Sans-Cravate; or, The Messengers; Little StreamsKock, Paul de
General
Sans-Cravate; or, The Messengers; Little Streams
Kock, Paul de
French fiction -- Translations into English
Then there is Rue Saint-Paul, which cannot fail to remind you of the
famous mansion erected by Charles V. With its gardens, it occupied all
the space between Rue Saint-Antoine and the river, from the city moat to
the church of the parish of Saint-Paul. In those days, the houses in
which kings dwelt were always flanked by huge towers, and the gardens
planted with fruit trees and vines. Rue Beautrellis and Rue de la
Cerisaye took their names respectively from a beautiful trellis and from
a plantation of cherry trees, both of which were within the confines of
the gardens of the Hôtel Saint-Paul. We have become more luxurious than
our kings of the olden time, for now no petty banker will have anything
but ornamental trees and shrubs in his park; he would blush to have you
find a plum tree or an apricot tree there.
On Rue des Trois Pavillons, one's thoughts inevitably turn to the fair
Diane de Poitiers, whom Henri II made Duchesse de Valentinois. That
street once bore her name, because she lived there; I cannot tell you
why they rechristened it, but, for my part, I prefer the name of a
pretty woman to Trois Pavillons.
Lastly, there is the Vieille Rue du Temple. Your heart contracts as you
recall the assassination of the Duc d'Orléans on that street, one
evening in the month of November, 1407, near a small house called the
Image de Notre-Dame.
But we have dwelt long enough on the memories evoked by that ancient
quarter. Although the Marais has retained down to the present day, in
some of its streets, a part of its primitive aspect, it has undergone
numerous changes; new, broad, and airy streets and elegant, even
coquettish, houses have risen on the sites of the gloomy Gothic
structures of our ancestors. As for the people of that quarter, they
bear no resemblance whatever to the Parisians who lived in the Marais at
the time of which we have been evoking the memory. Morals, customs,
manners, everything is changed, and we may well congratulate our
contemporaries that it is so; for, as we have seen, duels, murders, and
ambuscades are the subjects of most of the legends that have come down
to us. We may be less chivalrous, but, while we are no less brave, we
are more light-hearted, more amiable, and much less treacherous than our
forbears of the good old time.
To-day, the people of the Marais dress almost as well as those of the
Chaussée d'Antin; there are no districts in Paris now that are behind
the times in respect to fashions, but everybody cannot or does not
choose to follow them. A dandy of Rue Saint-Louis may make as fine a
show as he of Boulevard des Italiens, especially as there is nothing to
prevent their having the same tailor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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