In forming and housing the great collection of the History of Paris, to which the Musée Carnavalet is devoted, new buildings about a trim garden in the rear have been added to the original mansion, whose own rooms have been subjected to as little change as possible. Madame de Sévigné's apartment, on the first floor, is hardly altered, and her bedroom and _salon_ have been especially kept inviolate. The admirable mouldings, the curious mirrors, the old-fashioned lustre, remain as she left them, when she went to her daughter at Grignan to die. In this _salon_, and in the wide corridor leading to it, both now so silent and pensive, she received all the men of her day worth receiving; and it is here alone that we breathe the very atmosphere of this incomparable creature.
We may join the early-goers among these men, who make their way to another house, not far distant. There are temptations to stop before, and explore within, the seventeenth-century mansions all along Rues Sévigné and du Parc-Royal, but we pass on into Rue Turenne--once Rue Saint-Louis, the longest and widest and foremost in fashion of Marais streets, now merely big and bustling, with little left of its ancient glory--until we come to its No. 58, on the corner of old Rue des Douze-Portes, now named Ville-Hardouin, after the contemporary chronicler of the Fifth Crusade. This modest house at the corner has been luckily overlooked by the modern rebuilder of this quarter, who has not touched its two stories and low attic above a ground floor, its unobtrusive portal, its narrow hall, and its staircase; small and quaint, in keeping with the cripple who was carried up and down for many years. Paul Scarron lived here, in the apartment _au deuzième à droite_, dubbed the "_Hôtel de l'Impécuniosité_" by his young wife, who was the granddaughter of the Calvinist leader, Agrippa d'Aubigné, and who was to be the second wife of Louis XIV. Sitting at her scantily supplied supper-table here, the maid would whisper that a course was lacking, and that an anecdote from the hostess must fill the bill of fare instead. Goldsmith tells us, at the beginning of his "Retaliation:"
"Of old when Scarron his companions invited, Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united."