f imagination called
into life and given each its local habitation and its name by the poet's
pen working its immemorial spell upon the reader's credulity.

To me D'Artagnan is rather more vital than Richelieu. Hugo's imps
and Balzac's bullies dance down the stage and shut from the view the
tax-collectors and the court favorites. The mousquetaires crowd the
field marshals off the scene. There is something real in Quasimodo, in
Caesar de Birotteau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in Mazarin, in
the Regent and in Jean Lass. Even here, in faraway Kentucky, I can shut
my eyes and see the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were coming out
of the Bristol or the Ritz to step into her automobile, while the Grande
Mademoiselle is merely a cloud of clothes and words that for me mean
nothing at all.

I once passed a week, day by day, roaming through the Musee Carnavalet.
Madame de Sevigne had an apartment and held her salon there for nearly
twenty years. Hard by is the house where the Marquise de Brinvilliers--a
gentle, blue-eyed thing they tell us--a poor, insane creature she must
have been--disseminated poison and death, and, just across and beyond
the Place des Vosges, the Hotel de Sens, whither Queen Margot took her
doll-rags and did her spriting after she and Henri Quatre had agreed
no longer to slide down the same cellar door. There is in the Museum
a death-mask, colored and exceeding life-like, taken the day
after Ravaillac delivered the finishing knife-thrust in the Rue de
Ferronnerie, which represents the Bearnais as anything but a tamer of
hearts. He was a fighter, however, from Wayback, and I dare say Dumas'
narrative is quite as authentic as any.

One can scarce wonder that men like Hugo and Balzac chose this quarter
of the town to live in--and Rachael, too!--it having given such frequent
shelter to so many of their fantastic creations, having been the real
abode of a train of gallants and bravos, of saints and harlots from the
days of Diane de Poitiers to the days of Pompadour and du Barry, and of
statesmen and prelates likewise from Sully to Necker, from Colbert to
Turgot.

III

I speak of the Marais as I might speak of Madison Square, or Hyde
Park--as a well-known local section--yet how few Americans who have gone
to Paris have ever heard of it. It is in the eastern division of the
town. One finds it a curious circumstance that so many if not most of
the great cities somehow started with the risin