It was in the Marais that the intelligentsia of baroque Paris held their gatherings. In Rue de Béarn, behind the Place Royale, the new convent of the Minimes had just been completed, with a chapel decorated by Vouet, La Hyre and Champaigne, and a doorway that was seen as François Mansart’s masterpiece. Père Mersenne – ‘a savant in whom there was more than in all the universities together’, as Hobbes said of him in his own Paris exile – gave hospitality to Descartes for a number of months, before his move to Holland. Mersenne also received Gérard Desargues, a geometer who specialized in the design of staircases, along with his young student, Blaise Pascal, who lived not far away on Rue de Touraine. This was a curious establishment, in the lead not just in the struggle against misguided thinkers – the ‘confrérie des bouteilles’, Théophile de Viau, Saint-Amant, Guez de Balzac – but also in scientific research, with a library of 25,000 volumes. At the Hôtel de Montmort, on Rue du Temple, you could meet Huygens, Gassendi (who bequeathed Galileo’s personal telescope to Hubert de Montmort, counsellor to the Parlement), or Claude Tardy, the doctor who introduced into France William Harvey’s new ideas on the circulation of the blood and the role of the heart: there was a passionate controversy in the salons between the ‘circulationists’ and the ‘anti-circulationists’ who defended Galien’s system. Every Monday, Lamoignon de Malesherbes would invite writers to his hôtel on Rue Pavée80 – Racine, Bouleau, La Rochefoucauld, Bourdaloue – often also joined by Guy Patin, doctor to the king and professor at the Collège de France.
Women held salons as well. Some of them were what would later be called demi-mondaines: Marion Delorme, whose salon was on the Place Royale, and Ninon de Lenclos, whose residence on Rue des Tournelles was the rendezvous of the ‘libertines’, i.e., freethinkers, though this did not prevent her from having among her regulars La Rochefoucauld and Mme de Lafayette, Boileau, Mignard, and Lully. Legend has it that Molière read his Tartuffe here for the first time, before La Fontaine and Racine, who had come with the actress La Champmeslé. Mme de Sévigné wrote to her daughter on 1 April 1671, concerned about 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