Among the countless American feet that tread Rue du Bac and Rue de Babylone, on their way to the shop that is a shrine at the junction of those two streets, there may be some few that turn into Rue Oudinot. It is well worth the turning, if only because it has contrived to keep that village aspect given by gardens behind walls, and cottages within those gardens. It still bore its old name, Plumet, when General Hugo came to live in it, that he might be near his son in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and here he died suddenly in January, 1828. In this house, well known to Hugo, he installed Valjean and the girl Cosette. From this house, by its back door and by the lane between high parallel walls, Valjean slips out unseen into Rue de Babylone. In its front garden, under a stone on her bench, Cosette finds her wonderful love-letter; and here is the scene of that exquisite love-making, when Marius appears in the moonlight.
The trumpery tumults of 1832--in hopeless revolt against the Orleans monarchy and in impotent adventure for the republic--give occasion for grandiose barricade-building and for melodramatic combats. Hugo takes us, with Marius and his fellow-students, to that labyrinth of narrowest lanes, twisting about high bluffs of houses, that was then to be found between the churches of Saint-Leu and Saint-Eustache. It was a most characteristic corner of mediæval Paris, and it has, only recently and not yet entirely, been cut away by Rue Rambuteau, and built over by the business structures around the Halles. The street of la Grande-Truanderie is for the most part respectabilized, that of la Chanverie is reformed quite out of life, and la Petite-Truanderie alone remains narrow and malodorous. But "_Corinthe_" has been carted clean away. This was the notorious tavern, of two-storied stone, in front of which Enjolras defended his barricade, within which Grantaire emptied his last bottle, and in whose upper room these two stood up against the wall to be shot. Grantaire was doubtless sketched from his illustrious precursor and prototype, the poet, Mathurin Régnier, who tippled and slept at a table of this squalid drinking-den during many years, until the year 1615, when debauchery killed him too young. His colossal and abused body carried the soul, original, virile, and fiery, which he has put into his verse, although he has over-polished it a bit. When this tavern--in the fields near the open markets--was his favorite resort, it bore the sign and name, "_Pot-aux-Roses_"; it was dedicated later "_Au Raisin de Corinthe_"; and this was soon popularly shortened to "_Corinthe_." Forty years after his death, another true poet was born in the tall house that rose alongside this tavern, its windows looking out over the waste lands of the Marais, as Jean-François Regnard says in his verse. Like young Poquelin, thirty years before, this boy played about the Halles; then he went away to strange adventures in foreign lands with pirates and with ladies; and came home here to write comedies, that have the gayety and sparkle, yet not the depth, of those of Molière. Indeed, Voltaire asserts that he who is not pleased with Regnard is not fit to admire Molière. The seventeenth-century mansion, in which he was born, befitted the position of his father, a rich city merchant, and it has luckily escaped demolition, albeit brought down to base uses, as you shall see on looking at No. 108 Rue Rambuteau. And if you hurry to this neighborhood, you may yet find some few reminders of the scenes of 1832. In Rue de la Petite-Truanderie is just such a tavern as was "_Corinthe_," in its worst days. Its huge square pillars will hardly hold up, much longer, the aged stone walls. Just here is the dark corner where Valjean set Javert free; and in Rue Mondétour, at that end not yet shortened and straightened into a semblance of respectability, you may see a small sewer-mouth, direct descendant of the grated hole, down which Valjean crawled, with Marius on his back, to begin that almost incredible march through the tortuous sewers to their outlet on the Seine, under Cours-la-Reine. He came out on a spit of sand, "not very far distant from the house brought to Paris in 1824," says Hugo, who should have said 1826. His reference is to the house popularly named "_la maison de François Ier_." It was built by that monarch, at Moret on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, for his beloved sister, Marguerite de Navarre, it is believed. It was removed, stone by stone, and re-erected on its present site in Cours-la-Reine, where it is a delight to the lover of French Renaissance.