa here that his little Horace was
born; it was here that his wife and Danton’s passed the terrible night of the
10th of August, and it was here, in the great bedroom overlooking the Rue des
Cordeliers, that Danton’s wife died in February 1793,
As to
the furniture of the little apartment, it may be described as follows:—The
drawing-room was not very large, but there had been spent upon it the most
considerable sum in the furnishing of the house. It figures for very nearly a
third in the valuation, which may be read in Appendix VII, The white furniture,
which was the mark of the eighteenth century, was its principal note; it is
also worth observing that the household was sufficiently cramped for room to
use the cupboards in the drawing-room as wardrobes. The principal bedroom was
well furnished, but, as you will find to be the case in such houses in Paris,
the study, the dining-room, and the spare room to the side of the study were
very bare. It is also remarkable that the lumber-room held nothing but two
trunks and an old double bedstead. It was the household of a man who made every
effort to maintain his position before his wife's friends, but who was not
wealthy, and who had evidently arranged the scale of his expenditure
considerably below the probable receipts which an office such as his would have
brought in. I should much doubt whether as much as £500 a year would go out on
such an establishment, though he was certainly receiving £1000. We know the
reason of this; he had to pay off by every means in his power the debt which he
had incurred in buying the practice. While he lived in this house, and until
the office was suppressed in 1790, he continued to keep his business rooms in
the Rue de la Tissanderie. It may be worthy of mention that he kept two
servants, and that his apartment was on the first, whilst that of Desmoulins
was on the second floor of the house.
As to
the Cordeliers, on which the preceding note is written, the hall in which their
meetings were first held still exists (at we have said in the text) under the
title of Musée Dupuytren,
The Church
of the Cordeliers, into which they afterwards moved, has disappeared, but the
last locale of the club (when the Municipality had turned them out of the
church in 1791) still remains, and is to be discovered at No. 105 Rue
Thionville. Danton’s father-in-law had been master of a café on the Quai de
l’Ecole. This house still remains. If I am not mistaken, it was altered
slightly during the restorations of the Second Empire. It is the house which
now stands at the south-western corner of the Place de l’Ecole, and which faces
the quai on one side and the square on the other. The street and quay outside
M. Charpentier’s café was, however, somewhat oblique to the modern street, and
ran less east than west, more south-east than north-west, than it does to-day.
The quay
has been raised and the old fountain in the Place de l’Ecole destroyed.
Otherwise the quarter is much the same. The café became famous later for its
draught players, a reputation that still continues.