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Contents. Maps and Illustrations (etext transcriber's note) |
BY
MABELL S. C. SMITH
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1913,
By THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY.
Published October, 1913.
TO
M. P. G.
——
Un rayon de soleil a ses entrées partout.
Sardou
FRANCE has been inhabited since the days when prehistoric man unconsciously told the story of his life through the medium of the household utensils and the implements of war which he left behind him in the caves in which he dwelt, or which his considerate relatives buried with him to make his sojourn easy in the land beyond the grave. From bits of bone, of flint, and of polished stone archæologists have reconstructed the man himself and his activities through the early ages. Of contemporary information, however, there is none until the adventurous peoples of the Mediterranean pushed their way as traders and explorers into the heart of Gaul, and then wrote about their discoveries. The Gauls, they said, were largely Celtic in origin and had displaced an earlier race, the Iberians, whom they had crowded to the southwest. They were brave, loyal, superstitious, and subject to their priests, the Druids. Their dress showed that they had made great advance in knowledge over the cave men, for they wore colored tunics—which meant that they knew how to spin and weave and dye—and brazen helmets and shields and gold and silver girdles—which meant that they could work in metal.
Such industries prove that the nomadic life was over, and, in truth, there were many towns throughout Gaul, some of them of no mean size, furnished with public utilities such as wells and bridges, and surrounded by fields made fertile by irrigation. An independent spirit had developed, too, for in about the year 500 B.C. the chiefs and nobles rebelled against the lay authority of the Druids. Then these chiefs and nobles seem to have ruled “without the consent of the governed,” for Cæsar relates that before he went to Gaul in 58 B.C. the lower classes had rebelled against the upper, and, with the aid of the Druids, had beaten them.
It is from Cæsar, too, that we first learn something about Paris. “Lutetia,” he calls it, “a stronghold of the Parisii,” who were one of the three or four hundred tribes who dwelt in Gaul. Lutetia—“Mudtown” Carlyle translates the name—was not much of a stronghold, for its fortifications could have been nothing more than a stockade encircling the round huts which made up the village occupying an island in the Seine, the present “Cité” (from the Latin civitas), and connected with both banks by bridges. It was only about half a mile long and an eighth of a mile wide. It was large enough and strong enough, however, to serve as a refuge for the tribesmen in time of war. Probably such a haven was not an unusual arrangement. Not far from Paris is another instance in Melun which has grown around the village which the Romans called Melodunum, built in the same way on an island in the river.
In the spring of 53 B.C. Cæsar summoned delegates from all the tribes of Gaul to meet at Lutetia, but the rebellion of the year 52 in which the Parisii joined determined the Roman general to destroy the town and crush the tribe. He sent Labienus with four legions to carry out his plans. The Gauls chose as their leader Camulogenus of the tribe of the Aulerci, an old man, but skilled in warfare. He took advantage of the marsh on the right bank of the river and so stationed his troops as to prevent the approach of the Romans to the little town. Labienus first tried to make a road across the bog by laying down hurdles plastered with clay. This proved too much of an undertaking, so he slipped away “at the third watch” and retraced his steps to Melodunum. There he seized fifty ships which he filled with Roman soldiers and with them threatened the town so effectually that it yielded to him. Then he repaired the bridge, crossed to the left bank, and once more began his march toward Lutetia. When the Lutetians heard of this move from refugees, they burned their town and destroyed its bridges. Labienus put a Roman knight in command of each of the fifty ships which he had captured and ordered them to slip silently down the river for about four miles under cover of darkness. Five steady cohorts he left to guard the camp, and another five he despatched up the river after midnight with instructions to carry their baggage with no attempt at quiet. In the same direction he sent certain small boats whose oars were to meet the water right noisily. He himself led a body of soldiers in the direction which the ships had taken. When the Gauls were informed by their scouts of the seeming division into three bands of the Roman army they, naturally but unwisely, made a like division of their own men. In the battle that ensued—probably near the Ivry of to-day—the Gauls resisted with such courage that very few took refuge in flight, preferring to fall with the valiant Camulogenus. The Gauls left to watch Labienus’s camp tried to aid their fellows when they heard of the battle in progress, but they could not withstand the attack of the victorious Romans, whose cavalry cut down all but the few who managed to escape to the wooded hills.
So it happens, rather humorously, that the earliest written account of Paris is that telling of the destruction which left its site a clean slate upon which the Romans might begin to write its story. For five hundred years they wrote, until the Frankish invasion swept its destructive might across Romanized Gaul.
In five hundred years much may be brought to pass, and the Paris that Sainte Geneviève saved from Attila the Hun (451 A.D.) and in which Clovis established himself (481) was a town vastly different from the stockade-defended hamlet which Labienus set out to destroy. While its position was selected by the Gauls because it could be easily defended, it was evident in later and more peaceful times that the city could be developed into a valuable commercial station. The Seine and its tributaries, the Marne and the Oise, proved highways on which the products of a large district could be carried to the distributing center, Lutetia, whence they could be packed north or south or to the coast provinces over the masterly roads which always made an important feature of the Roman colonizing policy. There are Paris streets to-day which follow these same roads into the country.
Roman civilization made its last stand in Gaul, and Paris became one of the flourishing places which the Romans knew how to encourage. As soon as the strength of the builders permitted, the town ceased to be confined to the island and spread on both sides of the river. A bridge, fortified at the mainland end, connected the island with the right bank and with the road threading its way northward to avoid the marsh whose name (Marais) is still given to a district of the city. Where now on the north shore is the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville there has always been an open place, originally kept free for the landing of merchandise from the river boats. This open place was called the Grève or Strand, and the busy scenes enacted upon it sometimes included quarrels between the masters and the longshoremen. Such a dispute came to be called a grève, the French word to-day for a strike.
Where now the Palais Royal rises on the right bank, a reservoir held water to supply the public baths. Tombs clustered along the roads leading north and east, for cemeteries were not allowed within Roman cities. Otherwise the north side of the river with its unwholesome marsh was but scantily populated.
Far different was the southern or left bank, sloping pleasantly to the Seine from Mons
Lucotetius. This hill is now known as Mont Sainte Geneviève and is crowned by the church, Saint Étienne-du-Mont, that holds her tomb, and by the Pantheon, long dedicated to her, but now a secular building. This southern district was drained by the little stream, Bièvre, whose waters in later times were believed to hold some chemical properties which accounted for the brilliancy of the tapestries made in the Gobelins factory situated on its banks. Fields, fruitful in vines and olive trees, clustered around villas which the Romans knew well how to build for comfort and beauty, and which the conquered Gauls were not slow to adopt, modifying the form to their needs as they modified the Roman dress, covering with the graceful toga the business-like garments of older Gaul.
The later emperors came often to Lutetia. They, too, saw the beauty of the river’s left bank connected with the Cité by a fortified bridge. Some one of them, probably Constantius Chlorus, built a palace of majestic size with gardens sweeping to the river bank, and here in Lucotecia, Lutetia’s suburb, Constantine the Great and his two sons lived when they visited this part of Gaul. Constantine’s nephew, Julian, called the Apostate because of his adherence to the old philosophies, spent parts of three years here.
“I was in winter quarters,” he wrote, “in my dear Lutetia, which is situated in the middle of a river on an island of moderate size joined to the mainland by two bridges. The winter is less severe here than elsewhere, perhaps because of the gentle sea breezes which reach Lutetia, the distance of this city from the sea being only nine hundred stadia. This part of the country has excellent vineyards, and the people cultivate fig-trees which they protect against the winter’s cold by coverings of straw.”
In the huge palace where Julian found himself so happy his physician, Oribasius, prepared an edition of the works of Galen, the first book published in Paris; and here it was—or perhaps in the palace on the Cité—that in 361 the rebellious Roman soldiers proclaimed Julian as their emperor. Of the palace there is left to-day what was probably but a small part of the original building, but which is, in reality, a section of no small size. It was that portion of the structure which contained the baths, and it gave its name to the building—Palais des Thermes (Palace of the Baths). One room, preserved in fair condition and showing the enduring Roman brick and stone-work, is sixty-five feet long and thirty-seven feet wide and springs to a vaulted height of fifty-nine feet. It is used as a museum of Gallo-Roman remains. The baths were supplied with water by an aqueduct some eleven miles in length, fragments of which have been found at various parts of its course. At Arcueil, a town three miles from Paris, named from the Latin word arculus, a little arch, there still remain parts of two arches whose small stones are held by the extraordinarily tenacious Roman cement and are varied by occasional thin, horizontal layers of red tiles. At present they are built into the walls of a château which has recently been bequeathed to the town for an old men’s home.
Somewhere south of the palace and not far from it was a garrison to protect the suburb and the Cité from southern invasion. That it was not greatly needed during this peaceful and prosperous period seems proved by the fact that Lutetia’s amusement ground was not within its easy reach, but on the eastern slope of Mons Lucotetius. Here at some time during the Roman occupation, perhaps during the second or third century, an amphitheater was built, and here emperors and generals and merchants, Romans and Gauls, gazed upon the pageants and contests of the arena. Christianity wrought a milder mood in her believers and even before the invasion of the Franks the stone seats of the ellipse had been converted to other uses. Enough was discovered, however, some thirty
years ago to permit an adequate idea of the original appearance.
To Julian has been attributed the rebuilding of the Cité, and excavations at different points have unearthed remains unmistakably of Roman workmanship, which show that the island was completely surrounded by a wall. Probably some of the stones of the amphitheater went into it. This fortification has been related to the fourth century, and it is known that on the spot in the Cité where the Palais de Justice now houses the law courts, an administrative building of some kind has stood since this same early date. One of Julian’s successors, Maximus, erected a triumphal arch near the cathedral in 383, and it is probable that other pretentious structures justified the erection of the protecting wall.
The cathedral was a church dedicated to Saint Étienne, modest as compared with its medieval successor, Notre Dame, whose sacristy is placed on the same spot, yet showing that concentration of the arts in their expression of religious spirit which has made the churches of Europe at once the treasure-house of the student and the devotee, the inspiration of the poet, and the joy of the lover of color and of line. Both of these Christian churches have stood on ground already dedicated to religion, for under the choir of Notre Dame there was discovered in 1711 a pagan altar, now the chief relic of the museum in the Thermes. The inscription on the stone places it in the reign of the emperor Tiberius (14-37 A.D.), the successor of the great Augustus. Its inscription reads: “When Tiberius was emperor the Parisian Watermen publicly raised this altar to Jupiter, best and greatest.”
The Nautæ Stone.
These Watermen (Nautae) seem from early days to have been an important guild, first as carriers of merchandise and later as an administrative body. In the twelfth century the band was called the Brotherhood of Water Merchants, and its head the Provost of the Water Merchants, a name given in shortened form—Provost of the Merchants—to the first magistrate of the city up to the time of the Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Even to-day such of the duties of the Prefect of the Seine as apply not to the Department of the Seine but to the city of Paris alone are comparable to those of the Provost of the Merchants. From the seal of the Nautae, a boat, has developed the present coat of arms of the City of Paris.
It was about the middle of the third century that the altar to greatest Jupiter began to be deserted by its worshipers, for it was then that Saint Denis came to Paris to preach the new religion, and with his coming and the Emperor Constantine’s conversion Christian churches began to be built. Even the martyrdom of Saint Denis, who, according to Gregory of Tours, “ended his earthly life by the sword,” was no check to believers. Legend has it that his head was stricken off on Montmartre, the hill towering above Paris on the north, and to-day crowned by the pearl-white dome of the basilica of the Sacré Coeur gleaming, mysterious, through the city’s eternal haze. The hill’s name has been said to mean “Mount of Mars,” because of a pagan altar raised upon its summit, or “Mount of the Martyr,” referring to the death of Saint Denis. Either derivation may be defended, and neither contradicts the story that the holy Bishop of Paris, decapitated, picked up his head and carried it for several miles before a kindly-disposed woman offered him burial. Over his remains a chapel was raised, restored about two centuries later by Sainte Geneviève, and replaced in 630 by the basilica which Dagobert I (602-638) erected to house fittingly that most holy relic, the head of the saint. The existing church was begun about five hundred years later by Suger, the minister of Louis VI who adopted the oriflamme of Saint Denis as the royal standard of France. The flag hung above the altar and was used only when the king went into battle himself. Since the English victory on the field of Agincourt (1415) it has not left the church. The banner (in replica) stands to-day in the choir behind and to the left of the high altar. Throughout the church are the tombs of the Kings of France from Dagobert to Louis XVIII—twelve centuries of royal bones.
The canonization of Martin, bishop of Tours, the soldier saint who did not hesitate to divide his cloak with the shivering poor, received early recognition in Paris, where, indeed, he has always been popular. In what was in Roman days the country but is now well within the city limits a chapel was reared in his honor on the spot where he stopped to cure a leper when he was on his way to Paris. In the eleventh century it was replaced by the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, which developed into one of the huge monastic establishments which were each a little world in itself during the middle ages. Another chapel to Saint Martin rose at the mainland end of the bridge leading from the island to the right bank.
It was a fair and prosperous city that the world conquerors had nursed beside the Seine; it remained for time to prove whether its five centuries of growth had made it strong and sound or whether its heart was rotten and its roots uncertain of their hold.
THE reading of Cæsar’s “Commentaries” makes us know that the Gauls with whom he contended were worthy opponents, ingenious in planning warfare and enthusiastic in fighting. Even the trained Roman legions had to work for their victories. Granting possible exaggeration, which is a sore temptation to a conqueror, eager to magnify the difficulties of his conquest, it is nevertheless clear that a radical change had transformed these fierce Gauls and irresistible Romans of a half century before Christ when, five hundred years later, a band of less than 10,000 “barbarians”, led by Clovis, swept across a comparatively unresisting Gaul.
What had happened in Gaul was what had happened in other parts of the Roman Empire. Money had concentrated in the hands of an insatiable few. To supply them and the government every stratum of society was squeezed of its smallest coin, until good men of middle-class position were willing to sell themselves into slavery to avoid the insistent demands of self-seeking tax collectors, and the government was meanly willing to accept the sacrifice because the supply of slaves was not being kept up since the victorious eagles had ceased to perch upon Rome’s banner.
In Paris conditions were not different from those in other parts of the province. The town was good to look upon with handsome Roman buildings, and it was ordered with due respect to the laws for whose making Rome had undoubted genius; but beneath this fair outside there shivered the soul of the dependent grown cowardly from abuse, lacking loyalty for what was unworthy of loyalty. The Gauls, who had adopted the language and manners of their conquerors, had become weak from overmuch reliance on the stronger power; the Romans had softened during years of peace. So it happened that when the barbarians from the north and east threatened Gaul they were bought off with gifts of land, and when, in 451, Attila, the Scourge of God, led into the north his fierce and hideous Huns whose only joy was bloodshed, the people of Paris prepared themselves for flight when he was still a long way off.
For every vital crisis in the life of the individual there is given a counterbalancing power of endurance; to groups this power is taught by the man or woman whom the circumstances develop as a leader. In this emergency, when the dreaded shadow of the hawklike Hun fluttered the citizens, and they were making preparations for deserting the town and taking into hiding such of their goods and chattels as they could, the leader developed in the unexpected form of a woman—Sainte Geneviève. Some say that Geneviève was, like Jeanne Darc a thousand years later, a peasant girl. Saint Germain of Auxerre, the story goes, on his way to “quenche an heresye” across the Channel, chanced to visit Nanterre where his prophetic eye espied the divine spirit in the little maid and his holy hand sealed her unto God. Another version insists that Geneviève belonged to a prominent family in Paris and that her family’s influence accounted for her sway over the people.
For sway them she did. At her bidding the women of the city fasted and fell on their knees and assailed God with prayer. Nearer and nearer came the foe, and the unbelieving reviled the maiden; but Saint Germain reproached them for their lack of faith and the miracle came to pass—the “tyrantes approachyd not parys.”
All quarrels were lost in the apprehension of this attack of a common enemy, and by the united effort of Gauls and Romans, of Burgundians, Visigoths and Franks, the dreaded Attila was defeated near Châlons in a battle so determined that the very ghosts of the slain, it was declared, continued the fight.
Freed of this menace to the whole country the victorious tribes again fell to quarreling among themselves. The Franks proved sturdiest and most persistent. Descended from Pharamond, who, perhaps, was legendary, their king, Mérovée, had led them against Attila. Now his son, Childéric, attacked Paris. Again Geneviève rescued her townsmen from famine, herself embarking upon the Seine, which probably was beset by the enemy along the banks, and returning with a boatload of provisions which, by miraculous multiplication, revictualed the whole hungry and despairing garrison.
Childéric’s son, Clovis, leading about 8000 men, in 481 made himself king of northern France with Paris as his capital, thus establishing the line of monarchs who called themselves Merovingians. “Paris,” he wrote in 500 A.D., “is a brilliant queen over other cities; a royal city, the seat and head of the empire of the Gauls. With Paris safe the realm has nothing to fear.”
Clovis had married an orthodox Catholic wife, Clotilde, who was eager for his conversion. Her arguments are said to have been far from gentle, but they seem to have been suited to her husband’s nature, for he was almost persuaded to make the great change at the time of the birth of his eldest child. The baby died within the week, however, and the king looked upon his loss as an act of vengeance on the part of his deserted gods. When the second child recovered from a serious illness he was convinced that Clotilde’s intercessions had saved its life, and again he inclined toward Christianity. An incident determined his acceptance of his wife’s faith. In the battle of Tolbiac against the Germans Clovis begged the aid of “the God of the Christians” to determine in his favor a wavering victory. He won the fight, and it is easy to believe the joy of Sainte Geneviève, when the monarch was baptized in the cathedral at Rheims. He seems to have been of simple mind. The fittings and the ceremonies of the vast church touched his spirit to submission. “Is not this the kingdom of heaven you promised me?” he asked of the bishop. Again, when he listened to the story of the crucifixion, he is said to have cried with an elemental desire for vengeance, “Oh, had I been there with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ!”
Sainte Geneviève died in 509 and the citizens of grateful Paris over which she had watched in wise tenderness for fourscore years, made her their patron saint. The hill that had been known as Mons Lucotetius they called Mont Sainte Geneviève, and on it they built a chapel to honor and protect her grave. Clovis replaced the little oratory by a church as long as the mighty swing of his battle-axe, dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul and serving as the abbey church of a religious establishment which bore Sainte Geneviève’s name. Except for a dormitory and refectory this monastery was torn down in the middle of the eighteenth century to give place to a new church of Sainte Geneviève, secularized to-day and known as the Pantheon. The abbey church, built and rebuilt, was destroyed during the Revolution, the tower (called the Tower of Clovis, but really belonging to a later period) being all that is left of these historic structures. The reaction against religion in those turbulent revolutionary years made it no sacrilege to burn the good saint’s bones on the Grève, but some of the devoted preserved the ashes which rest now in a stone sarcophagus, elaborately canopied, in the neighboring church of Saint Étienne-du-Mont built in the twelfth century as a church for the dependents of the Abbey.
The comparatively peaceful and prosperous Roman period of five hundred years was followed by five centuries of strife and disaster at the hands of the northern tribes. The Roman Empire had found in Gaul the last stronghold of its civilization. There were large cities, fine buildings, public utilities, institutions of learning. To the barbarians, a youthful race at the destructive stage, these represented but so many things to be destroyed. Terrible and repeated onslaughts ousted the Romans, and then the victors became embroiled with new tribes who sought to drive them out. Palaces and houses were destroyed, fields and vineyards were laid waste. Paris, the stronghold of the early Merovingians, suffered less than the other important towns of Gaul, but the Franks had no standards of fair living, and they did not build up where time or their own ferocity had cast down. Tottering walls were bolstered with rough buttresses, new dwellings were square hovels of the same heavy stonework, farming languished, commerce died.
The successors of Clovis for one hundred and fifty years tricked their wives, murdered their rivals, and assassinated their nearest of kin if they stood in their way. Clovis divided his kingdom among his four sons. One of them was killed in battle soon after and left his three children to the care of their grandmother, Clotilde, with whom they lived in the great palace on the left bank. Just like the wicked uncles in many a fairy tale two of Clovis’s surviving sons obtained possession of the little boys by stratagem and took them away to the palace on the Cité. Then they sent to Clotilde a messenger who bade her choose between the shears and the sword—the shears which should clip the children’s locks and thereby sever their claims to the throne and send them into the Church, and the sword of death. In a passion of indignation Clotilde exclaimed that she would rather see them dead than shorn. Claiming this cry as their authorization the two men set about the murder of their nephews. Childebert, king of Paris, proved somewhat less brutal than his brother (he loved flowers enough to plant a garden at the Roman palace) and would have saved the children—they were hardly more than babies—but Clotaire stabbed two of them with his own hand. Then he married their mother. The third boy escaped, came under the tutelage of Saint Séverin and entered a Benedictine monastery. When he was a man grown he established a religious house at a spot a few miles from Paris called Saint Cloud from his name, Clodoald. Here, on a height above the river, stood the château where Napoleon effected the coup d’ état that made him First Consul, and whence Charles X issued the decrees that brought about the Revolution of 1830. The building was burned during the troubles of 1870, but the park with its fine allées of trees and its fountains is one of the playgrounds of modern Paris.
Clotaire had done away with the possible rivalry of his nephews but he had a bitter enemy in his brother Thierry. This amiable relative plotted his assassination. He invited him to a feast and stationed his desperadoes behind a curtain whence they should spring out upon their victim. Some friend of Clotaire’s, chancing to pass by, noticed below this apparently innocent screen a row of feet unaccounted for, and guessed the project of their owners. Warned of his danger Clotaire came amply guarded and caused his brother extreme annoyance by his evident knowledge of his plan and its consequent frustration. Thierry gave him a silver dish by way of souvenir of this pleasant occasion, but he repented him of this generosity as soon as Clotaire was out of sight and sent his son to replevin the gift.
One of Clotaire’s sons, Chilpéric I (who died in 584) gave his daughter in marriage to the son of the king of the Visigoths in Spain. A great train came to Paris to fetch the bride, and the appearance of these rough Goths and the thought of her approaching separation from her parents and friends so afflicted the young girl that her father determined to secure companionship for her. He commanded some chosen young people—girls and youths of her own age—and also some entire families to go with her into Spain. So great was the opposition to this high-handed proceeding that it became necessary forcibly to seize the unwilling recipients of the honor in order to be sure of their presence when the expedition started. Some of those who were to be separated from their kindred committed suicide in despair over their banishment. “In Paris there reigned a desolation like Egypt,” says sympathetic Gregory of Tours. Robbed of their children the rich Parisians found the country also robbed of gold and silver vessels and of handsome raiment, for the queen heaped into her daughter’s bridal coffers the treasures that she had obtained from the nobles in the course of years under the guise of revenue. So loath were the princess’s attendants to follow her fortunes and so lacking were they in loyalty that her retinue on arriving in Spain was lessened not only by the daily desertions of all who could manage to escape, but by the defection in a body of no less than fifty men.
Frédégonde, the bride’s mother, was a woman of forceful will and of unbridled passions. The list of deaths for which she was responsible reads like a roster of the royal family. Although of low birth she attracted the attention of the king, Chilpéric, and induced him to put aside his wife, Audovère. Chilpéric then married Galsuinthe, sister of Brunehaut, wife of his brother Sigebert. Frédégonde soon compassed Galsuinthe’s death and then achieved her ambition and became queen herself. Brunehaut naturally was indignant as well as sorrowful at her sister’s death, clearly the work of an assassin. She urged her husband to vengeance and he declared war against Chilpéric. His activity was not of long duration, however, for he, too, fell a victim to Frédégonde’s ferocity. Brunehaut saved her life only by claiming the asylum of the cathedral of Paris. Not long after she married Mérovée, a son of Chilpéric and Audovère. Then Frédégonde disposed of her by inducing Sigebert’s subjects to claim their queen and by insisting that Chilpéric should deliver her over to them. Mérovée, at her command, was shorn and imprisoned and hounded until he sought death at the hands of a servant. His brother was stabbed. Their mother, Audovère, was not safe even in the cloister, for she was murdered in her retreat. Chilpéric himself was the next victim, killed by a knife-thrust as he returned from the chase. He was succeeded by an infant son, Clotaire II (613-628), and Frédégonde spent the rest of her life in alternations of affectionately fierce devotion to his interests and in scheming against the authority of his guardians.
Brunehaut outlived her enemy, Frédégonde, by many years and finally met her death at the order of Frédégonde’s son. After a stormy career during which she compassed much good for the subjects of her son and grandsons and earned her share of hatred from the nobles whom she opposed, she was captured by Clotaire. Her extreme age—she was eighty—did not save her from a brutal end. She was stripped and displayed to his army, then bound by a foot, an arm and her hair to a wild horse which kicked her to death. This hideous deed was done in Paris where now the rue Saint Honoré crosses the rue de l’Arbre Sec, and not far from the site of the house wherein Admiral Coligny was slain, the first victim of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.
Of all the Merovingian kings only Dagobert I (628-638), son of Clotaire II, proved himself a man of strength, incongruously fighting and praying, massacring captives and building churches, living a vicious life in private and governing with justice and intelligence. “Great king Dagobert” he was called, and he was regarded impartially as a “jolly good fellow” and as a saint. He lived in the palace on the Cité, and he rebuilt the abbey of Saint Denis, invited distant merchants to visit Gaul, dealt out justice to poor and rich alike in unconventional and hearty fashion, and hammered his enemies with the same vigor and enthusiasm.
In the century following his the Merovingian line degenerated into a race of “Rois Fainéants” (“Do-nothing Kings”), dissolute, lazy, leaving the task of government to their Mayors of the Palace while they rolled slothfully in ox-carts from the debaucheries of one country house to the coarse pleasures of another.
The only upbuilding accomplished during the Merovingian two centuries and a half was the establishment of churches and religious houses. The Frank was not aggressive in the less active relations of his duties as a victor. He was content to learn the language of the conquered race and the mysticism of religion spoke to him winningly. Throughout the years when nothing that fell was restored and the hand was busy striking, at least one kind of constructive impulse was manifest when Clovis built the church in which he was buried on Mons Lucotetius, when his son, Childebert, reared an abbey on the south bank to protect the tunic of Saint Vincent, when on the north bank a church was dedicated to the same saint and another to Saint Laurent, while the south side was further enriched by edifices sacred to Saint Julien and to Saint Séverin, the tutor of Clodoald. It is not the original buildings that we see on these sites to-day, but it is a not uninteresting phase of the French spirit that has reared one structure after another upon ground once consecrated, so that a church stands to-day where a church stood fifteen hundred years ago.
The story of the foundation of the church of Saint Vincent is interesting from several points of view. Clovis divided his possessions among his four sons, giving Paris to Childebert. Childebert had no notion of staying cooped up in this northern town, and he went as far afield as Saragossa in search of war. During the course of his siege of that city he beheld its citizens marching about bearing what seemed to be a relic of especial sanctity. It proved to be the cloak of Saint Vincent in which they were trusting to save them from their assailants. It did not betray their trust, for Childebert became filled with eagerness to possess a relic which could inspire such confidence, and offered to raise the siege if they would give him the tunic. When he returned to Paris Saint Germain of Autun persuaded him to build a church for its protection and to establish an abbey whose members should make it their first duty to pay honor to the relic. This abbey was called later Saint Germain-des-Prés, the name which the abbey church bears to-day. It stands no longer in the meadows, but raises its square Merovingian tower above one of the busiest parts of Paris. Except for this tower the church was burned in the ninth century, but it was rebuilt in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the nave with its semi-circular arches is one of the few remaining examples in the city of the Romanesque architecture of which this was a characteristic. The choir shows in its arches and windows the hand of a later builder who was inclining toward the pointed Gothic.
The Merovingian kings were buried here. After the founding of Saint Denis the royal remains were removed to that abbey church.
The north bank church of Saint Vincent also received the name of Saint Germain, but this was to honor Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, the friend of Sainte Geneviève. This early edifice also was destroyed, but was rebuilt by Robert the Pious, and the later building held the bell which rang for the massacre of Saint Bartholomew a thousand years later.
These churches and monasteries were the means of preserving whatever of learning persisted through this period of return to primitive living. Every one of them was a center of information, and every one of them taught freely what it knew of agriculture and of the homely arts. Further the Church was thoroughly democratic. A bishop’s miter lay in every student’s portfolio, as a marshal’s baton hid in the knapsack of each one of Napoleon’s soldiers.
Of larger government, however, the bishops had small knowledge, and Paris, left to their guidance while the kings roamed abroad, lost her high prestige. She did not regain it under the next dynasty.
WHILE the nominal kings were losing their powers through inaction, activity was developing a race of strong rulers in the Mayors of the Palace—originally the royal stewards. Pépin d’Héristal (who died in 714) is accounted the founder of the family which was to oust the Sluggard Kings from the throne that they disgraced. Pépin’s son, Charles Martel—the Hammer—(715-741) stayed the advance of the Saracens in the fiercely fought battle at Tours where he earned not only his nickname but the gratitude of the Christian world, threatened by the Mohammedan invasion. Charles’s son, Pépin le Bref (752-768), thought that the time had come when the achievements of the Mayors of the Palace should receive recognition—when the king in fact should be the king in name. He appealed to Pope Zachary to sanction his taking the title. The pope was glad of the support of the Franks, and approved. Childéric III became the last of the Merovingian line when he was shorn of the long locks which symbolized his regal strength, and Pépin, anointed king in his stead, became the first of those monarchs who have been called Carolingians or Carlovingians from the name of his son, Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great.)
Pépin was anointed first at Soissons by the Bishop of Mayence who used in the ceremony the flask from which Saint Rémi had anointed Clovis. Later the new king was anointed again, this time at Saint Denis, by Zachary’s successor, Stephen III, who was the first pope to visit Paris. The Frankish nobles paid for the honor to their city by being forced by the Holy Father to swear allegiance to Pépin and his sons.
There was much in Paris to interest the pope. The Cité was rich in churches and religious establishments. The cathedral now was a church dedicated to Notre Dame, built by Childebert in gratitude for a recovery from illness. It stood beside the one-time cathedral dedicated to Saint Étienne; smaller churches honored Saint Gervais, Saint Nicholas and Saint Michel. Eloy, the jovial goldsmith saint, was the protector of a convent raised to his name. Saint Landry, a bishop of Paris in the seventh century, had founded a hospital on the very spot where Saint Louis and his mother, Blanche of Castile, were to build the Hôtel Dieu in the thirteenth century, and but the width of the present square from the new Hôtel Dieu, built since the Third Republic came into being. Together with religion and good works justice held sway on the island. In the Roman palace judges interpreted the laws gathered and summarized by Dagobert. In a building near by whose site is covered by the enlarged palace was housed the first organ known in Europe, a gift to Pépin. So mysterious seemed its working that a woman is said to have fallen dead when she heard it.
On the Cité dwelt the merchants, too, for the right bank of the river had not yet become the business section of Paris, although the Grève always was busy with the loading and unloading of boats. The shops in the Cité held stocks of rich stuffs and of gold and silver vessels and ornaments, chiefly of home manufacture, for the trade that had grown up in Gallo-Roman days was rapidly dying out in the unsympathetic atmosphere of constant strife.
Back from the river on the right bank were monasteries in whose great size the papal visitor must have delighted as he did in the establishment dedicated to the patron saint of Paris on the hill now called by her name, the Mont Sainte Geneviève, and in the abbey of Saint Germain-des-Prés, rich in lands and serfs and so gorgeous with Spanish booty that its church was called Saint Germain-le-Doré—The Gilded.
Charlemagne (768-814), son of Pépin le Bref, saw a splendid vision of a united Gaul, but his plan was not suited to a period when the German belief in the might of the strong-armed individual was laying the foundations of the feudal system. He himself was German and established his capital not at Paris, but nearer the German boundary, where he felt more at home. He visited Paris, however, lending the splendor of his presence to the services of dedication which marked the completion of the church of Saint Denis. Under the emperor’s direction his adviser, Alcuin of York, established in Paris the first of those schools which have made the city through the centuries one of the chief educational centers of the world. Charlemagne himself never learned to write, it is said, but his intelligence appreciated the value of learning and he first offered to the students of Europe the hospitality which Paris has given them with the utmost generosity ever since. To-day foreign students are admitted to the University of France on exactly the same terms as native students.
An equestrian statue of the Emperor, his horse led by Roland and Oliver, stands before the cathedral of Notre Dame.
Not only was Charlemagne’s kingdom divided after his death, but his strength as well seemed to have shared the shattering. His descendants were men of small force. Louis le Débonnaire, (814-840) succeeded the great king. Louis’ three sons, Lothair, Louis, and Charles the Bald divided the vast possessions into three parts.
The oath by which Louis pledged himself to support Charles against Lothair has an especial interest for scholars because it is the oldest known example of the Romance tongue which succeeded the Low Latin of the Gallo-Romans. The oath was given at Strasburg, the armies of Louis and Charles witnessing, in March, 842.
The weakness of Charlemagne’s successors helped the growth in power of the individual nobles. The feudal system developed without check. Families made themselves great by their fighting strength. Dukes and counts held sway without hindrance in their own dominions. Much as this added to their importance it was a disadvantage to them when there was need for concerted action against an enemy. Once Charlemagne saw the piratical crafts of the Northmen enter one of his harbors and he prophesied that they would bring misfortune to his people when he was no longer living to guard them. His prophecy came true, and when the sea robbers penetrated into the country by way of the big northern rivers and attacked the cities on the Seine and the Loire, sacking the churches and carrying away the riches of the monasteries, there was no concerted action among the nobles, and destruction and loss went on little hindered by the inadequate efforts of this or that feudal lord. Paris itself was pillaged more than once, and the abbeys of Saint Denis and Saint Germain-des-Prés paid unwilling tribute to the boldness of the invaders.
Charlemagne’s grandsons were not of the mettle to deal sharply with the Northmen. Charles the Bald preferred diplomacy to fighting. His nephew, Charles the Fat, once more united the great king’s possessions, but he was no warrior and when the terrible foes appeared in the Seine he was not ashamed to buy them off. Again and again they came, each time ravaging more fiercely, each time approaching nearer and nearer to Paris which they now threatened to destroy. It was in 885 that Rollo or Rolf, called the Ganger or Walker, because he was so huge that no horse could carry him, led a persistent band before whom the Parisians abandoned their suburbs and withdrew behind the walls of the Cité. They fortified the bridges leading to the northern and southern banks, and under their protection sustained a siege of a year and a half. Abbo, one of the monks of the monastery of Saint Germain-des-Prés, has told us about it in a narrative poem of some 1,200 lines. It all sounds as if the days of Cæsar had come again. The Northmen used machines for hurling weapons and fireballs into the city, and floated fireboats down the river to destroy the bridges. The Parisians retaliated from the wall and the towers. The leaders were Eudes, count of Paris and of the district around the city, and Gozlin, bishop of Paris, both of whom fought manfully, and also took intelligent care to foster the courage of their people. Not a day passed without fighting, and although success usually rested with the practised Northmen the Parisians did not become discouraged or demoralized. The most dramatic episode of the siege came at a time when the swollen Seine swept away the Petit Pont leading to the southern bank, and cut off from their friends the defenders of the Petit Châtelet on the mainland. The garrison numbered but a dozen men and they fought with superb courage until every one of them was killed.
Abbo’s story tells of sorties to secure food, of negotiations that fell through, of a journey made by Eudes to seek help from the Emperor and of the suspicion of treachery that his long absence cast upon him until he banished it by cutting his way through his foes into the town again. His return heartened the besieged, but the besiegers were not disheartened. Hot weather lowered the Seine and an attacking party found footing outside the walls of the island and built a fire against one of the gates. Then in truth the very saints were called on to give aid. Holy Sainte Geneviève’s body had been in some way brought into the Cité from its resting place on the southern hill, and now it was carried about the town that she had succored three centuries before. The trusting declared that they saw Saint Germain in spirit-guise upon the wall encouraging the defenders.
At last Charles appeared upon the hill of Montmartre, but while the plucky fighters in the beleaguered city were preparing to go forth to meet him they learned that once again he had bought off the invading army.
The fat king was deposed and died soon after and again the regal possessions were divided. Paris and its surroundings, the Île de France, fell (887) to Eudes, the candidate of a party of independent nobles who admired his fine work in the defense of the city.
The end of the siege did not mean the end of the new king’s troubles with Rollo. That sturdy opponent never ceased his fighting though his invasions became in time not ravages but reasonably ordered campaigns, since he did not destroy what he gained, and sometimes even repaired the damage he had done. Fortune was impartial. Now Rollo defeated Eudes, now Eudes defeated Rollo. The king’s most famous success was at Montfaucon, then northeast of Paris, but now within the fortifications. For five hundred years before the Revolution there stood on this spot a gibbet three stories high on which one hundred and twenty criminals could be hung at once. The man who built it was one of its victims.
Loyalty to the royal family led to the restoration of the Carlovingian line after the death of Eudes. Charles, called the Simple, a youth of nineteen, was set upon the throne and found himself faced at once by the problem of crushing or checking the perpetual invasion. When no solution had been found after thirteen years the king attempted conciliation. He offered Rollo his daughter in marriage and a considerable piece of territory provided that the rover should acknowledge himself Charles’s vassal and should become a Christian. Rollo considered this proposition for a period of three months and then consented to parley with the king over details. They went with their followers to a town not far from Paris where they ranged themselves on opposite sides of a stream and communicated by messenger. Rollo seems to have made no difficulty on the subject of his bride or of his religion, but he was fastidious as to the land he should receive. No one knew better than he the character and condition of northern France, and he rejected one proposed section after another on the plea of its being too swampy or too close to the sea or—brazenly enough—too seriously hurt by the harrying of the Northmen! When at last he deigned to accept what came to be called Normandy a further difficulty arose because he refused to acknowledge his vassalship by kneeling before the king and kissing his foot. He had never bent the knee to any one, he said, and he never would. He was willing to do it vicariously, however, and he directed one of his followers to offer the feudal salute. But his proxy had been trained in the same school. Stooping suddenly he seized Charles’s foot and raised it to his lips, oversetting the king and provoking bursts of laughter from the Northmen and of indignation from the Franks.
Charles found it prudent to swallow his rage and he was rewarded by gaining an admirable colony. The Northmen or Normans became excellent settlers and their coming invigorated a people whose feeble monarchs had represented only too well their own characteristics. It was largely through this vigorous northern influence that, when a break occurred in the Carlovingian line, Hugh Capet, duke of France and count of Paris, a descendant of Eudes’ brother Robert, was elevated (987) by the barons to the throne which his descendants in the direct line occupied for some three hundred years. The family never has died out. Louis XVI in prison was called “Citizen Capet;” the duke of Orleans, pretender to the non-existent French throne, is a twentieth century representative.
The tenth century found Paris reduced to practically its size when Cæsar sent Labienus to attack it. The Northmen had destroyed the faubourgs on the once flourishing left bank, and it was only by degrees that the abbeys of Sainte Geneviève and of Saint Germain-des-Prés replaced their buildings to meet the needs of the population slowly growing around them once more.
The northern bank was even more forlorn, with but a chapel or two to lighten its waste places, and an insignificant blockhouse, perhaps built by the Northmen, where to-day the Louvre stands magnificent.
Packed into the Cité were the houses and the public buildings of such population as the wars had left. A street led across the island from north to south, connecting the two bridges; another from east to west between the cathedral and the palace. Around the open square made by their crossing clustered the shops and markets. Wooden dwellings filled every alley and even crouched against the huge encircling wall. Nobles in armor, their servitors in leather, ecclesiastics with mail beneath their robes, merchants in more peaceful guise, peasants in walking trim—all these carried on the every-day life of this city which is seemingly immortal since fire and sword and flood have laid it low repeatedly but only for such brief time as it takes for it to grow again.
NEVER in all its many troubled days has France been more in need of a wise head and a steady hand than it was when in 987 the lords gave to Hugh Capet the name of King of France. He was already Count of Paris and Duke of France, that is, of the Île de France, the district around Paris. When he was chosen king the title meant only that a few powerful nobles promised him their fidelity. Back of this insignificant fact, however, loomed the idea of kingship remembered from the Roman days of centralized power. Combined with this idea was the governing principle of the new feudalism which emphasized the duty of every man to be loyal to his superior with obedience and support, to his inferior with protection. Thus the title of king meant much or little in proportion as the holders of great possessions lived up to their oaths of allegiance. The weakness of the royal person was the foundation weakness of the feudal system which
nominally linked the whole of society in an inter-dependent chain, but really fostered the strength of the individual.
Under such conditions it was only the man of unusual force who could maintain himself at a pitch of power greater than that of subordinates who were his equals in all but name. Hugh Capet proved himself such a man, fighting, cajoling, buying his way through a reign of constant disturbance, but strong enough at its end to leave his crown to his son without opposition from the nobles.
A medieval tradition had it that Hugh was the son of a butcher of Paris. A fourteenth century chanson called “Hugh the Butcher” encouraged the bourgeois to believe in the possibility of a like elevation. Dante refers to the story in the “Divine Comedy.” He hears a shade on the Fifth Ledge of Purgatory say: “I was the root of the evil plant which so overshadows all the Christian land that good fruit is rarely plucked therefrom.... Yonder I was called Hugh Capet: of me are born the Philips and the Lewises by whom of late times France is ruled. I was the son of a butcher of Paris. When the ancient kings had all died out, save one who had assumed the gray garb, I found me with the bridle of the government of the realm fast in my hands.”
Here follows a recital of wicked deeds done by Hugh’s descendants by reason of avarice, in the midst of which is the apostrophe, “O Avarice, what more canst thou do with us since thou hast so drawn thy race unto thyself that it cares not for its own flesh?”
There is no reason to suppose that the tradition concerning Hugh’s birth rested on fact. His descent from Robert the Strong was direct and he himself was the worthy head of a family that had given to the throne of France one titled and two untitled kings.
The son who followed Hugh was Robert the Pious (996-1031) and he and his successors for a hundred and fifty years labored perseveringly toward that centralization of power in the monarch which came to definite realization in the reign of Philip Augustus (1180-1223), and to establishment under the single-hearted rule of Louis IX, the Saint (1226-1270).
Within three centuries after the accession of the new dynasty Paris attained to the position which she has held ever since—as the head of the nation, leading by virtue of her thought and will, and as the heart of the people, beating with impulses of generosity and love and passion. With Hugh Capet himself her stability began, for he was the first king to make the city his permanent home. The palace at the western end of the Cité had been strengthened by Eudes who made of it a square fortress with towers. Here Hugh lived when he was not in the field suppressing the uprisings of the nobles who had elected him. That they were of a spirit so independent as to need a constant curb is to be guessed from a conversation reported to have occurred between Hugh and Adelbert, one of the great lords. “Have a care,” warned Hugh. “Who made you count?” “Who made you king?” instantly retorted the lord. Perhaps it was a wish not to seem to glory over his subjects that impelled Hugh never to wear his crown after the occasion of his coronation. By having his son Robert crowned at the same time he helped secure the stability of his line.
To the west of the palace Hugh planted a garden, and he also added stables, whose care was entrusted to a comte de l’étable, or constable, the title given later and until 1627 to the commander-in-chief of the French army. On the river side of the palace the king rebuilt the Gallo-Roman prison on the spot where now stands the Conciergerie. The keeper of this prison was a noble to whom was given the title of count of the candles, comte des cierges or concierge, the name bestowed to-day on a janitor. His pay in the olden days consisted of two fowls a day and the ashes from the king’s fireplace.
To the east of the palace on the spot where the Tribunal of Commerce now rises, there stood in Hugh’s day a Merovingian chapel dedicated to Saint Bartholomew. Legend has it that it was of ancient origin and had been sacred to pagan gods. To secure their overthrow, Saint Denis, it is said, went there to preach, and there it was that he was seized by his enemies. King Hugh enlarged the church and dedicated it not only to Saint Bartholomew but to Saint Magloire as well.
It was during the time of Robert the Pious that society, grown degenerate under the generally base or incompetent kings of the Merovingian and Carlovingian dynasties, reached its lowest ebb of hopelessness and inaction. Modern historians deny that fear of the end of the world when the year 1000 should open had anything to do with the lethargy of this period. Whether they are right or wrong, it cannot be disputed that after the year had begun there was a stirring such as had not been known for two or three generations. Only the church seems to have emerged triumphant in material things, for it now held rich possessions whose deeds of gift, beginning “Because of the approaching end of the world,” seem to hint at an attempt of former owners to be on the safe side in the event of the possible coming of the Day of Judgment. Whatever the cause, the givers, stripped stark, had to busy themselves to restore their affairs, and some new constructive impulse built noble buildings and inspired a brutalized society with ideals which devoted force to uplifting ends—the protection of the weak and the defense of the church.
Robert did not inherit his father’s energy or administrative ability. He was a handsome man, fond of appearing in public wearing his crown and flowing robes. He was something of a scholar, and so good a musician that he led the choir at Saint Denis and composed hymns which were accepted by the Church. The poor were his especial care and so traded on his good nature that they even snipped the gold tassels and fringe from his garments when he went abroad. At an open table many hundred dined daily at his expense. He was truly pious as his name declared, and, in the manner of the age, he sought to express his religious interest by the building of churches and monasteries. Paris in especial profited by his desire to win eternal favor, for he built or restored churches to the mystic number of seven and twice that number of religious establishments.
King Robert’s domestic life verged on tragedy. He married a distant cousin whom he loved devotedly, but the marriage was not approved by the pope, and when the king and queen refused to separate he excommunicated them. To be excommunicated meant not only that the offender was cut off from the sacraments of the Church, but that he was forbidden all intercourse with his fellow men. Every one fled at sight of the accursed and the few servants left to the royal pair cleansed with fire every plate and cup that they used.
Robert and Bertha finally bowed to the papal decree. Robert then married Constance, daughter of the Count of Toulouse, who proved a sufficient punishment for any and all his sins of omission and commission. In her train came troubadours and southern knights who brought to Robert’s rebuilt and enlarged Paris palace fashions of dress that were regarded as unseemly, manners that were all too frivolous, and characters unworthy of dependence. The novelty caught the fancy of the Parisians, who, according to an old chronicler, “before long reflected only too faithfully the depravity and infamy of their models.”
Constance kept a sharp eye on her husband’s charitable disbursements, and she brought up her sons so badly that Robert’s last years were embittered by their brawlings and rebellions. The king died bitterly lamented by his subjects, who knew enough of the character of his successor to feel strong apprehension concerning their fate at his hands.
The eleventh century, filled by the reigns of Robert, his son, Henry I (1031-1060) and his grandson Philip I (1060-1108), was made terrible by famines and wonderful by the opening of the great adventure of the Crusades. The famine brought to thousands a lingering death beside which the sudden departure attending the end of the world would have been peaceful translation. The Crusades, begun (1096) in exaltation but in a pitiful ignorance of ways and means, ended a hundred and seventy-five years later in selfishness and an accession of knowledge. The ignorance cost a waste of human life horrible to think of; the knowledge moved western Europe to expression in all forms of art, and brought about a feeling of unity which, in France, produced a nation bound by common interests. Beyond any calculation was the impetus given to commerce and to the intellectual life. The ordering of society, the institution of chivalry, the awakening to the vividness of mental activity and of beauty—these three influences touched life under the early Capetians until it grew and ripened into the simple, beauty-loving, God-fearing temper of the thirteenth century, the soul of the Middle Ages.
Henry I (1031-1060), no weakling but not a man of administrative ability, followed his father’s example as a builder. One of his benefactions was the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs which was begun in the last year of his reign on the site of a former establishment which had been destroyed by the Normans. It lay well out of the city on the old Roman road leading to the north and was a huge place, a fortified village in itself and quite independent of Paris. A wall of considerable size furnished with round towers surrounded an enclosure in which were a church, a refectory, a cloister, a chapter-house, an archive tower, a field for the pasturing of cattle, gardens for the raising of vegetables, and a cemetery for the burial of the dead. The wall has gone to-day except for one of the round towers which was preserved and rebuilt through the intercession of Victor Hugo when the straightening of a street called for its destruction. The field and gardens and the cemetery are now hidden beneath houses and pavements, but the church, whose erection lasted from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and the refectory, finished in the thirteenth century, have been preserved as parts of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, established by the Convention in 1794 as a technical school and museum of machines and scientific instruments. The church, secularized, serves as an exhibition hall for machinery, an incongruous and somewhat shocking combination. The refectory is put to the more suitable use of housing the technical library. Both are exquisite examples, and the church is the oldest existing instance in the city, of that Gothic architecture which sprang into being in the twelfth century as if to symbolize with its stretching height and its soaring spires, its delicate workmanship and its brilliancy of light and coloring, the aspiration toward the high and the beautiful which filled men’s desires after they came in contact with the appealing mysticism and the dazzling loveliness of the East.
Like his father Henry had trouble with his wives—there were three of them—and the marital affairs of his son, Philip I (1060-1108), were even more involved. Becoming violently infatuated with Bertrade, the fourth wife of the Count of Anjou, Philip sent away his wife, Bertha, and arranged with Bertrade during a church service that she should submit to being kidnapped. No bishop would marry them and it was only after long search that a priest was found sufficiently timid or sufficiently avaricious to yield his conscience to the royal demand. Excommunication followed promptly, and for twelve years the coming of Philip and Bertrade to a city silenced the church bells, which rang out joyfully again as they left. So bad was the effect upon his people of their king’s obstinate wrong-doing that the pope at last consented to an examination of the royal offender. All the bishops of France met in Paris on the first day of December, 1104. The Bishop of Orleans and the Bishop of Paris waited upon Philip and asked whether he were prepared to change his manner of life. He said that he was and accordingly appeared before the ecclesiastical body barefooted and seemingly penitent. Kneeling he promised atonement and swore to put aside Bertrade. Bertrade took a similar oath. Neither of them kept it, but so willing was everybody to feign blindness after this form of expiation that two years later the monks of Saint Nicholas at Angers received them both cordially, and Bertrade’s discarded husband dined at the same table with his successor and slept in the same room with him.
Philip never was a friend of the church though he did not in later life carry into effect depredations such as he planned when young, a real theft, in fact, which, through a miraculous intervention, never came to pass. Feeling a twinge of royal poverty—which does not mean that he was really very poor—he went with one of his officers to Saint Germain-des-Prés to take possession of some part of its riches. As they approached the treasury the king’s companion was stricken blind, a circumstance that put the thieving monarch to flight in terror. Yet the check was not lasting for he and his courtiers so corrupted some of the nunneries and monasteries of Paris that the Bishop of Paris was obliged to disperse the establishments. One of the largest, a convent, was on the Cité on the site of the present Prefecture of Police.
Having all this trouble with the pope and the church on his hands it is not to be wondered at that Philip was not stirred by Peter the Hermit’s preaching of the First Crusade. Indeed, no great ruler went on this first expedition, though the enlistment of many strong lords and their feudal following, and the unwise rush of whole families—women and children as well as men and youths—lost many lives to France in this most French of all the crusades.
Though not of a temper to sympathize personally with a love of learning Philip had intelligence enough and kingly pride enough to see the advantage to Paris of a concentration of schools in his capital. He never interfered with the teaching of the religious houses, and during his reign and immediately after at least four schools had obtained a more than local reputation. As the church of Saint Denis sheltered the tombs of the kings it was fitting that the abbey should instruct the sons of the nobles; the cathedral of Notre Dame stood in the heart of the Cité, and there the sons of the merchants were trained, one of their teachers being William of Champeaux whose eloquence knew no equal until it was matched and surpassed by one of his pupils, a young man from Brittany, Abélard. Abélard learned what many others have learned before and since, that it is both tactless and unprofitable to outshine your so-called “betters.” He was sent away from Paris. It was not long before he was summoned back by general acclaim, and joined the lecturers of the third great school of the time, the favorite of the foreign students, that of the abbey of Sainte Geneviève. His popularity there so displeased William of Champeaux that he severed his connection with the school of Notre Dame and founded the school and abbey of Saint Victor, on the south bank, east of the island. This abbey was suppressed during the Revolution and Napoleon built on its site the Halle aux Vins where the city’s supply of wine is stored in bond.
Of these four schools the one to which Abélard attached himself acquired a drawing reputation throughout all Europe, and scholars from England and Germany and Italy sought him eagerly, often enjoying the privilege of sitting under him at the expense of a long journey on foot and of a life of privation when Paris was reached. Abélard’s thesis was “Do not believe what you cannot understand”—the time-honored cry of the independent thinker. The conservatives bided their time; there was no use contending with a man in whom youth, beauty, learning and eloquence flowered in a magical persuasiveness.
Unfortunately for Abélard’s career he was invited by Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral, to enter his household as tutor of his niece, Héloise. It was a rash experiment. In a narrow street of the Cité, twisting about in the space north of the cathedral, the section where the canons and canonesses used to live, there is still shown the site of the garden where tutor and pupil, soon grown lovers, met in secret and plighted a troth that was to bring upon them both suffering and shame—for Abélard the end of his rise in the church, for Héloise, the cloister. They were married and lived for a time where now stands number nine on the Quai aux Fleurs, looking across the Seine to the right bank. Fulbert separated them, but even the conservatives were shocked at the hideous revenge which sent Abélard away from Paris only to be reunited with Héloise after her death in a convent twenty years after the death of her lover. To-day their tomb in Père Lachaise is the most visited of all the resting places of the illustrious in this famous cemetery.
Louis VI (1108-1137), called “the Wideawake” and “the Fat,” was a monarch who did much and planned more. Tall, handsome, energetic, serious, he was the author of policies which in later days developed important results. His accession found his kingdom surrounded by nobles who were nominally his subjects but really enemies of uncommon vigor awaiting the first chance to take their liege lord by surprise. He needed something more than his present resources to cope with the situation, and he met it by making for his son an advantageous marriage which won him the adherence of Poitou and Guienne, and by permitting in his adversaries’ domains, but not in his own, the establishment of communes—self-governing towns which paid for their privileges by supporting him against the nobles who ordinarily would have received their feudal obedience. Both these steps proved of substantial value to the crown, the first adding a large piece of territory to the royal possessions in the next reign, and the other developing a new social class, the bourgeoisie or town dwelling class, whose democratic spirit grew so rapidly that Louis IX in the next century had to check its advance if he would have his own unchecked. It has never been long subdued, however; it smoldered until it burst into the flame of the Revolution; it persists to-day as the genius of the Third Republic.
Paris never was a commune, but, in compensation for remaining under the rulership of the king and his provost (who lived in the Grand Châtelet built to defend the northern end of the bridge from the Cité as the Petit Châtelet held the southern bank) it received certain unusual privileges. Among them was the monopoly of water transportation between Paris and Mantes granted by Louis VI to the Corporation of Water Merchants. This corporation was the most powerful of the merchants’ guilds in whose hands rested the municipal administration.
Louis’ methods, and those of his schoolmate and adviser, Suger, abbot of Saint Denis, encouraged the growth of the city, for in this reign it began once more to increase briskly on both banks of the river. As in the earlier centuries, the pleasant country on the left bank proved more attractive than did the rough land on the right. The south side permitted streets to wander as widely as they willed, but on the north the newcomers were pushed into a crowded section along the river. Marsh and forest behind separated this compact district from Saint Martin-des-Champs. Even at this early stage the northern settlement, grouped around the Grève where the shipping was concentrated, was becoming the business part of Paris. At a discreet distance outside were the markets on exactly the spot where the Halles Centrales stand to-day, and just within the settlement Louis built for the benefit of the market men and women the church of Saint Jacques-la-Boucherie, now entirely destroyed except for a sixteenth century tower which stands in ornate dignity in a leafy square around which nineteenth century steam trams and twentieth century automobiles hoot and whirl.
To Louis VI is attributed the building of the second city wall, piecing out its predecessor so as to protect the suburbs on the right bank. He was interested, too, in religious establishments. He added to the number of the clergy of the chapel of Saint Nicholas near the palace, making part of their emolument six hogsheads of wine apiece from his own vineyards. He repaired Notre Dame, already five centuries old. He was a patron of Saint Denis, where he had been educated and where he adopted as the royal banner the oriflamme of the saint. He dedicated a church of the Cité to Sainte Geneviève in gratitude for her staying an epidemic of fever. He had the heads of cattle carved over the door of the church with which he honored Saint Peter—Saint Pierre-aux-Boeufs—for the especial benefit of the butchers of the city.
On top of Montmartre, standing demurely to-day beside the glittering basilica of the Sacred Heart, is the little church of Saint Pierre-de-Montmartre built by Louis as the chapel of a Benedictine abbey. Its restoration has been completed within the last decade, and its cold, undecorated severity compels a realization of monastic cheerlessness and of how acceptable must have been the reaction to the colorful warmth and grace of the Gothic. Though their church was not beautiful the Benedictines had no reason to be uncomfortable, for Louis granted to them a whole village and sundry estates, and in addition such eminently secular property as a monopoly of the baking privileges of certain ovens, a slaughter-house, the confiscated house of an Italian money-changer, and the exclusive right to fish in certain parts of the Seine.
Up to this point the buildings mentioned have but little to show to modern eyes beyond their ancient character and perhaps their form. A Roman bath, a Merovingian tower on the Church of Saint Germain-des-Prés, a rebuilt tower of Saint Martin’s Priory, two aged columns in Saint Pierre-de-Montmartre—these are but fragments of the old constructions. From this period on, however, it will become more and more usual to find large portions of early buildings. One such is the church of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre. Its date is a little later than that of the abbey church of Saint Pierre-de-Montmartre. It is Gothic at its simplest, yet its pointed windows and arches are prophetic of the beauty to come.
The story of Saint Julien, to whom the church is dedicated, is one of tragic interest. A youth of noble family, he gave himself earnestly to all the pursuits of his time and of his class, his one fault being his love of the cruelties of the chase. One day a dying stag whose doe and fawn he had killed prophesied that he would slay his own father and mother. The prophecy came to pass and Julien, in horror at the misfortune that had befallen him, left home and wife and wealth and wandered in poverty through the world seeking whom he might help. At last he established himself on a river bank in a hut where he sheltered travelers through the night, and in the morning ferried them across the stream. There he lived a life of expiation till death took him.
It was in the sixth century that a pilgrim’s hostel was built in Saint Julien’s honor on the south side of the Seine. There Saint Gregory of Tours lodged in 580, and there the Normans came in 886 and destroyed it. In the twelfth century it was rebuilt as a part of the Abbey of Longpont. Since then the unpretentious building has had a varied history. At one time it served as the general assembly hall of the University; again it became the chapel of the hospital, the Hôtel Dieu. During the Revolution it served as a storehouse for fodder. At some time the nave was destroyed, leaving in the present courtyard a well which once was beneath the roof of the church. The existing edifice, which is merely the choir of the twelfth century building, is used for the Greek service.
Thanks to his father’s prudent arrangements Louis VII, called “the Young” and “the Pious” (1137-1180), inherited a far larger and stronger territory than had Louis VI. He was by no means his father’s equal in intelligence or energy and his reign was unmarked by events notable either for Paris or for France. His happiest days were those that he spent in the cloisters of Notre Dame, he said. His father was happiest in the field.
A few years after Louis’ accession he became involved in a quarrel with the pope over a candidate for a bishopric. When the Count of Champagne sided with the Holy Father Louis invaded his domains. During the siege of the town of Vitry no fewer than thirteen hundred people who had taken refuge in a church were burned to death with the destruction of the building. Remorse for this disaster for which he was responsible made him lend a willing ear to the exhortations of Saint Bernard, an opponent of Abélard’s heresies who was now preaching the Second Crusade, and when Pope Eugenius came in person to France he gave the French king the pilgrim’s equipment and the oriflamme of Saint Denis in the Saint’s own church. The crusade ended in bitter disaster, and Louis died before the Third Crusade was under way, but his interest in the Holy Wars led to his patronage of the order of Knights Templar, which had been founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher. At the time when Pope Eugenius went to Paris there was a mighty gathering there of Templars, and probably it was then that King Louis granted them the land not far from the Priory of Saint Martin on which they built a huge establishment, part fortification, part religious house, whose surroundings they made fair by draining the marshes and converting waste land into fruitful fields.
The king does not seem to have been the cause of much civic improvement of Paris in spite of his long reign. He built an oratory to Notre Dame-de-l’Étoile near the palace. If we may judge by his usual oath—“By the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem”—it must have been he who gave the name to the cemetery of the Holy Innocents and its chapel, though probably they were established before his day. The burying ground was near the Halles, and it was laid out when that section was far beyond the crowded part of the town. By the time of the accession of Philip Augustus (1180), however, the population had pushed northwards from the busy river bank, the marsh had been made habitable, and the quickly increasing cemetery stood on the outskirts of the town, not in the country, and needed the wall which Philip gave it.
The Pont au Change, the bridge leading from the right bank to the island near the palace—perhaps the very line which the Grand Pont drew across the river at the time of the siege by the Normans—received its name at this time. There were houses built upon it from end to end, and Louis allowed the money-changers to do business upon it along one side and permitted the goldsmiths to establish themselves on the other. For four centuries this was the fashionable promenade of Paris until Henry IV finished the Pont Neuf whose open expanse across the western tip of the Cité gave more space for display. When a new king made his formal entry into Paris it was customary for a huge flock of birds to be let loose from the Pont au Change that they might carry the glad news abroad.
Eleanor of Aquitaine who had brought Louis and France so handsome a dowry proved a wife whose conduct her husband could not countenance, though he loved her with a stern fondness. Their marriage was annulled. Within a few months Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet who became Henry II of England and she gave her new husband possessions in France which, added to those which he already had as lord of Normandy, Brittany, Anjou and Maine, made him richer in French lands than the king to whom he owed allegiance. Then began the friction between the two countries which it has required centuries to still. Louis was twice married after his separation from Eleanor. His last wife was Alix or Adelaide of Champagne, whose marriage, consecration and coronation on a November day in 1160 were the ceremonies of the last brilliant scene enacted within the walls of the ancient Merovingian church of Notre Dame, soon to be replaced by the building which ennobles the Cité to-day.
After Louis’ death there came to the throne a king for whom the bird-sellers of the Pont au Change might properly have sent forth double the usual number of feathered messengers of gladness, for Philip the Great was to make France understand for the first time the spirit of nationality, and under him Paris was to develop into the brain that ordered the members.
IN Philip Augustus (1180-1223) was reincarnated Charlemagne’s wide-seeing spirit, and now it appeared at a time when it was possible to turn vision into fact. Charlemagne saw the value of a united nation under a centralized power but conditions were not ripe for the fulfillment of his vision. Philip Augustus was alert in taking advantage of the beginning made by Louis VI toward establishing the supremacy of the king and in availing himself of certain feudal rights which previous monarchs had not been strong enough to enforce. He insisted that his vassals, great lords all of them, should submit themselves to his court; that they should take him as arbiter of their disputes; that they should ask his confirmation, as suzerain, of any privileges that they granted to their vassals; and that they should make no changes in their fiefs which should lessen their value to him. As suzerain the king was heir to fiefs which fell vacant for any reason, and he acted as guardian for the many minor children orphaned in the constant quarrels in which the nobles engaged.
A strong grasp of all these hitherto unurged rights gave Philip a power that enabled him to repress the disorders of the country, and sounded the note for the downfall of feudal home rule which could not live harmoniously with power centralized in the monarch.
Philip’s procedure divided his kingdom into bailiwicks, each containing several provostships. Four times a year each bailli appeared before the assizes in Paris and reported on the condition of the land under his care. Thrice a year he came to town bringing the revenues of his bailiwick, and the king saw to it that the money was not turned over to any body of lords, always hungry for more without Oliver’s excuse, and accustomed to pocket any sums that strayed in their way. By the king’s decree the financial report was made to a board consisting of a clerk and of six burgesses. The burgesses were always Philip’s good friends. He made it for their interest to be faithful to him, and with their aid he played the barons against the church, the church against the barons, and both against the bands of robbers that infested the kingdom. He banished the Jews and confiscated their property, this for the same spiritual benefit which he thought would profit the country by his burning of heretics. Incidentally, the contents of the Hebrews’ coffers hidden in the ghetto on the Cité did not come amiss for the filling of the king’s own strong boxes in the palace not far away.
In the palace Philip’s father and grandfather had died, there he himself was born, and there he married his second wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, to whom he took so violent a dislike that he separated from her the next day. The unlucky young woman appealed to the pope and the consequent embroilment of Philip with the church on account of his subsequent marriage with Agnes of Meran laid the whole kingdom under interdict. No services were held in the churches even for marriages or burials and the unhappiness caused the people was so great that at last Philip put away Agnes and recalled Ingeborg. Because he loved Agnes tenderly he hated Ingeborg all the more and her life of seeming favor was in reality one of wretchedness.
When Philip came to the throne all the western part of what is now France belonged to the king of England, Henry II. The Île de France was cut off from the sea, and the frequent hostile actions of a vassal whose possessions were greater than his own kept the young monarch constantly involved in petty wars with a man so much older than he and so much more skillful a tactician that he gained nothing and even came near losing a part of what he had. Into the mind of the lad of fifteen these troubles instilled a hatred of England and a determination to be free of this perpetual annoyance and to obtain a hold upon land that seemed unnaturally owned by a lord who was his vassal and yet lived over seas.
The years intervening between the growth of Philip’s determination and his chance to put it into effect were filled with work which developed the young king’s naturally strong character and intelligence. After Henry’s death one of his troublesome sons succeeded him—Richard, who has come down in history as “the Lion-hearted.” Richard was handsome and brave, a man to stir the imagination and admiration of a fighting age, but he was too impetuous and too active to apply himself to the study of government. When the call came for the Third Crusade Richard found in it an outlet for his energy for which he would not have to make excuse to his deserted kingdom. He and Philip and Frederick of Germany all went to the East, and there the French and English kings came to know each other, Philip envying Richard’s dash and audacity and envied in turn for the statesmanlike qualities which he was developing.
When it became evident that his presence would be of no help to a crusade doomed to failure Philip insisted on withdrawing to France where he knew that his coming would be of advantage; Richard stayed on with no thought for his kingdom, hoping for further adventure. Philip put himself in touch with conditions in and around the Île de France, took advantage of all disturbances in his vassal’s provinces which would give him even a slender foothold, and was ready to meet any act of Richard’s successor, John, whatever it might be.
The opportunity came soon after John’s accession, for he could be depended upon to open some loophole through his disposition toward devious ways rather than straightforward. As lord of the western provinces of France he was Philip’s vassal; as Duke of Brittany his boy nephew, Arthur, was his vassal. When war broke out between France and England and John went across the Channel to pursue it, he found that his nephew, incited by Philip, without doubt, was laying claim to other provinces than Brittany. The easiest way out of the difficulty was to murder Arthur, which John is said to have done either with his own hand or by the dirks of ruffians in his presence. After Philip had stormed a fortress that had been looked upon as the chief defender of Rouen the frightened Englishman fled home, and then Philip devised a plan of making Arthur’s death work to his advantage. As John’s suzerain he summoned him to Paris to answer for his nephew’s death before the king’s court. John refused to appear unless he were promised a safe-conduct not only to the city but home again. Philip refused to promise protection for the return trip unless the court should declare John not guilty of the charge against him. Philip hardly could have expected that John would thrust his head into the noose, but it suited his purpose quite as well that he should not. What he wanted was his land and that he could take now with perfect justice when the court declared John guilty of murder and of treason in disobeying the orders of his overlord. The estates in France which John had inherited from his father, those in the north, were confiscated to the French crown. It was all much easier than fighting.
While diplomacy gained for Philip these northern possessions and the power that went with them, he gained a like addition in the south by a system of letting alone. Simon de Montfort, a noble of Normandy, entered upon a crusade against the people of Albi, in Toulouse, a town and district heretical enough to attract the attention of the persecutor and rich enough to draw the gaze of the avaricious soldier of fortune. The destruction that ensued laid waste a fair country and wiped out the greater part of its population. A few years later the province fell in to the crown in default of direct heirs to the ruling family of Toulouse, and thus the south of France was added to the northern and western possessions which were accumulating under Philip’s control.
Poor-spirited as was John, now called “Lackland,” he could not see himself deprived of his own land and his rival growing rich in other provinces without making some opposition. He entered into a coalition with the German emperor and with the Count of Flanders, who was one of Philip’s important vassals. Philip defeated the combined armies in the battle of Bouvines (1214) and thereby made himself the most powerful monarch in Europe. The success of the citizen soldiery established the reputation of the burgesses as strong and intelligent fighters and thereby struck terror to the hearts of nobles who were nursing plans of rebellion like those of the captured Count of Flanders. Yet nobles were one with burgesses in rejoicing over John’s final dismissal from any governing part in northern France and over the defeat of the intruding Germans. Never before in all her history had there been so universal a feeling of what it meant to be a Frenchman and to serve a country whose unity was symbolized by a king personally strong, strongly supported, in very truth the head controlling the members.
It is an interesting fact that the same period that established the supremacy of the king of France was marked in England by the check to the royal domination administered to John Lackland when the barons wrested from him the Magna Charta. Historians of other countries are apt to speak of the French as volatile, capricious, delighting in revolutions, of which the troubled fourscore years from 1789 to 1871 are examples. It might be well to remember that the English, who pride themselves on being neither volatile nor capricious, were less patient than the men across the Channel. They, too, made their stand against aristocratic privilege, and they did it five hundred years before the long-suffering French; they, too, cut off their monarch’s head, and Charles went to the block a hundred and fifty years before Louis mounted the guillotine. Action and reaction are equal, prolonged repression must result in corresponding expression. The evils of five centuries are quickly cured if less than one century is devoted to the healing.
After the battle of Bouvines the victorious army marched to Paris in a triumph which was participated in by every village along the way. Every parish church held a service of thanksgiving, every crossroads was packed with shouting peasants doing homage to the king, admiring the nobles, and, above all, wonderstruck at the new military force whose possible value they could see, even if it was not yet entirely clear how great would be the weight of the “mailed fist” of the bourgeois.
At the very time when the power of the king was becoming dominant, however, democracy showed itself even with impudence in the fabliaux, the popular tales which betrayed the jealous spirit of the populace toward the nobles and the clergy. These verses, marked by the esprit gaulois were characteristic of the period of the early middle ages as were also the chansons de geste which stirred the crusaders by their recital of the valorous deeds of accredited heroes. “Renard the Fox,” a long epic of three centuries’ growth, burlesques every aspect of the social life of the middle ages, and its delicious fooling paints a more vivid and more intimate picture than does the pen of any chronicler. These lighter forms were not representative of all the thought of the period, for Abélard’s thesis, ancient and ever new, that we should not believe what we do not understand, and Saint Bernard’s refutation of such a lack of faith were the most prominent instances of a mental activity that found lodgment in schools and expression in pulpit controversy and rostrum argument. Now, too, the professions and the arts no longer were confined to the monasteries, but laymen became teachers and writers and artists and craftsmen.
The opportunities of meeting in Paris like-minded people from all over Europe for a long time had drawn students to Paris, and schools were endowed for men of different nationalities. Philip united them under the jurisdiction of the University. From very early days the region on the south bank, just across from the eastern end of the Cité and extending up Mont Sainte Geneviève has been given over to students. In the church of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre they met with their instructors. Across the alley on which the church faces still stands the house of the governor of the Petit Châtelet before whom the young men appeared to adjust their differences. Behind the church runs the rue du Fouarre on which many colleges were situated, among them the Schools of France, Normandy, Germany and Picardy. In 1202 this thoroughfare was called rue des Escoliers, but when, by way of responding to Pope Urban V’s appeal for self-denial, the students in the classes sat on bundles of straw bought in the near-by hay market, the street changed its name to “Straw Street,” to commemorate their good intentions. Near by, to-day, is a modern street called “Dante,” after the Italian poet, who was not behind his contemporaries in studying in Paris. Émile Loubet, the former president of the French Republic, lives at number 5 on this street.
Le Louvre au Tems de Philippe Auguste
THE LOUVRE IN THE TIME OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS.
From an old print owned by the City of Paris.
Not far away is the rue des Anglais, which was laid out before Philip Augustus’s reign and took its name from the English students who frequented it. A little farther west, creeping in the dark between tilted houses, is the street, called since the fourteenth century, “of the Parchment Workers,” and in the thirteenth century rue des Escrivains. Two of the tiny dwellings, numbers 6 and 7, belonged in the thirteenth century to the English cathedral of Norwich, which used them as dormitories for the scholars which it supported at the French seat of learning.
These houses are built around a microscopic courtyard, a plan persistent in France through many hundred years. It is a plan seen to-day in many modern dwellings, in the Banque de France, a seventeenth century building, in the eastern end of the Louvre and in its pavement record of the earliest quadrangular Louvre. It is a plan making for light and air and it often permits the planting of a small garden within. The idea sprang from the necessity of a fortification’s preserving a stolid and impenetrable exterior while the life of its tenants, carried on within the shelter of its walls, had something of pleasant environment.
So closely does Paris cling to her ancient traditions that even in the twentieth century the schools and their students are removed but a few yards from their medieval location. The students of to-day, too, have their own traditions of dress and behavior which mark them as inhabitants of the “Latin Quarter” even if they are kodaked at Versailles on a holiday afternoon. They assume for themselves now privileges which Philip Augustus encouraged them to take by making them free from the regulations which the other citizens obeyed and subject only to the ecclesiastical tribunal. This difference of attitude caused many riots in the thirteenth century and they break out afresh in the twentieth with a frequency which helps to occupy any idle moments of the city police.
So great were the attractions of Paris offered not only to students but to merchants that the population of the city grew to one hundred and twenty thousand under Philip’s rule. The populous section on the south or left bank of the river was matched by another on the north, chiefly inhabited by merchants and artisans, and both of them were larger than the original Cité on the island. The Cité was the administrative and ecclesiastical center, for the king’s palace was not his only residence but also a palace of justice, and crowded into the limits set by the Seine were so many churches that one of them served a parish of only twenty houses.
The northward growth of the city encroached upon the Halles as it had upon the cemetery of the Innocents, and Philip recognized the necessity of enclosing and roofing the markets. Such utilities as public ovens, too, which had been a monopoly of some of the religious houses, he opened to the citizens at large. He also instituted a water supply, which, though far from ample, since it allowed only two quarts a day for each inhabitant, was an earnest of good intentions.
The original tower of the Louvre seemed to Philip a good nucleus for an enlarged fortification which should be at the same time a palace to which he might withdraw from the palace in the crowded Cité. Around the old donjon he built a rectangular fortress, its short end lying along the river, its entrance defended by another huge tower whose work of protection was reinforced by smaller towers, by a surrounding wall, and by a moat. Down beneath the treasures of to-day’s Louvre and out under the courtyard still run passages of this old building. They twist and turn within walls of rough masonry and inflame the imagination with thoughts of adventurous possibilities, of plots and prisoners and escapes, until they land the wanderer of a sudden in the coal bin of the hopelessly up-to-date furnace that heats the Hall of the Caryatides.
Across the river on the south bank stood another huge tower, best known by its later name, the Tour de Nesle. It was from this tower, that, in the fourteenth century, Jeanne of Burgundy, widow of Philip the Long, is reputed to have had the people who displeased her dropped into the river. Villon’s “Ballad of Old-Time Ladies” says:
Buridan was a professor in the University, and the author of the famous assertion that if an ass were placed between two equally attractive bundles of hay he would starve to death before he could determine which one to eat first. The tale goes that Buridan’s friends, fearing the outcome of his visit to the tower, were waiting in a boat and rescued him. Dumas’ play, “La Tour de Nesle” is based on the legends surrounding this old fortification, now existent only in a tablet placed on the eastern wing of the Institute to mark its site.
A chain across the stream from the Louvre to the Tour de Nesle regulated navigation, for it could only be taken down for the passage of boats by permission of the provost.
Starting south from the Tour de Nesle ran
the wall whose erection Philip commanded when he first went off to the wars, that his fair city might be well protected in his absence. It was higher and heavier than its predecessors, with a battlemented top to hide soldiers in action and frequent towers which served the triple purpose of sheltering extra men, of storing weapons and of affording points of observation somewhat above the wall itself. A dozen gates opened each upon a drawbridge whose lifting compelled the invader to cross a ditch in some way before he attempted to storm an entrance.
Leaving the Tour de Nesle the wall swept around Mont Sainte Geneviève and back to the river at a point about opposite the center of the present Île Saint Louis, east of the Cité. On the right bank it ran north and west, keeping below the Priory of Saint Martin which lay outside of it. Its course is traced on the pavement of the eastern courtyard of the present Louvre, part of one of the towers is extant in a government pawnshop in the Marais, a considerable section is to be seen in the enclosure beside Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, and its course is marked elsewhere by an occasional fragment, by some street named Fossé, or by a tablet placed by the Commission of Old Paris, which is doing excellent antiquarian work in the preservation and marking of historic buildings and localities.
The Paris of Philip Augustus was but a thirtieth part as large as the Paris of to-day, but it had three hundred streets. Narrow, dark and dirty alleys they were, the best of them, and even in this early century the devastating epidemics of a later day were not unknown. A contemporary historian says: “One day the king was in his castle of the Louvre and was walking back and forth, pondering the affairs of the kingdom, when there passed a heavy wagon whose wheels stirred up the street and caused an insupportable odor to rise from it. When he smelled this stench Philip experienced a profound nausea. At once he summoned the provost and the burgesses of the city and he gave them orders to pave the streets with large stones and strong, which was done.”
“Which was done in part” would have been nearer the truth, for, although one public-spirited citizen gave a large sum, most of the contributions were of the nature of samples from the shopkeepers’ stocks, and the actual amount of paving accomplished was very little for many centuries to come. As late as the sixteenth century Montaigne was deploring the evil odors of the city he loved so well, and Arthur Young, at the end of the eighteenth, compared the cleanliness of Paris most unfavorably with that of London. In Philip’s reign ladies seldom went afoot, so thick was the mud, composed of indescribable filth, and knights had good need of armor in times of peace to protect them from buckets of water, poured casually into the streets from abutting houses with only a cry of “Gare l’eau” as a warning.
Nevertheless, in days of festival these same narrow streets might be gorgeous to behold. When Philip Augustus returned from the battle of Bouvines the whole city came out to meet him. Chanting priests, singing girls, shouting urchins ushered him into a town decorated to do him honor. From windows and balconies hung rich tapestries and carpets; banners waved, and the sunlight flashed on glittering spearpoints by day as bonfires made breastplates glitter at night.
It would be hard to find in all history so complete an instance of a nation’s spiritual and mental growth expressing itself in outer form rapidly and in transcendent beauty as is exhibited in the evolution of Gothic architecture in France in the twelfth century. It originated in the Île de France and within the span of this hundred years Paris was rebuilt, bursting into the elegance and grace of the new style from the heaviness of the old as a butterfly casts aside its constraining cocoon.
The nave of Saint Germain-des-Prés, is an example of the heavy-pillared, round-arched building of the Romanesque era. The desire to give visible form to the universal feeling of uplift brought to birth the ogive or pointed arch which gave its name to “ogival” or Gothic architecture best shown, of course, in churches. Higher and higher the arches pointed skyward; lancet windows above helped to light the deep “vessel” or nave (from the Latin navis, ship) and the roof crowned all at a dizzying height.
Satisfying as this was from the point of view of beauty and of symbolism, it gave rise to serious practical questions. How were such lofty walls to be made strong enough to support the outward push of the roof? The thirteenth century had come about before the problem was solved entirely. By that time outer buttresses had been evolved strong enough for their work yet so delicate that they were called “flying,” spread as they were like the wings of a bird.
Decoration became more beautiful, also. Romanesque pillar capitals had been adorned with conventional vegetation and strange beasts whose originals never were on land or sea. The sculptors of the ogival period took Nature as their teacher and France as their schoolroom and carved the leaves and flowers and fruits that grew about them, the oak and willow and rose-bush and clover and grape. Pinnacles gave an effect of lightness to exteriors and their edges were
decorated with crochets (furled leaves) and tipped with fleurons or bunches of budding leaves.
High heavenward sprang spires from the western end of the churches, this western façade forming an imposing entrance to the nave through whose length the choir and altar at the eastern end, beyond the transepts, looked mysteriously far away. From the roof at the junction of the nave and the transepts a slender spire called a flèche (arrow) shot upward with exquisite grace.
The introduction of ogival architecture had a sudden and revolutionary effect upon the art of painting. Before the twelfth century mural decorations and the illumination of manuscripts had been the only instances in France. When the broad expanses of wall above the semicircular Romanesque arches vanished with the coming of the pointed arch there was no place left except the windows for the depiction of the lives of the saints, of scenes from Old Testament history and from the life of Christ. Glass then became the artist’s medium.
The most illustrious examples of the new style to be found in modern Paris are the cathedral of Notre Dame, the refectory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, and the Sainte Chapelle built by Saint Louis in the thirteenth century.
The cornerstone of Notre Dame was laid by Pope Alexander III in the reign of Louis VII (1163.) The new cathedral covered the spot where the Nautae had erected their altar to Jupiter, replaced the many times repaired Merovingian cathedral of Notre Dame, and attached itself to the ancient church of Saint Étienne, the original cathedral of Paris which stood where Notre Dame’s sacristy now rises. This old edifice was not taken down until the new was sufficiently advanced for the altar to be consecrated, so that service beneath the cathedral roof never was interrupted even for a day. The relics were removed to a new Saint Étienne’s, built on Mont Sainte Geneviève.
Construction went on briskly through Louis’ reign and the four decades of Philip Augustus’s and the three years of his successor’s, Louis VIII, and work ended on the superb edifice in the twentieth year of the rule of Saint Louis. It was a “quick job”—eighty-four years—as building went in those days. The great mass never has been completed, for the spires of the original plan have not been added. It has had its days of decay and of restoration, the last attempt having returned its elaborate west façade as closely as possible to its appearance in Philip Augustus’s day when it was finished.
Inside and out it is magnificently harmonious,
a worthy setting for the scenes it has witnessed—scenes splendid, startling, tragic. Here Saint Louis brought the Crown of Thorns and here his funeral took place. Here Philip the Fair rode in on horseback after the battle of Mons-en-Puelle and here he convened the first States General—the first Assembly wherein the burgesses were represented. Henry VI of England was crowned here, so was Marie Stuart, and here it was that Napoleon set the imperial crown upon his own head and then crowned Josephine. Here Henry IV, turned Catholic for the purpose of gaining possession of Paris, heard his first mass, and here, during the Revolution, a ballet dancer posed in the choir as the Goddess of Reason, “in place of the former Holy Sacrament.”
Officially, the cathedral is the hub of France, for measurements along the national highways are all made from the foot of its towers. Deep in the hearts of the French people, too, is love for this splendid fane. They love it as a summary of Gothic beauty, as a storehouse of history, and, above all, as the moral fortress of the city, sheltering as it does “Notre Dame de Paris,” the guardian of the city for five hundred years.
THE son of Philip Augustus, Louis VIII, whose accession was celebrated in Paris with high festivity, reigned for three dismal, unprofitable years. His wife, Blanche of Castile, reared to a manhood of conscientious rectitude their son, Louis IX, whose virtues were recognized by canonization less than thirty years after his death.
It has happened, oddly enough, that although women are forbidden by the fourteenth century construction of the Salic Law to sit on the throne of France as sovereigns, no country has been more frequently ruled by women. Sometimes the queen-mother has acted as regent during the minority of her son, sometimes the queen has steered the ship of state while her husband was out of the country on war intent. Isabella of Hainault, Philip Augustus’s first wife, was regent when her lord went to the third crusade in 1189; Blanche of Castile governed her son’s kingdom for ten years (1226-1236); Anne de Beaujeu, daughter of Louis XI, guided the realm of her brother, Charles VIII, from 1483-1490; Louise de Savoie ruled (1515) until her son, Francis I came of age, and was again entrusted with the power when he went upon one of his many military expeditions; Catherine de Medicis, the mother of three kings—Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III—began her career as a ruler when her husband, Henry II, was warring with Germany (1552), continued it unofficially during the short reign of Francis II, was legal regent (1560) during the minority of Charles IX, and enjoyed a long continuance of influence because of his and his brother Henry III’s weakness of character which she herself had fostered; Marie de Medicis (1610) played havoc with Henry IV’s reorganized France during the long minority of her son, Louis XIII; Maria Theresa controlled the kingdom of Louis XIV while the “Sun King” was carrying war into Holland; Marie Louise was declared regent when Napoleon left France (1812-1814) to meet the allied forces of Austria, England, Prussia, Russia, and Sweden; and Eugénie took her husband’s place when Napoleon III fought against Austria (1859) and again (1870) when he left his country, never to return to it, during the ill-advised contest with Prussia.
Blanche of Castile was a person of extraordinary political intelligence, tact and administrative ability. The years of her son’s minority were made turbulent by unruly vassals who thought to take advantage of the inexperience of a woman, yet the queen-regent proved herself able to cope with every situation that arose. She endeared herself and the young king to the burgesses by appealing to them for support against the lords, and the lords realized the worth of the citizens’ friendship. On one occasion, when the bourgeois of Paris set forth to meet and protect their young master who was surrounded by foes at some distance from the city, the nobles, hearing the news, gave up their iniquitous intentions and went to their homes. Indeed, it was their lack of coöperation among themselves that enabled Louis all through his reign to strengthen the royal power at the expense of that of his subjects.
In her treatment of these troublesome lords Blanche was not always obliged to use such stern measures as force of arms. Her armory was full of woman’s weapons, for she was handsome and gracious, and her manner and charm often brought about conclusions which she might not have reached by argument. In spite of the constant uprisings and conspiracies with which she had to contend the kingdom as a whole did not degenerate, and Philip Augustus’s strong foundation was not undermined. More and more power became centralized in the throne, Louis pursuing from a single-hearted belief that such a concentration was best for his people, the policy which his grandfather undertook for ambition’s sake.
Had Louis followed his personal inclinations he would have entered the religious life. It has been suggested that Blanche encouraged this spirit in him, not because it would have been possible for him to have given up his throne, but because, if his interests were involved elsewhere he would not interfere with his mother’s rule of his kingdom. Blanche’s failing was jealousy. Jealous even of her own child, she continued to force her influence upon Louis after he was of age. Jealousy moved her to interfere between him and his wife, Margaret of Provence, so that they had to meet by stealth. She even took him from his wife’s bedside when she was thought to be dying. Naturally such an attitude did not endear her to her daughter-in-law, and Margaret, envious perhaps, in her turn became ambitious for power which she was not competent to wield. Who shall say that Louis had an easy life between an ambitious mother to whom his dignity did not permit him to give way, and a wife, finely courageous, but without talents of the larger sort! Only the fact that he loved both women tenderly could have given him the wisdom to steer his course straight.
The English king, Henry III, became involved in a quarrel between Louis and one of his vassals, and invaded France. Louis took the oriflamme from Saint Denis and went against his foes, gaining victory after victory but using his gain with a moderation and kindness very different from the custom of the time. After the first hurt to his pride had worn away Henry was of a mind to be glad to accept Louis’ offer to give back to him such of his holdings in France as had been captured in the recent war, provided that Henry renounced others for all time, and admitted himself the vassal of France for those he still retained.
The ceremony of swearing the oath to Louis took place in the square (now the Place Dauphine) at the western end of the palace. Amid a great gathering of nobles and priests both French and English, Henry, dressed with no sign of his royal state, not even wearing sword, spurs, cape or head covering, knelt before Louis, laid his hands in his, and made oath, “Sir, I become your liegeman with mouth and hands, and I swear and promise you faith and loyalty, and to guard your right according to my power, and to do fair justice at your summons or the summons of your bailiff, to the best of my wit.”
Wise as he was in the rearing of his children, just to his people so that even the quarrelsome lords brought their troubles to his Paris court, generous to the poor and merciful to the afflicted, Louis was cruelly harsh to those whom he considered at fault on the score of religion. Heretics, so-called, he punished with severity; blasphemers he caused to be branded on the mouth, saying that he himself would consent to be branded with a hot iron if by that means all profane oaths might be removed from his realm. “I was full twenty-two years in his company,” says de Joinville, “and never heard him swear by God nor His Mother nor His Saints. When he wished to affirm anything he would say ‘Truly that was so,’ or ‘Truly, that is so.’”
On one occasion when he had commanded the branding of a Paris burgher the decree was harshly criticised by the people. When these same folk a little later were praising the king for some good works that he had done for the city he said that he expected more favor from God for the curses that his branding order had brought down upon his head than for the honor that he received for these good works.
Queen Blanche was given to benevolence and during her regency set her son an example which he willingly followed throughout his life. It was she who excited his interest in continuing the rebuilding of the Hôtel Dieu, the hospital which had stood in one guise or another for some half dozen centuries on the south side of the Cité between the cathedral and the river. A later annex was built on the left bank of the Seine adjoining Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, and this section was not demolished until 1908, although the buildings on the Cité were torn down and the present Hôtel Dieu on the north of the cathedral was built some forty years ago.
Louis’ philanthropic leanings included an establishment for the blind, three hundred (“Quinze-Vingts,” “Fifteen-Twenties”) being sheltered in a hospice which stood near the present Palais Royal, but is now established in the eastern part of the town. His interest in learning moved him to encourage his chaplain, Robert de Sorbon, in the enlargement of the school named after him, the Sorbonne, which Robert had undertaken at first for poor students, but which, under royal patronage, became a renowned theological school. It has always been independent in attitude, now opposed to the Reformation, now to the Jesuits, now to the Jansenists. To-day it is the University of Paris, the building on the Mont Sainte Geneviève being given over to the faculties of arts and sciences. Here come students from all over the world to listen to the foremost lecturers of France in a huge edifice which about a quarter of a century ago replaced one built by Richelieu. With the generosity which France has always shown in educational matters all the lectures are free.
The palace on the Cité remained under Louis the heart of the bustling city of 130,000 people. Here he came after his wedding, and the room that he occupied was used by many succeeding monarchs on the night after their first entry into Paris. The king’s library, built as a part of the palace, was filled with the work of several thousand copyists. Louis threw the building open to young students as well as to old scholars, and loved nothing better than to walk about among the young men and explain their tasks to them. In the palace garden the king used to sit and administer justice. De Joinville says:
“Sometimes have I seen him, in summer, go to do justice among his people in the garden of Paris, clothed in a tunic of camlet, a surcoat of tartan without sleeves, and a mantle of black taffeta about his neck, his hair well combed, no cap, and a hat of white peacock’s feathers upon his head. And he would cause a carpet to be laid down, so that we might sit round him, and all the people who had any cause to bring before him stood around. And then would he have their causes settled, as I have told you afore he was wont to do in the wood of Vincennes.”
Other parts of the palace were built by Saint Louis, notably the vaulted guard hall in the lower part of the north side. The ancient round towers belong to the Conciergerie where, during the Revolution, Marie Antoinette and many others as brave and as innocent went from imprisonment to death by the guillotine. Queen Blanche gave her name to an existing room in one of the towers.
In early days the towers must have been an impressive feature of the building. Their foundations are sunk below the surface of the river, and where the king’s hall opened on the street at the water level these massive constructions, now half buried by the quay, rose, tall and menacing on the island’s shore.
The Tour de l’Horloge, the square tower at the corner, replaces an early Merovingian tower on the same spot. The oldest public clock in France still tells the hour from its sculptured canopy, and its bell gave the left bank signal for the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.
Unable to leave his royal duties for the monastery, as he would have liked, Louis showed his leaning by the fostering of many religious houses. Paris was filled with brethren of the various orders, later to become a doubtful blessing, but now sincere, useful, typical of the trusting nature of the thirteenth century. Louis sat at their feet in spirit as he did literally before the great, lecturers of the University. To the Louvre he added a chapel.
It was to be expected that the Crusades would find an ardent response in the king. He went twice to the East, the first time to suffer a long captivity, and the last time to lose his life.
It was through the crusades that Louis became the owner of the Crown of Thorns whose possession gave him the highest pleasure that his life knew. Because of it Paris was enriched by one of its most beautiful buildings. The Emperor Baldwin, it appears, had borrowed a large sum of money from some merchants of Venice, giving as security the sacred relic. When he failed to redeem his pledge the merchants sought to recoup themselves. Louis regarded as a direct gift from Heaven this opportunity to secure for himself and his kingdom a relic so holy. The price asked was about $270,000, an enormous sum for that time. The money was raised, however, a part of it by forced contributions from the Jews, who had begun to drift back to France because their usefulness made it expedient to disregard Philip Augustus’s edict of banishment. Messengers carefully selected for their probity and piety, brought the Crown from Italy into France. It was encased in a coffer of gold which was set into another of silver and that in turn into a box of wood.
The king, dressed as a penitent and barefooted, met the messengers at the town of Sens, about sixty miles from Paris. There he took the casket into his own hands and walked with it all the way to the city. So eager were the crowds to see the procession that it could move but at the slowest pace. The multitude thickened as the city folk came out from the walls to join in reverencing the treasure. In order that every one might rest his eyes upon it Louis caused a lofty stand to be erected in an open spot and there the foremost of the clergy of France took turns in elevating the Crown for the crowds to see.
At Vincennes, east of Paris, the monks from the Abbey of Saint Denis joined the escort. When the advance was renewed Louis again bore the sacred casket which he carried to a spot of safety in the cathedral of Notre Dame which was at that time just about approaching completion.
From the cathedral Louis removed the relic to the chapel of Saint Nicholas, attached to the palace, so that it might be under his close supervision, and then, in an ecstasy of reverence he planned for its shelter a building which should be “in no wise like the houses of men,” the Sainte Chapelle. Only royal chapels received the title “Sainte.” This exquisitely beautiful structure is indeed royal, as it is truly a chapel, small and without transepts. The lower part contains the crypt with ogival vaulting which the builder, Pierre de Montereau, the architect of
the refectory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, learned, perhaps, from the Saracens. This part of the church was used for the religious services of the servants of the palace. It has been restored recently with the vivid red and blue and gold of its original decoration. Above is the main body of the chapel, with no entrance except that into the palace whence it was Louis’s habit to come twice or thrice during each night to prostrate himself before the altar. The chapel’s solid walls reach not far above a man’s head, and above them is a glittering mass of gorgeous glass, some of it the original. At the eastern end a gilded framework supports the platform to which the king ascended by a tiny staircase on the left side to show the sacred relic to the devout. Behind him the lower part of the western window was of plain glass that the people gathered in the courtyard might have the same privilege as those inside. The gold and jeweled covering of the relic was seized during the Revolution. The Crown, cased in glass, is now in the sacristy of Notre Dame.
The chapel’s glass tells the story of the coming of the relic to France and has portraits of the king and of Queen Blanche. In the outside carving as well as in the inside decoration Louis’s fleur-de-lis and his mother’s towers of Castile are repeated. The R of the rex stands supported by angels. A wealth of loving ornament enriches the western façade.
At one side a tiny window cut slanting in the thickness of the wall is the only opening from the chapel into a private room built on to the outside by Louis XI who feared assassination if he should attend mass openly.
The flèche now rising from the roof dates from 1853 and is the fourth of its kind. The second was burned, and the third destroyed in the Revolution. It is wonderful that the whole building did not meet a similar fate, for it was used as a storehouse for flour and received no gentle treatment. To-day, although still a consecrated edifice, but one service is held in it during the year. That is called the “Red Mass” and to it go the judiciaries, clad in their scarlet robes, when the courts open in the autumn, to celebrate the “Mass of the Holy Ghost.”
Louis’ conscientiousness as a sovereign extended even to the business details of the city of Paris, now so grown that its traffic required four bridges to knit the island with the right and left banks. The king established the Parliament of Paris, not a parliament in the English sense of the word, but a court of justice. A body of watchmen policed the streets. The guilds and corporations had a carefully developed organization. Municipal administration was placed under the care of the Provost of the Merchants and a body of councillors. The king was represented by the Provost of Paris. This office had so fallen into disrepute that it was with difficulty that Louis could secure any one to undertake the responsibility. How he reformed the office so that the holder became so eager to serve his fellow-citizens that he slept, all dressed, in the Châtelet, that he might be ready to do his duty at any hour, DeJoinville describes.
“The provostship of Paris was at that time sold to the citizens of Paris, or indeed to any one; and those who bought the office upheld their children and nephews in wrongdoing; and the young folk relied in their misdoings on those who occupied the provostship. For which reason the mean people were greatly downtrodden.
“And because of the great injustice that was done, and the great robberies perpetuated in the provostship, the mean people did not dare to sojourn in the king’s land, but went and sojourned in other provostships and other lordships. And the king’s land was so deserted that when the provost held his court, no more than ten or twelve people came thereto.
“With all this there were so many malefactors and thieves in Paris and the country adjoining that all the land was full of them. The king, who was very diligent to enquire how the mean people were governed and protected, soon knew the truth of this matter. So he forbade that the office of provost in Paris should be sold; and he gave great and good wages to those who henceforth should hold the said office. And he abolished all the evil customs harmful to the people; and he caused enquiry to be made throughout the kingdom to find men who would execute good and strict justice, and not spare the rich any more than the poor.
“Then was brought to his notice Stephen Boileau, who so maintained and upheld the office of provost that no malefactor, nor thief, nor murderer dared to remain in Paris, seeing that if he did, he was soon hung or exterminated; neither parentage, nor lineage, nor gold, nor silver could save him. So the king’s land began to amend, and people resorted thither for the good justice that prevailed.”
WITH the ending of Saint Louis’ life (in 1270) such stability and beauty as he had achieved for his kingdom seemed to pass away. The fifteen years’ reign of his son, Philip III, was lacking in eventfulness. He was with his father on the Crusade that cost Louis his life, and he came back to Paris, the “king of the five coffins,” bringing with him for burial at Saint Denis not only his father’s body but that of his uncle, his brother-in-law, his wife, and his son. Louis’ body lay in state in Notre Dame.
Philip inherited his father’s gentleness of spirit, but none of his intelligence or administrative ability. His physical courage won for him the nickname of “the Bold,” but it was through a train of circumstances with which he seems to have had little to do and not through war that the throne became enriched by the acquisition of some valuable territories in the south.
Probably, also, he did not realize that when he raised to the nobility a certain silversmith whose work he admired he struck a blow at the hereditary pride of the lords, and showed a new power which threatened the integrity of their class. Naturally, too, it encouraged the democracy.
A comparatively trivial happening of this reign shows the increasing boldness of the democratic spirit. The king took as his favorite a man who had been his father’s barber, and who probably possessed the traditional conversational charm attaching to his occupation. When Philip made him wealthy with lands, houses and gold the nobles of the court could not restrain their jealousy, and accusations charging him with the medieval equivalent of graft and even with baser crimes were soon so persistent and apparently so well-proven that even his royal master either was convinced or thought it wise to seem to believe. At any rate the man was hanged in company with Paris thieves of the meaner sort. To the commonalty of Paris who were not in a position to hear the whispers and accusations of the court this seemed an unmerited punishment, and they did not hesitate to express vivid opinions concerning the victim of what they supposed to be aristocratic greed.
When an aristocrat engaged in petty graft his reproof was not so swiftly administered. Enguerrand de Marigny, under whose direction the palace was enlarged by Philip the Bold’s son, Philip the Fair, was accused of charging rental for the booths along the Galérie des Merciers which connected the Great Hall with the Sainte Chapelle and whose stalls were supposed to be given rent free to tradespeople whose goods might be of interest to the folk who had daily tasks at the palace. Nothing came of the accusation, however, unless it may be thought to have been punished in common with other financial misdeeds of which Marigny was accused by Philip the Fair’s successor, Quarrelsome Louis—le Hutin—, and for which he was hanged on the Montfaucon gallows which he had built when he was Philip’s “Coadjutor and Inspector.”
Guilty or not, de Marigny was set a poor example by his master, for Philip the Fair (1285-1314) was so consumed by avarice that he spared neither friends, vassals, burgesses nor ecclesiastics if by taxing them or dragging them into warfare he might add to his treasures. His greed led him into the pettiness of debasing the coinage, and inspired him to defy the pope himself, though he claimed sovereignty over all the monarchs of Europe. He was a masterful ruler—Philip—but one who worked for his own interests and not for those of his people.
Probably, however, his subjects were entirely in sympathy with Philip’s evident desire upon his accession to know where he stood with England. If he wanted to bring about an immediate quarrel his wish was balked, for when he summoned Edward I to appear before him to take the oath of allegiance “for the lands I hold of you” the English king came to Paris without a whimper and offered public acknowledgment to his suzerain. Philip made a trifling quarrel between some French and English sailors an excuse for war, and the Flemish, who were also Philip’s vassals, were soon involved. Flanders manufactured woolen cloths which went all over Europe. Raw wool was imported from England. For commercial reasons it behooved the Flemish to stay at peace with England and to regard England’s enemies as their enemies. Philip was willing enough to be considered in that light since it gave him a chance to invade a country whose industries with their resultant wealth fairly made his palms tingle.
Certainly “Hands off” was not his motto. By underhand means he contrived to get some of Edward’s French possessions away from him and he forced the Parliament of Paris to approve his action. Naturally such behavior drove Philip’s opponents together. Philip suspected some new coalition and ordered the Count of Flanders to come to Paris. Guy obeyed unwillingly, and he was confirmed in his belief that it was a mistaken step when Philip, upon hearing that Guy and Edward were arranging a marriage between Edward’s son Edward and Philippa, Guy’s daughter, flew into a rage and straightway cast the count and his two sons into the tower of the Louvre. There they stayed for several months, gaining their freedom only at the expense of poor Philippa, who, as hostage, replaced them within the grim walls on the river bank.
For the next few years there was constant trouble in the north. The imprisonment of an entirely innocent girl gave zest to the Flemish rage over Philip’s arrogant demands. Guy betrothed another of his daughters (he had eight daughters and nine sons) to the English crown prince and sent an embassy to announce the new arrangement to Philip and to tell him that he considered himself freed from his allegiance.
In the resulting war Philip was victorious. Guy and his immediate followers went to Paris and gave themselves up to the king before the steps of the palace while the queen looked on sneeringly from a window. It was not Philip’s nature to be magnanimous and he hurried his enemy off to prison. With the queen he soon after paid a visit to his new possessions where Jeanne was filled with jealousy of the rich apparel of the women of Bruges. “There are only queens in Bruges,” she cried. “I thought that only I had a right to royal state.”
The governors whom Philip put over Flanders suffered from their master’s disease, greed of gold, and so outrageous was their behavior that Flanders revolted. In the battle of Courtrai the French suffered a defeat that made terrible inroads on the ranks of the nobility. This loss was of benefit to the personal power and the pocketbook of the king, however, through his inheritance of estates and his privileges as guardian of children orphaned by the battle.
Philip was in a fury over the check to his arms at Courtrai. He took Guy of Flanders out of the Louvre and sent him to arrange a peace. The Flemish were elated by success and would not listen to him, and the now aged count, who had been promised his liberty if he succeeded, returned again to his prison and to the death that was soon to give him a long-delayed tranquillity.
The war went on with varying fortune. Philip’s chief advantage was at the battle of Mons-en-Puelle. When he returned to Paris crowds gathered before the cathedral to see their monarch ride in full equipment into Notre Dame, bringing his horse to a stand before the statue of Notre Dame de Paris to whom he had vowed his armor if he might be given the victory. During the Revolution the equestrian statue which had worn this same suit of mail for four centuries and a half was broken up in the destruction that was meted out to all representations of royalty.
The struggle with Flanders lasted even beyond Philip’s reign. On the whole the results—direct and indirect—of the contest were in Philip’s favor. In England he was able to exert a more or less open influence through his daughter, Isabelle, to whom the often-betrothed English prince (who came to the throne as Edward II) was at last united. Probably the bridegroom’s pride in having married the handsomest woman of her country was somewhat neutralized by developments of her character which won for her the nickname of “the she-wolf of France.”
Meanwhile Philip became involved in a quarrel with the pope that lasted for many years and set its mark for all time on the relations and possible relations between France and Rome. In the course of one of his attempts to replenish his treasury Philip insisted that imposts should be levied on the clergy. They had previously been free, and they turned to the pope to support their refusal. This action precipitated an immediate quarrel which was patched up but broke out again under pressure of the king’s behavior. What with his wars and what with his natural acquisitiveness Philip was always needing and always obtaining money in ways deserving of sternest censure. Beside debasing the coinage, he had used infamous methods with the Jews, he had sold patents of nobility to men considered unsuitable to enjoy the honor of belonging to the aristocracy, and he had given their freedom to all serfs who were able to pay for it.
The king rebuked Philip in a bull. Philip personally superintended its burning by the Paris hangman. When the pope sent another the king summarized it for the popular understanding into “Boniface the Pope to Philip the Fair, greeting. Know, O Supreme Prince, that thou art subject to us in all things.” This document Philip caused to be read aloud in many public places together with what purported to be his answer; “Philip to Boniface, little or no greeting. Be it known to thy Supreme Idiocy that we are subject to no man in political matters. Those who think otherwise we count to be fools and madmen.”
This was all very dashing but Philip was shrewd enough to see that it was necessary when contending with a power that proclaimed itself accountable only to God to have the support of his people. He summoned to meet in Notre Dame (April 10, 1302) the first National Assembly. It was called the States General because it was made up of representatives of the three upper classes or estates—the clergy, the nobility and the burgesses of the free cities. It may well have been a satisfied body that gathered under the Gothic arches of the great church. Its members did not realize that their powers were only advisory and that they would be expected to advise the king to do what he wanted to. All that they were yet to learn. For the moment they felt that this meeting was a concession from a king who had curbed the power of the nobles, who was trying to prevent the clergy from even entering the hall where was sitting the Parliament of Paris, increasingly made up of lawyers, and who made it clear that he tolerated the burgesses only because they were occasionally useful.
To the burgesses this was in truth a proud moment, for it was their first admission to any body of the kind on even terms with the other two estates. They were to find out that, because the voting always was done by classes, they were to be outnumbered two to one on almost every question with a unanimity that betrayed the fear that their presence excited in the lords and clergy.
It was not until the fifteenth century that deputies from the peasantry sat with the Third Estate. In the five centuries between the calling of the first States General and the Revolution the Assembly was summoned only thirteen times. When Louis XVI ordered an election in the futile hope that something might be suggested that would help France in her trouble it had been one hundred and seventy-five years since a sitting had been held.
The first States General found itself in something of a predicament. It was clear that it was expected to endorse Philip’s attitude toward the pope, yet such a course would place the clergy at variance with the head of the church. Of course they yielded. Boniface was a long way off; Philip was near at hand, and the dungeons of the Grand Châtelet and of the Louvre were always able to hold a few more prisoners. The pope was notified that the affairs of France were the concern of France and not of an outsider. The pope replied with excommunication. Philip retaliated with charges for which, he said, the pontiff should be tried. Boniface, justly enraged, threatened to depose Philip and make the German emperor king of France. Philip once more laid his case before his subjects, this time in the palace garden. Hot and heavy raged the quarrel after this. It resulted in the popes becoming for seventy years no more than dependents upon the will of the French crown, and practically its prisoners at Avignon on French soil.
Having negotiated the election of a pope of French birth, Philip used him as a tool for the accomplishment of his mercenary and cruel plans against the Order of Knights Templar. This order, at once religious and military, had been founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher. Its duties over with the ending of the Crusades, idleness may, perhaps, have done its proverbial work. No one believes, however, that Philip’s charges of corruption in both religious practices and in manner of living were other than shamefully exaggerated excuses for seizing rich possessions which he had coveted ever since the time when, during a Paris riot caused by an unjust tax, he had taken refuge in the Temple to the north of the city. There he had seen the gathered treasures, and the fact that he owed his life to the Templars did not deter him from devising elaborate plans to rob them.
Early in the morning of October 13, 1307, all the Templars in France were seized in their beds and thrown into ecclesiastical prisons. There were one hundred and forty arrests in Paris. The knights listened, astounded, to what purported to be a confession by the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, of the truth of the abominable charges brought against the Order. They were promised liberty if they confirmed the confession. To the lasting credit of the Order only a few bought their freedom by perjury. The rest were “put to the question” with a wealth of hideous ingenuity which has seldom been approached in the grisly history of the torture chamber. In Paris alone thirty-six died as a result of their rending on the rack, and the others said anything that would put an end to suffering worse than death.
The methods employed by Philip became known to the pope, and although he had sworn to do the king’s behest in regard to some unknown deed, and this proved to be the deed, yet he had the courage to send a commission to Paris to search into the truth of the rumors that had reached him. It sat in the Abbey of Sainte Geneviève. Under shelter of the commission’s protection scores of witnesses from all over France told what they had endured, and denied their extorted confessions. Jacques de Molay himself was tortured physically and tormented mentally, but he persisted in a denial. His courage gave strength to over two hundred other knights who came before the commission to show the wounds by which they had been forced into saying what was not true.
But Philip was not to be balked of his prey. The archbishop of Sens, who was also metropolitan of Paris held a special court in the Hôtel de Sens. This palace was replaced almost two centuries later by the Hôtel de Sens now to be
seen on the rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul, a house well worth a visit from lovers of line and proportion as well as from antiquarians. To his court the archbishop summoned half a hundred of the knights who had denied their confessions, and the tribunal promptly convicted them of heresy and condemned them to be burned. The pope’s commissioners had no control over a local court and could not save the poor wretches. On a day in May, 1308, they were taken out of the city on the northeast and there suffered their cruel punishment, every one of them protesting to the assembled crowd the innocence of the Order. Six others were burned on the Grève.
Five years later the pope ordered the dispersal of the Order and Philip was at last able to take possession of their treasure—to repay himself for the heavy expenses of the trial!
While the Grand Master lived, however, even though he was in prison for life, the king did not feel secure in his ill-gotten gain. A year after the general dispersal the Parisians thronged one day into the Parvis de Notre Dame—the raised open space before the cathedral—where a representative of the pope, the archbishop of Sens and other church dignitaries sat enthroned. There Jacques de Molay and three other officers of the late Order were confronted with their false or extorted confessions. If it was done to harry them into some betrayal of feeling which could be taken advantage of for their destruction it was successful. De Molay protested against this untruth being again attributed to him. The crowd, eager for excitement, pressed closer to hear the ringing words of the old soldiers. Then, in the dusk of evening, noble and burgess and cleric pushed to the western end of the Cité where they could look across to some small islands, to-day walled and made a part of the land on which the Pont Neuf rests between the two arms of the Seine. On one of these islets the fagots were piled. A witness says; “The Grand Master, seeing the fire, stripped himself briskly; I tell just as I saw; he bared himself to his shirt, light-heartedly and with a good grace, without a whit of trembling, though he was dragged and shaken mightily. They took hold of him to tie him to the stake, and they were binding his hands with a cord, but he said to them, ‘Sirs, suffer me to fold my hands a while and make my prayer to God, for verily it is time. I am presently to die, but wrongfully, God wot. Wherefore woe will come ere long, to those who condemn us without a cause. God will avenge our death.’”
While the flames leaped scarlet against the river and the sky the Grand Master summoned pope and king to appear with him before the bar of the Almighty. They who heard must have shuddered, and shuddered yet again when in fact Pope Clement died within forty days and Philip the Fair within the year.
In Paris the huge establishment of the Temple with its many buildings, its considerable fields and gardens and its walls, had been independent of the city, and over its inhabitants the Grand Master had power of life and death. When Philip took possession of its treasure he turned over the enclosure to the Knights of Saint John who held it as his subjects. In the course of time the quiet precincts of the Temple became a haven for impoverished nobles, for unlicensed doctors and for small manufacturers “independent” of the guilds, for all these found sanctuary here. Later the growth of the city smothered the grounds with streets and houses and did away with most of the buildings. In 1792 when Louis XVI was imprisoned in the large tower and the other members of the royal family in the smaller tower the few buildings that were left were torn down so that they might not serve as hiding places for any rescue party. Napoleon had the donjon demolished in 1811, and everything that was left of the once superb commandery melted into the Square du Temple under the beautifying process instituted by Napoleon III. Until a very few years ago one of the sights of Paris for seers in search of the unusual was the Temple Market edging the square, where old clothes, old curtains, old upholstery—every sort of second hand “dry goods”—offered a chance for the securing of occasional wonderful bargains provided the purchaser was either fluent in his own behalf or indifferent to what was said to him.
Not far from the site of the Temple there stands to-day the church of Saint Leu, a part of which dates from the fourteenth century. It has small architectural value, but a quaint picture within tells a tale of legendary interest. A statue of the Virgin used to stand at the corner of the rue aux Ours, not far from the church. One day an impious Swiss soldier struck the figure with his sword and blood spurted from it. The man was hung upon the scene of his crime, and the statue was preserved in the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs. For more than three centuries afterward and until, indeed, the destructive spirit of the Revolution did away with customs as it did with buildings, it was usual to celebrate this happening by carrying through the streets a straw man in Swiss costume which was burned on the corner of the rue aux Ours.
Among the utilitarian institutions of the fourteenth century were the étuves, public vapor baths, which were made desirable by the scantiness of the water supply at home. These establishments were as popular as necessary. When they were ready for action a crier went through the streets shouting:
Wars and persecutions show large in any period but every day living and the minor happenings of social and civic growth weave the fabric on which occasional events stand out like figures on a patterned cloth. The shuttle of time flashed back and forth through Philip’s reign carrying the brilliant woof of exploits that resulted in increasing concentration of power, of wealth and of prestige in the monarch, and threading it through the dull warp of the increasing poverty of the lower classes and the lessening vigor of the nobles.
The persecution of the Templars was not the only persecution of the time. The narrow-mindedness that was increasingly to begrudge freedom of thought was beginning its death-dealing work. Here and there throughout France heretics were put to trial every now and then. The king defiled the day of Pentecost in 1310 by causing to be burned on the Grève a Jew who had been converted but who had denied his new faith, a priest who had been convicted of heresy, and a woman who had distributed heretical tracts.
Perhaps Philip thought by such deeds to win pardon for the financial exactions with which he tormented his people. He was constantly devising new taxes. One of the chief duties of the uniformed militia which he founded—dependent upon and consequently faithful to the crown—was the collection of his unjust levies. As he lay dying at Fontainebleau he said to his children gathered at his bedside, “I have put on so many talliages and laid hands on so much riches that I shall never be absolved.”
Paris did not increase much in extent or in population during Philip’s reign. Its beauty lay in the harmony that was building every new construction like its fellows, ogival (Gothic), with pointed windows and doors and high-pitched roofs—a style superb in large edifices but giving a pinched appearance to domestic architecture.
The Louvre served its grim purpose untouched through this period. Its commander was raised to the rank of captain and was honored by being forced to stand in no one’s presence but the king’s and to receive orders only from his royal master.
The little church of Saint Julien still served as the chapel of the University, and Philip decreed that the Provost of Paris, the king’s representative in the city, should go there every two years and in the presence of faculty and students should solemnly swear that he would protect the rights of both professors and students and that he would respect them himself. This meant the confirmation of Philip Augustus’s regulations which made the dwellers in the University section answerable only to the rector of the University. The schools of the left bank were increased by the addition of the College of Navarre, founded by the queen, Jeanne of Navarre, in gratitude for Philip’s victory at Mons-en-Puelle.
A curious story is told of the origin of the monastery of the Carmes Billettes in the city’s northern section that had been redeemed from the marsh and hence was called the Marais, a name which it still retains. It appears that in the reign of Philip the Fair a Jew of the Marais lent a sum of money to a woman, and then offered to quit her of her debt if she would bring him a consecrated wafer. When he had possession of it he pierced it, and then plunged it in boiling water. At each attack upon it blood spurted forth, and at last the nerve-shaken Jew screamed for help. Forced to confess his deed he was put to the torture and his house was torn down. Upon its site the king permitted the erection of a religious establishment.
It was Philip who built the first quay to restrain the Seine from damaging its banks. The king bought the Hôtel de Nesle of which the Tour de Nesle, scowling across at the Louvre, was a part. Its grounds had stretched down to the water where they fringed the stream with willows under which the townspeople used to enjoy the shade on hot summer days. The king had the trees cut down and a wall constructed to check the swirl of the river whose two arms rejoin just above after their separation by the island.
In the palace the administrative work of the city and of France was conducted, and so extensive was it now with all Philip’s territorial additions and all his activities calling for court adjustment that the ancient building was found to be much too small. Enguerrand de Marigny superintended its enlargement, and so generously did he build that the old palace came to be called “Saint Louis’ little hall.” The grandest part of the new structure was the Great Hall, called to-day in its rebuilt form the Salle des Pas Perdus. It was lofty and adorned with much vivid blue and gold. Statues of all the kings of France from Pharamond were placed on the upper parts of the pillars, visualizing historical characters for the youth of the town who might read dates on tablets affixed. For long years the curious were delighted by the sight of the skeleton of what chroniclers have described as a sort of crocodile, which had been found under the palace when the new foundations were dug. Across one end of the room was the enormous marble slab known as the table of Saint Louis. What is supposed to be a fragment of it is now in the lower part of the palace. Around this table met the members of three different law courts. When dinners or suppers of ceremony were given by the monarch only royalties were allowed to sit at this post of honor. An idea of its size may be gained from the knowledge that the Clerks of the Basoche at a later time used to enact plays upon it as a stage.
This organization, the Clerks of the Basoche, came into being in Philip the Fair’s time. The clerks of the law courts used to hold trials to adjust differences among themselves. They played the parts of attorneys and court officers, and no doubt there was a fine display of imitative rhetoric. The word basoche probably is derived from basilica, and was adopted because it was high-flown and unusual. The president was called the King of the Basoche until Henry III, who felt a bit weak about his own royal strength, forbade the use of the title.
In the court in front of the palace the clerks used to plant a tree or pole on the last day of every May, and this entrance is called even now the Cour du Mai. Here stood the tumbrils that carried the Revolutionary victims to the guillotine. At the foot of the former staircase convicts were branded, and here Beaumarchais gained the best possible free advertisement when his books were burned as being hostile to the well-being of society.
Opening out of the Salle des Pas Perdus is the “First Chamber,” the room which replaces Saint Louis’ bedchamber. Many a stern tribunal has been held there since the time of the gentle king. It was here that Louis XIV commanded his abashed hearers to understand that “I am the State,” and here sat the court that gave Marie Antoinette a poor semblance of trial.
With its prisons on one side stirring with memories of the Revolution, and its wonderful Gothic jewel, the Sainte Chapelle, on the other, the Palace of Justice, with all its myriads of rooms for a myriad of purposes, is one of the most story-laden and varied in Europe.
When Enguerrand de Marigny had finished his work of enlargement Philip commanded a season of rejoicing in the city. For a whole week the townsfolk poured in to the palace to see and to admire, and all the shops were closed so that there might be no other distractions. These same people had to pay the bills for the new construction, and, since the privilege of free entrance was one of long standing it is to be hoped that they felt themselves sufficiently rewarded for their enforced outlay by the pleasure given to their esthetic sense.
To the ceremony of the knighting of the king’s three sons, which was a part of the celebration, they were not admitted in numbers, as that was in the more private Louvre.
Philip the Fair’s immediate successors, Louis X, le Hutin, the Quarreler (1314-1316), Philip V, the Long (1316-1322), and Charles IV, the Fair (1322-1328), were rulers of small account. They all did some fighting, all inherited their father’s capacity to raise financial trouble for their subjects, and all had serious domestic difficulties. Their wives were unfaithful to them, and the three women were imprisoned or forced to enter the Church. Two brothers, Pierre and Philip Gualtier d’Aulnay, the lovers of Louis’ wife, Marguerite of Burgundy and of Charles’s wife, Blanche, were executed on the Grève. Philip’s wife, Jeanne of Burgundy, was the playful lady who dropped Buridan into the Seine from the Tour de Nesle.
After Marguerite had been strangled in her prison Louis le Hutin married Clémence of Hungary. His posthumous son, John I, lived but a few days, and Philip the Long claimed the confirmation of the promise which the Parliament of Paris, sitting in the palace, had made to support him rather than let the throne go to a possible daughter of Louis. This decision established the Salic law as applying to the throne.
Philip the Long had no children and was succeeded by his brother, Charles the Fair. Charles was twice married after his repudiation of Blanche, but he left only a daughter, born at the Louvre after his death, and the crown therefore went to his first cousin, Philip of Valois.
PHILIP OF VALOIS ruled as Philip VI (1328-1350), thus founding the royal house of Valois. Philip was not allowed to take his throne peacefully, however. There were other claimants, the most formidable being Edward III of England, who demanded the succession through his mother, Isabelle, daughter of Philip the Fair and sister of the late king. Edward’s aspirations brought to pass the Hundred Years’ War whose weary length saw France overrun by foreign enemies and by French brigands, tortured by famine and plague, and her king (John the Good) a prisoner in England. With everything topsy-turvy it becomes hardly a matter of surprise to learn that a French queen mother sold her son’s birthright, that an English prince was crowned king of France in Notre Dame, that the citizens of Paris welcomed the English to help defend them against their own countrymen, and that a maid led men to battle.
As often happens with men of extraordinary force Philip the Fair did not bequeath any legacy of energy to his sons. Philip of Valois, son of Philip the Fair’s brother, had no notable inheritance of character, but he was made of livelier stuff than his cousins. Although three reigns had passed since his uncle’s death it was only a period of fourteen years, and the royal power was then at the greatest point of concentration it had yet reached. A man of but ordinary vigor and judgment, one would suppose, would have been able to entrench himself strongly. Yet the promise of Philip’s early years of victory over the Flemish was unfulfilled by his serious defeats at the hands of the English.
He jumped into the arena promptly enough. At his coronation at Rheims on Trinity Sunday, 1328, the Count of Flanders, whose duty it was to bear the great sword, did not answer the herald’s summons, although he was there in plain view. When Philip asked for an explanation his vassal answered that he had been called by his title, and, because of the disobedience of his people, his title was now but empty sound. Philip was fired with instant sympathy. “Fair Cousin,” he said, “we will swear to you by the holy oil which hath this day trickled over our brow that we will not enter Paris again before seeing you reinstated in peaceable possession of the countship of Flanders.”
He found that he had entered upon no easy task, for the Flemish burghers were both brave and obstinate. However, he won a brilliant victory at Cassel, where, according to Froissart, of sixteen thousand Flemish “all were left there dead and slain in three heaps one upon another.” So annoyed was Philip by the trouble he had been put to to save his word unbroken that he gave the Count of Flanders some rather threatening advice when he left to make his deferred entrance into Paris.
“Count,” he said, “I have worked for you at my own and my barons’ expense; I give you back your land, recovered and in peace; so take care that justice be kept up in it, and that I have not, through your fault, to return; for, if I do, it will be to my own profit, and to your hurt.”
The count, however, could not keep out of embroilment with his people. Because England supplied the wool which the Flemish looms wove it was important to the manufacturers of Flanders that peace should be preserved between the two countries. Heedless of this necessity, the Count of Flanders, in 1336, eight years after the battle of Cassel, ordered the imprisonment of all the English in Flanders. King Edward retaliated in kind and clapped into jail all the Flemish merchants in England. The people of both countries were well aware that Philip of France was the instigator of all this turmoil.
A year after Philip’s accession, Edward, as lord of Aquitaine, had gone to France and paid his feudal duty to him. The two monarchs were supposed to be friends. Friendship is hard to preserve, however, when ambitions clash and when interested people are alert to foment trouble. In 1337 war was declared, and its dragging course for the next decade was prophetic of the whole miserable century.
After nine years of desultory fighting the French suffered at Crécy the worst defeat the country ever had known. For the first time in history gunpowder was used in war and the innovation made apparent at once the futility of the nobles’ fortresses against the new ammunition.
A part of the English army drew dangerously close to Paris—so near that the watchmen on the towers caught the gleam of their camp-fires, and refugees brought news of burning and slaughter no farther away than Saint Denis. The city was saved from attack only because Edward was besieging Calais. It cost England a year’s fighting to capture this Channel key to France, but she held it for two hundred years, a threat to French power and a grief to French hearts.
Destructive as was the new ammunition its work could not approach the loss occasioned by the “Black Death,” the plague which swept across Europe with such might that it even put an end to war.
In 1350 Philip VI died. His body was carried to Notre Dame where it lay in state before being taken to Saint Denis. There it was buried “on the left side of the great altar, his bowels were interred at the Jacobins at Paris, and his heart at the convent of the Carthusians at Bourgfontaines in Valois.”
A month later Philip’s son, John (1350-1364) was crowned at Rheims. By way of signalizing his accession he conferred knighthood on many young men, and for a week Paris was gay with continual feasting. Perhaps it was because so many people thronged the palace at this time, perhaps it was because of the encroachments of the courts, that John did not always occupy the royal apartments on the Cité but lived for some time at the Hôtel de Nesle which Philip the Fair had bought for the crown.
During the next five years John showed himself entirely lacking in the discretion and calmness which the uncertainties of the time demanded. He was influenced by favorites and he was constantly quarreling with his son-in-law, Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, who had caused the murder of a man whom John esteemed and who was incessantly playing fast and loose now with England, now with France. It was to consider certain charges against this undesirable connection that John held the first known lit de justice. The “bed of justice” received its name from the king’s seat, a couch raised on a dais, both covered with handsome stuffs sown with the fleur-de-lis. The king’s appearance was in harmony with his desire to accent his regal state for he wore his robes of ceremony and his crown.
With an exhausted treasury threatening the people with taxes, with the plague devastating the country, and with war imminent, it is small wonder that France was in a discouraged state. John tried to hearten his subjects by establishing subsidies and by giving festivals. By these means he won his nickname of “the Good,” but they were the cause of such impoverishment that when the English war broke out again he found himself in embarrassment for lack of money. Twice he summoned the States General, but his preparations were seriously hindered. His judgment as a general was no better than as a ruler. Inflated by some trifling successes he scorned the Black Prince’s proposals of peace and then allowed himself to be beaten ignominiously by a force much smaller than his own in one of the world’s great battles, that of Poitiers.
John’s personal courage was magnificent. Although several divisions of his army were withdrawn, including those headed by his three older sons, he fought valiantly in a hand-to-hand fight that waxed ever brisker as his opponents saw that they were dealing with some man of prominence. His fourteen-year-old son, Philip, stayed at his father’s side helping him by constant cries of warning. As a reward for his fidelity John afterwards gave him the province of Burgundy, a gift which proved to be a sore mistake for the happiness of France.
After the battle of Poitiers a burgher of Paris vowed a candle as long as the city to Notre Dame de Paris. It was to burn always. When the city grew so large as to make such a mass of wax impracticable the offering was changed (1605) to a silver lamp, and it may be seen now before the graceful figure which stands at the south side of the entrance to the choir of the cathedral.
John was gently treated in England and his presence was something of a social event. When he was held at a ransom and was returned to France while two of his sons, the dukes of Anjou and of Berri, were sent across the Channel to serve as hostages for the payment of the ransom, the king’s departure was a matter of regret. His welcome in France was equally warm.
“Wherever he passed the reception he experienced was most honorable and magnificent,” says Froissart. “At Amiens, he stayed until Christmas was over, and then set out for Paris, where he was solemnly and reverently met by the clergy and others, and conducted by them to his palace; a most sumptuous banquet was prepared, and great rejoicings were made; but, whatever I may say upon the subject, I never can tell how warmly the King of France was received on return to his kingdom, by all sorts of people. They made him rich gifts and presents, and the prelates and barons of the realm feasted and entertained him as became his condition.”
The hostage sons proved themselves not more reliable as hostages than they had been as fighters. One of them, at least, yielded to the call of Paris, broke his parole and fled home. John’s paternal pride was profoundly outraged. “If honor is banished from every other spot,” he said, “it ought to remain sacred in the breast of kings.” He returned at once to London and gave himself up to king Edward.
Again he found himself popular at the English court, and he passed a gay winter, entertaining Edward at Savoy House and being entertained in turn at the palace of Westminster. Before many months, however, he was stricken with a mortal illness and died without seeing France again.
While king John was held prisoner by the English (1356-1360), his son the dauphin, afterwards Charles V, ruled or tried to rule in France. During his regency there appears one of the foremost characters known to the history of Paris, Étienne Marcel. This man belonged to an old family of drapers, and had achieved the position of the Provost of the Merchants, the chief administrative office in the city’s gift.
The burghers of Paris were restless. The establishment of the States General had given them recognition of a kind and a consequent feeling of importance. Repeated tax levies had kept them in a constant state of irritation. John had crowded them out of the army, war, according to his theory, being a matter for nobles to handle. The ignominious defeat at Poitiers made them dissent cordially from this opinion.
These were but a few of the causes stirring in the minds of the burghers. Now, with their jovial and improvident king a prisoner in England, France entrusted to an untried youth of nineteen, and England’s plans unknown but always threatening, the bourgeois felt themselves to be facing both opportunity and responsibility.
To test the prince seemed to be the first summons. Returning from Poitiers Charles took the title of Lieutenant-General, installed himself in the Louvre, summoned the States General, and entered into negotiations with Marcel. The provost either was really distrustful of the dauphin or he saw some advantage for his own ambition in setting the people against their lord. When he went to a conference with Charles he was supported by a body of men heavily armed, and a little later he expressed himself as so fearful of the prince’s integrity that he refused to go nearer to the Louvre than the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, to the east of the fortress.
Egged on by Marcel the States General did their utmost to torment the young regent. Undoubtedly they had grievances, but Charles was not at all responsible for the state of the country and the Assembly’s methods of improving conditions savored more of bullying than of coöperation.
The body met less than three weeks after Charles’s arrival in Paris. More than eight hundred members from all northern France gathered in the Great Hall of the palace. Half of this throng was representative of the bourgeoisie, and their superiority in numbers over the nobility—depleted by its losses at Poitiers—and the clergy—naturally a lesser body, though almost every prelate of high rank was present—gave the middle class a courage they never before had assumed.
Activity against the regent was manifested promptly. The size of the Assembly being unwieldy a body of eighty was chosen from the full membership to confer and report to the whole meeting. Charles sent officers to represent his interests and to furnish information. On the second day the representatives refused to take counsel unless the officers were withdrawn. Why they wanted to be unchecked was quite evident when, a few days later, the States-General requested the dauphin to meet with them in the monastery of the Cordeliers on the left bank and hear the recommendations which had been approved by the full house. They demanded that twenty-two men of king John’s closest friends and councillors should be arrested, lose their offices and have their property confiscated, and, if trial proved them guilty of “grafting” and of giving bad advice to the king, they were to be further punished. A traveling commission was to be appointed to keep a check on all the officials of France, and a body of twenty-eight men—four prelates, twelve nobles and twelve burghers—was to have “power to do and to order everything in the kingdom just like the king himself.”
This proposition practically relegated the regent to private life. A proposal to release from prison Charles’s brother-in-law, Charles the Bad, was not only an attack on John’s management, but a threat against the dauphin’s peace, for the king of Navarre had come honestly by his nickname and was capable of fomenting endless trouble.
In return for conceding their demands the States promised the regent a force of thirty thousand men, their support to be provided by taxes of doubtful collectibility.
Charles found himself in a position of extreme difficulty. The people of Paris were clamorously in favor of the Assembly’s proposals. Everybody was ready to hit the man who seemed to have no friends. Charles sparred for time, announcing at a meeting held in the Louvre that all the matters under discussion must hold over until he had attended to some business with the German emperor and the pope which called him to Metz.
Although Paris was hostile to him Charles had friends elsewhere. He received information that the south of France was heartily royalist, and also that some of the deputies from northern towns to the Paris Assembly had been rebuked by their constituents when they returned home, for their attitude to the regent.
Unfortunately, to obtain money for his journey, Charles followed his father’s example and debased the coinage. When this became known a few days after his departure Marcel and the mob went to the Louvre and frightened Charles’s younger brother into rescinding the order. Six weeks later Charles returned and reëstablished his original order, with the result that all Paris rushed to arms and he was compelled to grant practically every demand of the Assembly.
When the Assembly met three months later its early enthusiasm had waned or else the representatives repented of their harsh demands or saw their injustice. The clergy and the nobility were fewer and there was a lack of harmony among the bourgeois, many of them objecting to the concentration of power which Marcel and a few of his friends were effecting.
Charles was clever enough to seize this time of uneasiness to announce that he “intended from now on to govern” by himself. His first efforts were not very successful, for Marcel by specious promises wheedled him into summoning the Assembly again, and then arranged for the liberation of Charles the Bad. He was welcomed by the Paris populace and had the audacity to make an address to them from the platform on the Abbey of Saint Germain-des-Prés from which the kings were used to watch the sports of the students on the adjoining Pré au Clercs.
The deputies foresaw a clash between the brothers-in-law, and it was but a small Assembly which met, some of the members having returned home after reaching Paris and recognizing the trouble that was bound to come from forcing the dauphin to accept Charles the Bad’s liberation and to receive him with a show of friendliness.
Outside of the city there was no show of friendliness between the royalists and the friends of Navarre. A lively little war was going on that sent the people from round about to seek protection within Marcel’s new wall. That Marcel was a man prompt both to see a need and to meet it is shown in his action when the news of the French defeat at Poitiers was brought to Paris. The very next day he gave orders for the rebuilding and enlargement of the wall that the English might encounter that obstacle if they advanced upon the city. The existing wall had not been changed since Philip Augustus’s time, five centuries before, and the new rampart showed one change in fashion—its towers were square instead of round. Its size indicated a distinct increase in the size of the city on the north side, for when the wall was completed by Charles V the ends on the right bank were not opposite the ends on the south bank. The south wall was made stronger, however, by a deepening of the ditches.
Charles lived much at the Louvre. Because he gathered a body of soldiers about him it was rumored that he was going to use them against the Parisians. The regent was not lacking in courage. Accompanied only by a half dozen followers he rode into one of the city squares and told the astonished crowd of his affection for Paris and its people, and of his intention of defending it against its enemies.
The people were so touched by their prince’s pluck and candor that Marcel found it prudent to stop laying charges against the dauphin and to transfer them to his councillors. After working up feeling against them for over a month he led a mob to the palace, where Charles was then staying. Together with some of his friends he pressed into the dauphin’s own room and there they killed Charles’s councillors, the marshals of Champagne and Normandy, not only in his sight but so close to him that he was splashed with their blood. Having impressed the boy with his strength he patronizingly offered to protect him and put on his head his own citizen’s cap of red and blue, the colors of Paris. Then he had the bodies flung on to Saint Louis’ huge marble table in the Great Hall, later to be exposed publicly, and made his way back to the Maison aux Piliers on the Grève and there addressed the people, taking great credit for the murderous deed that he had just brought to pass. The crowd approved him with vigorous shouting.
Marcel’s action with regard to the Maison aux Piliers is significant of his entire disregard of the wishes or the property of the crown prince. The house took its name from the fact that its second story, projecting over the street, was supported by columns. At this time it was over two hundred years old for it had been built in 1141. Philip Augustus bought it in 1212, but evidently he resold it, for there is a record that Philip the Fair bought it for a present for his brother. In some way Philip the Long got possession of it and gave it to one of his favorites. It seems to have returned to royal hands almost immediately, for Louis the Quarreler’s widow, Clémence, died there and willed it to her nephew, the dauphin of Vienne. His heir bequeathed the dauphiny and other property to Philip of Valois in trust for his grandson, the Charles of this chapter, who was the first heir apparent to wear the title of dauphin.
Marcel wanted the Maison aux Piliers for a city hall. The dauphin refused to give it up and tried various ways—even that of giving title to a private citizen—to save it from being taken from him. About six months before the murder of the marshals, however, Marcel bought it with public money, and called it La Meson de la Ville.
On the northern slope of the Mont Sainte Geneviève, on the site of a building of Roman construction, rose in Carolingian days the first city hall. It was clumsily made of stone and was called the Parloir aux Bourgeois. This was succeeded at some later day by a “parloir” near the Grand Châtelet. Marcel’s purchase decided the situation of the Hôtel de Ville for all time. It was in its logical place near the Grève where the very heart of the city’s business throbbed. There, rebuilt in 1540 by Francis I and in 1876 after its destruction by the communists, it has housed the city’s offices and has seen many strange and furious scenes in days of disturbance, and received many sovereigns and potentates in times of peace.
After the death of the marshals Marcel’s exactions upon the prince were grosser than ever. Charles was even forced to give Charles the Bad an annuity and to be frequently in his company. Just about a month after the assassination the dauphin managed to escape from Paris and go to Champagne where he was given cordial sympathy by the friends of the slain marshal. They urged him to besiege Paris and to kill the provost as punishment for the murder he had instigated. When the Parisians learned that the prince to whom they paid so little consideration was receiving a dangerous support in other places they begged the University of Paris to send messengers to ask him to spare the lives of the provost and his immediate following. Charles returned word that he would forgive the citizens provided a half dozen or so of their chief men were sent him as hostages. No one was willing to take the chance of surviving the “hostage” condition, and the city prepared to withstand a siege.
Immediately after Charles’s flight Marcel had removed the artillery from the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville, and had begun to swing the new wall outside of the fortress in order to cut it off from the country. The work of wall-building went on briskly on the right bank, and the moat was deepened around the fortifications of the left bank.
Being still under the spell of Charles the Bad’s vivacity and enterprise the Parisians invited him to be their captain. Down in their hearts, though, they did not trust him, and it was not long before they made his going out of the city with his men and engaging in a shouted conversation with the regent’s men an excuse for charging him with treachery and driving him out of the city.
Once beyond the walls he promptly joined the dauphin in putting down the peasant insurrection called the Jacquerie, from the peasant’s nickname, Jacques Bonhomme. Whether or not Marcel instigated the uprising is not known with certainty, but at any rate it served the purpose of leading the prince’s army away from Paris. The insurrection was not of long duration, for it was crushed with a heavy hand and no quarter.
Again Marcel dickered with Charles the Bad who was always ready to dicker with anybody on the chance of something turning out for his own profit. He was encamped at Saint Denis. The regent’s army almost surrounded the city and was in communication with a friendly party inside of which Jean Maillard was the most prominent.
Confident that he would be put to death if he were captured by the prince, Marcel arranged to open the city to Navarre on the night of July 31, 1358. Maillard was in charge of the Porte Saint Denis and when Marcel demanded the keys he refused to give them up. Then he leaped on his horse, took the banner of the city from the Hôtel de Ville and rode through street after street shouting “Montjoie Saint Denis,” the rallying cry of the monarch from early days. There was lively fighting among the citizens throughout the evening.
Marcel had sent word to Charles the Bad that entrance might be made by the east gate, the Porte Saint Antoine. As he neared it, key in hand, about eleven o’clock that night, he was met by Maillard.
“Étienne, Étienne,” cried Maillard, “what are you doing here at this hour?”
“What business is it of yours, Jehan! I am here to act for the city whose government has been entrusted to me.”
“That is not so,” cried Jehan with an oath. “You are not here at this hour for any good end; and I call your attention,” he said to the men with him, “to the keys of the gate that he is carrying for the purpose of betraying the city.”
“Jehan, you lie!”
“Traitor, ’tis you who lie!”
A sharp fight arose between the two bands and Maillard himself killed Marcel. He explained his course the next day to the people, “and the greater part thanked God with folded hands for the grace He had done them.”
When Charles the regent rode into Paris on the second day of August he passed a churchyard where the naked bodies of Marcel and two of his companions were exposed on the same spot where the provost had exposed the bodies of the two marshals.
It is not possible to tell now—perhaps it was not possible to tell in his own day—how much of Marcel’s activity was due to a sincere desire to improve the economic and political condition of the burghers of Paris, and how much was the result of his own ambition. Perhaps he was ahead of his time; certainly he was mistaken in his methods. Whatever the judgment upon him it is undeniable that he was a man of extraordinary force and a “spellbinder” whose personality has won him admiration through the centuries. Beside the Hôtel de Ville his statue stands to-day, a stern figure looking south across the river, and mounted on a horse which has been proclaimed as the finest bronze steed in the world.
Upon his return to Paris Charles showed a forbearance unusual in those times of swift reprisals. There were confiscations of the property of some of Marcel’s friends and even the beheading of two of them on the Grève, but that was before the regent’s entrance into the city, and he tactfully steadied popular feeling and gave no rein to the spirit of revenge which he might have been expected to feel. He even entered into an agreement of peace with that weathercock, Charles of Navarre, and Paris and its neighborhood drew a sigh of relief.
The dauphin seized the opportunity offered by this time of quiet to make the Louvre more habitable. The ancient tower was left undisturbed except that a gallery sprang from it to the northern wall which Charles built to complete the rectangle which Philip Augustus had begun.
Marcel had met his reward in the summer of 1358. The next spring Charles received from London the terms of a treaty which his father had made with king Edward III. A large stretch of western territory was to be yielded to England and an enormous ransom to be paid for the king’s release. It is a testimony to the increased strength of the subject in France that Charles submitted this document to a gathering of deputies who surrounded the regent on the great outer staircase of the palace and filled the courtyard below. They rejected with promptness and scorn the proposal to make their enemies a gift of nearly half of France and to ruin themselves by the raising of the exorbitant sum of four million crowns of gold. If any money was to be raised they preferred to spend it in fighting the English, and they offered their services as soldiers.
When Edward learned of France’s refusal to accept the treaty he promptly crossed the Channel. He met with such small success, however, that he was glad to make a compact with Burgundy by which he promised—for a consideration—to let that province alone for two years.
Edward then pressed on to Paris which he approached on the south. Charles, learning of his coming, burned all the villages adjoining the city on that side so that the English army would have to seek far for food. He discouraged any response to Edward’s attempts to draw the French soldiers outside the walls, and at the end of a week, the English, bored and hungry, withdrew.
Not long after, Charles was able to negotiate the Peace of Brétigny, which was all too hard upon France in its demands for the cession of territory and of a large ransom for John, but which the people, weary of war, received with joy. The bells of Notre Dame pealed their satisfaction, and the light-hearted Parisians danced and feasted in the squares, and entertained heartily the four Englishmen who represented King Edward. Each was given a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, the choicest possession of Paris.
Charles had obtained the money to pay part of his father’s ransom from his new brother-in-law, the duke of Milan who had just married his sister Isabelle. It was to secure the payment of the remainder that John’s younger sons, the dukes of Anjou and of Berri, were sent to England as hostages.
John reëntered Paris in December, 1360, four years after the disastrous battle that had cost him his liberty but had had the result of giving his son training which went far to make him one of the greatest kings that France ever has known. Paris was glad to welcome her monarch whose charm they loved and whose weakness they forgot.
The remaining four years of John’s rule was hardly wiser than the early part. He jaunted about the country, everywhere instituting festivals and tournaments. It was now that he gave the duchy of Burgundy to prince Philip as a reward for his pluck at Poitiers.
Then came the breaking of his parole by the duke of Anjou and John’s return to England and death. The stage was clear for the reëntrance of a man who was to treat his task of rulership as one worthy of serious approach.
KING JOHN’S body was sent over to France from London. As the cortège escorting the coffin drew near to Paris Charles and his brothers went out on foot to meet it, going beyond Saint Denis and then convoying it to the abbey where it was duly buried. The metropolitan of Paris, the archbishop of Sens, sang mass, and after the service the princes with their following of lords and prelates returned to the city.
On Trinity Sunday, not long after, these same lords and prelates were witnesses of the coronation at Rheims of Charles and his wife. The ceremonies and festivities lasted five days, after which Charles returned to Paris to take up the burden of government of a disordered and disheartened country.
John’s lavishness could not make the people blind to their losses by the plague and three years after Charles’s accession a new attack swept across France striking chiefly the large cities where ignorance of sanitation produced conditions in which truly only the “fittest”—the toughest—could survive. A writer of the time says, “None could count the number of the dead in Paris, young or old, rich or poor; when death entered a house the little children died first, then the menials, then the parents.” It is only wonderful that such epidemics did not make their visitations oftener, when, for instance, the bodies of Marcel and his companions in treachery were cast into the river at the Port Saint Paul, which is above the city, and the city continued to use the river water for drinking purposes.
The laxities of the last reign had permitted roving companies of what were little other than bandits to fight and burn and slay all over France, while in the northern provinces a lively war was going on with the Navarrese, helped by the Gascons and by bands of English. The territorial loss due to the Peace of Brétigny was a sore memory to king and people, and this participation in the internal strife of the country by the chief enemies of France aggravated hatred of the English. Nor was England the only land troublesome to Charles. There were dissensions in Italy and Spain and the French of the south were drawn into affairs that touched them practically although they were over the border. Avignon, which had been the enforced home of the popes since Philip the Fair’s refusal to acknowledge the temporal power of the pontiff over sixty years before, was deserted by Pope Urban V, who went to Rome in spite of Charles’s protestations. The emperor of Germany, Charles IV, was the only monarch of Europe who seemed to have any kindly feeling toward the young king. His friendship continued throughout Charles’s reign, and in 1378, two years before its end he and his son paid a visit to Paris.
Charles showed his appreciation of the imperial good will by the cordiality and elaborateness of his reception. The king’s representative, the Provost of Paris, and the people’s representative, the Provost of the Merchants, went as far as Saint Denis to meet the German train. The king himself, dressed in scarlet and mounted on a handsome white horse, awaited them at the suburb of La Chapelle. The combined retinues made a dazzling procession across the city to the palace on the island, where, in the evening, a supper was served to over eight hundred princes and nobles. The effect was disastrous on the emperor for he was so laid up with gout on the following day that he had to be borne by servants even the short distance between his apartments and the Sainte Chapelle where he heard mass and saw the Most Holy Relics. On that same day the burghers expressed their satisfaction with the visit by presenting their imperial guest, by the hand of the Provost of the Merchants, with a superb piece of silver and two huge silver-gilt flagons. Every day of the succeeding week was filled with festivities. In the city the emperor visited the Louvre and the Hôtel Saint Paul—the new palace at the east end—where he was received by the queen who showed him the royal menagerie. He made various excursions in the suburbs—to Saint Denis to see the tombs of the French monarchs, to the abbey of Saint Maur, east of the city, to the château of Vincennes, where Charles was born and where he was destined to die two years later, and where now the imperial gout prevented the elder guest joining the younger in a stag hunt, and finally, on the day of departure, to the king’s favorite château—de Beauté. Here the monarchs parted after exchanging rings and expressions of esteem.
Since Charles had so many troubles, both domestic and foreign, to contend with, it was fortunate that he was intelligent in his choice of advisers and sagacious and prudent in his legislation. Often he was hard-pressed financially, and more than once he had to summon the States General to secure approval of tax levies and of political moves. His fighting was not glorious, though Du Guesclin, whom he appointed Constable, was both bold and determined, but he knew how to make use of stratagem and even of defeat and to turn the quarrels of others to his own account.
Having brought about a state of peace and understanding in the immediate provinces and having strengthened himself by securing the fortification of many towns and the increase of his army, Charles found himself in a position to take the offensive against the English. A beginning at changing the state of affairs brought about by the Peace of Brétigny was made when the lords of Aquitaine, which the royal house of England held subject to Charles’s suzerainty, went to Paris, and, to the delight of the Parisians, entered a formal complaint against the harsh rule of the Prince of Wales. Edward was summoned to appear before the court at Paris. His reply to the messengers was: “We will willingly appear at Paris, since so the king of France commands us, but it will be with basnet on head and with sixty thousand men at our back.”
The States General supported Charles, and the court maintained that king Edward had forfeited his French holdings by failing to appear in Paris.
The English retaliated promptly, and for the remaining eleven years of Charles’s reign there was constant fighting though no great battle. Charles was not a knight of noteworthy personal prowess like his father. He never went to war himself, but he directed every move and carried diplomacy into every plan of operations. His army tolled the English along, always seeming to promise a meeting but never coming to grips, while at the same time it used up the food supply of the country and made the maintenance of the foreign force a matter of extreme difficulty. Small affairs were not prohibited, however, and the French took an English town here and another one there and won still others by stratagem.
At last from sheer fatigue a truce was entered into which lasted some two years. During it the Black Prince died. “The King of France, on account of his lineage,” says Froissart, “had funeral service in honor of him performed with great magnificence in the Sainte Chapelle of the palace in Paris, which was attended by many prelates and barons of the realm.”
A little later Edward III died and Charles, after holding a memorial service for him, also, in the Sainte Chapelle, at once put five armies into the field and instituted so vigorous an offensive policy that at the time of his death in 1380 the English were driven out of all but five coast cities.
Two months before the king’s death he lost his strong-armed Constable, Du Guesclin, at the siege of Châteauneuf-Randon. Strangely enough for a man who had spent his life in arms the great fighter did not die sword in hand, but of illness and in bed. The governor of the town, who had promised to yield to the Constable and to him alone, refused to give up his keys to the second in command and going out from the citadel laid them on the bier of the great captain. Du Guesclin’s body was carried to Paris where it lay in the monastery of the Cordeliers on the left bank before it was taken to Saint Denis where his tomb was arranged at the foot of the tomb which Charles had had prepared for himself. The ceremonies were as elaborate as those for a member of the royal family, in such esteem did the king hold the departed soldier.
It was only a few weeks later that Charles himself fell ill and realized that his end was not far off. He had known much sickness in his life—his was one of those triumphs of mind over unwilling matter. At one time before his accession his unamiable brother-in-law, Charles the Bad, had, it is asserted, caused him to be poisoned. So strong was the poison that his hair and nails fell from his body. His good friend the Emperor of Germany had sent him a skillful physician who had relieved his system by opening a small sore in his arm. If ever it proved impossible to keep this sore open, he told his royal patient, he must prepare for death, though he would have about a fortnight in which to set his house in order. Twenty-two years later, in September, 1380, the issue began to dry, and at the end of the month, on the eve of Michaelmas, the King died in his birthplace, the château of Vincennes. His body with face uncovered was borne through the mourning crowds of Paris to the abbey of Saint Denis where it was buried in the tomb already prepared.
When Charles as a young man had made a spirited speech to the Parisians telling them that he meant to live and die in Paris he made a statement that he lived up to. Economical even to penuriousness elsewhere, he built lavishly in Paris. His improvement of the Louvre has been mentioned. In the northeast corner of the quadrangle were a garden, tennis court and menagerie. A library of nearly a thousand volumes was housed in three stories of one of the towers. Charles was a great student, read the entire Bible through every year, and had a corps of translators, transcribers, illuminators and binders always at work. His collection was the nucleus of the present National Library although the Duke of Bedford carried off a goodly number of books to England in the later part of the Hundred Years’ War. The royal apartments in the Louvre, elaborately carved and decorated, were large and well arranged. The rooms of the queen, Jeanne de Bourbon, were on the south side overlooking the river, and the king’s were on the north. Each of the children had a separate suite and that of the dauphin rivaled in size and elegance those of his father and mother. Each set of rooms had its own chapel.
The palace on the Cité was full of unpleasant memories of the days of the regency—notably the murder of the marshals—and Charles no doubt was glad when the overcrowding caused by the business of the courts allowed him to break away from the tradition of royal residence under the ancient roof. With all its changes the Louvre still was a rather grim dwelling, and Charles chose a more open location at the extreme east of the city for his new Hôtel Saint Paul. He bought existing houses, some of which he demolished, and land and laid out a large establishment of which the present names of streets in the vicinity suggest varied uses, though none of the original buildings are left. The streets of the Garden, of the Cherry Orchard, of the Fair Trellis, of the Lions tell their own stories, while the rue Charles V, a tiny thoroughfare, is the only street memorial in all Paris which bears the name of this great monarch.
The Hôtel des Tournelles, so called from its many towers, was built by Charles just north of the palace of Saint Paul.
Certainly Paris thrived under Charles. The population increased to a hundred and fifty thousand, many people coming in to the town during the troublous times with Navarre and the English to secure the protection of its wall. Charles carried on Marcel’s plans of fortification. The chief point was the Bastille—at first merely two heavy towers protecting one of the city gates, but, by the time of Charles’s death, strengthened by the addition of six others so that it became a formidable fortress and dungeon. Its walls were fifteen feet thick and over sixty feet high. A deep ditch surrounded it. Its destruction by the mob on July 14, 1789, was one of the opening events of the Revolution, and so profoundly did its grim walls symbolize oppression that the anniversary of its destruction is the French national holiday. Where the huge building stood is now an open square adorned by a shaft called the “July Column” raised in honor of the heroes of the Revolution of July, 1830.
Of examples of domestic architecture of this time there is still in existence part of the Hôtel de Clisson. It is now the entrance of the Archives, and, like the Hôtel de Sens, shows the lingering style of the feudal château.
Charles was ably seconded in his civic improvements by Hugh Aubriot, the provost of Paris, who established a mallet-armed militia devoted to the king’s interests. The provost of Paris represented the king, and Charles added to his responsibilities many of those formerly attaching to the provostship of the Merchants before the king had experienced their extent in the hands of Marcel. Aubriot laid the corner stone of the enlarged Bastille. He never was on good terms with the clergy, unlike Charles, whose studiousness and piety endeared him to the ecclesiastics. On the very day of Charles’s funeral, even while the cortège was making its way to Saint Denis, the provost quarreled with the rector of the University, was ordered before the bishop of Paris to answer for his misdeed, and was condemned to life imprisonment. How he escaped is a later story.
As provost of Paris Aubriot lived in the Grand Châtelet on the right bank. This fortress, afterwards a prison, is now represented only by a square of the name. In the course of his improvements Charles strengthened its mate, the Petit Châtelet, on the left bank. He also installed the first large clock in Paris, that on the square tower of the Conciergerie.
As a symbol of the royal power the king ordered that there be added to the seal of the city of Paris, which bore the ship of the ancient guild of Nautae, a field sown with the fleur-de-lis.
WHEN Charles V lay on his death-bed he summoned his brothers, the dukes of Berri and Burgundy and his brother-in-law, the duke of Bourbon, and gave them detailed instructions concerning the guardianship of his son, the dauphin Charles, then twelve years old. He explained frankly that his brother, the duke of Anjou, was not asked to this conference, although next to himself in age, because of his grasping character. Undoubtedly there were other qualities upon which he did not need to dwell, for the duke of Anjou was that son of John the Good who had broken his word of honor, thereby compelling his father to return to his confinement in England.
The four brothers had no idea that Anjou was present other than in spirit, perhaps, at the council around the death-bed of the eldest. Yet he was concealed so near that he heard every word including the “no good to himself” which is the proverbial reward of the listener. He straightway went forth and turned to his own account the information so infamously acquired. Rushing from Vincennes to Paris he seized the king’s personal valuables, and, as soon as Charles was buried, he declared himself regent, because of his being the new king’s oldest uncle.
Charles VI (1380-1422) was only twelve years old, and, of course, was entirely in the hands of his guardians. The Parisians were disposed to be gentle toward the child, and received him with rejoicing when he entered the city after his coronation at Rheims. Their attitude was soon to change. Charles VI’s reign was one of such dissension and turbulence among his subjects, of such intrigue, hypocrisy and treachery among his friends and relatives, and of such advance by his external enemies who naturally took advantage of these internal troubles, that France has never been in worse case except during the horrors of the Revolution. Paris, where centered the initiative of the country, was torn by riot and insurrection, the burghers were manipulated by the lords, and the populace was at last declared subject to its chief enemy, the English.
The earliest trouble came when there was need of money for the meditated war with Flanders, and for the duke of Anjou’s secret preparations for an expedition to Naples where it was his life’s ambition to rule. As usual, the coffers of the Jews offered an irresistible temptation. The ghetto was in the heart of the Cité. Its houses were plundered and burned and many Hebrews lost their lives in trying to protect their property. To Anjou the citizens were more generous than to the king. A certain sum which they had promised to the royal treasury went into the avuncular pocketbook.
There had been fair words at first about the reduction of taxes, but when the words came to nothing the Parisians rose in hot rebellion. The immediate cause was the announcement of a new tax on all merchandise sold. When the tax-gatherers attempted to do their duty the people went to the Hôtel de Ville and the Arsenal and armed themselves with the mallets which Hugh Aubriot had prepared for the use of the militia when they should be called out against the English. For several days the people were masters of the city. Aubriot was released from the bishop’s prison and was put at the head of the rebellion, but he evidently regarded this as a doubtful honor, for he disappeared in the course of the night, seeming to think that an escape confirmed was better than a hazardous leadership. Prisoners for debt were released by the insurrectionists and the maillotins—mallet-bearers—committed many murders for which they were to suffer swift punishment.
Young Charles had had his first taste of war in Flanders and had gained the battle of Rosebecque. Returning to Paris the citizens came forth to meet him fully armed and with such martial demeanor that it looked as if they came to greet their lord in battle array. Charles sent an officer to them as they stood massed under Montmartre, to the north of the city, with a message to the effect that he had no desire to see them in any such guise, and ordering them back within the walls. When the young king had restored the oriflamme to its place beside the altar at Saint Denis he entered the city with every evidence of displeasure at the recent revolutionary behavior of the citizens. The barriers before the gates and the gates themselves were destroyed as if the monarch were making an entrance into the town of an enemy, and he rode haughtily through the streets, the only mounted soldier in the army, acknowledging neither by look or word the acclamations of his subjects. No sooner had he given thanks for his victories and had left Notre Dame than he issued stern orders of reprisal. He punished individuals by fine or imprisonment or death and the city by a loss of privileges which it had taken long to win. Among them, the Provost of Merchants became merely a minor officer of the king, the corporations lost the right of electing their heads, the chains which had been stretched across the streets at night and which could be serviceable as barricades were removed, and the burghers were disarmed.
Among the executions was that of Jean Desmarets, an old man who had served well and faithfully both king and people. His had been a soothing influence on many occasions when the citizens would have broken out in rebellion, but now he was caught in a position where his conviction was inevitable in the midst of a turmoil where discriminations were not made. On his way to execution some one shouted to him to ask King Charles for mercy. “God alone will I ask for mercy,” he said. “I served well and faithfully King Charles’s great-grandfather, and his grandfather, and his father, and they had nothing with which to reproach me. If the king had the age and knowledge of a man he would never have been guilty of such a judgment against me.”
When the Parisians piled up before the Louvre enough arms to furnish forth eight hundred thousand soldiers Charles knew that they were thoroughly penitent.
The king’s uncles soon wearied of guardianship which each must share with his brother, and they went off on their separate interests with the exception of the strongest of them all, the duke of Burgundy. He was that same Philip the Bold who had fought beside his father at Poitiers and who had received the duchy of Burgundy as his reward. He had made an advantageous marriage, and so firmly established was he and so conscious of his power that at the coronation of Charles VI he had sat down beside the king in the place which his brother Anjou should have occupied, and no one tried to dispossess him. Now he practically ruled the kingdom alone, though the other uncles returned now and then. Charles was but a lad still, and it was not unnatural that he should be lively, and his uncles were well content that he should be diverted from any attempt to learn anything of his business of government. Balls and jousts were frequent. There was a revival of the fashions of the days of chivalry, and old chronicles and tales were sought out to teach the ancient customs. The ladies wore extravagant head-dresses with veils and horns and the men decked themselves in tight nether garments and flowing sleeves.
Froissart tells in detail the events of the “First Entry” of Charles’s queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, into Paris. He is not right in saying that she never had been in the city. She had been married five years at the time: her wedding banquet had been given in the palace of the Cité, and she had been crowned in the Sainte Chapelle. This “Entry” was merely an excuse for especially gorgeous festivities.
“It was on Sunday, the 20th day of June, in the year of our Lord 1389,” says the chronicler, “that the queen entered Paris. In the afternoon of that day the noble ladies of France who were to accompany the queen assembled at Saint Denis, with such of the nobility as were appointed to lead the litters of the queen and her attendants. The citizens of Paris, to the number of 1,200, were mounted on horseback, dressed in uniforms of green and crimson, and lined each side of the road. Queen Joan and her daughter the Duchess of Orleans entered the city first, about an hour after noon, in a covered litter, and passing through the great street of Saint Denis, went to the palace, where the king was waiting for them.
“The Queen of France, attended by the Duchess of Berry and many other noble ladies, began the procession in an open litter most richly ornamented. A crowd of nobles attended, and sergeants and others of the king’s officers had full employment in making way for the procession, for there were such numbers assembled that it seemed as if all the world had come thither. At the gate of Saint Denis was the representation of a starry firmament, and within it were children dressed as angels, whose singing and chanting was melodiously sweet. There was also an image of the Virgin holding in her arms a child, who at times amused himself with a windmill made of a large walnut. The upper part of this firmament was richly adorned with the arms of France and Bavaria, with a brilliant sun dispersing his rays through the heavens; and this sun was the king’s device at the ensuing tournaments. The queen, after passing them, advanced slowly to the fountain in the street of Saint Denis, which was decorated with fine blue cloth besprinkled over with golden flowers-de-luce; and instead of water, the fountain ran in great streams of Clairé, and excellent Piement. Around the fountain were young girls handsomely dressed, who sang most sweetly, and held in their hands cups of gold, offering drink to all who chose it. Below the monastery of the Trinity a scaffold had been erected in the streets, and on it a castle, with a representation of the battle with King Saladin performed by living actors, the Christians on one side and the Saracens on the other. The procession then passed on to the second gate of Saint Denis, which was adorned as the first; and as the queen was going through the gate two angels descended and gently placed on her head a rich golden crown, ornamented with precious stones, at the same time singing sweetly the following verse:—
“Opposite the chapel of Saint James a scaffold had been erected, richly decorated with tapestry, and surrounded with curtains, within which were men who played finely on organs. The whole street of Saint Denis was covered with a canopy or rich camlet and silk cloths. The queen and her ladies, conducted by the great lords, arrived at length at the gate of the Châtelet, where they stopped to see other splendid pageants that had been prepared. The queen and her attendants thence passed on to the bridge of Notre Dame, which was covered with a starry canopy of green and crimson, and the streets were all hung with tapestry as far as the church. It was now late in the evening, for the procession, ever since it had set out from Saint Denis, had advanced but at a foot’s pace. As the queen was passing down the street of Notre Dame, a man descended by means of a rope from the highest tower of Notre Dame church, having two lighted torches in his hands, and playing many tricks as he came down. The Bishop of Paris and his numerous clergy met the queen at the entrance of the church, and conducted her through the nave and choir to the great altar, where, on her knees, she made her prayers, and presented as her offering four cloths of gold, and the handsome crown which the angels had put on her head at the gate of Paris. The Lord John de la Rivière and Sir John le Mercier instantly brought one more rich with which they crowned her. When this was done she and her ladies left the church, and as it was late upwards of 500 lighted tapers attended the procession. In such array were they conducted to the palace, where the king, Queen Joan, and the Duchess of Orleans were waiting for them.
“On the morrow, which was Monday, the king gave a grand dinner to a numerous company of ladies, and at the hour of high mass the Queen of France was conducted to the holy chapel, where she was anointed and sanctified in the usual manner. Sir William de Viare, Archbishop of Rouen, said mass. Shortly after mass the king, queen, and all the ladies entered the hall: and you must know that the great marble table which is in the hall was covered with oaken planks four inches thick, and the royal dinner placed thereon. Near the table, and against one of the pillars, was the king’s buffet, magnificently decked out with gold and silver plate; and in the hall were plenty of attendants, sergeants-at-arms, ushers, archers, and minstrels, who played away to the best of their ability. The kings, prelates, and ladies, having washed, seated themselves at the tables, which were three in number: at the first, sat the King and Queen of France, and some few of the higher nobility; and at the other two, there were upwards of 500 ladies and damsels; but the crowd was so great that it was with difficulty they could be served with dinner, which indeed was plentiful and sumptuous. There were in the hall many curiously arranged devices: a castle to represent the city of Troy, with the palace of Ilion, from which were displayed the banners of the Trojans; also a pavilion on which were placed the banners of the Grecian kings, and which was moved as it were by invisible beings to the attack of Troy, assisted by a large ship capable of containing 100 men-at-arms; but the crowd was so great that this amusement could not last long. There were so many people on all sides that several were stifled by the heat, and the queen herself almost fainted. The queen left the palace about five o’clock, and, followed by her ladies, in litters or on horseback, proceeded to the residence of the king at the hotel de Saint Pol. The king took boat at the palace, and was rowed to his hotel, where, in a large hall, he entertained the ladies at a banquet; the queen, however, remained in her chamber where she supped, and did not again appear that night. On Tuesday, many superb presents were made by the Parisians to the King and Queen of France, and the Duchess of Touraine. This day the king and queen dined in private, at their different hotels, for at three o’clock the tournament was to take place in the square of Saint Catherine, where scaffolds had been erected for the accommodation of the queen and the ladies. The knights who took part in this tournament were thirty in number, including the king; and when the jousts began they were carried on with great vigor, every one performing his part in honor of the ladies. The Duke of Ireland, who was then a resident at Paris, and invited by the king to the tournament, tilted well; also a German knight from beyond the Rhine, by name Sir Gervais di Mirande, gained great commendation. The number of knights made it difficult to give a full stroke, and the dust was so troublesome that it increased the difficulty. The Lord de Coucy shone with brilliancy. The tilts were continued without relaxation until night, when the ladies were conducted to their hotels. At the hotel de Saint Pol was the most magnificent banquet ever heard of. Feasting and dancing lasted till sunrise, and the prize of the tournament was given, with the assent of the ladies and heralds, to the king as being the best tilter on the opponent side; while the prize for the holders of the lists was given to the Halze de Flandres, bastard brother to the Duchess of Burgundy. On Wednesday the tilting was continued, and the banquet this evening was as grand as the preceding one. The prize was adjudged by the ladies and heralds to a squire from Hainault, as the most deserving of the opponents, and to a squire belonging to the Duke of Burgundy, as the best tenant of the field. On Thursday also the tournament was continued; and, this day, knights and squires tilted promiscuously, and many gallant justs were done, for every one took pains to excel. When night put an end to the combat there was a grand entertainment again for the ladies at the hotel de Saint Pol. On Friday the king feasted the ladies and damsels at dinner, and afterwards very many returned to their homes, the king and queen thanking them very graciously for having come to the feast.”
Three years later Charles became insane, and it seemed as if no man was his friend thereafter. Undoubtedly a life of youthful dissipation and a naturally violent temper were the bases of his malady. The provoking causes seem to have been two. Urged by the bishop of Laon Charles had plucked up courage enough definitely to send away his uncles and to undertake to rule with the help of some of his father’s advisers, whom he recalled. One of these men, his Constable, Oliver de Clisson, was foully murdered at a little distance from the Hôtel Saint Paul, a few minutes after he had left a banquet given by the king. When Charles was told of the murder he rushed into the street in his night clothes and heard the name of the assassin, de Craon, from de Clisson’s own lips. The king burned with desire for vengeance. He set out as soon as he could in pursuit of de Craon who was supposed to have fled to Brittany. On an extremely hot day for which the king was unsuitably dressed in a thick black velvet jacket and heavy scarlet velvet cap, there dashed out at him from the roadside an old man, probably half-witted, who kept crying “Go no farther; thou art betrayed.” Charles was much startled by this gruesome warning, and when close upon it a page’s lance fell clattering against some piece of steel equipment he was seized with frenzy, wounded several of his followers, and when he was at last overpowered and taken from his horse, recognized no one.
Never again was he wholly sane. There were times of betterment, but never any real mental health. His people loved him—his nickname is Bien-Aimé—as they would a helpless child, but after a while no one except a hired woman took any care of him. His clothes and his person were neglected and he had no medical care. Isabeau deserted him and he had a repugnance for her even when he did not recognize her. At other times he had lucid intervals when he took part in festivities prepared to divert him. It was at the wedding entertainment of a lady of the court, held at the Hôtel Saint Paul where he lived, that he came near being burned to death. He and five of his courtiers were sewed up in tarred skins and were supposed to represent satyrs. Some one, perhaps by accident, perhaps with the desire to get the king out of the way, set fire to these dresses. It was impossible to pull them off. One of the young men threw himself into a tub of water and was saved. The king escaped by being wrapped in the voluminous skirt of his very young aunt-in-law, the duchess of Berri.
With the head of the kingdom insane for thirty years and with court and political factions working against each other with all virulence it is not strange that the country became merely a ground for the display of individual passion. The duke of Burgundy of the moment was John the Fearless, son of Philip the Bold. Between John and Charles’s brother, Louis, duke of Orleans, raged a hot rivalry. Isabeau, whose relations with Louis were a public scandal, fed the fire of disturbance. At last, in November, 1407, only three days after a public reconciliation, Louis was assassinated at the hands of John’s bravos as he was decoyed by a false message purporting to be from Charles, from the Hôtel Barbette where he had been supping with the queen. The house with its charming little tower is still standing in a crowded street of the Marais. It is not hard to picture the rush of the assassins, the screams of onlookers aroused from sleep, the hiss of arrows shot at windows where eyes were seeing what was meant to be hid, and the final ordering away of the ruffians by a tall man in command.
The next day what member of the royal family more grief-stricken than the duke of Burgundy! Yet he admitted the deed to his uncle, the duke of Berri. In spite of that he had the audacity the day after to try to join the council of princes who met in the Hôtel de Nesle on the left bank to discuss the matter. To their credit be it said that they did not admit him. John rode away into Flanders, but so great was his confidence in the affection for him of the people of Paris that he ventured to return, to have his case defended by a monk—who argued for five hours justifying the murder of Louis as the murder of a tyrant—and to force the weak-minded king to forgive him the vile deed. He even practically ruled the city for a time in the absence of the queen. Indeed it was not long before he and Isabeau came to a secret understanding. A little later a marriage was arranged between the murderer’s daughter and one of the sons of his victim.
Louis of Orleans’ son Charles, better known as a poet than as a statesman or warrior, married for his second wife the daughter of the count of Armagnac of the south of France. The father-in-law was more energetic than Charles, and he headed the struggle with the Burgundians. The populace of Paris sided with the Burgundians, the court with the Armagnacs. For five years France, and especially Paris was rent with broils and battles. In Charles V’s day the corporations had grown strong enough to cause some concern to the king and the nobles. Now the powerful brotherhood of butchers entered with enthusiasm into the dissensions that were making Paris almost uninhabitable for the peacefully inclined. Accustomed to the sight of blood and its shedding they entered with enthusiasm into the reformation of the government and especially of such members of the Armagnac party as were prominent. Led by a slaughterer named Caboche they supported the Burgundians in every attack, always in the name of changes which the wisest men of the burghers saw to be beneficial, but which no one had the ability to bring to pass except by violence. The cry of “Armagnac” was enough to cause an attack on any passer in the street and many a private vengeance was accomplished by means of the party shout.
So bad did conditions become that the steadiest of the bourgeois at last summoned the Armagnacs to check the excesses of the Cabochiens. John the Fearless, who had been the real ruler, since he issued orders and proclamations purporting to come from the mad king, was driven out of the city.
His going was a relief to Paris but to the country as a whole it brought disaster, for the duke was not slow in joining forces with the English who had seen their opportunity in the disturbed condition of their enemy’s land. Henry V had recently succeeded his father and had all a newcomer’s and a young man’s enthusiasm for renewing the English claim upon the French crown. He himself headed the army and in October, 1415, inflicted upon the French the crushing defeat of Agincourt wherein 10,000 Frenchmen lay dead upon the field. Never since Agincourt has the oriflamme left the altar of Saint Denis.
The whole country was in a state of uproar, ready to change every existing arrangement in the hope that what succeeded it would be better. The populace of Paris rose against the Armagnacs and the treachery of a Burgundian sympathizer admitted the friends of John the Fearless. The guardian of the Porte de Buci (in the left bank wall just south of the Tour de Nesle) was an iron merchant whose place of business was on the Petit Pont, the western bridge connecting the Cité with the left bank. This man’s son stole his father’s keys and opened the gate to the Burgundians. They swarmed into the city and at once began a massacre so horrible that the streets were strewn with dead bodies which the children pulled about in play. The Provost of Paris seized the dauphin, afterwards Charles VII, then a lad of fifteen, and carried him in his arms to the Bastille where he might be in safety. The insurgents broke in to the Hôtel Saint Paul, took out the mad king and led him about the city on a horse on the pretense that he was giving his approval to the change of rule. As a matter of fact he was a mere puppet in their hands.
As if these disturbances were not enough, Paris, toward the end of this same year (1418), underwent a severe attack of the plague during which the mortality was so great that the dead were buried in ditches, six hundred in each trench. Between September 8 and December 8, according to the city grave-diggers, a hundred thousand people were buried and of these all but about a dozen in every four or five hundred were children. It is small wonder that the Danse Macabre, picturing all men as followed through life by skeletons giving warning of death, was painted in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, even though the number stated by the grave-diggers would seem to have been increased by the proverbial libation-pouring habits of the profession. Probably fifty thousand is nearer the truth.
Queen Isabeau was ever on the side which she thought most profitable to herself. Just now she was in league with John the Fearless who had caused her to be named regent. With him she had reëntered Paris; she concurred in his getting rid of the Cabochiens by sending them out of the city to attack the Armagnacs outside, and shutting the gates behind them; but it is suspected that she was not ignorant of the plot to murder the duke which was carried out the next year.
John the Fearless was succeeded by his son, Philip the Good, and he became the queen’s adviser. The battle of Agincourt had given Henry
V of England the right to dictate the terms of the Treaty of Troyes. By it Queen Isabeau practically gave away the crown which belonged to her son Charles, bestowed her daughter, Catherine, in marriage on Henry, and yielded the regency of France to Henry during the lifetime of the mad king. Burgundians and English escorted Henry V into Paris at the end of December, 1420. He made the Louvre his residence and put English officers in charge of the Bastille and the other fortifications. The Parisians at first received the newcomers with delight, for so worn was the city with quarreling and fighting that the advent of a new element was looked upon with hope. It was not long, however, before Henry’s sternness and the arrogance of his followers made them disliked, and the new element was found to be an element of discord. Between the regent and the Church there were continual dissensions, for the bishops refused to confirm Henry’s appointments of prelates sympathetic with England.
In addition to the constant disturbances that agitated the streets the city was in a pitiable state in other ways. Famine and plague had done their work thoroughly, and the population was much reduced; the always exorbitant taxes drove property owners out of the city into the country, which they found in such bad case that even the wolves went from the country into the city, and made nightly raids upon the cemeteries. Children died in the streets from hunger, dogs were eaten as a delicacy, and the demands of beggars upon the seemingly well-to-do were more in the nature of threats than appeals.
Henry V died in August, 1422, and Charles the Well-Beloved followed him to the grave in October of the same year. Henry’s body lay in state at Saint Denis before it was taken to England. Charles’s subjects came to view the remains of their poor tortured king during the three weeks that it rested at the Hôtel Saint Paul before being taken to Notre Dame and then to Saint Denis. Over his grave at Saint Denis the little English prince, Henry VI, only a few months old, was acknowledged king of France. The duke of Bedford became regent, and the English rose was quartered on the arms of Paris.
The rightful king, Charles VII, crowded out of Paris, fought with small success through the middle of France, until Jeanne Darc, the inspired peasant of Domremy, led his forces to such success that she dared besiege Paris. She established her army on the northwest of the city before the St. Honoré Gate, and there she fell, wounded by a shaft, but a short distance from the spot where her equestrian statue stands now on the Place des Pyramides. It would have been easier for her if death had come to her then than later in the flames of the Rouen market place.
It was about a month before her trial—some seven years after the death of Charles VI—that Henry VI was crowned king of France in the cathedral of Notre Dame (1431). The English lords made a brave showing at the ceremony, but there were few of the French nobles present, though many sent representatives who wore their escutcheons. So niggardly were the English after the service at the church that the people, who were accustomed to liberal largesse on such occasions, declared that there would have been more generosity shown at the wedding of a bourgeois jeweler.
Charles, who had been consecrated at Rheims in 1429 as the fulfillment of the dearest wish of the Pucelle, tried once more, in 1436, to win his city from the English. This time his general, the Constable de Richemont, entered by the Porte Saint Jacques on the south and advanced through the city unresisted. The English, to the number of about fifteen hundred, took refuge in the Bastille, whence they were starved out in short order and escaped by the Porte Saint Antoine into the fields. A year later Charles made his official entry into the town which he had left nineteen years before when the provost rescued him from the onslaught of the Burgundians. It was a solemn scene when the restored king knelt before the altar of Notre Dame to give thanks for his return.
When he went to the palace on the Cité he must have stood in need of all the composure that religion could give him for there he saw among the statues of the kings of France the statue of Henry V of England! Charles did not have it taken down. It stood with mutilated face to make public show of his scorn.
The English captured at Pontoise were drowned at the Grève soon after. Paris no longer welcomed the stranger.
The city itself was forlorn enough. So poorly was it protected that again wolves made their way through the gates which their keepers were too languid or too indifferent to guard properly. It is said that in one week of the month of September, 1438, no fewer than forty persons were killed by the hungry beasts in Paris and its immediate neighborhood. Twenty-four thousand dwellings stood vacant.
Charles reorganized the administration of Paris, restoring the elections of city officials which his father had suppressed, and establishing a fairly satisfactory arrangement of taxes. A marked addition to the royal power lay in the organization of a standing army devoted to the royal interests. It was thus that he utilized the energy of the adventurers who had grown irresponsible through the disturbed state of the country. By the aid of these soldiers he was enabled to put down the nobility who tried to revolt from his new ordinances and place the dauphin, afterwards Louis XI, on the throne. Louis did not object, but Charles enlisted the good-will of the bourgeoisie, and, chiefly because he did not ask them for money or soldiers, they gave both to him with such willingness that the lords took heed that a new power was confirming the royal attitude. It was not the end of his troubles with the dauphin who remained ever rebelliously opposed to his father, but when one lord was obliged to let the Parliament of Paris arbitrate his quarrels, and when another was thrust into a sack and thrown into the Seine their turbulence was at least discouraged.
With his domestic troubles thus quieted Charles could devote his attention to the war with England, and he did so in painstaking contrast to the almost lethargic indifference of his earlier years. The contest dragged its weary length along until October, 1453 when Charles marched victorious into Bordeaux. Calais was all that was left to England.
Eight years later (1461) Charles “the Victorious,” who had spent little time in Paris, died elsewhere. Stormy as had been his reign and unworthy as had been his character, he nevertheless left his kingdom not only at peace but with the royal power strengthened by the friendliness of the burgher class and possessed of an efficient weapon in the standing army. France was ready for the new order which was to begin under Charles’s son, Louis XI.
WITH Charles VII’s son, Louis XI (1461-1483), the modern history of France may be said to begin, since he substituted the use of brain for the use of muscle in the management of affairs. His earliest attempts at government seem not to have been successful, since at the end of four years he had alienated every class of society. The League of the Public Welfare was formed to oppose him, and it included nobles, clergy, burghers and populace, each of whom had its own serious grievance. Louis had a well-disciplined army but he could not be in all parts of his kingdom at once, and while his attention was given elsewhere his enemies approached Paris. The moral effect of the capture of Paris was to be dreaded almost as much as its actual loss, and the king made himself active in trying to prevent the misfortune. Unlike any ruler preceding him his first efforts were always diplomatic. Instead of rushing troops to Paris he sent messages of appeal to every class within the walls. They roused no response. There were in the University some twenty-five thousand students, no inconsiderable force, but the Rector refused to arm them for their monarch’s support. The burghers were similarly lacking in enthusiasm.
Marching in person to Paris Louis sacrificed a part of his army to engage the attention of the enemy whose forces he passed, and entered the city. His presence accomplished what his messages could not bring to pass. He and the queen reviewed a militia force of some 70,000 men, for the burghers became willing to fight for a king who had the good sense to ask their advice—even if he did not follow it—and he never failed to work for their esteem. For the first time in French history merit ranked position.
The story of Louis’ reign is a tale of fighting and intrigue, with a constantly increasing settlement of power in the monarch. Provinces fell into his hands; his enemies once in his grasp, never escaped. He was Louis the Spider, always weaving his webs, seldom doing it in vain. France had a greater feeling of unity now than before the English wars, and the power was still more solidly centralized in the crown.
Such activities left the king not much time for Paris. When he was there he lived in the Hôtel des Tournelles which Charles V had built, persisting in his affection for it although he was
nearly captured there at one time by some of his followers who were in a plot to seize his person. He curried favor with the people by calling himself simply a “burgher of Paris,” he himself lighted the Saint John’s Eve bonfire on the Grève, he walked about the city in a fashion unknown to royalty before, and he dined in shabby dress at the public table of any tavern that seemed convenient.
Something of the king’s implacability may be guessed from the punishments and tortures which were common in his reign. His Constable, Saint Pol, was executed on the Grève and a shaft twelve feet high, erected on the spot, warned others not to commit his fault. Another man of equal rank was imprisoned in an iron cage in the Bastille until he was executed. During his captivity Louis learned that his chains had been removed for a short time in order that he might go to church. He ordered that they should not be taken off again except when he was tortured. A man convicted of conspiracy was beheaded and his head was placed on a staff in front of the Hôtel de Ville.
The period of occupation by the English had left Paris with much dilapidation, for people who were not thinking of permanency were not thinking of building and but little of repairing. Even though a reign had intervened there was much to be done toward restoring the Gothic city, but Louis himself built little. His interests were, perhaps, more far-reaching. For instance his intelligence saw at once the value of the printing press, and he gave his consent to the establishment near the Sorbonne of several printers whose early work hastened to spread the renaissance of classical learning which took place when the fall of Constantinople (1453) dispersed the scholars of the East among the countries of the West. Over the ancient Roman roads that pierced Paris from north to south they made their way into the city which had been increasingly attractive to students ever since Alcuin established there a school for Charlemagne. The colleges clustered around the Mont Sainte Geneviève absorbed them rapidly, and the Rector who governed the University ruled over a notable accession to his people on the left bank. Louis welcomed these wanderers for what they gave to France, and they gave generously, for with them came the new spirit which touched not letters alone but every form of art.
Another of Louis’ organizations was the postal service which sent letters by messenger from Paris to all parts of France.
There is no description of the Paris of Louis’ time more vivid than Victor Hugo’s in “Notre Dame de Paris.” The narrow streets, the tall, high-pitched houses, the town spreading its business interests to the north and its collegiate interests to the south with the Cité and its many churches lying at the foot of the towers of the great cathedral—all these stand forth sharply in the second chapter of the Third Book. The Provost ruled the Ville, the Rector the University and the Bishop the Cité.
Ogival or Gothic architecture had been a growth, every part added with a meaning. Its development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was chiefly in details, windows, for example, being better drawn though less harmonious, and rose windows increasing in elaboration until they seemed the flames which gave their name to the flamboyant style of architecture. Decoration grew over-elaborate. It became customary to build chapels along the side aisles of the nave, and a gallery separating the choir and the nave. There is but one such gallery or jubé in Paris to-day, that of the Church of Saint Étienne-du-Mont.
After the Hundred Years’ War was over and the country knew peace again it was natural that the building of churches should begin once more. It is to this time that the church of Saint Laurent belongs, built on the site of an old monastery; Saint Nicholas-of-the-Fields not far away; Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, to which a bit here and a bit there had been added from very early days; Saint Séverin on the left bank. This church is one of the most interesting in modern Paris, crowded as it is into the old left bank quarter near Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, its façade taken bodily from Saint Pierre-aux-Boeufs, the ancient Cité church of the Butchers’ Corporation when it was demolished, its north doorway adorned with two lions between which the priests stood to decide causes, and its walls within decorated with tablets given to record many kinds of gratitude, from that for the passing of a successful school examination to that for a happy marriage.
Of examples of domestic architecture of this time there are still standing several examples. The little tower on the house from which Louis of Orleans went to his death is authentic, so is the tower of John the Fearless, once a part of the palace of the dukes of Burgundy, later the home of a troop of players, and now a curious spectator of a rushing twentieth century business street.
Louis restored the gardens of the palace on the Cité, and, although he did not live there, he established an oratory near the apartments of Saint Louis, and another from which he could look through a “squint” into the Sainte Chapelle.
So good a financier was he that there was never any demand on the people—after he had learned his early lessons—for money for city improvements. Not being asked to pay for them the burghers were enthusiastic in their coöperation in such repairs as the king undertook. The Hôtel de Ville was one such undertaking for a century had passed since Étienne Marcel had bought it and it was some two hundred years old then. The bridges over the Seine were patched up to last a while longer, but it was not long after Louis’ death that the Pont Notre Dame collapsed, houses and all, causing the death of several people.
A rather curious instance of the persistency of habit in Paris—a persistency which marks the French of to-day—may be noticed by comparing the testimony of a chronicler of the end of the twelfth century, with that of Villon, the poet of the fifteenth. To be sure the elder author’s statement is serious and the later man’s jocose, but there is an undoubted truth behind it. “The Petit Pont,” says Guy de Bazoches, “belongs to the dialecticians, who pace up and down, disputing.” Villon’s mention of the usage, “with a difference,” is in the third stanza of his tribute to the fluency and wit which he describes in his
A BALLAD OF PARIS WOMEN[1]
Envoi
Louis’ son, Charles VIII (1483-1498), reigned with a personal enthusiasm which diminished the power of the nobles, yet permitted the rise of the Third Estate, the political combination of the peasantry and the citizens or bourgeois class. He repaired the palace and the Sainte Chapelle in which he introduced an organ. His interest in Italy being excited Charles began a war there of no great importance in itself, but interesting as bringing to France a knowledge of art and architecture, which, when increased at the time of Louis XII’s (1498-1515) southern expedition, imposed ready-made upon France the style called Renaissance.
This style was a renewal of the classic influence. It flattened roofs and doors and windows, and decorated with designs borrowed or copied from the Greeks and Romans. An intermediate style shows a mixture of Gothic and Renaissance as was natural in this period of architectural change. While roofs and windows were flattening there were frequent combinations of pointed roofs and flat windows, of pointed windows and flat roofs. Sculptors were loath entirely to give up Gothic decoration yet were eager to show their knowledge of Renaissance. The result is called Transition, and often is too conglomerate to be pleasing. The most charming example in Paris is the Hôtel de Cluny, built adjoining the Thermes by the Abbots of Cluny and rebuilt by Louis XII.[2] Exquisite in every detail, and filled with one of the best collections of medieval domestic art in Europe it is a joy to the architect and the antiquarian. No happier afternoon can be spent in Paris than in roaming through these treasure-laden rooms and then in sitting in the Garden of the Thermes, letting the eye wander from the Roman ruins sixteen centuries old, massive and severe, to the lighter elegances of the medieval abbey, and then through the bars of the enclosure to the rushing streets of modern Paris. The French babies rolling on the grass are growing up with such contrasts so usual to them that they never will know the thrill that fires the American at the sight of these links in the chain of a great city’s history.
CHARLES VIII died without direct heirs and the crown fell to Louis XII, a grandson of that duke of Orleans who had played so sorry a part in the reign of Charles VI, the mad king, and who had been assassinated by the ruffians of John the Fearless. This change threw the reigning line into the hands of what is known as the Valois-Orleans family. Of that branch of the Capets the most brilliant monarch was Francis I, Louis XII’s successor, a son of his cousin, the count of Angoulême.
Three score years had passed after the fall of Constantinople when Francis I came to the throne, young, alert, intelligent, progressive. He was fond of literature and the arts, and the revival of ancient letters and the importation of Italian paintings and architecture roused him to vivid interest; he was ambitious and the discovery of America spurred him to claim a share for France; the aspirations of Emperor Charles V, urged him to dispute a rivalry which threatened his own career and the integrity of his kingdom.
Louis XII had been called the “Father of his People” because of the care with which he had nursed back to economic health the depleted forces of France which Louis XI had begun to restore. It is even told of him that he returned part of a tax after it had paid the demand for which it had been levied. Such a proceeding was unknown before, and it is small wonder that his subjects adored him. Francis reaped the benefit of his predecessor’s social and financial intelligence.
Of united national feeling there was more at the beginning of Francis’s reign than there ever had been, and power was more concentrated in the king than it ever had been. Feudalism with its picturesque and brutal individualism had been outgrown. With the disappearance of the need for fortified dwellings the rural strongholds of the nobility were modified into pleasant châteaux, while their masters, not obliged to stay at home to be ready to fight quarrelsome neighbors, were free to join the king in Paris or at Fontainebleau. Thus there was formed for the first time a court consisting of more than the retinue necessary for the conduct of the royal household. For the first time, too, the nobles brought the women of their families to court, with the result that dress and festivities became more brilliant than ever before, and language developed a precision which marks this period as the beginning of the use of Modern French.
Francis himself wrote not badly and his encouragement of writers won him the title of “Father of French Letters.” Here is his tribute to the intelligent favorite of Charles VII.
EPITAPH ON AGNES SOREL[3]
Francis’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre, was equally enthusiastic and talented and gathered about her a notable group of writers. Her affection for her brother was extraordinarily tender. After his death she wrote the following poem, translated in Longfellow’s “Poetry of Europe.”
Francis founded the College of France in Paris for the study of classical languages, testimony to the influence that had seized the country after the southern expeditions of Charles VIII and Louis XII. Francis’s establishment provided merely for the maintenance of a faculty, and it was not until the next reign that the question of housing separate from any of the existing schools came up. It was not until the time of Marie de Medicis that the building really was provided. Since that time the college has been rebuilt twice, restored and enlarged until it is now an imposing pile rising on the Mont Sainte Geneviève near the Sorbonne. Its lectures which are intended for adults are free, and the institution is not a part of the University but is under the Minister of Education.
Francis established a government printing office and permitted the use of private presses though the books that issued from them were censored. There was a time, indeed, when it became evident that men were thinking for themselves and that untoward happenings were the result, when all printing of books was forbidden. Étienne Dolet, scholar, writer and printer, was one of those who suffered from the king’s inconstant mind. He was charged with heresy, tortured, hung and finally burned with his writings on the spot where his statue now stands in the Place Maubert.
This square is on the left bank, but the usual place for executions was the Grève in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Near the Halles was a pillory which Francis rebuilt a quarter of a century after the people had destroyed it. It was an open octagonal tower and the victims inside were placed on a revolving platform so that they might be exposed to the crowd below.
The gorgeous scene that was enacted when Francis made his formal entry into Paris after the death of Louis XII was indicative of the brilliance and extravagance of his whole reign. It was his superior magnificence that lost him the partisanship of Henry VIII of England whose eyes he over-dazzled at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It was indeed well that he fell heir to Louis XII’s savings! The procession, according to the Austrian “special envoy,” was both “beautiful and gorgeous,” and Francis, arrayed in glistening armor, played to the gallery by making his handsome horse, white-and-silver decked, rear and prance so that his royal rider might display his horsemanship.
In the course of Francis’s prolonged contest with Charles V—a struggle in which he was even imprisoned at Madrid—he had many opportunities to see in Italy and Spain the art of a former time and the work of contemporary painters and sculptors as well. Not only did he send home many examples which were given him or which he captured or bought, but he invited to France Leonardo da Vinci, then an old man, Andrea del Sarto and Benvenuto Cellini. To the latter he gave a lodging in the Hôtel de Nesle, that left bank palace of which the Tour de Nesle was a part, on condition that he secured possession of it himself, as the king had previously made a present of it to the provost. Cellini armed his helpers and servants and defended his gift with such ferocity that the provost left him alone.
The king’s influence weighed heavily on the side of the humanist reaction against the austerities of art and life which had developed under the influence of an all-dominant church. The pendulum swung back and painters and sculptors chose less ascetic themes for brush and chisel. From Francis’s time on there was also a keen interest in portraiture.
A man of this king’s nature was not content to stay long in one place. When war was not making its demands upon him he was visiting all parts of his kingdom and spending no little time in the districts where hunting was good and where he built splendid châteaux so that he and his retinue might be comfortably housed. Fontainebleau and St. Germain-en-Laye are the two best known, while the château de Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne, adjoining the town was a charming retreat from the noise of the city. Except for a small bit included in a restaurant this building is no longer in existence, but in the Cours la Reine on the right bank facing the Seine is the small “House of Francis I” which the king built at Moret in 1572, and which an admirer bought and removed to Paris in 1826. It is an exquisite example of Renaissance architecture.
During the peaceful moments of the reign, there was a craze for building and Italian architects were offered handsome inducements to exercise their talents on French soil. It was a French architect, however, Pierre Lescot, who pulled down the Great Tower, the oldest part of the Louvre, and designed that portion which Francis and his son, Henry II, built, the southwestern corner of the eastern quadrangle. Henry’s initial, combined with the “D” and crescent of Diane de Poitiers, are visible in many places. Francis’s signature was the salamander, whose lizard-like length fitted comfortably into many decorative schemes.
Below the Great Tower there must have been a bed of soft earth of some sort, for it was found to be almost impossible to fill the huge hole left when the Tower was demolished. The populace saw in the strange sinking of the material dumped into the cavity the fulfillment of a legendary threat that, the fortress being meant to stand forever, its fall would be marked by untoward happenings. In fact it was nearly three hundred years before modern engineering knowledge was able to stop the seepage that caused the trouble.
During one of the intervals of peace with Charles V the emperor visited Paris. Indeed it was the necessity for making elaborate preparations for his visit that brought about the rebuilding of the Louvre whose dilapidation had not been appreciated before. The emperor was met outside the eastern wall and presented with the keys of the city. At the Saint Antoine gate there was a triumphal arch and the cannon of the Bastille roared a greeting as the monarch passed
beneath it. Farther on the procession stopped for the imperial guest to witness an allegorical play depicting the friendship of France and Germany. Over the Notre Dame Bridge, covered with ivy, Charles went to the cathedral and then to the palace of the Cité, where he supped. During his visit of a week he stayed at the Louvre, and was so brilliantly entertained that upon his departure he exclaimed, “Other cities are merely cities; Paris is a world in itself.”
The chief churches built in Francis’s reign were Saint Étienne-du-Mont (on the site of an earlier edifice) in which Sainte Geneviève’s ashes now rest, Saint Eustache, the church of the market people at the Halles, and the flamboyant tower of Saint Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. This tower is the last expression of the Gothic, while Saint Étienne and Saint Eustache show the Transition combination of Gothic and Renaissance.
Étienne Marcel’s Maison aux Piliers had been but a second-hand affair. By 1530 a new City Hall was imperative. Its corner stone was laid amid feasting on the open square with bread and wine for all comers and cries of “Long live the king and the city fathers!” This enthusiastic beginning did not foretell quick work, however, for eighty years elapsed before the building was done. Its style was the same that it is to-day except in the development of details.
It was the old Maison aux Piliers that had seen the dinner given to Queen Claude by the city fathers on the occasion of her entrance into Paris after Francis’s accession. Louis XII’s third queen, Mary, an English princess, was the first royal lady whom the city fathers had ventured to invite to partake of their hospitality. The occasion had not been entirely successful, for so great a throng pressed in to the city hall to observe the unusual guests that the waiters “hardly had room to bring the food upon the tables.” The arrangements for Queen Claude’s entertainment included precautions against such an invasion. When the great day came the provost of the Merchants and the lesser officials, clothed flamingly in red velvet and scarlet satin and followed by representatives of the guilds of drapers, grocers, goldsmiths, dyers, and so on, went to a suburb to meet their lady and act as her escort, and her majesty was graciously appreciative of all their attentions.
While the Renaissance, humanism and the discovery of the New World were exciting men to new interests they also did their part in promoting independence of thought. With ability to read the Bible in the original came questioning of previous interpretations. There grew up both within and without the Church a desire to reform it, and with Calvin and Luther there came into expression not only a protest against the present state of affairs but a formulation of a new belief. Rabelais and Montaigne in their vastly different ways worked toward the same end. The movement proved to be one of those appeals which spread like a flame when the air touches it. Rich and poor, noble and simple responded to the plea, and Francis found himself the ruler of people ready to fly at each other’s throats and clamoring for him to let loose the dogs of persecution.
Francis was a Catholic and condemned Protestantism in Francis, but in Germany he allied himself to the Protestant party against the emperor. Henry II (1547-1559), Francis’s son, did the same—and won some territory by the manoeuver—although he had strengthened his Catholic interests by marrying Catherine de Medicis, a niece of the Pope, and showed himself by no means friendly to the democratic ideas which the new religion fostered. His strength constantly was spent against the movement even to the end of his reign when he made an alliance for purposes of persecution with Philip II of Spain, husband of “Bloody Mary” of England. One of the first fruits of this union with the land of the Inquisition was the trial of a distinguished member of the Parliament, Anne du Bourg. Henry’s death merely interrupted the examination and du Bourg was burned on the Grève before the City Hall.
The Paris Protestants or Huguenots lived chiefly in the Faubourg Saint Germain on the left bank.
Henry’s chief exploit was the capture of Calais which had been in the hands of the English ever since the Hundred Years’ War, and whose loss meant so much to Queen Mary of England that she is said to have declared that when she died “Calais” would be found written on her heart.
The celebration in Paris of the capture of the long-lost city was one of the greatest possible failures. The main festivity was to be in the evening at the Maison aux Piliers. It poured in torrents sufficient to put a literal as well as a figurative damper on any pleasure-making. When Henry arrived at the Place de Grève the salutes of artillery frightened his horses and he was almost thrown down as he alighted from his carriage. At supper the crowd was so great that it was almost impossible to get anything to eat. The main part of the program within the hall was a play by the poet Jodelle who has left an amusing account of the evening of “My Disaster.” There were twelve actors in his musical sketch, he says. Of these six were so hoarse that they could not be heard, and the remaining six did not know their parts. One of the characters, Orpheus, was to sing a song in the king’s praise so literally moving that the very stones followed the singer about the stage. But, alas, the property man had misunderstood his orders and instead of preparing two rocks (rochers) he had arranged two steeples (clochers). When the unfortunate author, who had a part himself, saw these unexpected constructions coming across the stage he forgot his own lines, so utter was his amazement and misery.
Henry’s restless reign left him little time to spend in Paris or to devote to its beautifying. Whenever he came to the city festivities of all sorts ran high and the citizens paid for it all, though their temper grew sullen as the demands and the power of the crown increased. Henry expected the city fathers to meet expenses which they, quite reasonably, classed as personal matters; for instance, a charge for the food and shelter and care of a lion, a dromedary and a jaguar, which had been sent to the king from Africa.
Beyond the strengthening of the right bank fortifications, some addition to the palace of the Cité, and the continuation of the new Hôtel de Ville and of Francis I’s Louvre Henry did practically no building. His “H,” sometimes interlaced with his wife’s “C” and sometimes with Diane de Poitiers’ initial topped by her crescent, is by no means so frequent in Paris as, for example, in Fontainebleau, and other suburbs. In the courtyard of the Palais des Beaux-Arts is the façade of the château d’Anet which shows the monogram, and is a beautiful example of renaissance architecture.
A needed charity was instituted by the establishment of a Foundling Hospital. So usual was it to dispose of unwelcome infants that cradles for their reception were placed in the porch of Notre Dame itself. The hospital proved not an entire success, for about a century later Saint Vincent de Paul found that sorcerers, beggars and gymnasts were buying babies from the hospital at a franc apiece. His own foundation of a children’s home came from a chance meeting with a beggar who was breaking his purchase’s legs so that its wails might excite pity from passers-by.
Henry’s death was brought about by one of those tragic happenings that mar times of attempted gayety. Henry was marrying off his daughter and his sister for political reasons and he arranged a double wedding. The festivities included an elaborate supper in the Great Hall of the palace of the City and a tournament in the rue Saint Antoine. The king himself took part in the joust, by accident was mortally wounded by Montgomery, the captain of the Scottish guards, and died in the near-by Hôtel des Tournelles a few days after.
WHILE Henry II lived Catherine de Medicis was not conspicuous, Henry yielding rather to Diane de Poitiers than to his wife, but the queen-mother wielded a ruthless power over her three young sons who succeeded their father in turn. Through her, also, Italian pictures and books were brought in by their painters and authors, Italian architects transformed French buildings, Italian favorites filled the court, where they introduced the ruffs and padded trunks and soft crowned toques of Italian fashions. Paris streets, narrow as in the days when their Gothic houses were first built, widened into occasional squares meant to remind the queen of her southern home.
Francis II (1559-1560) was Henry’s oldest son, known to-day only as the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom he married in Notre Dame when he was fourteen and she was sixteen. He came to the throne a twelvemonth later and during the one short year of his reign he was a tool in the hands of the ex-Italian family of the Guises of which Mary’s mother was a member. Throughout France quarrels and conspiracies were rife, all having for their basic reason differences in religion and the lack of tolerance which could not allow freedom of belief.
Of Francis’s reign as it concerns Paris there is nothing of interest except the fact that his wedding supper, like that of his sister a year later, was given in the Great Hall of the palace of the Cité.
Francis’s death gave the crown to his next younger brother, Charles IX (1560-1574), who was but eleven years old. During the fourteen years of his reign Catherine de Medicis ruled, first as regent and later in fact though not in name. Her methods were tell-tale of her nature. She favored Protestants or Catholics as the moment demanded, she promised and did not fulfil, she deceived, she ordered assassination, she depraved the morals of her own children. All the time civil war went on, pausing now and again but never entirely ceasing.
The most horrible event of the whole hideous contest was the massacre of the Protestants which took place on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572. Catherine had arranged that her daughter, Marguerite of Valois, should marry Henry, King of Navarre, the leader of the Protestants. Whether this was done in the hope of bringing the opposing parties together, or whether the queen-mother’s intention was to decoy as many prominent Huguenots as possible to Paris it is impossible to say. The fact that Henry’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret, died in Paris a few weeks before the wedding, probably from poison-saturated gloves, would seem to lend color to the latter theory. So suspicious of evil were the Huguenots that it is said that one-half of Henry of Navarre’s moustache turned white from fear when he saw two prominent Catholics talking together a little while before the wedding.
Events proved that such suspicions were not groundless. The wedding was set for the seventeenth of August. On account of the difference between the religious belief of Henry and his bride, it took place in front of the cathedral in the Parvis or Paradise of Notre Dame. This was an open place raised above the level of the adjoining streets and railed from it. Marguerite was so unwilling to marry Henry that she refused her consent even up to the moment when the archbishop demanded it. Her brother, the king, met the emergency by seizing her head and bobbing it and the service went on as if she had answered a legitimate “I will.” After the marriage the bride heard mass in the cathedral while the bridegroom admired the bishop’s garden. Dinner followed at the bishop’s palace, and supper at the Louvre. On succeeding days there were balls, jousts, and masquerades.
Four days later Admiral Coligny, the head of the Protestants, was attacked by a paid assassin but not killed. This piece of news was brought to Charles IX while he was playing tennis on one of the courts at the eastern end of the Louvre.
On the night before St. Bartholomew’s Day the Provost of the Merchants was summoned to the Louvre and received instructions to close the city gates, to fasten the chains across the streets, and to arm the militia. At the appointed hour, or rather, owing to Catherine’s eagerness, at two in the morning, an hour before the appointed time, the signal was given on the right bank by the bell of the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, facing the eastern end of the Louvre, and on the Cité by that in the clock tower on the palace. Admiral Coligny, who lived just north of the Louvre, was killed in his bed and his body thrown from the window to the pavement where the Duke of Guise kicked it.
“They told us nothing of all this,” says the bride, Marguerite of Navarre, who has left an account of her experiences. “I saw everybody in action, the Huguenots desperate over this attack; M. de Guise fearful lest they take vengeance on him, whispering to everybody. The Huguenots suspected me because I was a Catholic, and the Catholics because I had married the king of Navarre who was a Huguenot. On this account no one said anything to me about it until evening, when being in the bedroom of the queen, my mother, seated on a chest beside my sister of Lorraine whom I saw to be very sad, as the queen my mother was speaking to some of them she noticed me and told me to go to bed. As I was courtesying to her my sister, weeping bitterly, seized my arm and stopped me, saying ‘Sister, don’t go.’ I was greatly frightened. The queen my mother saw it and called my sister and scolded her severely, forbidding her to say anything to me. My sister told her that there was no reason to sacrifice me like that, and that if they discovered anything they undoubtedly would avenge themselves on me. The queen my mother replied that if God so willed I should come to no harm, but, whatever happened, I must go, for fear of their suspecting something which would impede the outcome.
“I saw quite well that they were disputing though I did not hear their words. Again she roughly ordered me to go to bed. My sister burst into tears as she bade me good-night, daring to say nothing more to me, and I went away thoroughly stunned and overcome, without understanding at all what I had to fear. Suddenly when I was in my dressing room I began to pray God to take me under his protection and preserve me, without knowing from what or whom. Upon that, the King my husband, who had retired, summoned me to his room, and I found his bed surrounded by thirty or forty Huguenots whom I did not then know, for I had only been married a few days. They talked all night about the accident that had befallen the Admiral, resolving that as soon as morning came they would ask the king for revenge on M. de Guise and that if he would not give it to them they would take it for themselves. I still had my sister’s tears upon my mind and I could not sleep because of the fear she had inspired in me, though I knew not of what. Thus the night passed without my closing my eyes. At daybreak, the King my husband, suddenly making up his mind to ask justice from King Charles, said that he was going to play tennis until the King should awake. He left my room and all the gentlemen also. I, seeing that it was daylight, thinking that the danger of which my sister had spoken to me was passed by, overcome with sleep, told my nurse to shut the door that I might sleep comfortably.
“An hour after as I was still sleeping there came a man who beat on the door with hands and feet crying, ‘Navarre, Navarre!’ My nurse, thinking that it was the King my husband, ran at once to the door and opened it. It was a gentleman named Léran who had received a sword thrust in the elbow and a blow on the arm from a halberd, and who was still pursued by four archers who all rushed after him into my room. He, wishing to save himself, flung himself on to my bed. When I felt the man grasp me I flung myself out of bed, and he rolled after me still clinging to me. I did not recognize the man and I did not know whether he was there to attack me, or whether the archers were after him or me. We both screamed and we were equally frightened. At last, by God’s will, M. de Nançay, captain of the guards came. When he saw in what a state I was, though he was sorry he could not help laughing. He reprimanded the guards severely for their indiscretion, sent them away and granted to my request the life of the man who was still holding on to me. I made him lie down and have his wounds dressed in my dressing room until he was quite recovered. I had to change my clothes for the wounded man had covered me with blood. M. de Nançay told me what had happened and assured me that the King my husband was in the King’s room and that there would be no more disturbance. I threw a mantle over me and he escorted me to my sister, Madame de Lorraine’s, room, where I arrived more dead than alive. Just as I entered the antechamber, where the doors were all open, a gentleman named Bourse, escaping from the pursuit of the archers was pierced by a halberd-thrust only three paces away. I fell in the opposite direction into M. de Nançay’s arms thinking that the thrust had stabbed us both. When I had recovered somewhat I went into the small room where my sister was sleeping. While I was there M. de Mixossans, the King my husband’s first gentleman-in-waiting, and Armagnac, his first valet-de-chambre, sought me out to beg me to save their lives. I knelt before the King and the queen my mother to beg the favor from them and and at last they granted it to me.”
There is a story, probably untrue, that Charles, almost crazy with excitement took his stand at a window of the Louvre and shot down all the Huguenots he saw, shrieking “Kill! Kill!” For twenty-four hours the slaughter continued in Paris, ruffians and unprincipled men seizing the opportunity to kill for plunder and to rid themselves of their enemies. Paris streets literally ran blood and Paris buildings so echoed the cries of the dying that the king heard them in his own delirium of death.
When Queen Wilhelmina visited Paris in June, 1912, she placed a wreath at the foot of the statue of her ancestor, Admiral Coligny, which stands at the outside end of the church called the Oratory, now Protestant, not far from the spot of his assassination.
Charles IX’s name is not connected with buildings or improvements in Paris, so overshadowed was he by his mother. He rebuilt the Arsenal at the eastern end of the city, and he furthered the sale and demolition of the great establishment of the Hôtel Saint Paul, whose breaking up had been begun by Francis I.
Catherine had left the Hôtel des Tournelles after the death there of her husband, Henry II. At the Louvre she found herself sadly crowded, for she had been obliged to give up her royal apartments to the young queen when Charles married, and, counting her daughters and daughter-in-law there were four queens with their retinues to be housed in the old palace. Near the church of Saint Eustache the dowager-queen selected a location to her fancy for the building of a new palace, but the ground was occupied by a refuge of Filles Pénitentes. With the entire lack of consideration for others peculiar to the powerful, Catherine had this establishment razed and its inmates removed to an abbey on the rue Saint Denis. The religious of the abbey, in their turn, were sent to the top of the Mont Sainte Geneviève, where they took possession of the old hospital of Saint Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, whose name still clings to the parish and the church. The construction for which all this moving gave place was a charming palace known as the Hôtel de Soissons of which nothing is left but a graceful pillar from whose top it is said that Catherine indulged in the harmless amusement of star-gazing. The palace was pulled down in 1749 to give place to the Corn Exchange, and that, in 1887, to allow the erection of the Bourse de Commerce.
More ambitious was a southwestern addition to the Louvre, a wing going to meet the river, and another at right angles following the stream westward. This extension parallel with the Seine was begun with the idea of continuing it to meet the palace of the Tuileries (see plan of Louvre, Chapter XXII) which the queen had begun on the site of some ancient tile-yards to the west of the Louvre. Only the central façade was finished in Catherine’s day, a pavilion containing a superb staircase and crowned by a dome, connected by two open galleries with what was planned to be the buildings surrounding the quadrangle. The workmanship was exquisitely delicate. Its beauty was enhanced by a lovely formal garden laid out by that Jack-of-all-Trades, Bernard Palissy, best known as “the Potter.”
Of private buildings two of the most beautiful still remain. Both are in the Marais, which had become fashionable at this time on account of its proximity both to the Tournelles and the Louvre. One of them is the Hôtel Carnavalet which now houses the Historical Museum of Paris, the most interesting special collection in the city to students of olden times. This building was begun in 1544 in Francis I’s reign, by the then president of the Parliament of Paris, who employed the best architects of the day, Lescot and Bullant, aided by Goujon, the sculptor, whose symbolic figures give its name to the “Court of the
Seasons.” After changing hands more than once and being restored in the seventeenth century by another famous architect, Mansart, the house was occupied for eighteen years by Madame de Sévigné, the author of the famous “Letters.” When it was taken over by the city it was again thoroughly restored, and it now stands not only as a fine example of sixteenth and seventeenth century architecture but as a repository for bits and sections of old buildings from other parts of the city.
Not far away is the Hôtel Lamoignon, built toward the end of the sixteenth century for one of Henry II’s daughters. It is used for business purposes to-day, but its façade is still imposing with lofty Corinthian pilasters which rise from the ground to the roof. In the course of its vicissitudes it was the first home of the city’s historical library, and in the nineteenth century it was made into apartments, in one of which Alphonse Daudet, the novelist once lived.
Montaigne speaks with frankness of the evil smells of the streets of this time, and it is small wonder, since animals were slaughtered not far from the city hall, and the offscourings of the abattoirs drained into the Seine emitting foul odors as they went. Charles was moved to improve the condition of the Grève, which was a mud-hole and a dump-heap, not, apparently, because its state made it a disgraceful entrance to the city hall, but because it inconvenienced the crowds who assembled to witness tortures and executions on the square.
With Charles IX on the throne of France, Catherine de Medicis sought to provide for her youngest son by placing him on the vacant throne of Poland. A splendid fête at the Tuileries celebrated his election, and he set forth joyfully for his new kingdom. He had lived in his adopted country only a few months when the news of his brother’s death reached him. The French crown, was, naturally, more attractive than the Polish, and Henry planned immediate departure for his fatherland. He had been long enough in Poland to know something of the temper of his subjects and he fled like a criminal before the pursuit of enraged peasants armed with scythes and flails. If they had known him better they might not have been so eager to keep him.
The Parisians were not fond of Henry. He made his formal entry into the city adorned with frills and ear-rings, and accompanied by sundry small pet animals. It was his habit to carry fastened about his neck a basket of little dogs and occasionally he dug down under them to find important papers. Silly as it sounds this habit at least had the merit of being more humane than Charles IX’s custom of having fights between dogs and wild beasts.
Henry began at once to change for the worse his mother’s already vile court. Occasionally he was stricken with remorse and made such public exhibition of repentance as caused excessive mirth to all beholders of the processions wherein he and the dissolute young men, his “minions,” walked barefooted through the city. It is related that the court pages were once sharply switched in the Hall of the Cariatides in the Louvre for having indulged in a take-off of one of these penitential exercises of their king’s.
Except for the continuing of the work on the Louvre, decorating the old clock on the palace on the Cité (see Chapter VI) beginning the Pont Neuf across the western tip of the Cité, and establishing a few religious houses, Henry III was too busy contending with the Parisians to have time or inclination to beautify the city.
The Parisians not only objected to the continual financial drain made upon them by the king’s constant appeals for money for his minions, but they openly showed themselves favorable to the Duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic party.
For his own defense Henry brought into the city a band of Swiss soldiers. To the citizens it was the final outrage. Every section of the town hummed with preparations for revolt. A rumor of an attack upon the Temple made Henry send a body of troops there. For the first time in the history of Paris the people made use of a defense habitual with them two centuries later. They erected across the streets barricades made of barriques (hogsheads) filled with earth, took shelter behind them and attacked the mercenaries so vigorously that the Duke of Guise was forced to come to their rescue. The day after the Day of Barricades the troops sent to the defense of the Temple helped the populace seize it. When the governor of the Bastille went to the palace, and, entering the Great Hall, summoned the sixty members of the Parliament of Paris then in session, to follow him, and led them in their red and black robes through the streets to the prison where they were held for ransom, the citizens felt themselves to be in real possession of the town.
Henry had been warned of trouble on the Day of Barricades by a man who made his way to the royal apartments by the staircase existing even now in a corner of the Hall of the Cariatides. Reversing the direction taken by the Empress Eugénie when the news of the battle of Sedan reached Paris on the fourth of September some three hundred years later, the king fled through the Louvre westward, gained the stables of the Tuileries, mounted a horse, and fled once more, though not pursued as he had been in Poland. The Parisians did not want to keep him.
In an effort to bring about better conditions Henry had made concessions to the Huguenots. Indignant at what they considered as treachery to his own religion the Catholics organized a League, of which the popular duke of Guise was the head. The duke’s power over the people, as he had shown it when he stopped the attack upon the king’s Swiss guard, and his connection with the League brought about Guise’s assassination by Henry’s order. The Parisians were enraged by the loss of their favorite, shut the gates against Henry, and prepared themselves to withstand a siege. Henry was forced to join the Protestant army of his cousin, Henry of Navarre, at Saint Cloud, on the Seine a few miles below Paris. There the king was assassinated by a young Jacobin novice sent out from the city.
Thus Paris was responsible for the crown’s passing at this juncture to the House of Bourbon whose representative, Henry of Navarre, who now became Henry IV, was one of the Protestants to whom the city was fiercely opposed.
HENRY IV (1589-1598), came to the throne after a career of strife which by no means ended at his accession. His family were ardent Protestants. Henry was born in the country and received an outdoor training which made him hardy and vigorous in wide contrast to the debauched youths who sat upon the throne in Paris. The religious wars were seething all through his boyhood. When he was but fifteen his mother, Jeanne d’Albret, a woman of exceptional courage and address, presented him to the Protestant army and he was made general-in-chief, with Admiral Coligny as his adviser. When he was nineteen he agreed to the marriage with Marguerite of Valois which was to reunite the contending parties—or to serve as a bait to entice the chief Protestants of the country to Paris, according as one interprets Catherine de Medicis.
Breaking harshly in upon the wedding festivities the bell of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois clanged its awful knell, and when the horror was over Protestant Henry was lucky still to be alive. It behooved him to be prudent, and he accepted Charles IX’s commanding invitation to stay in Paris. Here he was under surveillance, and here he learned the ways of the most corrupt court that France had known up to that time, immoral, deceitful, treacherous, the women in every way as bad as the men.
During these years Henry diplomatically declared himself a convert to Catholicism, but it was a change for the moment; he had reverted long before the monk’s dagger made him King by slaying Henry III.
This murder meant an accession of hard work for Henry of Navarre for the League under the Duke of Mayenne and supported by Spain and Savoy was determined to accept no Protestant as ruler. Henry won a brilliant victory at Arques and another at Ivry.
Then the “burghers of Saint Genevieve” were indeed forced to “Keep watch and ward” for Henry marched upon Paris without which he could not call his crown his own. At his approach the people from the suburbs crowded into the city till it held some 200,000. Henry had no trouble in taking the chief of the outer settlements and in controlling the town’s food supply. The resulting famine drove the Parisians to straits such as they had not known since the days of Sainte Geneviève and were not to know again until the Franco-Prussian War. The usual meat soon gave out and when all the horses and all the mules were eaten, any stray dog or cat was pursued by the populace and when caught, cooked and devoured in the open street. From dead men’s bones was made a sort of pasty bread, and mothers knew the taste of the flesh of their own children whose strength had not availed against the greater force of hunger.
Touched by the suffering of the city which he regarded as his own, Henry offered to let the besieged leave the town, but so earnest was the League, so inspiring the preaching of the priests that not more than 3000 took advantage of the opportunity.
The League was not at peace with itself, however. Mayenne disposed by death of the Leaguers whose importance threatened his power and there was stirring that feeling in favor of Henry which found voice a little later in the “Satire Ménippée,” the essays which rallied Catholics to the support of their monarch. The papers were written by a canon of the Sainte Chapelle and half a dozen friends in the form of a burlesque report of a meeting of the States General. The following selection gives an idea of the spirit of unrest that was troubling Paris and of the lack of approval of Henry III’s assassination felt by the moderate party.
“O Paris who are no longer Paris but a den of ferocious beasts, a citadel of Spaniards, Walloons and Neapolitans, an asylum and safe retreat for robbers, murderers and assassins, will you never be cognizant of your dignity and remember who you have been and what you are; will you never heal yourself of this frenzy which has engendered for you in place of one lawful and gracious King fifty saucy kinglets and fifty tyrants? You are in chains, under a Spanish Inquisition a thousand times more intolerable and harder to endure by spirits born free and unconstrained as the French are than the cruelest deaths which the Spaniards could devise. You did not tolerate a slight increase of taxes and of offices and a few new edicts which did not concern you at all, yet you endure that they pillage houses, that they ransom you with blood, that they imprison your senators, that they drive out and banish your good citizens and counselors: that they hang and massacre your principal magistrates; you see it and endure it but you approve it and praise it and you would not dare or know how to do otherwise. You have given little support to your King, good-tempered, easy, friendly, who behaved like a fellow-citizen of your town which he had enriched and embellished with handsome buildings, fortified with strong and haughty ramparts, honored with privileges and favorable exemptions. What say I? Given little support? Far worse: you have driven him from his city, his house, his very bed! Driven him? you have pursued him. Pursued him? You assassinated him, canonized the assassin and made joyful over his death. And now you see how much this death profited you.”
Henry of Navarre became king of Paris as well as of the rest of France though it required a considerable concession to achieve that position. Still it was not the first time that he had made a mental somersault, so when he found that Paris was stubborn in spite of more than three years and a half of hunger, sickness and death, and that his enemies outside of the city were strong enough to inflict upon him a defeat of some moment, he yielded to the urging of his counselors, admitted with a shrug “So fair a city is well worth a mass” and declared his willingness to turn Catholic. After suitably prolonged disputations with theologians he declared himself convinced of the error of his belief, and on a Sunday in July, 1593, he appeared at Saint Denis where an imposing body of prelates was arrayed before the great door, and professed his new faith. Then he was allowed to enter the building and to repeat his profession before the altar.
Paris was not sorry to have an excuse for submitting and in the following March when Henry’s troops entered the city in the grayness of dawn one day toward the end of the month there was no opposition. On his way to Notre Dame to hear mass, Henry, resplendent in velvet, gold-embroidered, mounted on a handsome gray charger and constantly doffing his white-plumed helmet, was greeted with cries of “Long live the king” and “Hail to peace.” When the Provost of the Merchants and some of the principal citizens the day after his entry brought him a gift of sweetmeats, the king, though not fully dressed, for his subjects’ ardor had brought them at an unduly early hour, accepted the offering graciously, saying, “Yesterday I received your hearts; to-day I receive your comfits no less willingly.”
A Spanish troop had been called in by the League to assist them in holding the city against Henry. He allowed them to leave unmolested, contenting himself with watching them from a window as they passed through the Porte Saint Denis, and calling to them with cheerful insolence, “Gentlemen, my regards to your master—and never come back here!”
In the calm that succeeded the nation began a career of prosperity which it had not known for two generations. With cheerful severity Henry caused a gallows to be erected near the Porte Saint Antoine “Whereon to hang any person of either religion who should be found so bold as to attempt anything against the public peace.” He was determined that every peasant in the kingdom should have a chicken in the pot for his Sunday dinner, and he used intelligent methods of bringing about that result. Not only was he a man of practical good sense himself, but he was able to recognize that quality in others, and he chose men of prudence and intelligence as his advisers, chief of them the Duke of Sully. He encouraged agriculture, introduced new industries, permitted religious toleration through the Edict of Nantes, made himself the friend alike of peasant and of noble. France throve as she had not had a chance to do for many a decade—and the power of the crown became stronger than ever.
Henry’s early life had taught him to be active, and he lost no time in winning Paris to his friendship in various ways. He did not treat it like an enemy but as a returned prodigal, and the citizens lost none of their old privileges while they gained the civic improvements about which their new monarch busied himself promptly. He began the rebuilding of the city with the high roofed structures of brick and stone combined which showed that the classic outlines of the Renaissance were on the wane and which prefaced the Italian forms of the next reign.
In the place des Vosges of to-day may be seen the best extant examples of this style. Catherine de Medicis had made Henry II’s death at the Hôtel des Tournelles an excuse to leave a building damp and malodorous from the ill-drained marsh on which it was built. For a long time it housed only some of Charles IX’s pet animals, and then it was torn down except for a wing where Henry IV installed some of the silk workers whom he introduced into France that his people might learn a new industry. The palace park was used as a horse market, and finally all memory of the past was cleared away and Henry IV caused to be laid out the Place Royale now called the Place des Vosges. “The spear-thrust of Montgomery,” said Victor Hugo, “was the origin of the Place Royale.”
The king built at his own expense several of the houses along the south side and gave the remainder of the land to people who would finish the remainder of the quadrangle in harmonious style. An arcade runs about the whole square whose north and south entrances are under pavilions which break the monotony of the architecture. The effect is wonderfully pleasing even to-day when most of the houses show signs of dilapidation and the park which they enclose is noisy with the overflow of children from the old and crowded streets round about. In the days of its prime it must have been extremely dignified and handsome.
Many great names are connected with this square. Richelieu lived here, Madame de Sévigné was born here, and here in the house where Victor Hugo had an apartment is the museum where Paris has collected mementoes of the man the people loved. Backing against the southern houses of the square still stands the house which Sully built for himself, its once imposing façade whose windows show signs of occupation by many small businesses, looking down upon a disheveled courtyard.
Another step that tended to beautify Paris was the opening of the Place Dauphine from the western end of the palace of the Cité through the palace garden westward. It was surrounded by houses like those on the Place Royale. Madame Roland lived in one of them, situated where the place opens on the Pont Neuf which Henry finished. On it he planned to place his own equestrian statue, but that ornament underwent so many misfortunes, even to being shipwrecked on its way from Italy where it had been cast, that Henry was dead before it was set in place. It seems to have been fated to ill-luck, for during the Revolution it was melted down and made into cannon, although up to that time the people had laid their petitions at its foot. The existing statue replaced the old one in 1818.
On the northern part of the Pont Neuf Henry built the famous “Samaritaine,” a pump which forced water to the Louvre and the Tuileries, was crowned by a clock tower and a chime of bells, and was decorated with statues and carving. The name is perpetuated to-day in a department store on the right bank and in a public bath floating in the stream. On other bridges there were several of these pumps. One on the Pont Notre Dame was destroyed within the remembrance of people now living.
Berthod, a seventeenth-century writer of doggerel, who describes “La Ville de Paris” in “burlesque verses,” draws a lively picture of the activities of Henry’s great esplanade in
THE RASCALITIES OF THE PONT-NEUF
Two hospitals were built in Henry’s reign, one on the left bank, l’Hôpital de Charité, and the other outside of the city on the northeast, for contagious diseases.
Improvement of the quays was a manifold benefit to the city.
A satirical prescription warranted to cure the plague, was quoted then as it had been for the previous hundred years:
RECIPE FOR THE CURE OF THE EPIDEMIC
Queen Marguerite of Valois, the wife whose wedding festivities had precipitated the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, proved herself Catherine de Medicis’ own daughter in point of morals. Henry’s were none of the best and they were divorced, he to contemplate marriage with Gabrielle d’Estrées and after her death to clinch his Italian alliance by wedding Marie de Medicis, while Marguerite entertained herself with numerous lovers at the Hôtel de Sens and at a new house which she built on the left bank, finding it “piquant” to look across to the Louvre where her successor lived. In moments of emotion, conventionality or fright she founded several religious houses. Of the Monastery of the Petits-Augustins there is a remnant left, the chapel, which has been secularized and now houses the Renaissance museum of the School of Fine Arts. Its façade is, incongruously enough, the façade of Diane de Poitiers’ château d’Anet, mentioned above.
Henry’s devotion to Gabrielle d’Estrées, a rarely beautiful woman, made him have her initial carved in parts of the Louvre which he built. The letters are gone now except in one overlooked instance, and they were erased, it is said, by the order of Marie de Medicis. If this is true she seems to have had more feeling about this past love affair of the king’s than about his former wife, for she is said to have been friendly with Marguerite across the river even to the point of paying her debts.
In spite of Henry’s warlike career and his rough-and-ready manners he was not without the ability, which many early kings cultivated, to express his lighter emotions in verse. To-day this royal skill seems to have left the monarchs of Europe with the exception of Carmen Sylva and of Nicholas of Montenegro who writes and fights with equal enthusiasm. Here is a poem addressed to
CHARMING GABRIELLE[4]
The most ambitious architectural work of Henry’s reign was the addition which he made to the Louvre. Catherine de Medicis had begun a wing extending from the right angle of Francis I and Henry II toward the Seine, and then continued it in a gallery parallel with the river, and intended to meet the palace of the Tuileries. Henry IV finished both and added the story which was rebuilt in Louis XIV’s reign after a fire. It is now called the Gallery of Apollo and contains to-day a few of the crown jewels kept when the rest were sold twenty-five years ago. Out of this splendid hall opens the small square room in which hung Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” until its unexplained disappearance two years ago.
Popular as Henry was personally the political situation was so embroiled that he had many enemies. Soon after his triumphal entry into Paris he was unsuccessfully attacked by a youth named Chastel, and it is a testimony to the king’s openness of mind and tact that after a few year’s he caused the demolition of the monument which enthusiasts raised to commemorate his escape. As a further expression of the people’s horror at Chastel’s act his house, opposite the Cour du Mai, was razed and on its site the public executioner branded his victims.
A half dozen other attempts upon Henry’s life followed, and at last one was successful. Driving in an open carriage through a narrow street (rue de la Ferronerie) near the markets, he was stabbed by one Ravaillac who leaped upon the wheel of the carriage as it halted in a press of traffic. A fortnight later the assassin was tortured to death on the Grève. The body of the most popular sovereign that France has ever known lay in state in the Hall of the Cariatides, that huge gallery of the Louvre which had served as a guardroom in the days of Henry II and Catherine de Medicis. There could be no better testimony to the regard in which the “roi galant” was held not only in his own time but later than the fact that during the Revolution his body and tomb at Saint Denis were not disturbed.
HENRY IV’S death left France with a nine-year-old king, Louis XIII, (1610-1643), whose Italian mother, acting as regent, had small sympathy with her adopted land. Sully she soon dismissed and the court witnessed a greedy scramble for money and preferment between imported favorites and French nobles. In the brief period of four years the financial state of the country was such that it became necessary to summon the States General to see if any way out of the trouble might be found. France’s regeneration under Henry of Navarre had been a growth too rapid to have roots firm enough to withstand rough handling.
The Assembly was to accomplish nothing for it. It was in the autumn of 1614 that the Estates met in a hall in the Hôtel de Bourbon just east of the Louvre. The body was a unit in demanding reform, but unity ceased with that demand. The nobles were indignant at certain encroachments on their aristocratic rights, the queen having given privileges to some middle-class professional people for a financial consideration. The clergy were shocked at the suggestion that they pay taxes—an idea not to be considered, they said, for it would be giving to man what was due to God. The Third Estate had a just grievance in the fact that upon them fell all the expenses of the government, and their representatives, speaking kneeling as was the dispiriting custom, succeeded nevertheless in giving some caustic warnings.
The only result of all this quarreling was that a petition was sent to the king asking him to give his attention to the questions under discussion. The only reply from the Louvre was the information that greeted the deputies when they gathered the next day that the queen wanted their hall of meeting for a ball and that the Assembly was therefore disbanded. It was a hundred and seventy-five years after this brusque treatment before it met again just before the outbreak of the Revolution.
Richelieu, Paris born, Sorbonne educated, and at that time a bishop, was a member of this Assembly of 1614. When he became Marie de Medicis’ adviser, and, diplomatic and inflexible, imposed his will upon the country, the situation cleared. There was need of high-handed action at first. The minister had the greedy Prince of Condé arrested within the palace of the Louvre and sent to the Bastille; a force was sent against other hungry and violent nobles; the king himself, though then but a lad of sixteen, felt the bracing atmosphere of this change and ordered the arrest—possibly the death—of the Italian Concini, who, with his wife, Leonora Galigaï had ruled the nation through the queen. Concini was shot as he was crossing the bridge across the eastern moat of the Louvre, and the king looked on from a window. Leonora was beheaded and burned as a witch on the Grève.
Richelieu, become a cardinal, ruled with wisdom and vigor. He treated high and low with equal impartiality, even causing the execution of some of the greatest nobles in the land for the breaking of the law which forbade dueling. The Place de Grève witnessed the punishment for the sport of the Place Royale. Legalized struggles by the Parliament in the palace on the Cité, underhand plots by men very near the throne—all were met and overthrown by the sagacious premier, and his every act tended to confirm the strength of the crown. He fought sturdily against the Huguenots and conquered them with the fall of La Rochelle, a conquest which the church of Notre Dame-des-Victoires was established to commemorate, the original building serving as the sacristy of the present edifice. He confirmed Henry of Navarre’s Edict of Nantes, however, giving to the Protestants religious liberty and civil rights. Abroad the cardinal’s policies brought territory and prestige to the crown.
Louis lived but a scant half year longer than Richelieu. The king’s whole life was passed under the domination of a determined mother, Marie de Medicis, and a masterful prime minister. It would have required a stronger personality than his to make itself felt, though Rubens has recorded in a series of pictures now in the Louvre the quarrels and reconciliations of the royal family. His only interests were hawking, drilling soldiers, and craftsmanship in leather. He was terribly bored most of the time, apparently without any initiative toward remedying the situation. His court reflected his own disposition and was incredibly dull, though ordered in etiquette and brilliant in garb.
It is to the regent and the cardinal and not to the king that Paris was indebted for the many embellishments of this reign and for any impetus that it gained toward the standards of art and literature which rose to their climax in the next reign.
Henry IV had made Paris so pleasant a place to live in that the city was constantly growing. Rivaling the Marais in popularity a new section became fashionable, the Quarter Saint Honoré on the northwest of the town. By way of protecting this rapidly enlarging district Louis swung the city wall so far west as to include the Tuileries gardens. It was in this newly popular quarter that Richelieu built for himself the Palais Cardinal which he bequeathed to the king and which then took its present name, the Palais Royal. He encountered difficulties in the construction of his new home for his ideas of what he wanted did not harmonize with what he could have. The hôtels of other men were in the way and sometimes even the cardinal’s expressed desire was not enough to make them turn over their property to him. When they were citizens of small account he brought pressure, not always honest, to bear upon them; when they were people of importance he sometimes had to keep his wishes in abeyance. The result was an irregularity of outline that was not beautiful. To secure a symmetrical garden Richelieu did from within what few of the city’s enemies ever have succeeded in doing—he pierced the king’s new wall. After the cardinal’s death the queen-regent, Anne of Austria, moved into the palace, and in its garden Louis XIV grew up, a rather forlorn little figure so uncared for that once he was found after dark asleep under a bush.
Outside of the city wall running along the river bank was the Cours la Reine laid out by
Marie de Medicis as a parade ground for the satins and velvets, the flowing cloaks and plumed hats of her courtiers. A similar sight was to be seen in the gardens of the left bank palace which Marie, disgusted with the gloom of the Louvre which she could not believe was really the palace when she first came to Paris, had rebuilt on the site of an old residence of the dukes of Luxembourg. To-day, with that combination of thrift and love of beauty which characterizes the Frenchman, the Senate occupies one part and the President of the Senate lives in another section. The national museum of contemporary art is housed in a modern building adjoining. The garden is still carefully ordered, the only renaissance garden in Paris, and is a fitting adjunct to the beautiful and varied Italian edifice which looks down upon it. The grounds are dotted with statues of eminent men and women, most of them portraits. To the east of the palace is an elaborate Florentine fountain and basin called the Fountain of the Medicis.
It was in Louis’ reign that Paris became the seat of an archbishop who used as his episcopal residence the bishop’s palace on the south side of Notre Dame. Of a half-dozen religious houses founded or enlarged at this time the best known is the Val-de-Grâce, made prominent by its gift from Louis’ wife, Anne of Austria, of a handsome church, a thank-offering for the birth of a son after a childless wedded life of twenty-three years. This son ruled as Louis XIV, the “Grand Monarque.” The church of the Val-de-Grâce was dome-crowned in the fashion set by the left bank monastery of the Carmelites and followed in the construction of the near-by palace of the Luxembourg, of the chapel of the Sorbonne in which is Richelieu’s tomb, of the Church of Saint Paul-Saint Louis, in whose graveyard Rabelais was buried, and, in the next reign, of the College Mazarin (the Institute) and of the Dome of the Invalides beneath which Napoleon sleeps. The popularity of the dome continued far into the next century, for Sainte Geneviève’s church, now called the Pantheon, is topped in the same majestic style.
Now was the beginning, too, of the so-called “Jesuit” style, seen to-day in not undignified form in the façades of Saint Paul-Saint Louis near the Place de la Bastille, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the left bank church of fashionable weddings, Saint Roch on the rue Saint Honoré, from which the crowds watched the daily passing of the tumbrils during the Revolution, Saint Gervais, east of the Hôtel de Ville, which cherishes a crucifix from the ancient abbey of Sainte Geneviève, and the Oratory also on the rue Saint Honoré, now a Protestant church and serving as a background for a fine group of statuary representing Admiral Coligny between Fatherland and Religion.
The main feature of these façades is the superposition of columns. All three orders are used in Saint Gervais, the simplest, Doric, at the bottom, the Ionic above, and the most florid, the Corinthian at the top. The others employ but two orders, always with the more elaborate above.
Decoration was of the heavy style called baroque which developed later into the slightly more acceptable rococo, so called from its use of rocks, shells, and foliage combined with conventional scrolls. Louis’ addition to the Louvre, however, of a part of the eastern courtyard, reproduced the renaissance decorations of the constructions of Francis I and Henry II to which they were attached.
Far to the east of the city Louis’ physician started a botanical garden which developed into the present huge Jardin des Plantes with its connecting collections of animals. One of the sights of the garden is a spreading cedar tree which the famous eighteenth century botanist, Jussieu, is said to have brought from the Andes, a tiny plant, slipped under the band of his hat.
An important addition to the Paris of Louis XIII’s time was the construction of what is now called the Île Saint Louis to the east of the Cité. This island was made by uniting two small islands, one of which had belonged to the bishop and the other to the canons of the cathedral. With bustling Paris only the cast of a stone away on each bank these two islets were devoted to such rural uses as the pasturage of cows and the whitening of linen. One of them, however, in Charles V’s time, had been the scene of a strange combat between a man and a dog, the property of his enemy whom he was accused of murdering from the fact that the dog attacked him whenever they met. Lists were enclosed on the then barren island and the king and a great crowd of men from court and town stood about to see the outcome of the “ordeal.” The man was allowed a stick; the dog had a barrel open at both ends into which he might retreat and from which he could plunge forth. When he was loosed he rushed about his enemy, evading his blows, threatening him now on one side and now on another until he was worn out, and then flew at his throat and threw him down so that he was forced to make confession of his crime thus proven by the “wager of battle.”
Henry IV built a chapel which became in the eighteenth century the present church of Saint Louis-in-the-Island, whose delicately pierced spire shows glints of sky through its openings. The first union with the main land was by a
bridge to the right bank. An engineer named Marie conceived the idea of joining the two islets, and now the island is a unit and only the name of a street indicates where the Seine once flowed between.
Once begun, this new residence section rapidly became popular among people who wanted to live somewhat remote from the turmoil of many streets. To-day the island is covered from tip to tip with dwellings and such few shops as are needed to supply the daily needs of the people, but there is still the atmosphere of remoteness that made its charm for Gautier and Baudelaire and Voltaire, and which induced Lambert de Thorigny, president of the Parliament, to build the superb mansion, still standing and restored to its original beauty, on whose decorations all the best French artists of the day lavished their skill. To cross one of the bridges on to the island is to find one’s self transported to one of the provinces. It is as true to-day as when it was written a hundred and thirty years ago that “the dweller in the Marais is a stranger in the Isle.”
Louis XIII cared little for letters. Richelieu, on the other hand, made some pretensions to being a literary man himself, recognized ability in others, and was able to understand the usefulness and the power of the pen. It was, in part, his encouragement that made the success of the literary meetings at the Hôtel de Rambouillet near the Louvre where the “precious” ladies and gentlemen conversed and wrote in a language whose high-flown eloquence was a reaction against the rough language of the military court of Henry IV. Corneille came to the fore in Louis’ reign, and, for his own political purposes, Richelieu organized a group of writers who had met for their own pleasure into the French Academy whose members, the forty “Immortals,” assume to-day to be the court of last resort on the literature and language of France.
The two succeeding sovereigns, Louis XIV and XV added other academies—of Inscriptions, Sciences and so on—which, after the Revolution, were combined as the Institute and established in the Collège Mazarin near whose dome a tablet now marks the former site of the Tour de Nesle.
It is quite probable that when the great cardinal died, Paris not being gifted with prophetic vision, drew a sigh of relief. His was indeed a master spirit. Beneath the rush of the city’s life there was no one of whatever class who did not know that he was neither too high nor too low to receive the premier’s attention if he drew it upon himself. Richelieu’s word meant his making or his breaking. If Richelieu stretched forth his hand he might be raised to prominence: if Richelieu frowned he might be sent to a prison from which only Death would release him.
Cardinal de Retz, who analyzed Richelieu’s qualities with impartiality and intelligence said of him “all his vices were those which can only be brought into use by means of great virtues.” Claude le Petit (1638-1662), author of “La Chronique Scandaleuse ou Paris Ridicule,” in describing the Palais Royal, wrote:
HISTORY repeated itself when Louis XIII died, leaving as his heir a child of five, Louis XIV (1643-1715), whose kingdom was ruled by a regent, the queen mother, Anne of Austria, who took as her adviser another cardinal, the Italian, Mazarin. This newcomer to power was a different sort of man from his predecessor, Richelieu. “He possessed wit, insinuation, gayety and good manners,” says de Retz, but “he carried the tricks of the sharper into the ministry.”
War with Spain brought success at the beginning, but the Parisians were all too soon quarreling over the finances, and in the thick of a civil war. The people resented the arrest of a member of Parliament, Broussel, which had been accomplished while the general attention was engaged by the celebration at Notre Dame and in the streets over the victory at Lens. De Retz, who was at that time archbishop suffragan of Paris, went to Anne to ask for Broussel’s release. The queen laughed at him and so roused his wrath that he joined the insurgents. He did it whole-heartedly, for for some time to come he fought in the streets—alternately with trying to calm the people—and once was seen at a sitting of the Parliament of Paris with a dagger carelessly protruding from his pocket—“the archbishop’s breviary,” some wit called it.
After de Retz’s failure the Parliament sent a delegation to the regent at the Palais Royal to demand the release of Broussel. Anne refused and the burghers tucked up their gowns and clambered over the street barricades to report their failure to the people. Half way across town they were met by a mob who declined to accept any such decision as final, and once more the envoys turned about and made their laborious way back to the regent.
Anne finally yielded her prisoner, but her action did not end the struggle, which was carried on for some years and was called the Fronde (sling) because the members of Parliament behaved like the stone-slinging youngsters of the faubourg Saint Honoré who gave way before the king’s archers, but renewed their sport as soon as their backs were turned. The contest seems to have been rather absurd, for while the personal courage of the Parisians was unquestioned there was no organization, and the troop that rode gaily out to meet the royal regulars was pretty sure to ride back sad and bedraggled.
The little king was taken to Saint Germain for protection during this year-long commotion, and it was not until peace between the warring parties had been formally proclaimed that he returned to Paris.
This peace did not last long, for the bourgeoisie, some members of the nobility and even a few princes of the blood royal were among the disaffected Parisians. Anne and Mazarin adopted high-handed measures, but they soon found that imprisoning men like the Prince de Condé of the Bourbon family did not ingratiate the court with the people or advance its cause. Two years later on a summer’s day Mazarin took the child king to the top of the hill on which is now the cemetery of Père Lachaise that he might watch a battle between his own troops under Turenne and those under Condé just outside the city walls on the east. Condé’s force was out-numbered and it looked as if he were going to be crushed between Turenne’s army and the wall when the Porte Saint Antoine was suddenly opened and the guns of the Bastille were used against Turenne while Condé’s army gained this unexpected refuge.
It turned out that the king’s cousin, the Duchesse de Montpensier, known as “La Grande Mademoiselle,” had taken upon herself to give the orders which defeated the royal troops. This strong-minded young woman was the bachelor girl of her time, and a “character.” What she would do next was the constant guess and the constant diversion of the court. Although she was eleven years older than Louis he was so captivated by her vivacity that the cardinal thought it judicious to keep the cousins apart, and gave her apartments at the Louvre. At one time during the siege of Orléans she made her way across the moat in a small boat and squeezed her way into the town through a postern gate. At love she scoffed and she refused every offer of marriage that was made to her until she was of an age ostensibly of discretion when she fell madly in love with an adventurer. Her marital experiences undoubtedly made her return to her earlier beliefs in the foolishness of love and marriage.
The court retreated to Saint Denis. The city was given over to internal dissension for some of the city officials were accused of sympathizing with the hated foreign cardinal and his party, and the Hôtel de Ville became the center of violent scenes, its besiegers men who wore in their hats a tuft of straw, the badge of the Frondeurs. It was only when Anne consented to send Mazarin away that the Fronde came to an end and once again Louis could return to Paris.
With such youthful experiences of his chief city it is small wonder that Louis XIV had no great love for it as a place of residence and that he spent most of his life at Versailles. The hunting lodge which Louis XIII had built was the nucleus of the huge palace which his son made large enough not only for his family and retinue but for a large number of the nobles whom it was his policy to gather about him so that he could keep his eye on them. By this means the power of the nobles was decreased on their own estates while their respect for the king, on whose words and smiles they hung, was enormously increased. A lord was grateful for a room at Versailles even though it were so far from private as to be used as a passage-way. Many of the nobility paid handsomely for positions in the royal kitchens. Later in the reign these offices were held by bourgeois, for the finances of this class improved as those of the upper class lessened on account of decreased revenues from their neglected estates. The burghers aped the nobles in manners and in dress, and by favoring them, from whom he had nothing to fear, Louis gained the friendship of an important body. He raised no objection when the citizens took nobles into business partnership, for that served him both by lowering ancient pride and by providing money upon which he could make some demand.
In manners, dress and literature this reign was increasingly formal following upon the example of Louis who was formal because he honestly believed himself godlike and insisted on formality as appropriate. His was a grand manner and his an incomparable selfishness. His belief in the divine right of kings stretched until “right” meant the right to do whatever he chose however unkind or immoral. Beneath the gorgeousness of the court was a life of hypocrisy, self-seeking, and crime almost beyond belief.
The godlike sovereign certainly had a more than human appetite. It is related that at one dinner he ate:
In theatrical parlance, he was “playing to capacity.”
Upon Mazarin’s death the king, then twenty-three years old and ignorant of independent action, had made known his intention of conducting affairs himself. For the rest of his life he worked hard every day at the affairs of the state, comforted when things went wrong with the refreshing thought that the fault was not his because he had acted with God-given intelligence. The early part of his career was marked by such advance in the condition of the finances, the laws, education, the army, and industrial achievement that, provided he blinded himself to the fact that in Colbert, Vauban and Louvois he had exceptionally efficient administrators, he might well think himself a paragon of intelligence. Great generals won his battles; great writers praised his power; great artists and architects built grandly in his honor. It is not strange that he thought himself what others called him, the “Grand Monarque” and the “Roi Soleil.”
Centralization was the basic policy of Louis’s career. In Paris it took the form of substituting a law court under royal control for the local courts in different parts of the city, and in making the municipal offices purchasable from the king. Municipal improvements made the city pleasanter to live in. An effort was made—not very successfully from the modern point of view—to keep the streets clean, and at night a lantern was hung midway between cross streets and burned until midnight. As the number of lights installed was but 6,500 and Paris at that time covered some four square miles of territory it may be seen that the illumination was not dazzling. It was enough, however, to be of assistance to Louis’ new police force, and to make visible in the evening as well as the morning the two gates—of Saint Denis and Saint Martin—erected by the admiring Parisians to do honor to his early victories. The fire department became a lay institution at this time for, rather curiously, fire fighting had previously been the work of a religious house. The population is estimated at between eight and nine hundred thousand.
Two new squares of this century were the Place des Victoires, in front of Notre Dame des Victoires, and the Place Vendôme, north of the rue Saint Honoré. By a city regulation no change is permitted to-day of the façades of the buildings on these two open places.
At the extreme eastern end of modern Paris the Place de la Nation is the former Place du Trône, which received its name when in 1660 Louis sat upon a temporary throne beyond the city wall to receive congratulations upon having secured the Peace of the Pyrenees.
The poet Scarron, husband of Françoise d’Aubigné who, after his death, became the governess of the king’s children by Madame de Montespan, and who later was married secretly to Louis, has left a description of Paris in the “Great Century.” The translation is by Walter Besant.
An epitome of society this. Paris was indeed full of adventurers, of criminals even among the high-born, of gamblers so mad over games of chance that special laws had to be passed driving them out of the city. There is still standing near the Hôtel de Ville the Hôtel d’Aubray where lived the famous poisoner, the Marquise de Brinvilliers.
A glance at the career of this woman shows a social condition amazing in its calm iniquity. The marquise herself, of seemingly guileless charm, acquired from a lover the destructive skill which she utilized in removing from her path her relatives and any other people who interfered with her in any way. Her trial is a “celebrated case” not only because of her own rank but because other people of note were suspected of being in collusion with her. Torture was abolished under Louis XIV but not until after Madame de Brinvilliers had been made to drink many buckets of water and to be sadly bent across wooden horses.
She was beheaded on the Grève, her body burned and the ashes thrown to the winds. At about the same time accident disclosed an astounding number of cases of poisoning or attempted poisoning. Mme. de Montespan undoubtedly tried to make way with the father of her children, the king, and rumors were constant of many other instances. “So far,” said Mme. de Sevígné’s son, “I have not been accused of attempting to poison little mamma, and that is a distinction in these days.”
Paris was lively enough during this reign, for Versailles was not so far away but that its people could go to town for city diversions, and as Louis grew more serious with age and court etiquette more rigorous and burdensome, the town made its call more and more insistently. Louis himself, hugely bewigged and elaborately elegant, however, does not often appear in the picture. Once he took part in a gorgeous carrousel—a carnival chiefly of equestrian sports—which took place in the large square—now called the Place du Carrousel—lying between the Louvre and the Tuileries. Once, twenty-five years later, he was entertained at the Hôtel de Ville at a dinner at which the city officials waited upon him in person. Yet neither of these pictures lingers in the memory like that of the bewigged monarch usually most punctilious in his dress for occasions, appearing in the palace of the Cité before the Parliament, booted for the chase, arrogantly careless of any courtesy toward the body he addressed and haughtily insisting with the full force of his sincere belief that he and the State were one,—“L’État c’est moi.”
Power was dear to the king’s heart and he so impressed his magnificence on his people that they thought it only fitting that he should have a rising sun carved on the buildings which he erected, such as that part of the Louvre which he built to complete the eastern quadrangle. (See plan, Chapter XXII). The eastern exterior of this section, facing the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, shows the superb colonnade designed by Perrault, a sort of universal genius, who was both a physician and an architect. Another piece of his work was the Observatory, still in active use on the left bank near the University. The king’s appreciation of splendor demanded completeness, and so his handsome buildings were placed in the setting of stately gardens, his chief designer being Le Nôtre whose work is still to be seen encircling the palaces in the environs of Paris. In the city he laid out the gardens of the Tuileries, and that superb avenue, the Champs Elysées, which leads from the broad Place de la Concorde to Napoleon’s Arch of Triumph. The four hundredth anniversary of Le Nôtre’s birth was celebrated on March 12, 1913, when Parisians recalled his work with almost unanimous approval because of its harmony with the impressive buildings which it supplemented.
Other important buildings of Louis’ reign were the Invalides or Soldiers’ Home with its church and its later addition, the work of Mansard who gave his name to the curb-roof which we know. Beneath Mansard’s beautiful dome the body of Napoleon now lies “among the people whom I loved.”
Louis’ contest with the pope over the king’s position as head of the French church tended to lessen his interest in the establishment of religious institutions, but the famous church of Saint Sulpice, whose twin towers are landmarks on the left bank, was begun by him, together with the seminary whose square ugliness is soon to house the overflow from the near-by Luxembourg museum. Since the quarrel between church and state in 1902-03, the building has stood bleakly empty except when it was used to shelter some of the refugees made homeless by the Seine floods a few years ago.
The Abbey-in-the-Woods, removed by Louis from Picardy to Paris and made famous by the residence there in the middle of the last century of the witty Madame Récamier, has been until very recently one of the chief historic “sights” near the celebrated left bank department store, the Bon Marché.
The Church of Saint Nicholas-du-Chardonnet is interesting chiefly because of the tomb which LeBrun, the painter, designed in honor of his mother, a sepulcher opening at the summons of a hovering angel.
Among Louis’ good works must be counted the union of several hospitals into one known as the Salpêtrière from its occupying the site of a saltpeter manufactory, and devoted to-day to the care of nervous diseases and insanity.
The tapestry manufactory of the Gobelins family was received into royal favor by Louis and then as now did its work only for the government. Its products to-day, painstakingly made by skillful workmen who have given their lives to this task as did their fathers before them, are never sold, but are used for the decoration of public buildings and as gifts for people whom the state wishes to honor.
Of comparatively small houses belonging to this century the best remaining instances are the Pavilion of Hanover, in which is the Paris office of the New York Times; the Hôtel Mazarin which now contains the fine collection of books known as the National Library; the Hôtel de la Vrillière, now the Bank of France, with an échauguette (observation turret) by Mansard; the Hôtel de Soubise, used with the Hôtel de
Clisson to house the national archives; the near-by Hôtel de Hollande, once the Dutch embassy; and the Hôtel Beauvais from whose balcony the queen-mother, the Queen of England, Cardinal Mazarin and Turenne watched the entrance of Louis XIV and his bride, Maria Theresa of Spain.
The latter part of Louis’ reign showed a constant decline in power resulting from a decline in common sense no less than from the loss of able advisers. Taxes brought the peasants to poverty, famine killed them when disease did not. Territory was lost. As a last burst of stupidity the revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove out of the country the best class of artisans who took their intelligence and skill to the enrichment of other countries. The beginning of the eighteenth century found France with a selfish nobility, and a disordered bourgeoisie and a peasantry in whose hearts was smoldering the fire of bitter hatred that was to burst forth into flame at the Revolution. During the winter of 1709, six years before Louis’ death, the cold was so severe that five thousand people died of their sufferings in Paris alone, and the scarcity of food was so pronounced that the purveyors of the court had difficulty in securing enough for the king himself to eat.
So ended in suffering and sullenness the reign of the Grand Monarque.
IT was a pitiful country to which Louis XV fell heir (in 1715) when his great-grandfather died. The peasants had been taxed to the last sou, the nobles, untaxed and selfish, scrambled greedily for court preferment and left their estates uncared for, many of the bourgeois tried to emulate the nobles in extravagance, and all of them seemed to view with apathy a government in which the most intelligent part of the community had an extremely small share.
The nouveau riche has his place in the picture. It is related of a rich salt manufacturer, for instance, that he was asked by a friend to whom he was showing a fine villa that he had just built, why a certain niche was left vacant. Proud of his occupation the owner replied that he intended to fill the space with a statue symbolic of his business. To which the friend retorted with a prompt suggestion, “Lot’s wife.”
At the time of his accession Louis was but five years old, and the regency was given into the hands of the unscrupulous Duke of Orleans. Both courtiers and Parisians were delighted at the removal of the court from Versailles to the city, but the good people of the town soon realized that the added liveliness was a doubtful advantage, for the gayeties of the Palais Royal in which the regent lived were gross debaucheries. Even holy days were not held sacred, and Orleans is said to have expressed extravagant admiration for a certain church dignitary who was reputed not to have gone to bed sober for forty years. To such a pass did the extravagances fostered by the regent grow that even Louis the Well-Beloved, himself the Prince of Extravagance, was compelled later to pass sumptuary laws regulating dress and the expense of entertainments.
There is in the French character to-day a certain credulity as concerns “get-rich-quick” schemes which renders the people astonishingly responsive to the efforts of swindlers like Madame Humbert, notorious a few years ago. It is a quality in curious contrast to the shrewdness which makes them the readiest financiers of modern Europe, yet in a way it supplements the thrift which some students look upon as a result of the bitter days of the “Old Régîme,” the pinching period that resulted in the Revolution. It would seem that this characteristic is not a modern phenomenon, for at the beginning of Louis XV’s reign a Scotsman named Law proposed a paper money scheme that was seized upon with eagerness by all classes of an impoverished society. Nor was it a phenomenon peculiar to France, for at about the same time the South Sea Bubble was exciting England to a frenzy of acquisitiveness. Whatever the psychology, all France and especially all Paris went wild over Law’s propositions. He issued small notes which he redeemed in specie until he won the confidence of the public and the government endorsed his bank and permitted the use of his paper in payment of taxes. The Mississippi valley was supposed at that time to abound in gold and silver and Law’s office in the rue Quincampoix, near the Halles and the church of Saint Leu, was fairly besieged by courtiers and clergy, by tradesmen and ladies of the nobility eager to buy stock in a mining company which Law organized. West of the Halles, near the Hôtel de Soissons, was a Bourse des Valeurs established entirely for the conduct of business connected with Law’s schemes.
It is probable that Law was self-deceived. At any rate, when the bubble burst he was as hard hit financially as any of his victims, and, in addition, barely escaped with his life from their wrath, when they besieged his bank in the Place Vendôme and rushed, howling with rage, to the Palais Royal where they thought he had taken refuge. The government repudiated its debts, but private individuals could not do that and the ruin was general. A rhyme of the day says:
Louis ruled—or misruled—for sixty years. In the space of six decades much may happen for good or ill, but this long reign was marked by no rises and by few falls, merely by a gradual, consistent decadence. The country engaged in the War of the Polish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War, and in all lost territory, men and prestige, while the effects of the hated tax collector added to the ever-growing misery. The people were too crushed to do more than look on dully while their sovereign secured in infamous ways the wherewithal for his infamous pleasures. He sold the liberty of his subjects, for any one who could pay for a warrant (lettre de cachet) could put a private enemy into prison where he might lie forgotten for years. He sold the lives of his people, for he starved them to death by scores through the negotiation of a successful corner in food stuffs. Even when he disbanded the parliaments (courts) the only bodies that were trying to do anything, there was small stir made about it.
Louis encouraged a persecution of the Huguenots, yet, Catholic though he was, he favored the expulsion of the Jesuits against whom the Jansenists, also Catholics, were contending. Friend was pitted against friend, neighbor against neighbor in these fierce quarrels based on religious differences, always the fiercest quarrels that man can know.
The persecution was often petty, always bitter, yet it had its serious side when Pascal and the writers who gathered at Port Royal entered into philosophic discussion. This serious addiction of the people was a curious aspect of the mental and moral state of the period. While some people were entering heart and soul into these arguments there was at the same time an ample number of readers who devoured with gusto poems, plays and novels so coarse that to-day they never would reach print. That the same people might be interested in both sorts of literature is attested by the temper of some of the highest ecclesiastics who not only connived at the king’s immoral life, but furthered it. In some temperaments the extremes of the age produced an unbalanced state. This showed itself at one time throughout Paris in the behavior of the “Convulsionaries of Saint Médard,” who hysterically proclaimed the miracles performed at the tombs of two priests buried in the ancient churchyard of Saint Médard, near the Gobelins factory. So wide-spread and so distracting was this belief that the graveyard was closed to the public. This step caused a wit to fasten upon the wall an inscription.
“By order of the king, God is forbidden to perform miracles in this place.”
Contemporary accounts of the execution of a man who had made an attempt upon the life of the king shows a callousness to suffering that would seem impossible if one had not read recently of the brutalities of the Balkan war, nearly three hundred years later. The execution took place as usual in the Place de Grève, and every window and balcony was filled with eager spectators, many of them elegantly dressed ladies of the court who played cards to while away the moments of waiting. The poor wretch who was to furnish amusement for this gay throng was placed on an elevated table where all might see him, and he was gashed and torn and twisted and burned and broken for an hour before the breath mercifully left his mangled body.
Like his great-grandfather, Louis preferred Versailles to Paris, but not for the Sun King’s reason. He had no especial desire to keep his eye on his courtiers, but kindred spirits he gathered about him and the favorites of Madame de Pompadour ruled and of Madame du Barry vulgarized the once decorous though far from impeccable salons of Versailles.
With lowered taste architecture became rococo and decoration a mass of wreaths and shells and leaves and scrolls.
In Paris, meanwhile, the Louvre fell into such disrepair that it was habitable only by people willing to live in haphazard fashion for the sake of a free lodging, while private stables occupied much of the ground floor and the government post horses stamped and kicked beneath Perrault’s unfinished colonnade. Disgusted at this eyesore in their once beautiful city the Parisians authorized the Provost of the Merchants to offer to repair the building at the expense of the town. Louis, however, seems to have thought that if the citizens had so much money to spend it had better be on him, and he refused the offer and set about devising new ways of capturing the hidden coin.
Of building there could not be much at a time when the monarch took no pride in his own chief city and suffered no expenditures except those that he saw no way of diverting to his own yawning purse. One of the few constructions of Louis’ date is the Mint, built on one of the left bank quays on a part of the site once occupied
by the ancient Hôtel de Nesle. It contains a museum of coins and medals as well as the workshops for the making of coins.
Another of the king’s languid interests was the Military School which looms imposingly across the southeastern end of the Champ de Mars as the modern tourist sits at luncheon on the first ‘stage’ of the Eiffel Tower. The Field of Mars itself, now green with lawns and bright with flowers, was laid out as a drill ground on the very spot where a battle with the Normans took place during the siege of 885 A.D. Its great size has frequently made it useful for large gatherings of people, and no fewer than four World Exhibitions have erected their plaster cities upon its ample space.
Another open place of impressive size was the present Place de la Concorde, first called the Place Louis XV. This vast square, now the center of Paris, was framed on the side of the Tuileries gardens by balustrades designed by Gabriel, the architect of the Military School, and was planned as a setting for that colossal statue of the King on which a wag pinned a placard saying:
The square stood on the western edge of the settled part of the city, but not too far away for the appropriate erection of the handsome buildings still standing on the north side restored to their early dignity. One of these, built as a storehouse for state effects, is now used by the Ministry of Marine. The other was a private hôtel. Between the two the rue Royale runs a little way northward to the classic church of the Madeleine, whose cornerstone Louis laid on the site of a former chapel, but whose construction was long delayed. Standing on its broad steps to-day the eye follows the vista of the rue Royale across the square and over the river to the Palace of Deputies, begun as the Palais Bourbon in the early part of Louis XV’s reign.
It was in the rue Royale that most of the deaths occurred during Louis XVI’s wedding festivities, and it was through this street that the tumbrils laden with victims for the guillotine came from the rue Saint Honoré.
A little way from the place on the west is the Palace of the Élysée, which the government furnishes as a mansion for the President of the Republic. It has been rebuilt and restored since its first condition as a private house which Louis XV bought and gave to Madame de Pompadour.
Not being of a markedly religious turn except when he was ill, it is not surprising that Louis promoted the construction of very few churches. One of them, Saint Philippe-du-Roule, replaced a leper hospital. A few years before the Madeleine was begun, a new church of Sainte Geneviève was planned as a crown for the Mont Sainte Geneviève. Great difficulties had to be overcome in providing a firm foundation, for the elevation was found to be honeycombed with the quarries of Gallo-Roman days. It was fifty years after its beginning before the adjoining abbey chapel of Sainte Geneviève, which the new building was to replace, was torn down, leaving the fine dome-crowned church—now the Pantheon—to stand uncrowded.
Opposite the Pantheon to the west is the Law School, designed by the same architect, Soufflot.
In public utilities Paris found herself somewhat richer than before Louis’ reign. The postal service attained such effective organization that it made three deliveries a day and was housed in a large and adequately equipped building. It became usual to number all the houses as had been done for some two hundred years on the house-laden bridges. The names of streets were cut on stone blocks and affixed to a corner building.
In spite of the discomfort of getting about the large city through dirty streets carriages had been introduced but slowly into the city. As late as the sixteenth century only the king and ladies of the court used the heavy coaches which were called “chariots.” In the next century chairs carried by porters became fashionable among the extravagantly dressed and bewigged. A cab service, established midway through the hundred years won instant favor, and was greatly improved in Louis XV’s time, though Parisians were condemned for many decades longer to traverse the town through streets unprovided with sidewalks and defiantly dirty.
It is hard for the admirers of twentieth century Paris cleanliness to realize that an English traveler, writing just before the French Revolution, complains bitterly of the dirt and disorder and danger of the streets and compares them most unfavorably with London thoroughfares.
Another undertaking, this time of scientific interest, was the tracing of the meridian of Paris from the Observatory of the left bank across the river to Montmartre on the right of the Seine. In the left transept of the church of Saint Sulpice is a section of the line, and a small obelisk on which a ray of sunlight falls from the south at exactly noon. At the same moment the sun’s rays set off a cannon, placed where the meridian crosses the garden of the Palais Royal.
That the fire service was not astonishingly competent seems to be indicated by the disasters
of this century. Twice serious fires destroyed large parts of the Hotel Dieu, the old general hospital. It had become so crowded in the Sun King’s time that six and eight patients were put into one bed. Nothing was done to relieve the situation, however, until it reached such a pass that even the careless Regent was aroused and provided money for the building of a new wing by taxing public amusements. The second conflagration (in 1772) was not extinguished for eleven days. Many sufferers were burned in their beds, and hundreds of others, turned out into the December cold, took refuge in near-by Notre Dame.
In the same year with the earlier fire at the hospital (1737) a two-day conflagration started by prisoners worked havoc with the palace of the Cité. In 1777 another destroyed the front of the palace. Another fire earlier in the century had its origin in the efforts of a poor woman to recover the body of her drowned son through the mediation of Saint Nicholas. To that end she set afloat in the Seine a wooden bowl containing a loaf of bread and a lighted candle. The candle set fire to a barge of hay. Some one cut the boat loose and it was swept by the current under the Petit Pont which was consumed with all its burden of houses. The bridge was quickly replaced, but without any buildings on it, a fashion followed toward the end of Louis XVI’s reign when the Pont Neuf and the Pont Notre Dame were cleared.
The Pont Neuf’s broad expanse became at once the field for hucksters and mountebanks of all sorts; here strikers assembled near the statue of Henry IV; here, according to an old verse-maker, there was much love-making near the “Bronze Horse;” and here the enlisting officers plied their activities even up to a quarter of a century ago when army service became compulsory.
LOUIS XV was succeeded in 1774 by his twenty year old grandson, Louis XVI, at whose birth the Paris that later was to kill him expressed extravagant delight in countless feasts, balls and displays of fireworks. Young as he was at his accession, Louis had been married for several years. His wife, Marie Antoinette, was but fourteen when she came to Paris as a bride, and an accident which occurred during the wedding festivities seemed a mournful prophecy of the troubled days to come. At the close of a fête in the Place Louis XV a panic seized the crowd. It rushed headlong into the rue Royale in such a passion of terror that the narrow street was swiftly filled with a mass of people fighting their way over the bleeding, dying bodies of those who had reached the exit first and by chance had fallen.
Again the royal family preferred Versailles to Paris. In the country the well-meaning young king tinkered with locks and was generally dull and uninteresting, while the queen made a charmingly elaborate pretence at living the simple life, à la Watteau. Louis did his ineffective best to straighten out the affairs of his kingdom but the deluge which Louis XV had predicted was coming and rapidly.
The court often came to town both to give and receive entertainment, and public festivities were not infrequent, for the people had a sort of tolerant affection for the king and queen whose gentleness and helplessness were not without their appeal. When the dauphin was born, eight years after the accession, the City of Paris gave a dinner at the Hôtel de Ville in honor of the event. The royal table was laid with seventy-eight covers and at it the king and his two brothers were the only men, the remaining seventy-five being the queen, the princesses and the ladies of the court. As seems frequently to have happened at these large dinners at the City Hall not everything went smoothly. This time the trouble arose from the commands of etiquette. The hosts bent their whole energies upon serving the king promptly. When he had finished his dinner the guests at the other tables had had nothing but butter and radishes, yet in spite of their hunger they were forced to rise and leave when the king rose. As the preparations for the feast are reported to have been lavishly extravagant it is to be hoped that “the left-overs” were given to the poor who were pitiably hungry most of the time in those days.
The public works of Louis’ reign were not many. The unrest of the people was too evident, the supply of money too small for much to be accomplished. To the clearing of the bridges which has been mentioned above was added an effort to bring light and air into at least one crowded spot on the left bank by tearing down the ancient Petit Châtelet. A new wall protected several of the outlying suburbs, and was not pulled down until 1860. At each of its gates was a pavilion, several of which are still standing, which served as an office for the collectors of the octroi, a tax levied even now upon all food brought into the city. As anything to do with taxes was obnoxious to the people this construction has been described as
which may be inadequately translated, “The wall walling Paris makes Paris wail.”
The over-florid architecture of Louis XV’s reign showed signs of betterment under the younger Louis through the influence of the Greek. The best and, indeed almost the only remaining examples are the church of Saint Louis d’Antin which Louis built as a chapel for a Capuchin convent, and the Odéon, a theater. This building has a dignified façade, but around the remaining three sides runs an arcade filled with open-air book shops whose widely varied stock is more picturesque than appropriately placed. Its actors are the students graduated in the second rank from the government school of acting. Those of the first grade make up the company of the Comédie Française whose playhouse stands in columned ugliness to-day attached to the corner of the Palais Royal.
The drama always has been fostered in Paris, but up to Molière’s time no especial provision was made for the presentation of the play from which the people derived so much pleasure. In early times the performance took place in the street. In the fifteenth century the clerks attached to the court held in the palace of the Cité performed farces in the great hall of the palace, using Louis IX’s huge marble table as a stage. In the sixteenth century a troupe remodeled for its use a part of the Hôtel of Burgundy of which a fragment is left in the Tower of John the Fearless. In the seventeenth century a disused tennis court in the Marais housed a company of players. Molière and his actors occupied the hall of a half-ruined residence opposite the eastern end of the Louvre until it was torn down, when they moved to the Palais Royal.
Street fairs were enormously popular. They
were often conducted by hospitals or religious houses. The best known are the Fair of Saint Germain and the Fair of Saint Laurent, both the left and the right banks being served by these two entertainments. There were side shows and mountebanks of all kinds, and some old verses say that “as one approaches his ears are as full as bottles with noise.”
In summing up the causes of the Revolution soon to let loose the pent-up fury of generations of repression, the economic and social reasons are easily seen. To English minds the only wonder is that the people endured so long the steady curtailment of opportunity and that they were so long deluded by the magnificence of royalty. The lower classes were taxed inordinately, even on necessities. The nobility (of whom there were some two hundred thousand as against England’s five hundred) and the clergy were not taxed at all, and when the Minister of Finance suggested to the assembled Notables, whom Louis was forced to summon, that they should bear their share of the government support, they resented the idea as insulting. Not only were the taxes heavy, their collection was farmed out to tax-gatherers who were permitted to take in lieu of salary as much more than the original tax as they could squeeze out of their victims. And, as if this drain, long continued and ever increasing, were not enough, Louis XV had collected advance taxes.
Politically, the power of the French monarch was practically absolute. The nobility and clergy almost invariably supported him, voting two to one against the Third Estate in the States General, and, as this body had not convened for nearly two hundred years before Louis XVI summoned it, it hardly could be regarded as a check to absolutism. Trial by jury had fallen into complete disuse and no man was sure of his personal liberty or of undisturbed ownership of his property, and, at the same time, he was denied freedom of belief and of speech.
But independence of belief and of speech was fast increasing, and its growth is an evidence of the intellectual change which is one of the causes of the Revolution, less evident but not less powerful than those which affected the economic, social and political status of Frenchmen. Paris was the center of this intellectual and literary activity. In Paris lived or sojourned the men whose advanced thinking was percolating through all classes of society—Voltaire and Montesquieu, who pleaded for liberty and a constitutional government, and Rousseau whose appeals for individual freedom of politics, religion and speech subordinated to the good of the whole, crystallized in the war cry “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” which has become the watchword of modern France. In Paris, too, were published the famous philosophical and economic articles of the Encyclopedia, often with difficulty in evading the police, and often interrupted by the prison visits of its contributors, Diderot being sent to the Bastille immediately upon the appearance of the first volume.
Skepticism permeated the upper classes, irreligion the lower.
Paris, indeed, was the very crater of the Revolution. In the scholars’ attics on the left bank argument was growing loud where only whispers had been heard before; in the crowded tenements of the eastern quarter around the Saint Antoine Gate, and especially amid the fallen grandeurs of the once fashionable Marais people were talking now where once they had hardly dared to think. The mob that was soon to take unspeakable license in the name of Liberty was watching for an opportunity to test its strength.
It made its first trial amid the excitements of the election to the States General which Louis was forced to summon when the Notables failed to suggest any solution of the country’s problems. It met in the spring of 1789, the first time in one hundred and seven-five years. Riots were frequent, prophetic of the struggle with the king which began as soon as the sitting opened at Versailles. Louis closed the hall to the assemblage and they met in the tennis court and took the famous oath by which they bound themselves not to disband until they had prepared a written constitution. They called themselves the National Constituent Assembly, the nobility and clergy joined them at the king’s request, and they voted thereafter not by classes but as individuals.
Some of the Third Estate knew definitely what they wanted. A peasant declared that he was going to work for the abolition of three things—pigeons, because they ate the grain; rabbits, because they ate the sprouting corn; and monks, because they ate the sheaves.
Three weeks after the Oath of the Tennis Court, Desmoulins, a young journalist, made an inflammatory speech in the garden of the Palais Royal, declaring that the fact of the king’s surrounding his family with Swiss soldiers was an introduction of force that made the wise regard the Bastille as a menace to the city.
The facts seem to be that most of the prisoners were well cared for, so well fed that Bastille diet was a town joke, and, as a picture by Fragonard shows, might even entertain their friends.
On July 14, 1789, two days after Desmoulins’ speech, the Parisians poured against the fortress a horde of citizens armed with weapons taken from the Hôtel des Invalides. They forced the first drawbridge, burned the governor’s house and easily compelled his surrender, since the garrison of which the people declared themselves in terror consisted only of about eighty men who were but scantily provided with ammunition. The crowd set free the prisoners, who numbered but a half dozen or so under Louis’ mild rule, seized the captain and hurried him to the Grève where they struck off his head and carried it about the city on a pike—the first of such hideous sights of which the Revolution was to know an appalling number. The destruction of the huge mass of masonry was begun the next day and lasted through five years. Lafayette sent one of the keys to General Washington.
So thoroughly did the Bastille symbolize oppression in the public mind of France that the anniversary of the day of its fall has been made the national holiday.
One of the schemes proposed for the decoration of the vacant square was the erection of an enormous elephant to be made from guns taken in battle by Napoleon. A plaster model stood in the place for several years, the same animal which served as a refuge for the street urchin, Gavroche, in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” After 1830 the present “July Column” was erected to the memory of the victims of the “Three Glorious Days” of the Revolution of that year.
Upon hearing of the Fall of the Bastille the king made concessions to the Assembly and then went to Paris accompanied by a huge and motley crowd armed with guns and scythes. The mayor went through the ceremony of presenting him with the keys of the city in token of its loyalty, while at almost the same time Lafayette was organizing the citizens into the National Guard, who wore a cockade made up not only of red and blue, the colors of Paris, but of white, the royal hue.
The nobles, awakened to the danger of a general insurrection, tried to put a stop to the rioting and incendiarism that was spreading over the country by offering to yield their privileges. This concession proved but a sop, for the people’s hunger was now unappeasable. Louis continued to spend most of his time at Versailles to the dissatisfaction of the Parisians. When they heard of the expressions of loyalty uttered by the king’s body-guard at a banquet they voted that the court had no right to feast while Paris was suffering for bread, marched to Versailles and forced the king, the queen, and the little dauphin—the baker and his wife and the baker’s boy, they called them—to go back with them to town. Marie Antoinette had succeeded in making herself extremely unpopular, both with the nobility who objected to her independence of the laws of etiquette to which they were accustomed, and with the people, who called her the “Austrian Wolf,” and who really believed her to be sinister and wicked instead of a gay and affectionate young woman, whose worst fault was thoughtlessness. If she had had before but small knowledge of the opinion in which she was held by her subjects she discovered it during this ten-mile drive when her carriage was surrounded by east-end roughs and disheveled women from the Halles who had only been deterred from killing her as she stood beside her husband at Versailles by her display of dauntless courage, and who crowded upon her now, yelling indecencies and shaking their fists at the king and the uncomprehending little prince and his sister. This return to Paris was called the “Joyous Entry.”
Arrived at Paris they went to the Tuileries and passed a sleepless night in the long-deserted palace which seems to have been despoiled even of its beds. There they lived for many months, willingly served only by a few faithful guards and daily insulted by people who came to see the tyrants and to watch the “Wolf’s Cub” dig in the little fenced enclosure which he called his garden. The king’s brother and his closest friends fled from the country, leaving him to face his troubles alone.
The first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was celebrated upon the Field of Mars by a great festival. Undeterred by a violent rainstorm a hundred thousand people passed before an Altar of the Fatherland erected in the middle, and after taking part in a religious service, listened to Lafayette, who was the first to swear to uphold the Constitution, and to Louis, who declared: “I, King of the French, swear to use the power which the constitutional act of the State has delegated to me, for the maintenance of the Constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by me.”
The Assembly confiscated church property and gave to the state the control of the clergy. Then it ordered the clergy to take an oath to support the Constitution. Because this implied an acknowledgment that the action of the Assembly was justifiable the pope forbade the clergy to take the oath. At first the king vetoed this bill, called the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy,” and then he sanctioned it. It was this vacillation that caused the distribution in Paris of the cartoon of “King Janus.”
The Assembly worked hard in the old riding school near the Tuileries, and formulated many political changes which did not live and many civil improvements which were more enduring. Mirabeau used his strength for order; but popular clubs, the Jacobins and Cordeliers, which took their names from the old religious buildings in which they met, were constantly stirring the fiercest passions of the people, and principles closely akin to anarchy were taught in the press of Danton and Desmoulins, sincere believers in revolution.
Despairing of achieving peace from within the king entered into a secret arrangement with several other European rulers, by which they were to invade France and subdue his subjects for him, and in June, 1791, he tried to escape from the country with his family and to join his allies. They stole forth at night from the Tuileries and managed to leave the city, but they were recognized and sent back, making their way once more to the palace through a huge and sullen crowd. The clubs clamored for the king’s deposition and the people rioted in the Field of Mars against Lafayette and the mayor of Paris, who dispersed them at the command of the Assembly.
In the autumn the Assembly finished the preparation of the constitution and disbanded, to be succeeded at once by the Legislative Assembly, whose leaders, the Girondins, were antiroyalists, but not active republicans. War was declared against Austria, but distrust and discontent led the French army to reverses of which the revolutionary press made the most.
It happened to be on the anniversary of the flight of the royal family that the Marais and the Faubourg Saint Antoine again gave up their hordes, who lashed themselves into fury as they pushed their way through the chamber where the Assembly was sitting, and then surged on to the Tuileries. Without doubt their intention was murder, but once more, as when Marie Antoinette fronted them at Versailles, they stopped abashed before a calm which they could not understand. Louis donned the scarlet liberty cap which they handed him, the queen allowed a similar “Phrygian bonnet” to be put upon the dauphin, and the mob stood appeased and even admiring. Yet only a few days later Lafayette, the defender of the Assembly, was forced to flee from the country. The Reign of Terror had begun.
The threatened approach of the foreign enemy was the signal for a final attack upon the royal family. Early on one August morning the National Guard and the Swiss Guards massed themselves about the palace to withstand the assault of the crowd whose ominous roar was heard growing momentarily louder as it poured westward under the leadership of a brewer of the Faubourg St. Antoine. The guards gave their life valiantly, but they were hacked to pieces in the struggle which Thorwaldsen’s famous Lion commemorates at Lucerne. The victorious rabble set fire to the palace, which was partly destroyed, and then rushed before the Assembly, demanding that it dissolve in favor of a National Convention. In the old riding school the king and queen, their children and the king’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, took refuge, staying crowded into a small room while the Assembly discussed the question of what should be done with them. After three days and nights of extreme discomfort they were removed to the tower of the ancient Temple.[5]
Paris was the very heart of the Terror. The rabble had learned its power and unscrupulous leaders permitted brutality and urged violence. A casual word was enough to cause anybody, man, woman or child, to be arrested as a suspect and thrown into prison. If he did not die there, forgotten, he came out only to be taken before a so-called tribunal which listened to false charges, practically allowed no denial or protest, declared its victims, in detachments, guilty of “conspiring against the Republic” and sent them straightway to the guillotine.
This instrument was invented by a physician, Dr. Guillotin, to provide a humane method of capital punishment. Its victims would feel no pain he said; only a refreshing coolness! It was set up in various parts of the city. In the Place Louis XV, then called the Place de la Révolution, the scaffold was erected near the statue of Liberty to which Mme. Roland addressed her famous exclamation: “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” Around it gathered a daily crowd, some, the industriously knitting women described in “A Tale of Two Cities,” who came as to a vaudeville performance; some, fanatics, equally joyous over the downfall of hated aristocrats or of plebeian “enemies of the Republic,” others, monsters who rejoiced in blood, no matter whose. Pitiful, indeed, were those who came day after day to watch the tumbrils approaching from the east through the rue Royale from the rue Saint Honoré for some friend whose appearance here might solve the mystery of an unexplained disappearance. In a little over two years two thousand and eight hundred people lost their heads in this place; one thousand three hundred were slain in six weeks in the Square of the Throne; scores more suffered in the small square where the Sun King had held his Carrousel, and yet others in the Grève before the City Hall.
Even such slight semblance of the forms of justice as preceded the ride to the guillotine was denied to hundreds of people, many of them innocent of any fault. Almost a thousand of such victims were massacred in the early days of September following the incarceration of the royal family. Bands of authorized assassins held pretended court in the prisons and butchered the helpless prisoners. At the Abbaye, the old prison of the monastery of Saint Germain-des-Près, the unfortunates were killed in the square before the church. It was in this prison that Mme. Roland wrote the “Memoirs” that give us one of the most vivid contemporary pictures that we have of these awful days. Here, too, Charlotte Corday spent the days between her murder of Marat and her passage to the guillotine.
If there is one more moving spot than another in the Paris of to-day it is the Carmelite Convent near the Palace of the Luxembourg. Behind the old monastic buildings, almost deserted now, lies one of those unexpected gardens which make Paris wonderful in surprises. Surrounding houses shut out the roar from the stone-paved street. In a central pool a lone duckling, surviving from Easter Day, swims briskly as playful goldfish nip the webs of his busy feet. It is all as peaceful and as remote from scenes of either pain or joy as a château garden in the provinces. Yet here at the garden entrance of the building one hundred and twenty parish priests were hacked down in cold blood at the command of a coward who urged on his ruffians through a grated window. The stains are still red in a tiny room above where the swords of some of the assassins dripped blood against the plastered wall, and down in the crypt are piled the skulls of the slaughtered, here crushed by a heavy blow, there pierced by a bayonet thrust or a pistol bullet.
During this time when the mutual suspicion of the moderate Girondists on the one hand and of the radical group, Robespierre, Marat and Danton and their friends, on the other, brought about the arrest of no fewer than three hundred thousand suspects, all sorts of places were pressed into service as prisons, even buildings so unsuitable as the College of the Four Nations (the Institute) and the Palace of the Luxembourg. In the latter was detained Josephine, who was afterwards to marry Napoleon.
Five months after his capture the king was tried by the Convention, which had succeeded the Legislature and had formally declared the Republic, and twenty-four hours after his conviction “Citizen Capet” was beheaded on the same charge that had brought thousands of his subjects to the scaffold, that of having “conspired against the Republic.” He died bravely, his last words silenced by an intentional ruffle of drums.
The queen was removed from the Temple to the Conciergerie where she was kept in close confinement, never without guards in her room, until she went through a form of trial which sent her to execution in the October after Louis’ death. Her courage, so often tested, was superb, and her composure failed her only when a woman standing on the steps of Saint Roch to watch the tumbrils pass, spat upon her. Mme. Elizabeth was guillotined a few days later. The dauphin probably died in the Temple of ill-treatment, though tales persisted of an escape to the provinces and even to America. The little princess was the only member of the pathetic group to live through this time of horror. She married the duke of Angoulême.
Internal dissensions grew sharper. The extremists made use of the lawless Paris rabble against the more moderate element and a number of prominent Girondists were seized and plunged into the Conciergerie only to leave it to march singing to the guillotine. Marat’s death by the knife of Charlotte Corday could not stay the turmoil.
There were grades of radicalism even among the extremists. The most advanced struck at the very basis of social agreement. Religion they declared out of date and substituted the worship of Reason. The Goddess of Reason, a dancer, they installed with her satellites in the most sacred part of Notre Dame, Saint Eustache became the Temple of Agriculture, Saint Gervais the Temple of Youth, Saint Étienne-du-Mont the Temple of Filial Piety, Saint Sulpice the Temple of Victory. Other sacred buildings were put to more practical uses—the Convent of the Cordeliers became a medical school, the Val-de-Grâce a military hospital, Saint Séverin a storehouse for powder and saltpeter, Saint Julien, a storehouse for forage, the Sainte Chapelle a storehouse for flour.
The observation of Sunday as a day of rest was abolished, and men and animals died of fatigue. Many churches were closed, for “We want no other worship than Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” cried the radicals.
Robespierre of a sudden took a stand against such a display of irreligion, probably that he might have yet another accusation to bring against his enemies. To replace the Cult of Reason he established with grotesque rites a Worship of the Divine Being, acting himself as the high priest. The ceremony took place in the Tuileries Garden where there is still standing the stone semicircle built for the occasion. Robespierre was adorned with a blue velvet coat, a white waistcoat, yellow breeches and top boots and he carried a symbolic bouquet of flowers and ears of wheat. After he had made a speech there were games and the burning of effigies of Atheism, Selfishness and Vice.
Destruction and change reigned. Churches were mutilated if the statue of some ancient saint wore a crown; the relics of Sainte Geneviève were burned on the Grève; the Academies were suppressed; no street might be named after a saint; no aristocrat might keep the de of his name.
The very calendar was altered, the new year beginning on September 22, 1792, which was the first day of the Year I of the Republic.
The division of the year into twelve months was unaltered, but instead of weeks each month was divided into three decades of ten days each. This necessitated the addition at the end of the twelfth month of five extra days so that the new calendar might agree with that used by other peoples. These days were called by the absurd name, Sansculottides. The months were given names made appropriate by the season or the customary weather. They were:
On the other hand some excellent constructive work was accomplished by the foundation of several schools and libraries, of several museums, among them the Louvre, and of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, established in the ancient priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs. Thanks to the good sense of a private individual many architectural relics of priceless value were saved from destruction and converted into a museum in what is now the Palais des Beaux Arts. After the Revolution most of them were restored whence they had come.
It has been computed that the Revolution cost France 1,002,351 lives. To make up these figures Robespierre was now killing two hundred people a week. At last, when he tried to establish his own position with some show of legality the end of the Terror was in sight. For the moment, however, it seemed as if there were only increased horror, for the Parisians took possession of
Robespierre and fought fiercely in his defence against the supporters of the Convention. It was the Grève, the theater of many wild scenes, which furnished the battleground. Robespierre and the mob were defeated and when Robespierre went to the guillotine, with his face, which has been described as looking like a “cat that had lapped vinegar,” bound up because of a wound, then the Terror died with him. Thousands of suspects were released at once from prison, and the city, except for the vicious element whose worst spirit he incarnated, breathed freely once again.
So strong was the reaction that the royalists hoped for a return of power, and even marched against the Tuileries where the Convention was sitting. They were hotly received, however, by the troops of the Convention, one of whose officers, Bonaparte, killed royalist pretenses now only to revive imperial aspirations later on.
NAPOLEON was a very young and unsophisticated Corsican when, in October, 1795, he commanded the troops that protected the Convention, in session in the Tuileries, against the Paris “sections” and the National Guard which had deserted to the royalists. He was still young, but a man rotten with ambition when, after Waterloo, he fled to Paris, and, in the Palace of the Élysée, signed his abdication of the throne of his adopted country. In the twenty years intervening he had raised himself to the highest position in the army, and he had won the confidence of an unsettled people so that they turned to him for governmental guidance, and made him consul for ten years, then consul for life and then emperor.
In the two decades he had done great harm, for, abroad, he had embroiled in war every country of Europe, and at home he had exhausted France of her young men and had left the country poorer in territory than when he was first made consul. Nevertheless, by the inevitable though sometimes inscrutable law of balance, the evil he had wrought was not without its compensating good. The countries of Europe learned as never before the meaning of the feeling of nationality and of the value of coöperation, while France—which, with her dependencies, Napoleon, at the height of his career, had spread over three-fifths of the map of western Europe—had gained self-confidence and stability and had crystallized the passionate chaos of the Revolutionary belief in the rights of man.
Aside from his military and political genius Napoleon’s character underwent a striking development as his horizon enlarged. He belonged to a good but unimportant family which dwelt in a small town. His early manner of living was of the simplest, yet he grew to a love of splendor and to a knowledge of its usefulness in impressing the populace and in buying their approbation.
Paris is connected with Napoleon throughout his whole career. He first appears when but a lad, brought to the Military School with several other boys by a priest. He lived in modest lodgings, at one time near the markets, and at another near the Place des Victoires.
In 1795 the Convention drew up a new constitution by which the government was vested in a Directory of five members. Even in its early days Napoleon wrote from Paris to his brother of the change following upon the turbulent, sordid period of the Revolution. “Luxury, pleasure and art are reviving here surprisingly,” he said. “Carriages and men of fashion are all active once more, and the prolonged eclipse of their gay career seems now like a bad dream.”
In the midst of this agreeable change to which even his natural taciturnity adapted itself he met and married Josephine, widow of the Marquis de Beauharnais who had been guillotined under the Terror. They both registered their ages incorrectly, Napoleon adding and Josephine subtracting so that the discrepancy between them, she being older, might appear less. This marriage introduced Napoleon to a class of people into whose circle he would not otherwise have penetrated on equal terms, and he learned from them many social lessons which he put to good use later. Yet Talma, the actor, when accused of having taught Napoleon how to walk and how to dress the part of emperor, denied that he could have given instruction to one whose imagination was all-sufficient to make him imperial in speech and bearing. No descendant of a royal line ever wore more superb robes than Napoleon the emperor on state occasions, and the elegance of the throne on which he sat was not less than that of his predecessors.
Bonaparte had risen slowly in the army because of his open criticism of his superiors, but by the time of his marriage he had become a general, and three days after his wedding he was despatched to Italy to meet the allied Italians and Austrians. Less than two years later the war was ended by the Peace of Campo Formio. In the two months preceding its negotiation Bonaparte had won eighteen battles, and had collected enough indemnity to pay the expenses of his own army, to send a considerable sum to the French army on the Rhine and a still greater amount to the government at home.
When it came to making gifts to Paris he had the splendid beneficence of the successful robber. Indemnities were paid in pictures as well as in money, bronzes and marbles filled his treasure trains, and the Louvre was enriched at Italy’s expense. Of the wealth of rare books, of ancient illuminated manuscripts, of priceless paintings and statuary pillaged from Italy’s libraries, monasteries, churches and galleries, even from the Vatican itself, no count has ever been made. With such treasures as Domenichino’s “Communion of Saint Jerome” and Raphael’s “Transfiguration” under its roof and with booty arriving from the northern armies as well as the southern, it is small wonder that the Louvre became the richest storehouse in the world. After Napoleon’s fall many of the works of art were returned whence they had come, but enough were left to permit the great palace to hold its reputation.
In the turmoil of the Revolution it had been impossible for any one person to please everybody. Napoleon was distrusted by a large body of the Parisians for the part that he had played in the support of the Convention in October, 1795, and these people Bonaparte set himself to conciliate. The Directory, also, was jealous of him. It meant that the victorious general must tread gently and not seem to have his head turned by the honors paid to his successes. There were festivals at the Louvre where his trophies looked down upon the brilliant scene, and at the Luxembourg, superbly decorated, upon the occasion of his formal presentation to the Directory of the treaty of Campo Formio. There were gala performances at the theaters at which the audience rose delightedly at Napoleon if he happened to be present, and the Institute elected him a life member. This honor gave him the excuse of wearing a civilian’s coat, and, although when in Italy he had dined in public like an ancient king, here he lived quietly on the street whose name was changed to “Victory Street,” by way of compliment, and showed himself but little in public, the more to pique the curiosity of the crowd which acclaimed Josephine as “Our Lady of Victories.”
If he had had any hope of being made a member of the government at this time, he soon saw that he was not yet popular enough to carry a sudden change, and that, indeed, it behooved him, as he himself said, to “keep his glory warm.” To that end he set about arousing public sentiment against England. He concluded, however, that an invasion was not expedient at that time, and set sail for Egypt, taking with him the flower of the French army not only for their usefulness to himself, but that their lack might embarrass the government if need for them should arise in his absence.
A curious bit of testimony to the non-religious temper of the time is the bit of information that though Bonaparte included in his traveling library the Bible, the Koran and the Vedas, they were catalogued under the head of “Politics.”
In the next year and a half Napoleon met with both successes and reverses. He learned that, as he had foreseen, the Directory was involved in a war with Italy which threatened its financial credit and its stability, while at home its tyrannical rule was adding daily to its enemies. Bonaparte saw his chance and determined to leave Egypt, to put himself at the head of the Italian armies and then to go to Paris, fresh from the victories which he was sure to win, and to present himself to the people as their liberator. Leaving his army and setting sail with a few friends he touched at Corsica where he learned that France was even riper for his coming than he had supposed, and accordingly abandoned the Italian plan and went directly home. So hopefully did the people look to him for relief from their troubles that his whole journey from Lyons to Paris was one long ovation, while his reception by the Parisians was of an enthusiasm which betrayed much of their feeling toward the government and promised much to the man who would bring about a change.
Napoleon was only too glad to accommodate them. He tested the opinion of the chiefs of the Directory and skillfully put each man into a position where he felt forced to support the general. Josephine played her part in the political intrigue; Lucien Bonaparte, who had been elected President of the Five Hundred by way of compliment to his brother, played his. According to pre-arrangement the Council of the Ancients sitting in the Tuileries decreed that both houses should adjourn at once to Saint Cloud that they might be undisturbed by the unrest of Paris, and that Bonaparte be appointed to the command of the Guard of the Directory, of the National Guard, and of the garrison of Paris, that he might secure the safety of the Legislature.
Napoleon, who was waiting for the order at his house (not far north of the present Opéra) rode to the Tuileries and accepted his commission. The next day, at Saint Cloud, he utilized his popularity with the soldiers to force the dissolution of the Directory. The result was gained by trickery but it was nevertheless satisfactory to the people who went quietly about their affairs in Paris while the excitement was on at Saint Cloud and expressed themselves afterwards as amply pleased with the coup d’état. A new constitution was adopted. The government was vested in three consuls, Napoleon, on December 15, 1799, being made First Consul for ten years. All three consuls were given apartments in the Tuileries but one of the others had the foresight never to occupy a building from which he might be ejected by the one who said to his secretary when he entered it, “Well, Bourienne, here we are at the Tuileries. Now we must stay here.”
Stay there he did, and the palace saw a more brilliant court than ever it had sheltered under royalty. Josephine was a woman of taste and tact, and the building which Marie Antoinette found bare even of necessary furnishings at the end of her enforced journey from Versailles, the wife of the First Consul arrayed in elegance and used as a social-political battle field in which she was as competent as was her husband in the open. “I win battles,” Napoleon said, “but Josephine wins hearts.” Dress became elegant once more and not only women but men were as richly attired as if the Revolution with its plain democratic apparel had not intervened. Once more men wore knee breeches and silk stockings, and it was only the aristocrats whose property had been confiscated who advertised their poverty by wearing trousers, “citizen fashion.”
“Citizen,” as a title, fell into disuse, and once again “Monsieur” and “Madame” were used as terms of address. At first the consuls were addressed as “Citoyen premier consul,” “Citoyen second consul,” and “Citoyen troisième consul.” The clumsiness of these titles induced M. de Talleyrand to propose as abbreviations “Hic, Haec, Hoc.” “These would perfectly fit the three consuls,” he added; “Hic for the masculine, Bonaparte; haec for the feminine, Cambacérès, who was a lady’s man, and hoc, the neutral Lebrun, who was a figurehead.”
Napoleon’s acquaintance with other capitals spurred him to emulate their beauties and his knowledge of engineering helped him to bring them into being in his own. He opened no fewer than sixty new streets, often combining in the result civic elegance with the better sanitation whose desirability he had learned from his care of the health of his armies. He swept away masses of old houses on the Cité, he tore down the noisome prisons of the Châtelet and the tower of the Temple and laid out squares on their sites, he built sidewalks, condemned sewage to sewers instead of allowing it to flow in streams down the center of the streets, introduced gas for lighting, and completed the numbering of houses, an undertaking which had been hanging on for seventy-five years.
He added to the convenience of the Parisians by building new bridges, two commemorating the battles of Austerlitz and Jena, and one, the only foot-bridge across the river, called the “Arts” because it leads to the School of Fine Arts and the Institute which houses the Academy of Fine Arts. He made living easier by opening abattoirs and increasing the number of markets. He helped business enterprises by constructing quays along the Seine and by establishing the Halle aux Vins where wine may be stored in bond until required by the merchants. This market also relieved such congestion as had turned the old Roman Thermes into a storehouse for wine casks. New cemeteries on the outskirts, one of them the famous Père Lachaise, the names upon whose tombs read like a roster of the nineteenth century’s great, lessened the crowding of the graveyards and the resulting danger in the thickly settled parts of the city.
The First Consul’s methods of reducing to order the disorder of France grew more and more stifling, his basic principle more and more that of centralization. Independence of thought as it found expression in politics, he silenced as he silenced the newspapers and censored all literary output. He set in action the modern machinery of the University of France, and he supervised the planning of the entire elementary school system, so centralized, that it is possible to know in Paris to-day, as he did, “What every child of France is doing at this moment.”
Unhampered trade and commerce, improved methods of transportation, a definite financial system headed by the Bank of France, a uniform code of laws—all these contributions to stability were entered into in detail by the marvelous visualizing mind whose vision could pierce the walls of the Tuileries and foresee that battle would be waged at the spot called Marengo on the map lying on the table.
Early in 1800 war was renewed in Italy and Napoleon in person superintended the perilous crossing of the Alps. Yet although the news of the victory at Marengo was celebrated in Paris with cheers and bonfires, the successes of the French armies in Italy and in Germany did not secure full popularity to the First Consul in Paris, for on Christmas Eve, 1800, an attempt was made upon his life as he was driving through a narrow street near the Tuileries. The bomb which was meant to kill him fell too far behind his carriage, however, and the only result of the plot was that he was provided with an excuse for ridding himself by exile and execution of some two hundred men whom he looked upon as his enemies.
In 1802 the Peace of Amiens put a temporary stop to the war, and Napoleon looked to France to reward him for winning glory and territory for the French flag. Already he was impatient of the ten-year limitation of his power, and it was his own suggestion that the people should be asked, “Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be made Consul for life?” This referendum resulted overwhelmingly in his favor. He was appointed Consul for life with the right not only to choose his successor but to nominate his colleagues. Then he encouraged French manufactures, he regulated taxes, he established art galleries in Paris and the departments, incidentally banishing the artists’ studios whose establishment had been allowed in the Louvre and in the side chapels of the church of the Sorbonne. He offered exemption from military service to students and other people to whom it would be a hardship, such as the only sons of widows, he assisted scientific men, among them our own Robert Fulton who, in 1803, built a steamboat which sank in the Seine. The nobility, whom Napoleon encouraged to return from exile, were allowed to use their titles, thereby establishing a precedent for the time when he himself would be creating dukes. For the moment he declared an aristocracy of merit by founding the Legion of Honor to which men are eligible by distinguished service to France in any field. The nation felt a soundness and a comfort that it had not known for many a long year.
Even the outside nations that had been at war with France thought it safe to visit it again and Paris was full of travelers who admired the new rue de Rivoli whose arcades run parallel with the Tuileries gardens. They found, too, that the old names of before the Revolution were being adopted once more—the Place de la Revolution became again the Place Louis XV—and the old etiquettes and elegances of royalty resumed. Josephine’s aristocratic connections helped to relate the old nobility with the new court and its “new” members whose fortunes had risen with their leader’s. Much of the glitter of the Tuileries came from the great number of soldiers always in evidence, for Napoleon’s suspicious nature caused him to have a large military escort wherever he went. His professional zeal prompted the careful review of the troops which he made every Sunday, and which was one of the “sights” for the tourists of the day who looked with an approach to awe upon the exact lines of grenadiers drilled to an astonishing accuracy.
As in the days of Francis I and Louis XIV the classical in art and language touched the pinnacle of popularity. With the government in the hands of “Consuls” it was appropriate that the legislative body should be called the “Tribunate.” The Tribunate held its sessions in the Palais Royal which had been called Equality Palace during the Revolution and was now christened Palace of the Tribunate.
It was through the Tribunate that Napoleon manipulated the offer of the title of Emperor which was made to him in 1804. It came as the crown of his ambition because it was the recognition of both his military skill and his political and administrative ability. He expressed his feeling when he refused the suggestion for an imperial seal of “a lion resting” and proposed instead “an eagle soaring.”
Success is a heady draught. At the beginning of his career Bonaparte used to compliment his generals by saying, “You have fought splendidly.” After a time he said, “We have fought splendidly.” Still later his comment was, “You must allow that I have won a splendid battle.”
With the pope Napoleon had made an arrangement, the Concordat, by which he restored the Roman Catholic as the national church of France. The papal power was not accepted as in other countries, but the treaty gave him a hold over the pope so that when the new emperor, to conciliate the royalists who were all Romanists, summoned him to assist at his coronation, Pius VII felt himself constrained to obey. He was lodged in the Pavilion of Flora, the western tip of Henry IV’s south wing of the Louvre, overlooking the Seine.
Napoleon and Josephine had been married only with the civil ceremony, as was the custom during the Revolution. On the day before the coronation Cardinal Fesch, Napoleon’s uncle, married them with the religious ceremony in the chapel of the Tuileries. The celebration of the Concordat had been conducted magnificently in Notre Dame, but the coronation on December 2, 1804, was the most splendid of the many splendid scenes upon which the Gothic dignity of the cathedral had looked down. In preparation, many small buildings round about were pulled down and many streets suppressed or widened. Decorated with superb tapestries, resounding with the solemn voices of the choir, the ancient church held a scene brilliant with the uniforms of generals and the rich costumes of officers of state and of representatives from all France, aflutter with plumes and glittering with the beauty and the jewels of the fairest women of the court. It was a scene unique in history, for never before had a man of the people commanded so superb a train every one of whom was alert with a personal interest in a ceremony which meant his own elevation as well as that of the aspirant to the power of that Charlemagne whose sword and insignia he had caused to be brought for the occasion.
The pope and his attendants advanced in dignified procession, acclaimed by the solemn hail of the intoning clergy. Before the high altar the Holy Father performed the service of consecration, anointing for his office the man who had been chosen to it by the will of the people. Then, as he was about to replace the gold laurel wreath of the victor with a replica of Charlemagne’s crown, Napoleon characteristically seized it and placed it on his own head.
With his own hands, too, he crowned Josephine. She was dressed like her husband in flowing robes of purple velvet heavily sown with the golden bee which Napoleon had copied from those found in the tomb of Childéric, father of Clovis, and which he had adopted as the imperial emblem because he wanted one older than the royalist fleur-de-lis. Followed by ladies of the court, her mantle borne by her sisters-in-law, who had been made princesses, Josephine knelt, weeping, before Napoleon, who placed her crown lightly on his own head and then laid it upon that of his empress. David’s famous picture hanging in the Louvre has saved this moment for posterity.
On the night before the coronation the city was plastered by royalist wits with placards which read: “Final performance of the French Revolution. For the benefit of a poor Corsican family.”
A fortnight later the emperor and empress were entertained by the city fathers at a banquet. The Hôtel de Ville had been gorgeously done over for the coronation, the throne room being hung with red velvet sown with the imperial bee. On the return of the distinguished guests to the Tuileries the streets were illuminated, and on the Cité a display of fireworks lighted up the ancient buildings.
The “poor Corsican family” did indeed profit by the successes of its prosperous member. After the coronation the imperial court far exceeded in elegance the court of the Consulate. Many of the ancient offices—Grand Almoner, Grand Marshal, Grand Chamberlain—were revived from the days of the Bourbons; many of them, indeed, were held by members of the old nobility; and it was one of Louis XVI’s former ambassadors to Russia who held the post of Master of Ceremonies, instructing, rehearsing
and laying down the laws of etiquette for public functions according to the customs of the old régîme.
Soon after the coronation Paris was again deserted of its foreign tourists for once again war was imminent. Napoleon was so sure of the success of his proposed invasion of England that he supplied himself with gold medals inscribed “Struck at London in 1804.” Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar put an end to the usefulness of these medals, and the great fighter turned his attention to other foes than the English. Six weeks later he defeated the combined forces of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz and sent to Paris one thousand two hundred captured cannon which were melted down to make the column which stands to-day in the Place Vendôme.
Events of the campaign are pictured in relief on the bronze plates which wind in a spiral around the Vendôme column. On the top stood a statue of Napoleon dressed in a toga according to the classic fashion of the moment. At the Restoration in 1814 this statue was taken down and its metal used for the making of a new statue of Henry IV on the Pont Neuf, the former statue having been destroyed during the Revolution. For seventeen years the white flag of the Bourbons floated from the Vendôme column, and then Louis Philippe substituted a statue of Napoleon in campaign uniform. For thirty-two years this figure looked down the rue Castiglione to the Tuileries gardens, and then Napoleon III replaced it by a Napoleon once more in classic dress. He did not stand long, however, for in the troubles of 1871 the Communards pulled down the whole column. Four years later it was reërected and is now topped by Napoleon in his imperial robes.
The Place Vendôme in which the column stands, and the arcaded rue Castiglione which leads into it from the similarly arcaded rue de Rivoli, are, like the Place des Victoires, guarded against change by a municipal law. In the case of the squares, each laid out as a unit, it is easily seen that any change in the façades would do serious injury to the harmony of the whole. The arcades of the rue Castiglione have their ornamental value in furnishing an approach to the Place Vendôme. To a dispassionate eye, however, the chimney-pots and skylights of the rue de Rivoli so overbalance by their ugliness the symmetry of the arcades below that the impertinent traveler feels moved to ask for an amendment to the law as far as this street is concerned. The same ugly roofs mar the otherwise beautiful addition which Napoleon made to the Louvre.
In 1806 Napoleon reconstructed the German Empire and secured the dependence of Naples and the Netherlands upon himself by placing his brothers on their thrones, and of other sections of Italy by granting their government to nineteen dukes of his own creation. Then followed the battles of Jena, Eylau, and Friedland which humbled Prussia, and the festivals which welcomed the conqueror to Paris surpassed in brilliancy any that had gone before. Two of the triumphal arches which beautify Paris were raised to commemorate these victories. The Triumphal Arch of the Carrousel, a reduced copy of the arch of Septimius Severus in Rome, was built as an entrance to the Tuileries from the small square of the Carrousel. It must be remembered that in the early nineteenth century the whole of the north wing of the Louvre was non-existent, its site being occupied by a tangle of small streets and mean houses, whose destruction was merely entered upon when Napoleon I began to build the section of the palace running east from the rue de Rivoli end of the Tuileries toward the ancient quadrangle of the Louvre. Upon the top of the arch was placed the bronze Quadriga from Saint Mark’s in Venice which Bonaparte sent home after his first Italian campaign. After Napoleon’s fall the horses were sent back to Italy and replaced on the arch by a modern quadriga.
The Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, a mammoth construction begun by Napoleon on the crest of a slope approached by twelve broad avenues, is adorned with historical groups and bas-reliefs which repay a close examination, but the impressiveness of the monument rests in its dominating position which makes it one of the focal points in a panoramic view of the city. It is a majestic finish to the vista of the Champs Élysées seen from the Place de la Concorde. Although many different forms of decoration have been suggested for the top of the arch, and some have even been tried by models, none has been found satisfactory, and the great mass remains incomplete.
Though France had returned from its Revolutionary wanderings and once again had an established religion, and though the Emperor went to mass as regularly as his army duties permitted, there was practically no building of new churches by Napoleon. It was a sufficient task to repair the mutilations of the Revolution. The church of Sainte Geneviève—the Pantheon—was consecrated in the early years of the Consulate. In 1806 the construction of the Madeleine, which had been begun some sixty years before, was renewed, not, however, as a church, but as a Temple of Glory. Before it was finished the Restoration had come and had turned it into a church again.
The Madeleine shows the classic influence, as does the Bourse, whose heavy columns, while decorative, do not seem to be especially appropriate for an Exchange. Victor Hugo scornfully says that so far as any apparent adaptation to its purpose is to be seen the Bourse might be a king’s palace, a House of Commons, a city hall, a college, a riding school, an academy, a storehouse, a court house, a museum, barracks, a tomb, a temple or a theater.
And it might!
The Bourse makes itself known at some distance by the noise which rises from its coulisses or “wings”—our “curb”—where a constant fury of chatter is going on.
The pillared façade on the Seine side of the present Palace of Deputies was designed to harmonize with the façade of the Madeleine at the northern end of the rue Royale. This front, conspicuous from the Place de la Concorde, is not the real front of the Palais Bourbon whose main entrance is on the rue de l’Université.
While anything in Europe remained apart from his control Napoleon was not happy, so after the Peace of Tilsit he turned his attention to the south once more. Portugal yielded to him through sheer terror. He compelled the abdication of the king of Spain, but here England interfered, and the Peninsular War brought him its reverses. Renewed war with Austria, however, added the battle of Wagram to the list of the great fighter’s victories. He was at the summit of his power and his very successes made him increasingly conscious that he had no son to inherit the fruits of his life work. He realized fully that Josephine’s tact and diplomacy had won him many a bloodless victory, and he had an almost superstitious belief that she brought him luck. However, ambition conquered affection. Eugène Beauharnais, Josephine’s son, was compelled to approve before the Senate the divorce which the pope would not confirm but which the clergy of Paris were forced to grant. Josephine, though stricken with grief, bore herself bravely before the court during her last evening at the Tuileries where the divorce was pronounced. She withdrew to Malmaison, some six miles out of the city, where she died in 1814, Napoleon’s name the last word on her lips.
Failing to arrange a Russian match Napoleon married Marie Louise of Austria, first by proxy in Vienna, then by a civil ceremony after the bride reached France, and lastly by the religious ceremony in the great hall of the Louvre. Cardinal Fesch gave the benediction, for the new marriage was not approved at Rome. Indeed, thirteen of the cardinals refused to be present at the ceremony and were thereafter called the “black cardinals” because they were forbidden by the emperor to wear their red robes.
Marie Louise came to Paris a frightened girl, for Napoleon had no reputation for gentleness, but she seems to have found him endurable. It is even related that at one time when he caught her experimenting with the making of an omelette he gave yet one more instance of his omniscience by playfully teaching her how to prepare it. That he dropped it on the floor would seem to prove that Jove occasionally nods.
In the following March enthusiastic crowds about the Tuileries listened anxiously for the cannon which should announce by twenty-one reports the birth of a daughter to the empress, by one hundred and one the coming of a son. Their joy rose to frenzy when the twenty-second boom announced an heir who received the title of the King of Rome, and for days the city was given over to rejoicing. Napoleon himself told the news to Josephine in a letter dated
Paris, March 22, 1811
My dear,
I have your letter. I thank you for it. My son is fat, and in excellent health. I trust he may continue to improve. He has my chest, my mouth and my eyes. I hope he will fulfill his destiny.
Josephine, who was staying at Evreux, commanded a festival to be held in the town, and when she returned to Malmaison Napoleon secretly had the baby sent to the country for her to see.
Yet it soon seemed as if the loss of Josephine had, indeed, deprived Napoleon of his good fortune. He quarreled with the pope and even kept him a prisoner in the palace of Fontainebleau. This quarrel alienated Catholic Frenchmen, and they included practically all those with Bourbon leanings. To punish Russia for not agreeing to his plan for humiliating England by cutting off its trade with the continent he entered the country in the invasion which destroyed his army by a death more bitter than that encountered in battle.
During his fearful retreat from Moscow two adventurers almost succeeded in bringing about a coup d’état in Paris by reading to a body of the soldiers a proclamation purporting to be from the Senate, and by capturing the Prefect of Police and the City Hall. The news reached Napoleon and when he realized that so much had been accomplished without any outcry being made for a continuance of the Napoleonic line, he left the army and went post haste to the city, where he found hostile placards constantly being posted. His presence quieted the ominous disturbance, and he drove impressively with the empress to the Senate in a glassed carriage drawn by cream-colored horses, and there and elsewhere spread falsely reassuring reports minimizing the losses in Russia. Very soon, however, the truth carried mourning to almost every home in France, and with it hatred of the man who had brought it to pass.
In January, 1813, the Emperor left once more for the front after appointing Marie Louise as regent and confiding her and the King of Rome to the care of the National Guard assembled before the Tuileries.
There is no doubt that the genius that had sent Napoleon to victory after victory with almost clairvoyant intelligence was now failing. He lacked decision and his generals were not trained to help him. He made blunder after blunder coldly disheartening to sorrowful France. “Have the people of Paris gone crazy?” he cried angrily when he heard that public prayers were being offered for the success of the campaign.
Prayers were needed. The “army of boys,” all that Napoleon could raise after the disastrous retreat from Moscow, was defeated at Leipsic late in 1813, and the allies—England, Russia, Prussia, Sweden and Austria—pressed upon Paris both from the north and the south. The city was no longer guarded by defensible walls and her reliance could be only in her garrison of about twenty-five thousand men. Marie Louise, the regent, fled from the city on March 29, 1814, and on the next day Napoleon left Fontainebleau at the head of a few cavalry to lend his aid, but found that the city already had yielded. On the thirty-first the King of Prussia and the Czar entered Paris on the north by the faubourg Saint Martin, finding a welcome from the white-cockaded royalists. Within three weeks Napoleon had abdicated and had started for his modest throne on the island of Elba, and a fortnight later Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI, made his formal entry. The people, trained to Napoleon’s magnificence, looked coldly on the fat, plainly dressed elderly man who drove to the Tuileries in a carriage belonging to his predecessor, whose arms had been badly erased and imperfectly covered by those of the Bourbons.
Paris was glad to be rid of the man it had come to look upon as a vampire draining the strength of France to feed his personal ambition, yet the city by no means enjoyed the presence of the allies. They insisted on the return to Italy of many of the art treasures on which the Parisians had come to look with the pride of possession. There were constant quarrels of citizens with the invading officers and the townsfolk were nettled at the frank curiosity with which they and their
city were scrutinized by the many travelers of all nations who poured in immediately. It was then that a rope was laid about the neck of Napoleon on the Vendôme column and he was lowered to the ground to be replaced by the Bourbon flag.
Less than a year afterwards Paris was aquiver over the report that the chained lion had broken loose and was advancing to the city in the march which he declared at Saint Helena was the happiest period of his life. The fickle peasants who had pursued him out of the country so that he had had to disguise himself as a white-cockaded postboy to escape them, now received him joyfully. At his approach Louis fled from the Tuileries, but Napoleon did not occupy the palace. It was at the palace of the Élysée that he worked out his plans against the allies, and it was there that he signed his abdication when the defeat at Waterloo put an end to the Hundred Days. Three days later he went to Malmaison, and he never saw Paris again. He died in 1821 at Saint Helena. In December, 1840, Louis Philippe caused his remains to be brought to Paris where they were borne beneath the completed Arch of the Star and down the Champs Élysées, and were laid under the Dome of the Invalides that the request of his will might be granted: “I desire that my ashes repose on the banks of the Seine among the French people whom I have so greatly loved.”
IT was the 25th of June, 1815, when Napoleon left Paris for the last time. On July 7 the allies entered the city after some unimportant skirmishing on the outskirts, and on the next day Louis XVIII again took up his residence in the Tuileries. The Second Restoration of the Bourbons had come to pass.
Louis found himself received with even less enthusiasm than on his first appearance, and his people loved him less and less during the nine years of his reign. He confirmed his earlier charter establishing personal and religious freedom and equality before the law and the freedom of the press. He fell more and more, however, under the influence of the conservative element, with the result that he permitted a savage persecution of the Bonapartists, let education come under sectarian control, and imposed on the laboring classes a narrow ecclesiasticism which aroused their ire. When he was forced by Russia, Austria and Prussia to fight in support of the tyrannical king of Spain, Ferdinand VII, against a democratic movement, he placed the Bourbons of the Restoration on record as sympathetic with autocracy.
Paris was in no peaceful state. There were many of Napoleon’s old soldiers in town who were constantly quarreling with the monarchists in restaurants and theaters. An assassin killed the Duke of Berry, the son of Louis’ brother who succeeded him as Charles X. The execution for political conspiracy of four young men known as the “four sergeants of La Rochelle” made a great stir among the lower classes of the city, always an inflammable element.
The town was forced, also, to pay her share of the war indemnity and of the support of the garrisons with which the allies saddled the frontier and the chief cities. One hundred twenty-five thousand dollars a day was the sum which Paris expended in hospitality toward her very unwelcome guests. Needless to say there was not much ready money for improving the city.
One reverent monument, the Chapelle Expiatoire, the king did begin to the memory of his brother. The bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been buried in the graveyard behind the Madeleine. Their remains were removed to Saint Denis in 1815, but the small domed chapel, hemmed in to-day by busy Paris streets, rises in remembrance of them and sanctifies the one great grave before it in which lie the bodies of two thousand unrecorded victims of the Revolution, while the barrier on right and left is formed by the tombs of the seven hundred Swiss guards slain in defense of their sovereigns when the mob stormed the Tuileries on the tenth of August, 1792.
The renewed religious feeling introduced by the royalists expressed itself in the erection of two churches, Saint Vincent-de-Paul and Our Lady of Loretto, both in the style of Latin basilicas, though Saint Vincent’s is made majestic by two square towers not unlike those on Saint Sulpice. The approach to Saint Vincent’s is by two semicircular inclined planes, divided by a flight of steps—a handsome entrance. There are but few at all like it in all Paris. More interesting than the architecture of these churches is their position, on the north and just within the “exterior boulevards” which mark Louis XVI’s wall. Population must have increased heavily in this district to call for two churches of large size and so near together. Many of the fifty-five new streets laid out in this reign must have been in this section.
An engraving of 1822 shows that the Champs Élysées had become a field for the performances of mountebanks, jugglers, rope-walkers, stilt-walkers, and wandering musicians.
Louis died unlamented. He had been fat when first he entered the Tuileries; his manner of life was not one calculated to reduce adipose tissue. His subjects joked about his habits by punning upon his name, calling Louis Dixhuit (Louis XVIII) Louis des Huitres (Oyster Louis). He was the last king to die in Paris or even in France, and the last to be buried with his kind in Saint Denis.
That Charles X, Louis’ brother, was prepared to follow that royal custom when the time came seems proven by his immediate return to the traditions of his ancestors. He was consecrated and crowned in the cathedral at Rheims which had witnessed the coronation of Clovis and that of every French king since Philip Augustus in the twelfth century. Like the Grand Monarque he “touched for the king’s evil,” believed in the divine right of kings, and thought himself allwise in the conduct of government and his people all-foolish. He recalled the Jesuits whom Louis XV had banished and mulcted the masses to make restitution to the royalists whose property had been confiscated when they fled from Revolutionary France.
Paris forgot that she had loved him in his gay and spendthrift youth, forgot the passing amusement of his coronation festivities in the Place du Carrousel, forgot that his armies were winning some successes along the Mediterranean, forgot everything but hatred when he outraged her confidence by disbanding the National Guard, on whose loyalty and prudence the whole city relied.
When he tried to force through the legislature a bill to muzzle the press, to censor all other publications and to forbid freedom of speech in the universities, that body flatly refused to follow his instructions. So determined was Charles to have his own way that this rebuff and the victories of the liberals in the election of 1830 taught him no lesson, and on July 26 of that year he issued a proclamation which brought about a second Revolution. He declared the new liberal legislature dissolved and summoned another to be chosen by the votes of property-holders only. He appointed a Council of State from his own sympathizers, and he abolished the freedom of the press. Thiers’ paper, the National, and the Courrier issued a prompt protest against these tyrannical Ordinances, and were as promptly suppressed. Crowds gathered before the newspaper offices where Thiers showed the understanding and the grasp of the situation which later made him prime minister under Louis Philippe and first president of the Third Republic.
It was not only the excitable classes—the right bank artisans and the left bank students—always ready for a fight, who engaged in this attempt to overthrow the king; the whole city took part, either by fighting or by taking into their houses fugitives hard pressed by the royal troops. The city was heavily garrisoned and the citizens naturally were at a disadvantage against well-trained, well-equipped regulars. They fought, however, with the ingenuity and the joyousness which always has marked the Parisian when he seized such opportunities. The narrowest streets in the old sections—just north of the City Hall around the church of Saint Merri, near the markets, and on the Cité—were barricaded and served for three days as a bloody battleground. On the twenty-eighth the bell on the City Hall rang out its summons and the republican tricolor side by side with the black flag of death told the crowd better than words for what they were to contend. Until the afternoon there was no fiercer struggle than here and on the near-by bridge to the Cité, where a youth, planting the tricolor on the top of the middle arch, was shot, crying as he fell, “My name is Arcole! Avenge my death!” At least his death is remembered, for the bridge still bears his name, Arcole.
Encouraged by their successes of the day, the people on the next morning marched to the Louvre where they fought and fell and were buried by hundreds beneath Perrault’s colonnade. They poured through the Tuileries as in the days of the Revolution, and they carried the throne from the Throne Room to the Place de la Bastille where they burned it as a symbol of tyranny. By way of expressing their feeling for the dignitaries of the church they sacked the archbishop’s palace beside Notre Dame on whose towers the tricolor floated. When night fell twenty-four hours later at least five thousand Parisians had fallen in what they called, nevertheless, the Three ‘Glorious’ Days of July. Paris and Paris alone had achieved a revolution for all France.
To commemorate the dead the July Column, Liberty crowned, was raised on the site of the Bastille, and beneath it in two huge vaults lie scores upon scores of the victims of the overthrow.
The success of the revolution was a hint which even Charles could understand. He had been at Saint Cloud during the outbreak. He never went back to Paris. After his abdication he went to England and died in Austria six years later.
The political revolution was not the only sudden change of the year 1830. On the 25th of February occurred the “Battle of Hernani” when Victor Hugo’s famous play in which he embodied the principles of the new “romantic” school of writing, had its first performance. The classicists rose with howls and hisses at the very first line, in which was an infringement of classical rules, and the evening passed tempestuously, even with an interchange of blows. The piece was allowed other hearings, however, and at last the novelty became no longer a novelty but the fashion.
For all her desire for a republican form of government, France, during the great Revolution, had not been so fortunate in her leaders that she was prepared now to elevate an ordinary citizen to the headship, the more as there was no man of especial distinction with the exception of the too-aged Lafayette. It was he who, in an interview with Louis Philippe, a member of the Orleans branch of the royal house, expressed the popular wish for “a throne surrounded by republican institutions.”
Louis Philippe, who was descended from a younger brother of Louis XIV,[6] had served in the Revolutionary army, but had become entangled in a conspiracy which made it prudent for him to join his royalist friends in England. The Restoration (1814) permitted his return and he had long lived the life of a quiet bourgeois dwelling in a Paris suburb, and educating his children in the public schools. He was generally liked and it needed but small artificial stimulation to start a boom for his candidacy. On the night of the 30th of July he walked in from Neuilly and went to the Palais Royal. Three days later Lafayette presented him to the still armed and still murmuring crowds before the City Hall, and on the ninth of August the Chamber of Deputies declared him king not “of France” but “of the French” to emphasize in his title his summons from the people.
In England during this part of the nineteenth century there was much popular upheaval over the suffrage and the revolution of industry by the introduction of machinery. France was equally disturbed, but over political problems. Louis Philippe apparently had been the choice of the people, he wore the tricolor and sang the “Marseillaise” beating time for the crowd to follow, and the provisions of his government were liberal. Yet he received cordial support only from the Constitutionalists. He was opposed by the Bonapartists, by the Legitimists, who wanted a representative of the Bourbons, and by the Republicans who urged a government like America’s. To the latter belonged the Paris rabble and they never let pass an opportunity to stir up trouble for the king. Only a year after his accession when the Legitimists were holding a service in memory of the Duke of Berry in the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois the mob entered the building and seized the communion plate, the
crucifix and the priests’ vestments which they threw into the river as they crossed the bridge to the Cité where they first sacked and then destroyed the archbishop’s palace.[7] Against this demonstration good-hearted Louis turned the firemen’s hose instead of the soldier’s bayonets.
This riot was but one of many which marked the first ten years of Louis Philippe’s reign. That of the fifth and sixth of June, 1832, is well known because Victor Hugo described it in “Les Misérables.” The king’s life was attempted more than once, and it could have been small comfort to him to feel that his assassination was not undertaken for personal reasons but because he represented a hated party. It is not to be wondered at that the “Citizen King” ceased to beat time while the crowd sang the “Marseillaise,” and that he told an English friend who urged him to save his voice in the open air, “Don’t be concerned. It’s a long time since I did more than move my lips.”
Hated by the Republican rabble the king was no less shunned by his own class, the nobility of the left bank faubourg Saint Germain. They were so unwilling to frequent a court made up of worthy but uninteresting bourgeois that Louis is said to have remarked that it was easier for him to get his English friends from across the Channel to dine with him at the Tuileries than his French friends from across the Seine.
Added to the other troubles of this time was the cholera which swept Europe in 1832. Paris looked on it as something of a joke when it first broke out, several maskers at a ball impersonating Cholera in grisly ugliness. When some fifty dancers were attacked by the disease during the evening the seriousness of the situation began to be understood. Before it left the city twenty thousand people had died.
Such fearful mortality was enough to give matter for thought to any ruler, and enough was known then about sanitation to cause Louis to set to work clearing out some of the countless narrow streets with their unwholesome houses with which the older parts of the city still abounded, though fifty-five new streets, many of them erasing former ones, had been opened during the Restoration. The Place du Trône, now the Place de la Nation was completed. The handsome columns, erected just before the Revolution, mark the city’s eastern boundary. They are surmounted by statues of Philip Augustus and Saint Louis.
Before Louis Philippe’s reign ended there were some eleven hundred streets within the city limits, and the extension and improvement of the lighting system increased their safety, while they were made beautiful by many fountains. Of these the best known is that in memory of Molière. It is erected opposite the house in which the great dramatist died, and was made possible by one of those public subscriptions by which the French more than any other people express the gratitude of the masses for a genius which has given them pleasure.
The water service for domestic use was poor, water-carriers bringing water in barrels to subscribers and selling it in the street.
The present fountains of the Place de la Concorde are also of this period, and the obelisk of Luxor which the pacha of Egypt presented to the king of France, was brought from its place before the great temple of ancient Thebes where it had stood for three thousand years to make the central ornament of the same huge square.
The present fortifications of Paris date from this reign. Thiers built them during his ministry and some thirty-odd years later he had the satisfaction of knowing that it was through his efforts that the city was able to hold out for nearly five months against the Prussians.
Of new works for the embellishment of the city Louis Philippe began but few. The one church of interest was twin-spired Sainte Clotilde, an accurate reproduction of thirteenth and fourteenth century Gothic. Though initiating little the king finished several important undertakings of his predecessors. One of these was the Palais des Beaux Arts where many American students now study art; another was the church of the Madeleine, and still another the Arc de Triumphe de l’Étoile. Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle were carefully restored to their original beauty by the skillful architect and antiquarian, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Palais de Justice was enlarged. A further example of the preservation of old buildings for the benefit of the people was the conversion of the Hôtel Cluny into a museum of medieval domestic life, and of the adjoining Thermes of the Roman palace into a repository of Gallo-Roman relics.
With bridges and railroads increasing the public comfort, a vigorous body of writers adding to the literary reputation of Paris, and the discovery of Daguerre introducing to the world photography whose developments have revolutionized many occupations and made possible many others, the eighteen years of Louis’ reign was a rich period. It was increasingly turbulent, however, as each riot provoked severe rulings in an effort to prevent further trouble, and each access of severity enraged the mob more than ever. The proletariat had no vote, and the suffrage advances across the Channel served only to irritate and make the French poor feel poorer than ever both in property and in political rights.
The crisis came (in 1848) as often happens, over a comparatively small matter. The king forbade a banquet of his opponents, and the mob seized upon the refusal as an excuse to fight. The National Guards should have served as a buffer between the royal garrison and the rabble, but the rabble stole their guns and the worthy bourgeois of the Guards were of small service to anybody. There was fighting here and there all over the city, but chiefly in the neighborhood of the boulevard of the Temple. There seems to have been no especial reason in these skirmishes; the coatless fought the wearers of coats without stopping to inquire their political belief. Huge crowds collected along the rue de Rivoli and along the quay, hemming into the Place du Carrousel another throng packed almost to inmovability. His wife and daughters watching him anxiously from the windows, the king, now a man of seventy-five, came from the Tuileries, mounted a horse and moved slowly through the press. Only an occasional voice cried “Long live the king,” and he soon returned to the palace. In a few minutes word flew from mouth to mouth that Louis Philippe had abdicated. It was true. An hour and a half later he left the Tuileries never to return.
With him went his family, leaving behind them all their personal belongings. At once a horde of roughs took possession of the palace, slashing pictures, breaking furniture, breakfasting in the royal dining room, and sending out to buy a better quality than the king’s coffee which they drank in exquisite Sèvres cups taken out through the broken glass of a locked cabinet. The royal cellars were emptied promptly. The princesses’ dresses adorned the sweethearts of the most persistent fighters. Again, as in 1830, the throne went up in smoke after every rascal in town had had a chance to test the softness of its cushions.
At the Hôtel de Ville the second Republic was proclaimed, the poet Lamartine at its head for the money there was in it, it is said. A minor actor who was in a general’s costume at a dress rehearsal and who put his head out of a theater window to see the cause of the uproar in the street, was haled forth, set upon a horse, escorted to the City Hall and introduced to the nondescript and self-appointed members of the provisional government there gathered as “governor of the Hôtel de Ville.” They accepted him without question and Lamartine confirmed him in his office the next day!
A republican government pure and simple, however, did not satisfy a large part of the citizens of Paris who were extreme socialists and demanded that the state provide work for everybody. So insistent were they that Lamartine established National Workshops and the actual development of the theory proved more convincing than any possible argument. Thousands of people were soon enrolled. Many proved idlers, many were ignorant, much of the output was poor; yet, such as it was, it seriously disorganized trade and so flooded the market that prices went down and wages were forced to follow. The men who received $1.00 a day at first were reduced in a few months to $1.20 a week, while the government was saddled with a debt of $3,000,000 and with hundreds of citizens less than ever able to take care of themselves after this period of what was practically living on charity. The solid citizens demanded an immediate change, the government insisted that a larger number of the beneficiaries should either seek other work or go into the army. Again Paris was a battlefield during three days when many of the streets were literally ankle-deep in blood. The Parisians could build a barricade right dexterously by this time and bourgeois and rabble killed each other heartily in the most pitiable sort of civil war. Archbishop Affre, who went in person to the faubourg Saint Antoine to use his influence with the fighters, was mortally wounded. His torn and blood-stained garments are preserved in the sacristy of Notre Dame.
Early in July an open-air mass in memory of the victims was solemnized at the foot of the obelisk, but it did not mean that peace was established, and for a few months more the country quarreled on under the provisional government until Louis Napoleon was elected president of the Republic in December, 1848.
LOUIS NAPOLEON[8] was the son of Hortense, Josephine’s daughter, who had been forced to marry Napoleon I’s brother, Louis, who disliked her as much as she did him. By the time of Napoleon’s downfall they were divorced and young Louis’ life from his sixth to his twenty-first year was one of constant change as he traveled from one place to another with his mother who was not welcomed as a resident of their towns by many small officials afraid of their political heads. This long period spent out of the country of his birth gave Louis the accent which provoked the passage at arms with Bismarck. Wishing to be polite to the great German he remarked blandly, “I never have heard a stranger speak French as you do;” to which Bismarck promptly responded, “I never have heard a Frenchman speak French as you do.”
When a man grown Louis Napoleon became a soldier of fortune. He fought against the pope; he tried to get up a revolution for his own benefit in the garrison at Strasburg; he entered France from the sea near Boulogne, again with no success; he was captured and imprisoned for six years, escaping in the clothes of a workman. It was only after the abdication of Louis Philippe that he dared to appear in Paris. While he was made a member of the Constituent Assembly, and was wire-pulling to secure his election to the presidency he was so poor that a street vender, a woman well-known because of her skill in getting about on two wooden legs, offered him money from her savings. When his star was in the ascendant he offered her an annuity. She refused it, saying that he wouldn’t take her money and so she wouldn’t take his. Béranger, the “people’s poet,” and Victor Hugo believed in Bonaparte and used their influence in his behalf.
The election in 1848 put an end to Louis’ poverty but his appetite for power grew by what it fed on. The new constitution decreed that a president could not be a candidate for reëlection until four years had elapsed after his first term of office. This arrangement did not suit Louis’s ambition and in 1851 he followed the great Napoleon’s example in executing a coup d’état. It meant more barricades and more slaughter in the Paris streets, but it disposed of his enemies and left him free to secure yet another constitution which lengthened the president’s term to ten years. As with the great Napoleon, the people elected him emperor for life only a year later. He took the title of Napoleon III.
The cholera ravaged France for many months during the early part of Louis Napoleon’s presidency. On one day there were six hundred and eighty deaths in Paris alone. Yet neither the epidemic nor republican simplicity prevented many elaborate public functions. In the autumn of 1848 the Palais Bourbon was the scene of many balls with a somewhat motley array of guests. It was currently reported in the city that before every ball there was such a washing and starching as never had been known before in the northern and eastern parts of the city, and that the tradesmen of those sections were accustomed to say with an air of pride, “No, we have nothing in ladies’ white kid gloves to-day except in small sizes—seven and under.”
In 1849 on the anniversary of the great Napoleon’s death, a memorial mass was solemnized at the Invalides, the old uniforms of the veterans adding their pathos to the impressive scene as the officers knelt while Louis visited the tomb of his illustrious predecessor. On the first anniversary of Louis’ election a splendid banquet at the Hôtel de Ville expressed the people’s satisfaction. Three years later, on New Year’s Day, the guns of the Invalides fired ten shots for every million of votes that assured Louis’ position for ten years more. A Te Deum of gratitude was sung at Notre Dame, the choir chanting “Domine, salvum fac praesidentem nostrum Napoleonem.” The religious celebration was followed by a ball given by the Prefect of the Seine at the Hôtel de Ville.
Realizing that the chances of success in Paris upheavals usually were with the side which the army favored Louis did his best to make himself popular with the soldiers. In the spring of this same year a series of brilliant festivals gave them recognition—a distribution of flags on the Field of Mars, a ball in honor of the army, a banquet at the Tuileries to the officers, and a banquet of twenty-four hundred covers to the students of the Military School.
The proclamation of the empire was hailed in Paris with enthusiastic demonstrations. The citizens gave Bonaparte an almost solid support (208,615 votes out of 270,710), decorated the city with such inscriptions as “Ave Cæsar Imperator,” and with elaborate illuminations. Napoleon’s entry into the city was a spectacle such as the Parisians always have loved. Heading a splendid array of soldiers he rode into town from Saint Cloud, ten miles out, and, hailed by the guns of all Paris, he entered the city under the Arc de Triumphe de l’Étoile, and then went down the Champs Élysées to the Tuileries. The new emperor’s decision to have no formal coronation but to give its cost, $50,000, to hospitals and orphanages throughout France, warmly endeared him to his subjects.
The Exposition of 1855 was a drawing card for Paris. By the side of the monumental affairs into which these exhibits have grown the arrangements seem simplicity itself. Yet Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the royal children spent a happy week visiting the Palais de l’Industrie and being entertained by plays at Saint Cloud, fireworks and a ball at Versailles, a ball at the City Hall, a review of troops on the Field of Mars. When the queen drove to visit Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle the decorated streets were lined with enthusiastic crowds.
Like his great predecessor Napoleon III’s vision saw a noble Paris, and at once he set about improvements which would beautify the city, give work to the poor, make the bourgeois forget his limitation of their power in the municipality, and compensate the suburbs now included within the city limits for the increase of their taxes.
Paris no longer had a mayor, but as to-day, two prefects, one “of the Seine” and the other “of police.” Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine, was a man amply fitted to carry out the emperor’s plans, and it is to him that the city owes much of the openness which is one of her greatest beauties and benefits. His was the idea of laying out streets radiating from a central point as do those around the Arch of the Star. This diagonal arrangement permits not only quick passage from one part of the city to another, but allows a small body of men and a few cannon to hold a commanding position. Napoleon probably had the habits of the Paris mob in mind when he ordered this plan and the asphalt surface which is far less useful for missiles than are paving stones. The rue de Rivoli was carried on eastward partly doing away with an unsavory neighborhood which crowded closely upon the Louvre; a long boulevard called “de Strasbourg” and “de Sebastopol” swept northward from the Seine and southward across the Cité to join the boulevard Saint Michel on the right bank. In all twenty-two new thoroughfares were opened and three bridges. Between the Place du Châtelet and the Hôtel de Ville was the old tower of Saint Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. It was restored to its former perfection and surrounded by one of the small parks which are the city’s best gifts to the poor and for which she utilizes every available spot. A new Hôtel Dieu on the north side of the Parvis de Notre Dame replaced the ancient building on the south side of the same square, and did a further good work in wiping out many wretched old streets.
Remembering Napoleon I’s intention with regard to the Louvre the emperor completed the long delayed project of joining the Tuileries and the older palace. On the side of the Seine he built the entrance to the Place du Carrousel, the connecting link between Henry IV’s unfinished gallery and Catherine de Medicis’; on the north side he swept away the remaining tangle of small streets adjoining the rue de Rivoli, thereby enlarging the Place du Carrousel to its present size and permitting the building of three quadrangles to match the three on the south,[9] which are partly of his construction. The architecture is massive, elaborate, over-decorated, yet, taken all in all, superb. Its heavy magnificence lessens our regret at the loss of the Tuileries which completed the rectangle at the west, for those who remember it say that the smaller palace was overpowered by the imposing “New Louvre.”
Several new churches added to the adornment of the city under the empire. One of these, Trinity, renaissance in style, is approached by a “rampe” somewhat recalling that of Saint Vincent-de-Paul. Another church, dedicated to Saint Augustin, is in the Byzantine style, and is ingeniously though not always acceptably adapted to the limitations of a small triangular space.
Among the improvements were the buildings of the present Halles Centrales on the age-old spot where markets have served Paris. An early morning visit to the Halles is an object lesson on the distribution of food for a large city. The crowd is terrific, the volubility ear-splitting. Certain characteristic stalls interest the traveler, as, for example, that where broken food from hotels and restaurants is sold for two sous a plate.
To this time belongs the new building—on the Cité now—for the Tribunal of Commerce; enlargements of the National Library and of the Bank of France; the construction of two theaters on the Place du Châtelet, one leased now by Sarah Bernhardt, and of the Opéra. This is huge and elaborate in renaissance style, a building much criticized but also much admired, especially for its staircase and for its decorative frescos and bronzes. It is the home of the National Academy of Music.
The fountain showing the valiant figure of Saint Michel facing the bridge at the corner of the boulevard Saint Michel, has a position like that of the Molière fountain, making a graceful and harmonious decoration for the end of a house lying in the acute angle between two meeting streets.
The extension of the city’s water supply was the more appreciated because it was belated. Twelve thousand gas lamps made a much-needed illumination. Two railway stations added a convenient public service.
Just outside the fortifications is the Bois de Boulogne, originally a forest, but now developed as a park, retaining its naturalness and charm with the addition of good roads, and attractive tea-houses.
Finally, the lovely Parc Monceau was laid out to please the prosperous inhabitants of the recently developed quarter near the Arc de l’Étoile, and an old quarry was ingeniously converted into a thing of seemingly natural beauty for the benefit of the poorer people of Belleville in the north-eastern part of the city. In 1861 the population of Paris was 1,667,841.
Yet even all these public works and the brilliancy of the not at all exclusive court which Napoleon and his wife, Eugénie (whom he had married with magnificent ceremony at Notre Dame in 1853), held at the Tuileries, could not entirely calm the restless and not yet satisfied Parisians. To the poorer classes “empire” did not ring as true as “republic.” Napoleon boldly laid the question of the empire before the people of France once more, and once more they returned a handsome vote in his support, but Paris was unconvinced. She cast 184,000 Nos against 139,000 Yeses.
As must always happen in connection with foreign affairs the emperor’s attitude provoked hostility as well as approval. There were opponents of the Crimean War as well as advocates; there were adverse critics of the treaty with Austria which closed the war which France undertook in behalf of Italy. Long-continued friction with Germany had brought about a general wish for war. Napoleon planned to secure his own popularity by entering upon a struggle which he knew would be approved by the majority of his subjects. Paris was wildly enthusiastic, crying “On to Berlin!” regardless of the fact that the army was almost entirely unprepared.
A trivial incident furnished the excuse and the emperor in person invaded Germany, but the list of encounters was almost entirely a list of defeats and the Prussian army pressed the French forces back into their own country. Paris was so furious at the realization of what this invasion might mean that it is said that Napoleon never would have passed through the city alive if he had returned then.
The battle of Sédan, fought on the first of September, 1870, not only was an overwhelming defeat, but there the emperor was taken prisoner. Never again did he see the city he had worked so hard to beautify. After he was released (in 1871) he went to England where he died in 1873.
News of the battle reached Paris on the fourth of September and produced such utter consternation that the mob was frightened into comparative quiet. A great crowd, however, eager and determined, entered the Legislature where the deputies were in session and demanded the abolition of the empire. Jules Favre, Gambetta, Jules Simon and several other deputies of the “opposition” party, led the crowd to the City Hall, formed a provisional government, and declared the Third Republic.
The empress, meanwhile, who had only too good reason to fear the possible temper of the Paris mob, had heard the news in the Tuileries and took instant flight. Accompanied only by one lady and by the Austrian and Italian ambassadors, she traversed the whole length of the Louvre to its eastern end. As she came out on the street facing the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois she was recognized by a small boy who called her name. This recognition so terrified the ambassadors that they did not stop to find the carriage that was waiting for them, but pushed the empress and her companion into an ordinary cab, and called to the cabman no more definite direction than “To Boulevard Haussmann.” The two frightened women had not even a handbag with them and not so much as their cab fare. Fortunately the empress happened to think of her dentist, an American named Evans. They drove to his house and through his help managed to leave the city and to escape to England. There Eugénie still lives.
The new government represented to the Prussians that the war had been the emperor’s affair, and that Prussia had declared that she was fighting the imperial idea. The enemy refused to grant peace, however, and Paris was besieged from September 19, 1870 to January 30, 1871. Several battles around the city resulted in defeat for the French and the loss of some towns. Marshal Bazaine surrendered the “army of Metz” without a struggle. The king of Prussia made the palace at Versailles his headquarters and from it directed the bombardment.
Within Paris suffering increased sadly during the four months and a half of the siege. Outside supplies of fuel and food were cut off and the city’s stores ran very low, though reports of peace were apt to bring out collections which were being kept in hiding to secure high prices when the great pinch should come. The trees in the parks were cut down for fuel and warmth. Bombproof cellars were at premium.
Just as during the siege of Henry IV, animals not usually eaten were now slaughtered for food.
Horace Vernet, the famous artist, mournfully complained to a friend, “They have taken away my saddle horse to eat him—and I’ve had him twenty years!” From which it is a fair assumption that the steaks which he provided were not all tenderloin. Indeed, it is said that while dishes made from the smaller animals were rather fancied so that when the siege was over dogs and cats were scarce, there were left thirty thousand horses, which would seem to prove that even the starving do not like tough meat. Etiquette forbade inquiry of one’s hostess as to the nature of any dish served at a dinner, but it was entirely de rigueur to compliment it after partaking. Rat pies came to be considered a real delicacy. Toward the end the animals in the Zoölogical Gardens fell victims to the town’s necessities. A camel was sold for $800 and netted a good deal more than that for the restaurant proprietor who bought him.
A final brave sortie met with such complete defeat that it was clear that the city must surrender. The provisional government yielded, promising to give up all Alsace and half of Lorraine, to pay an indemnity of a billion dollars and, crown of bitterness for Paris, to permit the hostile army to take possession of the city.
On the first of March the Prussians entered from the west. They found massed before the Triumphal Arch of the Star two thousand school boys. Their spokesman, a lad of twelve, approached the commander.
“Sir,” he said, bringing his hand to his cap in salute, “we ask that you will not lead your men under our arch. If you do,” he added firmly, “it will be over our bodies.”
The troops made a circuit.
It was only three days that the Prussians remained in Paris, but during that time the city mourned openly. All the shops were closed, all business was discontinued. When the enemy left everything they had touched was treated as if defiled. It is said that because a Prussian soldier had been seen to leap over one of the chains which swing from post to post to keep a space clear around the Arch of the Star a new chain was substituted.
The pride of Paris was humbled grievously.
WHEN the siege of Paris came to an end and the German troops were withdrawn the provisional government which had been making its headquarters at Bordeaux removed to Versailles. The violent element in Paris which had given Louis Philippe so much trouble had increased both in numbers and in strength of feeling during the third quarter of the century. Now these radicals asserted that Thiers, the head of the provisional government, had betrayed France to the enemy, and they won to their way of thinking the Central Committee of the usually conservative National Guard. From the City Hall they directed the election of a new city government, the Commune of Paris, which held itself independent of the Assembly at Versailles and defied it.
Just a month after the hated Prussians had left Paris the communists made a sortie toward Versailles. As a natural reaction the Versailles government invested the city, and Frenchmen were pitted against Frenchmen as in the days when Henry IV was besieging his own capital town. Nor was the conflict merely between the people inside and the people outside—within Paris there was a constant struggle between the conservatives and the communists and even among the communists themselves. The conservatives disapproved of the drastic social changes made by the new government in closing the churches, and dispersing some of the religious orders, as well as of their confiscations of property on slight warrant and their onslaught upon monuments of sentimental and artistic value, such as the Vendôme Column. The communists, on the other hand, were torn by internal dissensions and their constant quarrels brought about the usual weakness resulting from poor team work.
Ferocity never failed them, however. Constructive measures were postponed; revenge, never. No sufficient excuse ever has been offered for their massacres of hostages, good Archbishop Darboy among them; none for the senseless orgy of destruction with which, after a two months’ struggle, they recognized their defeat by the government troops under Marshal MacMahon. When the soldiers entered Paris their first work was the extinguishing of the fires which the communists had set in a hundred places. Men and women, urged by hatred and fanaticism, piled kegs of gunpowder into
churches, even into Notre Dame, relic and record of centuries, and poured petroleum upon the flames devouring the Palace of Justice, the Sainte Chapelle, the library of the Louvre, the Luxembourg palace, the Palais Royal. The houses on the rue Royale were a mass of broken brick. The Ministry of Finance on the rue de Rivoli was so injured that it was torn down, to be replaced by a hotel. Three hundred years of historical association did not avail to save the palace of the Tuileries whose ruins were considered not sufficient to be restored. The Hôtel de Ville was a mere shell and required practically entire rebuilding. Property amounting to a hundred millions of dollars was destroyed, while the historical and sentimental value of many of the buildings cannot be computed.
The communists were as reckless with their own lives as with the buildings. Some two thousand persons—women and children as well as men—fell in the contest with the government. The last struggle was in the cemetery of Père Lachaise whose tombs could serve only as temporary protection against shell and shot from the rash fighters who were soon to need a final resting-place. It was only after the execution of many of the insurgent leaders that Marshal MacMahon brought about a semblance of peace.
With returning quiet all France turned its attention to securing the payment of the war indemnity of a billion dollars due to Prussia. Until that indebtedness was cleared off the hated uniform of the army of occupation was omnipresent. So eager were the French to rid themselves of this sight that every peasant went into his “stocking” or tapped his mattress bank until the necessary amount was subscribed many times over. Two years and a half after the capitulation of Paris not a German soldier was left in the country. There could be no stronger testimony to the national thrift fostered by the pinch of the pre-Revolutionary days and so alive to-day that the French are looked upon as the readiest financiers in Europe, prepared to invest in anything from a Panama Canal to a New York gratte-ciel (skyscraper).
The terms of the peace with Germany required the surrender of one-half of the border province of Lorraine and the whole of Alsace. It was a bitter day not only for these districts but for the whole country when the Germans took possession of the ceded territory. Fifty thousand people left their property behind and went over into France rather than lose the name of Frenchmen. Many came to America. Now, forty years later, the memory of the loss is not dulled, and the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde wears perpetual mourning.
Many have been the problems faced by France since the Franco-Prussian war. Political adjustment has been of first importance, of course, but Paris has had her own questions to answer, and, because of her cosmopolitanism, her solutions have been of interest to the whole world. Much time and thought have been spent on the repairs required by the excesses of the communists. The rebuilding of the City Hall on the same spot on which it had stood for five hundred years and in the style which Francis I initiated three centuries before, was a task on which Paris lavished thought and money. The exterior is a finely harmonious example of renaissance. The mural paintings of the interior are a record of the work of the best French artists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They are enhanced by heavily handsome gildings and by chandeliers of glittering crystal.
As a whole, however, the city has put more expenditure into the perfecting of public utilities, the beautifying of streets and the construction of parks—works of use to the many—than into the erection of buildings of less general service. The panorama which make the frontispiece of this volume shows the care with which pavements and curbs and tree-guards are ordered. A small tricycle sweeper is 1912’s latest device for removing any last reproach of Lutetia’s mud—a reproach formulated to-day only by Parisians made fastidious by a century of cleanliness.
The panorama shows also the arrangement of the quays and the orderliness which makes them possible in the very center of the city, even when there is discharged upon them huge loads of freight brought from the sea by the strings of barges (seen in the picture of the Eiffel Tower opposite page 360) which are moved by a tug and a chain-towing device.
In some parts of this city of three million inhabitants the quays disclose scenes that are almost rural. Under the fluttering leaves of a slender tree a rotund housewife is making over a mattress, exchanging witticisms with a near-by vender of little cakes. Not far off the owner of a poodle is engaging his attention while a professional dog clipper is decorating him with an outfit of collar and cuffs calculated to rouse envy in the breasts of less favored caniches.
When the hero of an old English novel orders his servant to call a “fly” we wonder whether the misnamed vehicle which responds has been christened from the verb or the noun. There is no doubt in Paris as to the origin of the “fly boats” on the Seine. These busy little travelers are of insect origin—they are bateaux mouches.
What these boats are on the river the fiacres have been on land. These small open carriages
are now being replaced by motor taxis. The use of the meters on the horse-propelled vehicles as well as on the machines has deprived the tourist of one of the daily excitements of his visit—the heated argument with the driver concerning his charge. Another change which has been consummated since 1913 began is the passing of the horse-drawn omnibus with its “imperial” or roof seats, from whose inexpensive vantage many travelers have considered that they secured their best view of the city streets. The two subway systems have many excellent points, not least of which is a method of ventilation which makes a summer’s day trip below ground a relief rather than a seeming excursion on the crust of the infernal regions.
The Champs Élysées is thought to offer the finest metropolitan vista in the world, when the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile is seen across the Place de la Concorde from the Tuileries gardens, over two miles away.
Such vistas are frequent in Paris, offering a “point of view” in which a handsome building or monument finds its beauty enhanced. The regularity of the skyline adds to this effect. By a municipal regulation no façade may be higher than the width of the street and the consequent uniformity provides a not unpleasing monotony.
Paris parks are world famous, not only for the beauty of such great expanses as the Bois de Boulogne, just outside the fortifications, with its forest and lake and stream, its good roads and its alluring restaurants, but for the intelligent utilization of small open spaces in crowded parts of the city. Wherever any readjustment of lines or purposes gives opportunity, there a bit of grass rests the eye and a tree casts its share of shade. If there is space enough a piece of statuary educates the taste or the bust of some hero of history or of art makes familiar the features of great men. The demolition of the old clo’ booths of the Temple gave such a chance, and amid tall tenements and commonplace shops mothers sew and babies doze and one-legged veterans read the newspapers beneath the statue of the people’s poet, Béranger.
At one end of this square rises the Mairie of the Third Arrondissement (ward). These Mairies, of which there are twenty, are decorated with paintings, often by artists of repute, and always symbolic of the Family, of Labor or of the Fatherland. The Hall of Marriages in which the Mayor of the arrondissement performs the civil ceremony required by law, receives especial attention and usually is a room handsomely appointed and adorned.
The French imagination likes to express itself
in symbols. Throughout the city there are many large groups, such as the Triumph of the Republic, unveiled in 1899, which dominates the Place de la Nation—a figure representative of the Republic attended by Liberty, Labor, Abundance and Justice. Even statues or busts or reliefs of authors, musicians or statesmen frequently are supported by allegorical figures. Such is the monument to Chopin which includes a figure of Night and one of Harmony, and such is the monument of Coligny whose portrait statue stands between Fatherland and Religion. In the Fountain of the Observatory seahorses, dolphins and tortoises surround allegorical figures of the four quarters of the globe. The young women lawyers who, in cap and gown, pace seriously through the great hall of the ancient Palace of Justice, are living symbols of twentieth century progress.
Haussmann’s plan of laying out broad streets radiating from a center served the further purpose of adding to the city’s beauty by providing wide open spaces and of wiping out narrow streets and insanitary houses. The Third Republic has continued to act on this scheme and has succeeded wonderfully well in achieving the desired improvement with but a small sacrifice of buildings of eminent historic value. On the Cité a web of memories clung to the tangle of streets swept away to secure a site for the new Hôtel Dieu on the north of Notre Dame which replaced the ancient hospital which has stood since Saint Louis’ day on the south side of the island.
The completion in 1912 of the new home of the National Printing Press near the Eiffel Tower brings to mind a Parisian habit indicative of thrift and of a respect for historical associations. The Press has been housed for many years in the eighteenth century hôtel of the Dukes of Rohan built when the Marais was still fashionable. Anything more unsuitable for a printing establishment it would be hard to find. The rooms of a private house become a crowded fire trap when converted to industrial purposes. This use of the house has tided over a crisis, however, and once the last vestige of printer’s ink has been removed the old building probably will be restored to the beauty which the still existing decorations of some of the rooms show, and will be used for some more suitable purpose. One proposal is that it be used as an addition to the National Archives, since its grounds adjoin those of the Hôtels Clisson and Soubise, their present home. The Hôtel Carnavalet houses the Historical Museum of Paris, and part of the Louvre is used for government offices—two other instances of Paris wisdom.
There have been three Expositions in Paris under the Third Republic. Each has left behind a permanent memorial. The Palace of the Trocadéro, dating from 1878, is a huge concert hall where government-trained actors and singers often give for a strangely modest sum the same performances which cost more in the regular theaters with more elaborate accessories. The architecture of the Trocadéro is not beautiful but the situation is imposing and the general effect impressive when seen across the river from the south bank where the Eiffel Tower has raised its huge iron spider web since the World’s Fair of 1889.
The tower is a little world in itself with a restaurant and a theater, a government weather observatory and a wireless station. Since aviation has become fashionable the frequent purr of an engine tells the tourist sipping his tea “in English fashion” on the first stage that yet another aviator is taking his afternoon spin “around the Tour Eiffel.”
The latest exposition, that of 1900, gave to Paris the handsome bridge named after Czar Alexander III, the Grand Palais, where the world’s best pictures and sculptures are exhibited every spring, and the Petit Palais which holds several general collections and also the paintings and sculpture bought by the city from the Salons of the last thirty-five years. Such public art galleries are found throughout France, a development of Napoleon’s idea of bringing art to the people. Like Paris the provinces take advantage of the Salons to add to the treasures of their galleries.
Near the two palaces is the exquisite chapel of Our Lady of Consolation. It is built on the site of a building destroyed during the progress of a fashionable bazaar by a fire which wiped out one hundred thirty-two lives. The architectural details are of the classic style popular in the reign of Louis XVI.
Already rich in beautiful churches Paris has been further graced in recent years by the majestic basilica of the Sacred Heart gleaming mysteriously through the delicate haze that always enwraps Montmartre. The style is Romanesque-Byzantine, and the structure is topped by a large dome flanked by smaller ones. The interior lacks the colorful warmth of most of the city churches, but time will remedy that in part. Construction has been extremely slow for the same reason that the building of the Pantheon was a long process—the discovery that the summit of the hill was honeycombed by ancient quarries. It became necessary to sink shafts which were filled with masonry or concrete. Upon this strong sub-structure rises the splendid
work of expiation for the murder of Archbishop Darboy. The city owns the church.
To the tourist whose attention is not confined to the stock “sights” of Paris the city streets offer a wide field of interest. They show the stranger within the walls the neatness of the people and the orderliness which manifests itself in the automatic formation of a queue of would-be passengers on an omnibus or a bateau mouche. They disclose little that looks like slums to the eye of a Londoner or a New Yorker, for dirt and sadness rather than congestion make slums, and the poor Parisian looks clean and cheerful even when a hole in his “stocking” has let all his savings escape.
History lurks at every corner of these streets. It commands attention to the imposing pile of Notre Dame, it piques curiosity by the palpably ancient turrets of the rue Hautefeuille. The non-existent is recalled by the tablet on the site of the house where Coligny was assassinated, by the outline of Philip Augustus’s Louvre traced on the eastern courtyard of the palace, by the name of the street that passes over the mad king’s menagerie at the Hôtel Saint Paul. Étienne Marcel sits his horse beside the City Hall he bought for Paris; Desmoulins mounts his chair in the garden of the Palais Royal to make the passionate speech that wrought the destruction
Architects Who Directed the Building of the Louvre.
| 1. Pierre Lescot and Jean Goujon 2. Chambiges 3. Philibert Delorme and Bullant 4 and 5. Ducerceau 6. Jacques Lemercier |
7 and 8. Louis Levau 9. Perrault 10, 11 and 12. Percier and Fontaine 13 and 14. Visconti and Lefuel |
of the Bastille. Even the boucheries chevalines, the markets that sell horse steaks and “ass and mule meat of the first quality,” bring back the days when Henry IV cut off supplies coming from the suburbs of Paris and when, three hundred years later, the Prussians used the same means to gain the same end. That the Parisians of to-day are willing to take chances on universal peace in the future seems attested by the recent vote (1913) of the Municipal Council to convert the fortifications and the land adjacent into parks. The people of the markets, at any rate, are not worrying about any possibilities of hunger for they continue as hard-working and as fluent as when they acted as Marie Antoinette’s escort on the occasion of the “Joyous Entry” from Versailles, though kinder now in heart and action.
Paris charms the stranger as the birdman of the Tuileries Gardens charms his feathered friends—making hostile gestures with one hand and popping bread crumbs into open beaks with the other. The great city of three million people, like all great cities, threatens to overcome the lonely traveler; then, at the seeming moment of destruction, she gives him the food he needs most—perhaps a glimpse of patriotic gayety in the street revels of the fourteenth of July, perhaps the cordial welcome that she has bestowed on students since Charlemagne’s day, perhaps the less personal appeal of the beauty of a wild dash of rain seen down the river against the western sky, perhaps the impulse to sympathy aroused by the passing of a first communion procession of little girls, wide-eyed from their new, soul-stirring experience.
In a quiet corner behind a convent chapel where nuns vowed to Perpetual Adoration unceasingly tend the altar, rests the body of America’s friend, Lafayette. If for no other reason than because of his friendship, Americans must always feel an interest in the city in which he did his part toward crystallizing the bourgeois rule which makes the French government one of the most interesting political experiments of Europe to-day. Yet Paris needs no intermediary. In her are centered taste, thought, the gayety and exaggeration of the past, light-heartedness in the stern present. The city is a record of the development of a people who have expressed themselves in words and in deeds, and by the more subtle methods of Art. The story is not ended, and as long as the writing goes on, vivid and alluring as the “Gallic spirit” can make it, so long there will be no lack of readers of all nations, our own among the most eager.
![[Largest version. (1.5MB)]](images/i_b001fp_huge.jpg){kind=link}
Merovée
|
Childéric I
|
_Clovis_[10] (481-511)
|
+-----------------------+---------+-----------+---------------------+
| | | |
Thierry I Chlodomir Childébert I _Clotaire I_
(King of Metz) (King of Orleans) (King of Paris) (King of Soissons, then
Sole king, 558-561)
|
+-------------------+-----------------------+-------------------------+--+
| | | |
Caribert Gontran Sigebert I Chilpéric I
(King of Paris) (King of Burgundy) (King of Austrasia, (King of Soissons,
M. Brunehaut, M. Frédégonde, D. 584)
D. 575) |
| |
Childébert II _Clotaire II_
| 613-628
| |
Thierry II _Dagobert I_
628-638
|
_Clovis II_
638-656
|
+---------+---------------+
| |
_Childéric II_ _Thierry III_
D. 673 D. 691
|
Chilpéric II
|
Childéric III
(Deposed by Pepin le Bref in 752)
Pépin d’Héristal
(Duke of the Franks, D. 714)
|
Charles Martel
(Mayor of the Palace in Austrasia,
715-741)
_Pépin le Bref_
(Deposed Chïldéric III in 752.
752-768)
|
_Charlemagne_
768-814
|
_Louis le Débonnaire_
814-840
|
+-------------+---------+------------------------------------+
| | | |
Lothair Pépin Louis, the German _Charles I, the Bald_
840-855 | 840-877
| |
_Charles II, the Fat_ _Louis II, the Stutterer_
881-888 877-879
|
+------------+-------------------+-----+
| | |
_Louis III_ _Carloman_ _Charles III, the Simple_
879-882 879-884 892-929
|
_Louis IV d’Outremer_
936-954
|
+---+----+
| |
_Lothair_, Charles
(Duke of
Lorraine).
954-986
|
_Louis V_[11]
986-987
_Hugh Capet_
(Duke of France, Count of Paris,
Elected King of France, 987)
987-996
|
_Robert, the Pious_
996-1031
|
_Henry I_
1031-1060
|
_Philip I_
1060-1108
|
_Louis VI, the Fat_
1108-1137
|
_Louis VII, the Young_
1137-1180
|
_Philip Augustus_
1180-1223
|
_Louis VIII, the Lion_
1223-1226
|
+-----------------------+---------------+
| |
_Louis IX--Saint Louis_ Charles
1226-1270 (Count of Anjou and Provence;
founder of the royal house of
Naples)
|
+---------------------------------------+
| |
_Philip III, the Bold_ Robert
1270-1285 (Court of Clermont; founder
| of the house of Bourbon)
|
+----------------------------------------+
| |
_Philip IV, the Fair_ Charles
1285-1314 (Count of Valois; founder
of the house of Valois)
|
_Philip VI_
1328-1350
|
+------------------------+----------------------+------------------------+
| | | |
_Louis X, the Quarreler_ Philip V, the Long_ _Charles IV, the Fair_ Isabelle
1314-1316 1316-1322 1322-1328
(M. Edward II, of England)
|
Edward III, of England
_Philip VI, of Valois_
(Son of Charles, Count of Valois, a
younger brother of Philip the Fair)
1328-1350
|
_John, the Good_
1350-1364
|
+-----------------------+------------------+----------------------+
| | | |
_Charles V, the Wise_ Louis John Philip
1364-1380 (Duke of Anjou) (Duke of Berri) (Duke of Burgundy)
|
John, the Fearless
| |
+-----------------------------+ |
| | |
_Charles VI, the Well-Beloved_ Louis |
| 1380-1422 (Duke of Orleans; |
| founder of the house |
| of Valois-Orleans) |
| | |
_Charles VII, the Victorious_ Philip the Good
1422-1461 |
| |
| | | |
| +-----------+------+---+ |
| | | |
| Charles John |
| (Duke of Orleans) (Count of Angoulême) |
| | |
_Louis XI_ | Charles Charles the Bold
1461-1483 _Louis XII_ (Count of Angoulême) |
| 1498-1515 | |
+-----------------------+ | |
| | | |
_Charles VIII_ Jeanne _Francis I_ Mary
1483-1498 (M. Duke of Orleans 1515-1547 (M. Maximilian, Archduke
afterwards Louis XII) | of Austria)
| |
_Henry II_ Philip
(M. Marie de Medicis) |
1547-1559 Charles V
| (Emperor)
+--------------------------------------------------+-------------------------+
| |
_Francis II_ _Charles IX_ _Henry III_ Elizabeth Marguerite
(M. Mary, Queen 1560-1574 1574-1589 (M. Philip II (M. Henry of Navarre,
of Scots) of Spain) afterwards Henry IV)
1559-1560
Robert, son of St. Louis, married Beatrice of Bourbon and had a son Louis, Duke of Bourbon, from whom was descended Antoine, Duke of Vendôme, who married Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre. Their son was
_Henry IV_
1589-1610
|
_Louis XIII_
1610-1643
+-------------------------------------------------+
| |
_Louis XIV_ Philip, Duke of Orleans
1643-1715 (Founder of the house of Bourbon-Orleans)
| |
Louis the Dauphin Philippe (Regent)
| |
Louis of Burgundy Louis
| |
_Louis XV_ Louis Philippe
1715-1774 |
| |
Louis the Dauphin Louis Philippe (“Egalité”)
| | | |
+---------------------+-----------------------+--------+------------+----------------+
| | | | |
_Louis XVI_[12] Louis of Provence Charles of Artois _Louis Philippe_ (“Citizen King”)
1774-1793 (afterward (afterward (succeeded by
| _Louis XVIII_, _Charles X_ _Napoleon III_)
1814-1824) 1824-1830)
|
Louis XVII
1814-1824
| |
Duke of Berry Ferdinand, Duke of Orleans
| |
| +--------+-------+
| | |
| Louis Robert
Count of Chambord (Count of Paris) (Duke of Chartres)
|
Robert
Carlo Bonaparte
|
+-----------+-----------------+--+-----------+----------------+
| | | | |
Jos. Bonaparte _Napoleon I_ Lucien Bonaparte Louis Bonaparte Jer. Bonaparte
| |
Napoleon II _Napoleon III_
(King of Rome)
| 1792. The Convention. 1795. The Directory |
1799. The Consulate |
1804 Napoleon I
1814 Louis XVIII
1815. Napoleon I
|
1815. Louis XVIII 1824. Charles X |
1830. Louis Philippe |
1848. Louis Napoleon, President
1852. Napoleon III
|
1870. Provisional Government 1871. M. Thiers, President 1873. Marshal MacMahon 1879. M. Grévy 1885. M. Grévy 1887. M. Carnot |
1894. Casimir Périer 1895. Félix Faure 1899. Emile Loubet 1906. Armand Fallières 1913. Raymond Poincaré |
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U.
Abbaye Prison; see Saint Germain-des-Prés.
Abbey; see Church.
Abélard, 57-59, 65, 77.
Academy, 258.
Amphitheater, 10.
Anne of Austria, 252, 253, 260, 262, 263.
Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, 270, 330, 337, 350, 358, 360, 363, 368, 375.
Arc du Carrousel, 329.
Archbishop’s Palace, 253, 344, 347.
Archévêché; see Archbishop’s Palace.
Archives Nationales, 378.
Arènes; see Amphitheater.
Arsenal, 222.
Banque de France, 79, 272, 362.
Bastille, 162, 163, 183, 185, 191, 206, 228, 249, 293, 294, 295, 298, 383.
Bibliothèque Nationale; see National Library.
Blanche of Castile, 33, 90-98, 101.
Bois de Boulogne, 205, 363, 376.
Bonaparte; see Napoleon.
Bourse, 331.
Bourse de Commerce, 223.
Bridge; see Pont.
Carlovingian Kings, 32-41.
Catherine de Medicis, 209, 214-230, 237, 243, 246, 247, 361.
Champ de Mars, 281, 298, 358, 359.
Champs Elysées, 270, 330, 337, 340, 358, 375.
Chapelle Expiatoire, 339.
Chapelle, Sainte, 87, 100, 126, 155, 170, 173, 194, 197, 233, 306, 350, 359, 371.
Charlemagne, 33, 35, 36, 37, 69, 192, 383.
Charles IV, 127, 128.
Charles V, 136-165, 179, 190, 256.
Charles VI, 166-185, 199.
Charles VII, 181, 183-189, 201.
Charles VIII, 197, 199, 202.
Charles IX, 215-227, 231, 237.
Charles X, 23, 339, 341-344.
Châtelet, Grand, 60, 114, 145, 164, 172, 318.
Châtelet, Petit, 38, 60, 78, 164, 289.
Church or religious house:
Abbey-in-the-Woods, 271.
Saint Augustin, 361.
Saint Bartholomew and
Saint Magloire, 49.
Carmelites, 254, 303.
Carmes Billettes, 123.
Sainte Clotilde, 349.
Cordeliers, 139, 159, 299, 306.
Saint Denis, 27, 30, 33, 35, 37, 56, 60, 61, 65, 94, 100, 105, 133, 153, 156, 159, 160, 164, 168, 181, 184, 235, 247, 339, 341.
Saint Eloy, 33.
Saint Etienne, 11, 33, 88.
Saint Etienne-du-Mont, 8, 21, 88, 193, 207, 306.
Saint Eustache, 207, 222, 306.
Sainte Geneviève, 21, 42, 57, 116, 254, 283.
Sainte Geneviève des Ardente, 61.
Saint Germain-des-Prés, 29, 34, 37, 42, 55, 62, 85, 141, 303.
Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, 30, 138, 193, 217, 230, 270, 346, 365.
Saint Gervais (on the Cité), 33.
Saint Gervais and Saint Protais (in the Ville), 254, 306.
Holy Innocents, 66, 81, 182.
Jacobins, 133, 299.
Saint Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, 61, 207, 360.
Saint Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, 223.
Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, 28, 63, 64, 78, 83, 96, 122, 194, 306.
Saint Laurent, 28, 193.
Saint Leu, 120, 276.
Saint Louis d’Antin, 289.
Saint Louis en l’Ile, 256.
Madeleine, 282, 283, 331, 339, 350.
Saint Martin-des-Champs, 14, 53, 60, 62, 65, 83, 87, 101, 120, 308.
Saint Médard, 279.
Saint Merri, 343.
Saint Michel, 33.
Saint Nicholas, 33, 61, 100.
Saint Nicholas-du-Chardonnet, 272.
Saint Nicholas-des-Champs, 193.
Notre Dame, 11, 33, 38, 57, 61, 64, 67, 87, 88, 89, 100, 110, 112, 129, 133, 151, 168, 173, 184, 185, 186, 212, 214, 235, 253, 260, 285, 306, 324, 344, 350, 354, 358, 359, 363, 371, 378, 381.
Notre Dame de Consolation, 380.
Notre Dame de l’Etoile, 65.
Notre Dame de Lorette, 340.
Notre Dame-des-Victoires, 250, 267.
Oratory, The, 254.
Saint Paul-Saint Louis, 254.
Saint Peter and Saint Paul, 2.
Petits-Augustins, 244.
Saint Philippe-du-Roule, 283.
Saint Pierre-aux-Boeufs, 62, 194.
Saint Pierre-de-Montmartre, 62, 63.
Saint Roch, 254, 305.
Sacré Coeur, 13, 62, 380.
Saint Séverin, 28, 194, 306.
Sorbonne, 254, 321.
Saint Sulpice, 271, 284, 306.
Saint Thos. Aquinas, 254.
Trinity, 361.
Val-de-Grâce, 253, 306.
Saint Victor, 57.
Saint Vincent, 28, 29.
Saint Vincent-de-Paul, 340, 361.
Capetians, Early, 44-67.
Cité, 3, 8, 10, 11, 33, 34, 37, 39, 42, 48, 56, 57, 60, 61, 66, 67, 70, 78, 80, 81, 83, 96, 133, 167, 181, 193, 194, 217, 227, 250, 255, 318, 326, 343, 360, 362, 377.
City Hall; see Hôtel de Ville.
Clovis, 5, 16, 19, 20, 22, 28, 29, 33, 341
Coligny, 27, 217, 221, 230, 232, 254, 381.
College of France, 202.
College of the Four Nations; see Institute.
Collège Mazarin; see Institute.
Comédie Française, 290.
Conciergerie, 48, 97, 98, 164, 305.
Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, 53, 308.
Convent; see Church.
Corn Exchange, 223.
Cours la Reine, 205, 252.
Dagobert I, 14, 27, 34.
Dolet, Etienne, 203.
Eiffel Tower, 281, 374, 379.
Eudes, 38, 39-41, 48.
Eugénie, 91, 228, 363.
Fair of Saint Germain, 291.
Fair of Saint Laurent, 291.
Field of Mars; see Champ de Mars.
Foundling Hospital, 212.
Francis I, 145, 199-209, 211, 222, 224, 246, 255, 323, 373.
Francis II, 214, 215.
Gate; see Porte.
Gobelins, 8, 272.
Gothic Architecture, 85.
Gozlin, 38.
Grève, 6, 34, 61, 117, 121, 143, 145, 186, 191, 203, 210, 225, 247, 250, 269, 295, 303, 307, 309.
Halle aux Vins, 57, 319.
Halles Centrales, 61, 66, 81, 203, 207, 276, 297, 362, 383.
Henry I, 52-54.
Henry II, 206, 209-214, 222, 224, 237, 246, 247, 255.
Henry III, 226-229, 231, 233.
Henry IV, 66, 89, 215-221, 229-248, 250, 251, 256, 257, 286, 324, 327, 361, 366, 369, 383.
Hôpital de Charité, 242.
Hôtel:
d’Aubray, 268.
Barbette, 178, 194.
Beauvais, 273.
de Bourgogne, 290.
of Burgundy; see Hôtel de Bourgogne.
Carnavalet, 224, 378.
de Clisson, 163, 273, 378.
de Cluny, 197, 350.
Dieu, 33, 34, 64, 95, 96, 285, 360, 378.
de Hollande, 273.
Lamoignon, 225.
Mazarin, 272.
de Nesle, 124, 133, 178, 204, 281.
Saint Paul, 156, 162, 174, 175, 176, 177, 181, 184, 222, 381.
de Rambouillet, 257.
de Rohan, 378.
de Sens, 116, 163, 244.
de Soissons, 223, 276.
de Soubise, 273, 378.
des Tournelles, 162, 190, 213, 222, 224, 237.
de Ville, 6, 143-147, 167, 191, 195, 203, 207, 208, 210, 211, 254, 263, 268, 269, 288, 303, 326, 334, 343, 346, 352, 357-360, 365, 369, 371, 373.
de la Vrillière, 272.
Hugh Capet, 41, 44-47, 49.
Ile Saint Louis, 83, 255, 257.
Institute, 254, 258, 304, 307, 314, 319.
Isabeau of Bavaria, 170-183.
Jardin des Plantes, 255.
Jeanne Darc, 18, 184, 185.
John the Fearless, 180, 181, 182, 199.
John I, 127.
John II, 129, 133-136, 151, 152, 165.
Josephine de Beauharnais, 304, 312-332.
July Column, 163, 296, 344.
Latin Quarter, 78, 79.
Law School, 283.
Library, National, 160, 272, 362.
Louis Bonaparte, 355.
Louis Napoleon; see Napoleon III.
Louis of Orleans, 178, 179, 199.
Louis Philippe, 327, 345-351, 356, 369.
Louis VI, 14, 59-64, 69.
Louis VII, 64-67, 88.
Louis VIII, 88, 90.
Louis IX (Saint), 33, 47, 59, 88-105, 125, 126, 143, 290, 348, 378.
Louis X, 107, 127, 144.
Louis XI, 102, 187-197, 200.
Louis XII, 197-200, 202, 203, 208.
Louis XIII, 248, 251, 255, 257, 260, 264.
Louis XIV, 126, 246, 252, 253, 258, 260-273, 323, 345.
Louis XV, 258, 274-287, 289, 292, 341.
Louis XVI, 42, 76, 114, 119, 282, 285, 287-305, 326, 336, 340, 380.
Louis XVIII, 14, 336-341.
Louvre, 42, 79, 81, 83, 84, 98, 109, 110, 114, 122, 128, 138, 140, 142, 146, 149, 156, 160, 161, 162, 169, 183, 205, 206, 211, 217, 222, 224, 227, 239, 246-249, 251, 253, 257, 263, 269, 270, 280, 308, 313, 314, 321, 324, 326, 328, 329, 332, 360, 365, 371, 378, 381.
Lucotecia, 8.
Lutetia, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 373.
Luxembourg, Museum of the, 253, 271.
Mairies, 376.
Maison aux Piliers; see Hôtel de Ville.
Marais, 6, 83, 123, 178, 224, 251, 257, 290, 293, 300, 378.
Marcel, Etienne, 137-149, 162, 195, 207, 381.
Marie Antoinette, 98, 126, 287, 297, 300, 301, 305, 310, 317, 339, 383.
Marie de Medicis, 202, 243, 244, 248, 251-253.
Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, 27, 30, 98, 215, 217-222, 243.
Mazarin, 260, 262, 263, 265.
Merovingian Kings, 19, 22-30, 32.
Military School, 281, 311, 358.
Ministry of Finance, 371.
Mint, 280.
Monastery; see Church.
Mons Lucotetius, 8, 10, 21, 28.
Montfaucon, 40, 107.
Montmartre, 13, 62, 284, 380.
Mont Sainte Geneviève, 8, 21, 34, 78, 83, 88, 96, 144, 192, 202, 222, 283.
Napoleon, 57, 89, 119, 254, 270, 295, 304, 309-338, 355, 356, 380.
Napoleon III, 119, 328, 354-365.
National Printing Press, 378.
Nautae Stone, 12, 13, 88.
New Louvre, 361.
Notre Dame, Parvis de, 117, 216, 360.
Observatory, 270, 284.
Odéon, 289.
Opéra, 316, 362.
Palace:
on the Cité; see Palais de Justice.
of Deputies: see Palais Bourbon.
of the Elysée, 282, 310, 337.
Equality; see Palais Royal.
of the Tribunate; see Palais Royal.
Palais:
des Beaux-Arts, 212, 244, 308, 319, 350.
Bourbon, 282, 331, 357.
Grand, 379.
de l’Industrie, 359.
des Invalides, 254, 271, 295, 337, 347, 357.
de Justice, 9, 11, 34, 61, 71, 80, 94, 97, 100, 107, 124, 126, 128, 133, 138, 143, 150, 161, 170, 171, 173, 186, 194, 197, 211, 213, 215, 227, 228, 239, 270, 285, 290, 350, 371, 377.
du Luxembourg, 253, 254, 303, 314, 371.
Petit, 379.
Royal, 6, 96, 252, 259, 261, 275, 276, 284, 290, 294, 346, 371, 381.
des Thermes, 9, 12, 62, 198, 319, 350.
du Trocadéro, 379.
des Tuileries, 224, 229, 239, 246, 251, 269, 270, 281, 297, 299, 300, 306, 310, 316, 320, 322, 324, 326, 329, 332, 333, 335, 336, 337, 338, 340, 343, 348, 351, 358, 361, 363, 371, 375, 383.
Pantheon, 8, 21, 254, 283, 330.
Parc Monceau, 363.
Parisii, 2, 3.
Parloir aux Bourgeois, 144.
Pavilion of Hanover, 272.
Père Lachaise, Cemetery of, 58, 262, 319, 371.
Pharamond, 19, 124.
Philip I, 52, 54-56.
Philip Augustus, 47, 66, 68-89, 92, 99, 123, 142, 144, 149, 341, 348, 381.
Philip III, 105.
Philip IV, 89, 107-127, 129, 133, 144, 154.
Philip V, 127, 128, 144.
Philip VI, 128-133, 144.
Place:
de la Bastille, 295, 344.
du Carrousel, 269, 329, 341, 351, 361.
du Châtelet, 360, 362.
de la Concorde, 270, 281, 287, 302, 322, 330, 331, 349, 371, 375.
Louis XV; see Place de la Concorde.
de la Nation, 267, 348, 377.
de la Révolution; see Place de la Concorde.
du Trône, 267, 302, 348.
Vendôme, 267, 276, 327, 328.
des Victoires, 267, 311, 328.
Pont:
Alexander III, 379.
d’Arcole, 343.
des Arts, 319.
d’Austerlitz, 319.
au Change, 66, 67.
Grand, 66.
d’Iena, 319.
Neuf, 66, 118, 227, 239, 240, 286, 327.
Notre Dame, 172, 195, 207, 240, 286.
Petit, 38, 181, 195, 196, 285, 289.
Porte:
de Buci, 181.
Saint Antoine, 147, 185, 236, 262.
Saint Denis, 236, 266.
Saint Honoré, 184.
Saint Jacques, 185.
Saint Martin, 266.
Pré aux Clercs, 141.
Prefecture of Police, 56.
Quarter Saint Honoré, 251.
Quinze-Vingts, 96.
Regent, duke of Orleans, 274, 285.
Regents, Women, 90, 91.
Richelieu, 96, 238, 249-252, 254, 257, 258-260.
Robert the Pious, 30, 47, 49-52.
Robert the Strong, 41, 47.
Rollo, 37, 39, 40.
Saint Denis, 13, 49.
Sainte Geneviève, 5, 14, 18, 19, 20, 30, 39, 207, 232, 307.
Salpêtrière, 272.
School of Fine Arts; see Palais des Beaux Arts.
Sorbonne, 96, 202.
Strasburg Oath, 36.
Temple, 65, 119, 228, 301, 305, 318, 351, 376.
Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, 362.
Tour de Nesle, 82, 83, 124, 127, 181, 204, 258.
Tower of Clovis, 21.
Tower of John the Fearless, 194, 290.
Tribunal of Commerce, 49, 362.
University of France, 35, 64, 78, 82, 98, 122, 145, 190, 192, 193, 202, 270, 320.
University of Paris; see Sorbonne.
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] Paraphrased by James Ravenel Smith.
[3] From Longfellow’s “Poetry of Europe.”
[4] Translated by Louisa Stuart Costello.
[5] See Chapter VII.
[7] Since then the Archbishop of Paris has lived near the Invalides.
[9] See plan, Chapter XXII.
[10] Sole rulers in italics.
[11] Louis V left no children. The crown should have gone to his uncle, Charles, Duke of Lorraine, but the nobles elected Hugh Capet to be king (987).
[12] See Chronological Table of Rulers, page 394.