PARIS AND ITS STORY

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Rue St. Antoine.

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P A R I S
AND   ITS   STORY

BY
T.   O K E Y



ILLUSTRATED  BY
KATHERINE KIMBALL
& O.   F.   M.   WARD

1904
LONDON:   J.   M.   DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.

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PREFACE

THE History of Paris, says Michelet, is the history of the French monarchy. The aim of the writer in the following pages has been to narrate the story of the capital city of France on the lines thus indicated, dwelling, however, in the earlier chapters rather more on its legendary aspect than perhaps an austere historical conscience would approve. But it is precisely a familiarity with these romantic stories, which at least are true in impression if not in fact, that the sojourner in Paris will find most useful, translated as they are in sculpture and in painting on the decoration of her architecture both modern and ancient, and implicit in the nomenclature of her ways. Within the limits of time and space allotted for the work no more than an imperfect outline of a vast subject has been possible. The writer has essayed to compose a story of, not a guide to, Paris. Those who desire the latter may be referred to the excellent manuals of Murray, Bædeker and of Grant Allen—the last named being an admirable companion for the artistically-minded traveller. In controversial matter, such, for instance, as the position of the ancient Grand Pont, the writer has adopted the opinions of the most recent authorities.

The story of Paris presents a marked contrast with that of an Italian city-state whose rise, culmination and fall may be roundly traced. Paris is yet in the stage of lusty growth. Time after time, like a young giantess, she has burst her{vi} cincture of walls, cast off her outworn garments and renewed her armour and vesture. Hers are no grass-grown squares and deserted streets; no ruined splendours telling of pride abased and glory departed; no sad memories of waning cities once the mistresses of sea and land; none of the tears evoked by a great historic tragedy; none of the solemn pathos of decay and death. Paris has more than once tasted the bitterness of humiliation; Norseman, and Briton, Russian and German have bruised her fair body; the dire distress of civic strife has exhausted her strength, but she has always emerged from her trials with marvellous recuperation, more flourishing than before.

Since 1871, when the city, crushed under a two-fold calamity of foreign invasion and of internecine war, seemed doomed to bleed away to feeble insignificance, her prosperity has so increased that house rent has doubled and population risen from 1,825,274 in 1870 to 2,714,068 in 1901. The growth of Paris from the settlement of an obscure Gallic tribe to the most populous, the most cultured, the most artistic, the most delightful and seductive of continental cities has been prodigious, yet withal she has maintained her essential unity, her corporate sense and peculiar individuality. Paris, unlike London, has never expatiated to the effacement of her distinctive features and the loss of civic consciousness. The city has still a definite outline and circumference, and over her gates to-day one may read, Entrée de Paris. The Parisian is, and always has been, conscious of his citizenship, proud of his city, careful of her beauty, jealous of her reputation. The essentials of Parisian life remain unchanged since mediæval{vii} times. Busy multitudes of alert, eager burgesses crowd her streets; ten thousand students stream from the provinces, from Europe, and even from the uttermost parts of the earth, to eat of the bread of knowledge at her University. The old collegiate life is gone, but the arts and sciences are freely taught as of old to all comers; and a lowly peasant lad may carry in his satchel a prime minister’s portfolio or the insignia of a president of the republic, even as his mediæval prototype bore a bishop’s mitre or a cardinal’s hat. The boisterous exuberance of youthful spirits still vents itself in rowdy student life to the scandal of bourgeois placidity, and the poignant self-revelation and gnawing self-reproach of a François Villon find their analogue in the pathetic verse of a Paul Verlaine. Beneath the fair and ordered surface of the normal life of Paris still sleep the fiery passions which, from the days of the Maillotins to those of the Commune, have throughout the crisis of her history ensanguined her streets with the blood of citizens.[1] Let us remember, however, when contrasting the modern history of Paris with that of London, that the questions which have stirred her citizens have been not party but dynastic ones, often complicated and embittered by social and religious principles ploughing deep in the human soul, for which men have cared enough to suffer, and to inflict, death.

Those writers who are pleased to trace the permanency of racial traits through the life of a people dwell with satisfaction on passages in ancient authors who describe the Gauls{viii} as quick to champion the cause of the oppressed, prone to war, elated by victory, impatient of defeat, easily amenable to the arts of peace, responsive to intellectual culture; terrible, indefatigable orators but bad listeners, so intolerant of their speakers that at tribal gatherings an official charged to maintain silence would march, sword in hand, towards an interrupter, and after a third warning cut off a portion of his dress. If the concurrent testimony of writers, ancient, mediæval and modern, be of any worth, Gallic vanity is beyond dispute. Dante, expressing the prevailing belief of his age, exclaims, “Now, was there ever people so vain as the Sienese! Certes not the French by far.”[2] Of their imperturbable gaiety and the avidity for new things we have ample testimony, and the course of this story will demonstrate that France, and more especially Paris, has ever been, from the establishment of Christianity to the birth of the modern world at the Revolution, the parent or the fosterer of ideas, the creator of arts, the soldier of the ideal. She has always evinced a wondrous preventive apprehension of coming changes. The earliest of the western people beyond Rome to adopt Christianity, she had established a monastery near Tours a century and a half before St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, had organised his first community at Subiaco. In the Middle Ages Paris became the intellectual light of the Christian world. From the time of the centralisation of the{ix} monarchy at Paris she absorbed in large measure the vital forces of the nation, and all that was greatest in art, science and literature was drawn within her walls until, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she became the centre of learning, taste and culture in Europe.[3] During the first Empire and the Restoration, after the tempest was stilled and the great heritage of the Revolution taken possession of, an amazing outburst of scientific, artistic and literary activity made Paris the Ville Lumière of Europe.

Paris is still the city in Europe where the things of the mind and of taste have most place, where the wheels of life run most smoothly and pleasantly, where the graces and refinements and amenities of social existence, l’art des plaisirs fins, are most highly developed and most widely diffused. There is something in the crisp, luminous air of Paris that quickens the intelligence and stimulates the senses. Even the scent of the wood fires as one emerges from the railway station exhilarates the spirit. The poet Heine used to declare that the traveller could estimate his proximity to Paris by noting the increasing intelligence of the people, and that the very bayonets of the soldiers were more intelligent than those elsewhere. Life, even in its more sensuous and material phases, is less gross and coarse,[4] its pleasures more refined than in London. It is{x} impossible to conceive the pit of a London theatre stirred to fury by a misplaced adjective in a poetical drama, or to imagine anything comparable to the attitude of a Parisian audience at the cheap holiday performances at the Français or the Odéon, where the severe classic tragedies of Racine, of Corneille, of Victor Hugo, or the well-worn comedies of Molière or of Beaumarchais are played with small lure of stage upholstery, and listened to with close attention by a popular audience responsive to the exquisite rhythm and grace of phrasing, the delicate and restrained tragic pathos, and the subtle comedy of their great dramatists. To witness a première at the Français is an intellectual feast. The brilliant house; the pit and stalls filled with black-coated critics; the quick apprehension of the points and happy phrases; the universal and excited discussion between the acts; the atmosphere of keen and alert intelligence pervading the whole assembly; the quaint survival of the time-honoured “overture”—three knocks on the boards—dating back to Roman times when the Prologus of the comedy stepped forth and craved the attention of the audience by three taps of his wand; the chief actor’s approach to the front of the stage after the play is ended to announce to Mesdames and Messieurs what in these days they have known for weeks before from the press, that “the piece we have had the honour of playing” is by such a one—all combine to make an indelible impression on the mind of the foreign spectator.

The Parisian is the most orderly and well-behaved of citizens. The custom of the queue is a spontaneous expression{xi} of his love of fairness and order. Even the applause in theatres is organised. A spectacle such as that witnessed at the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885, the most solemn and impressive of modern times, is inconceivable in London. The whole population (except the Faubourg St. Germain and the clergy) from the poorest labourer to the heads of the State issued forth to file past the coffin of their darling poet, lifted up under the Arc de Triomphe, and by their multitudinous presence honoured his remains borne on a poor bare hearse to their last resting-place in the Panthéon. Amid this vast crowd, mainly composed of labourers, mechanics and the petite bourgeoisie, assembled to do homage to the memory of the poet of democracy, scarcely an agent was seen; the people were their own police, and not a rough gesture, not a trace of disorder marred the sublime scene. The Parisian democracy is the most enlightened and the most advanced in Europe, and it is to Paris that the dearest hopes and deepest sympathies of generous spirits will ever go forth in

It now remains for the writer to acknowledge his indebtedness to the following among other authorities, which are here enumerated to obviate the necessity for the use of repeated footnotes, and to indicate to readers who may desire to pursue the study of the history of Paris in more detail, some works among the enormous mass of literature on the subject that will repay perusal.{xii}

For the general history of France the monumental Histoire de France now in course of publication, edited by E. Lavisse; Michelet’s Histoire de France, Récits de l’Histoire de France, and Procès des Templiers; Victor Duruy, Histoire de France; Histoire de France racontée par les Contemporains, edited by B. Zeller; Carl Faulmann, Illustrirte Geschichte der Buchdruckerkunst; the Chronicles of Gregory of Tours, Richer, Abbo, Joinville, Villani, Froissart, Antonio Morosini; De Comines; Géographie Historique, by A. Guerard; Froude’s essay on the Templars; Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, by T. Douglas Murray; Paris sous Philip le Bel, edited by H. Geraud.

For the later Monarchy, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, the Histories of Carlyle, Mignet, Michelet and Louis Blanc; the Origines de la France Contemporaine, by Taine; the Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VIII.; the Memoirs of the Duc de St. Simon, of Madame Campan, Madame Vigée-Lebrun, of Camille Desmoulins, Madame Roland, Paul Louis Courier; the Journal de Perlet; Histoire de la Societé Française pendant la Revolution, by J. de Goncourt; Goethe’s Die Campagne in Frankreich, 1792; Légendes et Archives de la Bastille, by F. Funck Brentano; Life of Napoleon I., by J. Holland Rose; L’Europe et la Revolution Française by Albert Sorel; Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution, by C. D. Hazen. For the particular history of Paris, the exhaustive and comprehensive Histoire de la Ville de Paris, by the learned Benedictine priests, Michel Félibien and Guy Alexis Lobineau; the so-called Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, edited by L. Lalanne; Paris Pendant la Domination Anglaise, by A. Longnon; the{xiii} more modern Paris à Travers les Ages, by M. F. Hoffbauer, E. Fournier and others; the Topographie Historique du Vieux Paris, by A. Berty and H. Legrand. Howell’s Familiar Letters, Coryat’s Crudities, and Evelyn’s Diary, contain useful matter. For the chapters on Historical Paris, E. Fournier’s Promenade Historique dans Paris, Chronique des Rues de Paris, Enigmes des Rues des Paris; the Marquis de Rochegude’s Guide Pratique à Travers le Vieux Paris, and the excellent Nouvel Itinéraire Guide Artistique et Archéologique de Paris, by C. Normand, now appearing in fascicules published by the Société des Amis des Monuments Parisiens, have been largely drawn upon and supplemented by affectionate memories of an acquaintance with the city dating back for more than thirty years, and by notes of pilgrimages, under the guidance of a member of the Positivist Society of Paris, made in 1891 through revolutionary Paris and Versailles.

For personal help and information the writer desires to express his obligations to Monsieur Lafenestre, Director of the Louvre: Monsieur L. Bénédite, Director of the Luxembourg; Monsieur G. Redon, architect of the Louvre and the Tuileries; Professor A. Legros; and for help in proof-reading to Mr James Britten.{xiv}

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CONTENTS

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LINE ILLUSTRATIONS BY KATHARINE KIMBALL

LIST OF MAPS

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PARIS AND ITS STORY

CHAPTER I

GALLO-ROMAN PARIS

THE mediæval scribe in the fulness of a divinely-revealed cosmogony is wont to begin his story at the creation of the world or at the confusion of tongues, to trace the building of Troy by the descendants of Japheth, and the foundation of his own native city by one of the Trojan princes made a fugitive in Europe by proud Ilion’s fall. Such, he was very sure, was the origin of Padua, founded by Antenor and by Priam, son of King Priam, whose grandson, yet another Priam, by his great valour and wisdom became the monarch of a mighty people, called from their fair hair, Galli or Gallici. And of the strong city built on the little island in the Seine who could have been its founder but the ravisher of fair Helen—Sir Paris himself? The naïve etymology of the time was evidence enough.

But the modern writer, as he compares the geographical position of the capitals of Europe, is tempted to exclaim, Cherchez le marchand! for he perceives that their unknown founders were dominated by two considerations—facilities for commerce and protection from enemies: and before the era of the Roman roadmakers, commerce meant facilities for water carriage. As the early settlers in Britain sailed up the Thames, they must have observed, where the river’s bed begins somewhat to narrow, a hill rising from the continuous{2} expanse of marshes from its mouth, easily defended on the east and west by those fortified posts which, in subsequent times, became the Tower of London and Barnard’s Castle. If we scan a map of France, we shall see that the group of islands on and around which Paris now stands, lies in the fruitful basin of the Seine, known as the Isle de France, near the convergence of three rivers; for on the east the Marne and the Oise, and on the south the Yonne, discharge their waters into the main stream on its way to the sea. In ancient times the great line of Phœnician, Greek and Roman commerce followed northwards the valleys of the Rhone and of the Saone, whose upper waters are divided from those of the Yonne only by the plateau of Dijon and the calcareous slopes of Burgundy. The Parisii were thus admirably placed for tapping the profitable commerce of north-west Europe, and by the waters of the Eure, lower down the Seine, were able to touch the fertile valley of the Loire. The northern rivers of Gaul were all navigable by the small boats of the early traders, and, in contrast with the impetuous sweep of the Rhone and the Loire in the south and west, flowed with slow and measured stream:[5] they were rarely flooded, and owing to the normally mild winters, still more rarely blocked by ice. Moreover, the Parisian settlement stood near the rich corn-land of La Beauce, and to the north-east, over the open plain of La Valois, lay the way to Flanders. It was one of the river stations on the line of the Phœnician traders in tin, that most precious and rare of ancient metals, between Marseilles and Britain, and in the early Middle Ages became, with Lyons and Beaucaire, one of the chief fairs of that historic trade route which the main lines of railway traffic still follow to-day. The island now known as the Cité, which the founders of Paris chose for their stronghold, was the largest of the group which lay involved in the many{3} windings of the Seine, and was embraced by a natural moat of deep waters. To north and south lay hills, marshes and forests, and all combined to give it a position equally adapted for defence and for commerce.

THE CITÉ.

Point Du Jour.

The Parisii were a small tribe of Gauls who were content to place themselves under the protection of the more powerful Senones. Their island city was the home of a prosperous community of shipmen and merchants, but it is not until the Conquest of Gaul by the Romans that Lutetia, for such was its Gallic name, enters the great pageant of written history. It was—

“Armèd Cæsar falcon-eyed,”[6]

who saw its great military importance, built a permanent camp there and made it a central entrepôt for food and{4} munitions of war. And when in 52 B.C. the general rising of the tribes under Vercingetorix threatened to scour the Romans out of Gaul and to destroy the whole fabric of Cæsar’s ambition, he sent his favourite lieutenant, Labienus, to seize Lutetia where the Northern army of the Gauls was centred. Labienus crossed the Seine at Melun, fixed his camp on a spot near the position of the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and began the first of the historic sieges for which Paris is so famous. But the Gaulish commander burnt the bridges, fired the city and took up his position on the slopes of the hill of Lutetius (St. Genevieve) in the south, and aimed at crushing his enemy between his own forces and an army advancing from the north. Labienus having learnt that Cæsar was in a tight place, owing to a check at Clermont and the defection of the Eduans, by a masterly piece of engineering recrossed the Seine by night at the Point du Jour, and when the Gauls awoke in the morning they beheld the Roman legions in battle array on the plain of Grenelle beneath. They made a desperate attempt to drive them against the river, but they lost their leader and were almost annihilated by the superior arms and strategy of the Romans. Labienus was able to join his master at Sens, and the irrevocable subjugation of the Gauls soon followed. With the tolerant and enlightened conquerors came the Roman peace, Roman law, Roman roads, the Roman schoolmaster; and a more humane religion abolished the Druidical sacrifices. Lutetia was rebuilt and became a prosperous and, next to Lyons, the most important of Gallo-Roman cities. It lay equidistant from Germany and Britain and at the issue of valleys which led to the upper and lower Rhine. The quarries of Mount Lutetius produced an admirable building stone, kind to work and hardening well under exposure to the air. Its white colour may have won for Paris the name of Leucotia, or the White City, by which it is sometimes called by ancient writers. Cæsar had done his work well, for so completely were the Gauls Romanised, that{5} by the fifth or sixth century their very language had disappeared.[7]

But towards the end of the third century three lowly wayfarers were journeying from Rome along the great southern road to Paris, charged by the Pope with a mission fraught with greater issues to Gaul than the Cæsars and all their legions. Let us recall somewhat of the appearance of the city which Dionysius, Rusticus and Eleutherius saw as they neared its suburbs and came down what is now known as the Rue St. Jacques. After passing the arches of the aqueduct, two of which exist to this day, that crossed the valley of Arcueil and brought the waters of Rungis,[8] Paray and Montjean to the baths of the imperial palace, they would discern on the hill of Lutetius to their right the Roman camp, garrison and cemetery. Lower down on its eastern slopes they would catch a glimpse of a great amphitheatre, capable of accommodating 10,000 spectators, part of which was laid bare in 1869 by some excavations made for the Campagnie des Omnibus between the Rues Monge and Linné. Unhappily, the public subscription initiated by the Académie des Inscriptions to purchase the property proved inadequate, and the Company retained possession of the land. In 1883, however, other excavations were undertaken in the Rue de Navarre, which resulted in the discovery of the old aqueduct that drained the amphitheatre, and some other remains, which have been preserved and made into a public park.

REMAINS OF ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE.

On their left, where now stands the Lycée St. Louis, would be the theatre of Lutetia, and further on the imposing and magnificent palace of the Cæsars, with its gardens sloping down to the Seine. The turbulent little stream of the Bièvre flowed by the foot of Mons Lutetius on the east, entering the main river opposite the eastern limit of the{6} civitas of Lutetia, gleaming white before them and girdled by Aurelian’s wall[9] and the waters of the Seine. A narrow eel-shaped island, subsequently known as the Isle de Galilée,[10] lay between the Isle of the Cité and the southern bank; two islands, the Isles de Notre Dame and des Vaches, divided by a narrow channel to the east, and two small islets, the Isles des Juifs and de Bussy, to the west. Another islet, the Isle de Louviers, lay near the northern bank beyond the two eastern islands. Crossing a wooden bridge, where now stands the Petit Pont, they would enter the forum (Place du Parvis Notre Dame) under a triumphal arch. Here would be the very foyer of the city; a little way to the left{7} the governor’s palace and the basilica, or hall of justice;[11] to the right the temple of Jupiter. As they crossed the island they would find it linked to the northern bank by another wooden bridge, replaced by the present Pont Notre Dame.[12] In the distance to the north stood Mons Martis (Montmartre) crowned with the temples of Mars and Mercury, four of whose columns are preserved in the church of St. Pierre; and to the west the aqueduct from Passy bringing its waters to the mineral baths located on the site of the present Palais Royal. A road, now the Rue St. Martin, led to the north; to the east lay the marshy land which is still known as the quarter of the Marais.

Denis and his companions preached and taught the new faith unceasingly and met martyrs’ deaths. By the mediæval hagiographers St. Denis is invariably confused with Dionysius, the Areopagite, said to have been converted by St. Paul and sent on his mission to France by Pope Clement. In the Golden Legend he is famed to have converted much people to the faith, and “did do make many churches,” and at length was brought before the judge who “did do smite off the heads of the three fellows by the temple of Mercury. And anon the body of St. Denis raised himself up and bare his head between his arms, as the angels led him two leagues from the place which is said the hill of the martyrs unto the place where he now resteth by his election and the purveyance of God, when was heard so great and sweet a melody of angels that many that heard it believed in our Lord.” In an interesting picture, No. 995 in Room X. of the Louvre, said to have been painted for Jean sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy, by Malouel, and finished at his death in 1415 by Bellechose, St. Denis in bishop’s robes{8} is seen kneeling before the block; the headsman raises his axe; one of the saint’s companions has already met his fate, the other awaits it resignedly. To the left, St. Denis in prison is receiving the Sacred Host from the hands of Christ.

Roman Baths in Musée De Cluny.

The work that Denis and his companions began was more fully achieved in the fourth century by the rude Pannonion soldier, St. Martin, who also evangelised at Paris. He is the best-known of Gallic saints, and the story of his conversion one of the most popular in Christendom. When stationed at Amiens he was on duty one bitter cold day at the city gate, and espied a poor naked beggar asking alms. Soldiers in garrison are notoriously impecunious, and Martin had nothing to give; but drawing his sword he cleaved his mantle in twain, and bestowed half upon the shivering wretch at his feet. That very night the Lord Jesus appeared to him in a dream surrounded by angels, having on His shoulders the half of the cloak which Martin had given to the beggar. Turning to the angels, Jesus said: “Know ye who hath thus arrayed Me? My servant Martin, though yet unbaptised, hath done this.” After this vision Martin received baptism and remained steadfast in the faith. At length, desiring to devote himself wholly to Christ, he begged permission to leave the army. The Emperor Julian, who deemed the Christian faith fit only to form souls of slaves, reproached him for his cowardice, for he was yet in the prime of life, being forty years of age. “Put me,” exclaimed Martin, “naked and without defence in the forefront of the battle, and armed with the Cross alone I will not fear to face the enemy.” Early on the following morning the barbarians submitted to the emperor without striking a blow, and thus was victory vouchsafed to Martin’s faith and courage, and he was permitted to leave the army. The illiterate and dauntless soldier became the fiery apostle of the faith, a vigorous iconoclast, throwing down the images of the false gods, breaking their altars in pieces and burning their temples. Of the Roman gods, Mercury, he said, was{9} most difficult to ban, but Jove was merely stupid[13] and brutish, and gave him least trouble. Martin was a democratic saint, of ardent charity and austere devotion. Later in life he founded the monastery of Marmoutier, which grew to be one of the richest in France. His rule was severe; when his monks murmured at the hard fare he bade them remember that cooked herbs and barley bread was the food of the hermits of Africa. “That may be,” answered they, “but we cannot live like the angels.”

On the 16th of March 1711, some workmen, digging a tomb for the archbishop of Paris in the choir of Notre Dame, came upon the walls, six feet below the pavement, of the original Christian basilica over which the modern cathedral is built. In the fabric of these walls the early builders had incorporated the remains of the still earlier temple of Jupiter, which had been destroyed to give place to the Christian church, and among the débris were found the fragments of an altar raised to Jove in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar by the Nautæ, a guild of Parisian merchant-shippers, an altar on whose foyer still remained some of the very burnt wood and incense used in the last pagan sacrifice. The mutilated stones, with their rude Gallo-Roman reliefs and inscriptions, may be seen in the Frigidarium of the Thermæ, the old Roman baths by the Hôtel de Cluny, and are among the most interesting of historical documents in Paris. The Corporation of Nautæ who dedicated this altar to Jove, were the origin of the Commune or Civil Council of Paris, and in later time gave way to the provost[14] of the merchants and the sheriffs of that city. Their device was the Nef, or ship, which is and has been throughout the ages the arms of Paris, and which to this day may be seen carved on the vaultings of the Roman baths.

In the great palace of which these baths formed but a part was enacted that scene so vividly described in the{10} pages of Gibbon, when Julian, after his victories over the Alemanni and the Franks, was acclaimed Augustus by the rebellious troops of Constantius. On a plain outside Paris Julian had admonished the sullen legions, angry at being detached from their victorious and darling commander for service on the Persian frontier, and had urged them to obedience. But at midnight the young Cæsar was awakened by a clamorous and armed multitude besieging the palace, and at early dawn its doors were forced; the reluctant Julian was seized and carried in triumph through the streets to be enthroned and saluted as emperor. He was lifted on a shield, and for diadem, crowned with a military collar. In after life the emperor-philosopher looked back with tender regret to the three winters he spent in Paris before his elevation to the imperial responsibilities and anxieties. He writes of the busy days and meditative nights he passed in his dear Lutetia, with its two wooden bridges, its pure and pleasant waters, its excellent wine. He dwells on the mildness of its climate, where the fig-tree, protected by straw in the winter, grew and fruited. One rigorous season, however, the emperor well remembered[15] when the Seine was blocked by huge masses of ice. Julian, who prided himself on his endurance, at first declined the use of those charcoal fires which to this day are a common and deadly method of supplying heat in Paris. But his rooms were damp and his servants were allowed to introduce them into his sleeping apartment. The Cæsar was almost asphyxiated by the fumes, and his physicians to restore him administered an emetic. Julian in his time was beloved of the Lutetians, for he was a just and tolerant prince whose yoke was easy. He had purged the soil of Gaul from the barbarian invaders, given Lutetia peace and security, and made of it an important, imperial city. His statue, found near Paris, still recalls his memory in the hall of the great baths of the Lutetia he loved so well.{11}

The so-called apostasy of this lover of Plato and worshipper of the Sun, who never went to the wars or travelled without dragging a library of Greek authors after him, was a philosophic reaction against the harsh measures,[16] the bloody and treacherous natures of the Christian emperors, and the fierceness of the Arian controversy. The movement was but a back-wash in the stream of history, and is of small importance. Julian’s successors, Valentinian and Gratian, reversed his policy but shared his love for the fair city on the Seine, and spent some winters there. Lutetia had now become a rich and cultured Gallo-Roman city.{12}

CHAPTER II

THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS—ST. GENEVIEVE—THE CONVERSION OF CLOVIS—THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY

IN the Prologue to Faust the Lord of Heaven justifies the existence of the restless, goading spirit of evil by the fact that man’s activity is all too prone to flag,—

“Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh.”[17]

As with men so with empires: riches and inaction are hard to bear. It was not so much a corruption of public morals as a growing slackness and apathy in public life and an intellectual sloth that hastened the fall of the Roman Empire. Owing to the gradual exhaustion of the supply of slaves its economic basis was crumbling away. The ruling class was content to administer rather than to govern and unwilling or incompetent to grapple with the new order of things.[18] For centuries the Gauls had been untrained in arms and habituated to look to the imperial legions for defence against the half-savage races of men, giants in stature and strength, surging like an angry sea against their boundaries. Towards the end of the fourth century Vandals and Burgundians, Suevi and Alemanni, Goth and Hun, treading on each other’s heels, burst through the Rhine frontier, destroyed the Roman garrisons and forts, and inundated Gaul. Two of these races stayed to form kingdoms: the Burgundians in the fertile plains of the Rhine; the Visigoths in Aquitaine and North Spain, whose aid the Romans were{13} fain to seek to roll back the hordes of Attila’s Huns at Chalons-sur-Marne. This was the last achievement of Roman arms in Gaul, and even that victory was largely due to the courage of the Goths. In the fifth century the confederation of Frankish tribes who had conquered and settled in Belgium saw successive waves of invasion pass by, and determined to have their part in the spoils of Gaul. They soon overran Flanders and the north, and at length under Clovis captured Paris and conquered nearly the whole of Gaul.

The end of the fifth century is the beginning of the evil times of Gallic story. That fair land of France, “one of Nature’s choicest masterpieces, one of Ceres’ chiefest barns for corn, one of Bacchus’ prime wine cellars and of Neptune’s best salt-pits,” became the prey of the barbarian. The whole fabric of civilisation seem doomed to destruction. Gaul had become the richest and most populous of Roman provinces; its learning and literature were noised in Rome; its schools drew students from the mother city herself. But at the end of the sixth century Gregory of Tours deplores the fact that in his time there were neither books, nor readers, nor scholar who could compose in verse or prose, and that only the speech of the rustic was understood. He playfully scolds himself for muddling prepositions and confusing genders and cases, but his duty as a Christian priest is to instruct, not to charm, and so he tells the story of his times in such rustic Latin as he knows. He draws for us a vivid picture of Clovis, the founder of the French monarchy, his savage valour, his astuteness, his regal passion.

After the victory over Syagrius, the shadowy king of the Romans, at Soissons, Clovis was met by St. Rémi, who prayed that a vase of great price and wondrous beauty among the spoil might be returned to him. “Follow us,” said the king, “to Soissons, where the booty will be shared.” Before the division took place Clovis begged that the vase might be{14} accorded to him. His warriors answered: “All, glorious king, is thine.” But before the king could grasp the vase, one, jealous and angry, threw his francisque[19] at it, exclaiming: “Thou shalt have no more than falls to thy lot.” The broken vase was however apportioned to the king, who restored it to the bishop. But Clovis hid the wound in his heart. At the annual review in the Champ de Mars near Paris, the king strode along the line inspecting the weapons of his warriors. He stopped in front of the uncourtly soldier, took his axe from him, complained of its foul state, and flung it angrily on the ground. As the man stooped to pick it up Clovis, with his own axe, cleft his skull in twain, exclaiming: “Thus didst thou to the vase at Soissons.” “Even so,” says Gregory quaintly, “did he inspire all with great fear.”

At this point of our story we meet the first of those noble women, heroic and wise, for whom French history is pre-eminent. In the first half of the fifth century St. Germain of Auxerre and St. Lew of Troyes, chosen by the prelates of France “for to go and quench an heresy that was in Great Britain, now called England, came to Nanterre for to be lodged and harboured and the people came against them for to have their benison. Among the people, St. Germain, by the enseignements of the Holy Ghost, espied out the little maid St. Genevieve, and made her come to him, and kissed her head and demanded her name, and whose daughter she was, and the people about her said that her name was Genevieve, and her father Severe, and her mother Geronce, which came unto him, and the holy man said: Is this child yours? They answered: Yea. Blessed be ye, said the holy man, when God hath given to you so noble lineage, know ye for certain that the day of her nativity the angels sang and hallowed great mystery in heaven with great joy and gladness.{15}”

When on the morn she was brought to him again, he saw in her a sign celestial, commended her to God, and prayed that she would remember him in her orisons, and on his return to Paris, finding her in the city, he commended her to its people. Tidings came that “Attila, the felon knight of Hungary, had enterprised to destroy and waste the parts of France,” and the burgesses of Paris for great dread they had, sent their goods into cities more sure. Genevieve caused the good women of the town “to wake in fastings and orisons, and bade the merchants not to remove their goods for the city should have none harm.” At first the people hardened their hearts and reviled her, but at St. Germain’s prayers they believed in her, and our Lord “for her love did so much that the tyrants approached not Paris, thanks and glory to God and honour to the virgin.” At the siege of Paris by Childeric and his Franks, when the people were wasted by sickness and famine, “the holy virgin, that pity constrained, went by the Seine to Arcy and Troyes for to go fetch by ship some victuals. She stilled by her prayers a furious tempest and brought the ships back laden with wheat.” When the city was at length captured, King Childeric, although a paynim, saved at her intercession the lives of his prisoners, and one day, to escape her importunate pleadings for the lives of some criminals, fled out of the gates of Paris and shut them behind him.

The saint lived to build a church over the tomb of St. Denis and to see Clovis become a Christian. She died in 509, and was buried on the hill of Lutetius, which ever since has borne her name.

TOWER OF CLOVIS.

“Her hope,” says the Golden Legend, from which we have chiefly drawn her story, “was nothing in worldly things, but in heavenly, for she believed in the holy scriptures that saith: Whoso giveth to the poor liveth for availe. The reward which they receive that give to poor people, the Holy Ghost had showed to her long tofore, and therefore she ceased not to weep, to adore and to do{16} works of pity, for she knew well that she was none other in this world but a pilgrim passing.”

The faithful built a little wooden oratory over her tomb, which Clovis and his wife Clotilde replaced by a great basilica and monastery which became their burial-place. All that now recalls the church, whose length the king measured by the distance he could hurl his axe, is the so-called Tower of Clovis, a thirteenth-century structure in the Rue Clovis. The golden shrine of the saint,[20] which reached thirty feet above the high altar, was confiscated by the Revolutionists to pay their armies, and what remains of her relics is now treasured in the neighbouring church of St. Etienne du Mont.

The conversion of Clovis is the capital fact of early French history. His queen Clotilde, niece of the Burgundian king, had long[21] importuned him to declare himself a Christian. He had consented to the baptism of their firstborn, but the infant’s death within a week seemed an admonition from his own jealous gods. A second son, however, recovered from grievous sickness at his wife’s prayers and this, aided perhaps by a shrewd insight into the trend of events, induced him to lend a more willing ear to the teachers of the new Faith. In 496 the Franks were at death grapple with their German foes at Tolbiac. Clovis, when the fight went against him, invoked the God of the Christians and prayed to be delivered from his enemies. His cry was heard and the advent of the new Lord of Battles was winged with victory.

There was a stirring scene that Christmas at Rheims, when Clovis with his two sisters and three thousand of{18} his warriors marched through the streets, all hung with cloth of many colours, into the cathedral which was glittering with innumerable candles and perfumed with incense of divine odour. Clovis was the first to be baptised. “Bend thy neck, gentle Sicamber,” cried St. Rémi. “Adore what thou didst burn: burn what thou didst adore.” When the bishop was reading the Gospel story of the Passion, the king, thrilled with indignation, cried out: “Ah! had I been there with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ.”

The conversion of Clovis was a triumph for the Church: in her struggle with the Arian heresy in Gaul, she was now able to enforce the arguments of the pen by the edge of the sword. The enemies of Clovis were the enemies of the Church, and as the representative of the Eastern emperor, she arrayed him, after the defeat of the Arian Goths in the South, in purple and hailed him Consul and Augustus at Tours. Her scribes are tender to his memory, for his Christianity was marked by few signs of grace. He remained the same savage monarch as before, and did not scruple to affirm his dynasty and extend his empire by treachery and by the assassination of his kinsmen. To the Franks, Jesus was but a new and more puissant tribal deity. “Long live the Christ who loves the Franks,” writes the author of the prologue to the Salic law; and Clothaire I., when the pangs of death seized him in his villa at Compiègne, cried out, “Who is this God of Heaven that thus allows the greatest kings of the earth to perish?” Nor was their ideal of kingship any loftier. Their kingdom was not a trust, but a possession to be divided among their heirs, and the jealousy and strife excited by the repeated partition among sons, make the history of the Merovingian[22] dynasty a tale of cruelty and treachery whose every page is stained with blood.

Bois de Boulogne—Lac Supérieur

In the ninth century a story was current among the{19} people of France which admirably symbolises the fate of the dynasty. One night as Childeric, father of Clovis, lay by the side of Basine, his wife, she awoke him and said, “Arise, O king, look in the courtyard of thy dwelling and tell thy servant what thou shalt see.” Childeric arose and saw beasts pass by that seemed like unto lions, unicorns and leopards. He returned to his wife and told her what he had seen. And Basine said to him: “Master, go once again and tell thy servant what thou shalt see.” Childeric went forth anew and saw beasts passing by like unto bears and wolves. Having related this to his wife she bade him go forth yet a third time. He now saw dogs and other baser animals rending each other to pieces. Then said Basine to Childeric: “What thou hast seen with thine eyes shall verily come to pass. A son shall be born to us who will be a lion for courage: the sons of our sons shall be like unto leopards and unicorns: they in their turn shall bring forth children like unto bears and wolves for their voracity. The last of those whom thou sawest shall come for the end and destruction of the kingdom.”

Clovis, in 508, made Paris the official capital of his realm, and at his death in 511 divided his possessions between his four sons—Thierry, Clodomir, Childebert, and Clothaire. Clodomir after a short reign met his death in battle, leaving his children to the guardianship of their grandmother, Clotilde. One day messengers came to her in the palace of the Thermæ from Childebert and Clothaire praying that their nephews might be entrusted to them. Believing they were to be trained in kingly offices that they might succeed their father in due time, Clotilde granted their prayer and two of the children were sent to them in the palace of the Cité. Soon came another messenger, bearing a pair of shears and a naked sword, and Clotilde was bidden to determine the fate of her wards and to choose for them between the cloister and the edge of the sword. An angry exclamation escaped her: “If they are not to be{20} raised to the throne, I would rather see them dead than shorn.” The messenger waited to hear no more and hastened back to the two kings. Clothaire then seized the elder of the children and stabbed him under the armpit. The younger, at the sight of his brother’s blood, flung himself at Childebert’s feet, burst into tears, and cried: “Help me, dear father, let me not die even as my brother.” Childebert’s heart was softened and he begged for the child’s life. Clothaire’s only answer was a volley of insults and a threat of death if he protected the victim. Childebert then disintwined the child’s tender arms clasping his knees—he was but six years of age—and pushed him to his brother, who drove a dagger into his breast. The tutors and servants of the children were then butchered, and Clothaire rode calmly to his palace, to become at his brother’s death, in 558, sole king of the Franks. The third child, Clodoald, owing to the devotion of faithful servants escaped, and was hidden for some time in Provence. Later in life he returned to Paris and built a monastery at a place still known by his name (St. Cloud) about two leagues from the city.

Clothaire himself had narrowly escaped assassination when allied with Thierry during the wars with the Thuringians. Thierry invited his brother one day to a conference, having previously hidden some armed men behind the hangings in his tent. But the drapery was too short, and Clothaire as he entered caught sight of the assassins’ feet peeping through. He retained his arms and his escort. Thierry invented some fable to explain the interview, embraced his brother and bestowed on him a heavy silver plate.

The fruits of kingship were bitter to Clothaire. Ere two years were past his rebellious and adulterous son, Chramm, escaped to Brittany and raised an army against him. Chramm and his allies were defeated, himself, his wife and children captured. Clothaire spared none. Chramm was strangled with a handkerchief, and his wife and children{21} were cast into a peasant’s hut which was set on fire and all perished in the flames. Next year the king took cold while hunting near Compiègne, fell sick of a fever and died.

Four out of seven sons had survived him, and again the kingdom was divided. Charibert, king of Paris, soon died, and yet again a partition was made among the three survivors. To Siegbert fell Austrasia or Eastern France as far as the Rhine: to Chilperic, Neustria or Western France to the borders of Brittany and the Loire: Gontram’s lot was Burgundy. Once more the consuming flames of passion and greed burst forth, this time fanned by the fierce breath of feminine rivalry. Siegbert had married Brunehaut, daughter of the Visigoth king of Spain: Chilperic had espoused her sister, Galowinthe, after repudiating his first wife, Adowere. When the new queen of Neustria came to her throne she found herself the rival of Fredegonde, a common servant, with whom Chilperic had been living. He soon tired of his new wife, a gentle and pliant creature; Fredegonde regained her supremacy and one morning Galowinthe was found strangled in bed. The news came to the court of Austrasia and Brunehaut goaded King Siegbert to avenge her sister’s death. Meanwhile Chilperic had married Fredegonde, who quickly compassed the murder of her only rival, the repudiated queen, Adowere. At the intervention of Gontram war was, for a time, averted, and Chilperic, by the judgment of the whole people, made to compensate Brunehaut by the restoration of her sister’s dowry. But Chilperic soon drew the sword and civil war again devastated the land. By foreign aid Siegbert captured and spoiled Paris and compelled a peace. Scarcely, however, had the victor dismissed his German allies, when Chilperic fell upon him again. Siegbert now determined to make an end. He entered Paris, and the Neustrians having accepted him as king, he prepared to crush his enemy at Tournay. As he set forth, St. Germain, bishop of Paris, seized his horse’s bridle and warned him that the grave he was {22}digging for his brother would swallow him too. It was of no avail. He marched to Vitry and was proclaimed king of Neustria. After the proclamation two messengers desired to see him. As he stood between them listening to their suit he was stabbed on either side by two long poisoned knives: the assassins had been sent by Fredegonde. Chilperic now hastened to Paris and seized the royal treasure. Brunehaut’s son, Childebert II., a child of five, was, however, stolen away from the palace in a basket by one of Siegbert’s faithful servants and proclaimed king by the warriors.

But Fredegonde’s tale of blood was not yet complete. She soon learned that Merovée, one of Chilperic’s two sons by Adowere, had married Brunehaut. Merovée followed the rest of her victims, and Clovis, the second son, together with a sister of Adowere, next glutted her vengeance. “One day, after leaving the Synod of Paris,” writes St. Gregory, “I had bidden King Chilperic adieu and had withdrawn conversing with the bishop of Albi. As we crossed the courtyard of the palace[23] he said: ‘Seest thou not what I perceive above this roof?’ I answered, ‘I see only a second building which the king has had built.’ He asked again, ‘Seest thou naught else?’ I weened he spoke in jest and did but answer—‘If thou seest aught else, prithee show it unto me.’ Then uttering a deep sigh, he said: ‘I see the sword of God’s wrath suspended over this house.’” Shortly after this conversation Chilperic having returned from the chase to his royal villa of Chelles, was leaning on the shoulder of one of his companions to descend from his horse, when Landeric, servant of Fredegonde, stabbed him to death.

Thirty years were yet to pass before the curtain falls on the acts of the rival queens, their sons and grandsons, but the heart revolts at the details of the wars and lusts of these savage potentates. Gregory begins the fifth book of his Annals by expressing the weariness that falls upon him when he recalls the manifold civil wars of the Franks.{23}

Rue St. Jacques.

Let us make an end of this part of our story. By her son, Clothaire II., Fredegonde continued to dominate Neustria: Brunehaut ruled over Austrasia and Burgundy through her sons Theodobert II. and Thierry II. Battle and murder had destroyed Brunehaut’s children and her children’s children until none were left to rule over the realms but herself and the four sons of Thierry II. The nobles, furious at the further tyranny of a cruel and imperious woman, plotted her ruin, and in 613, when Brunehaut, sure of victory, marched with two armies against Clothaire II., she was betrayed to him, her implacable enemy. He reproached her with the death of ten kings, and set her on a camel for three days to be mocked and insulted by the army. The old and fallen queen was then tied to the tail of a horse: the creature was lashed into fury and soon all that remained of the proud queen was a shapeless mass of carrion. The traditional place where Brunehaut met her death is still shown at the corner of the Rue St. Honoré and the Rue de l’Arbre Sec. Thierry’s four sons had already been put to death.

In 597 her rival Fredegonde, at the height of her prosperity, had died peacefully in bed, full of years, and was buried in the church of St. Vincent (St. Germain des Prés) by the side of Chilperic, her husband, and Clothaire II. became sole monarch of the three kingdoms.

Amid all this ruin and desolation, when the four angels of the Euphrates seem to have been loosed on Gaul, one force was silently at work knitting up the ravelled ends of the rent fabric of civilisation and tending a lamp which burned with the promise of ideals nobler far than those which fed the ancient faith and polity. The Christian bishops were everywhere filling the empty curule chairs in the cities and provinces of Gaul. At the end of the sixth century society lived in the Church and by the Church, and the sees of the archbishops and bishops corresponded to the Roman administrative divisions. All that was best in the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy was drawn into her bosom, for{24} she was the one power making for unity and good government. From one end of the land to the other the bishops visited and corresponded with each other. They alone had communion of ideas, common sentiments and common interests. St. Gregory, bishop of Tours, was the son of a senator; St. Germain of Auxerre was a man of noble lineage, who had already exercised high public functions before he was made a bishop. St. Germain of Autun was ever on the move, now in Brittany, now at Paris, now at Arles, to crush heresy, to threaten a barbarian potentate, or to sear the conscience and, if need were, ban the person of a guilty Christian king. The bishop of Trèves, seeing the horses of some royal Frankish envoys grazing in the wheat-fields of the peasants, threatened to excommunicate them if they spoiled the substance of the poor, and himself drove the horses away.

By the end of the sixth century two hundred and thirty-eight monastic institutions had been founded in Gaul, and from the sixth to the eighth century, eighty-three churches were built. The monasteries were so many nurseries of the industry, knowledge and learning which had not perished in the barbarian invasions; so many cities of refuge from violence and rapine, where the few who thirsted after righteousness and burned with charity might find shelter and protection. “Every letter traced on paper,” said an old abbot, “is a blow to the devil.” The ecclesiastical and monastic schools took the place of the destroyed Roman day-schools, and whatever modicum of learning the Frankish courts could boast of, was due to the monks and nuns of their time; for some at least of these potentates when not absorbed in the gratification of their lusts, their vengeance, greed, or ambition, were possessed by nobler instincts.

Brunehaut, nurtured in the more cultured atmosphere of the Visigoth court of Spain, protected commerce and kept the Roman roads[24] in repair, founded monasteries and corresponded with Gregory the Great, who commended to{25} her care the safety of his missionaries passing through her dominions to convert the Angles across the straits.

Chilperic, whom Gregory of Tours brands as the Herod and Nero of his time, plumed himself on his piety, was concerned at the blasphemies of the Jews, and forced on them conversion or exile at the sword’s point. He composed Latin hymns, and discussed the nature of the Trinity with Gregory and the bishop of Albi. He sought to reform the alphabet by the addition of new letters which corresponded to the guttural sounds in the Frankish tongue, and ordered that the old alphabet should be erased from the children’s books with pumice stone in all the cities of his kingdom, and the reformed alphabet substituted for it.

Among the wives of Clothaire I. was the gentle Radegonde, who turned with horror from the bloody scenes of the palace to live in works of charity with the poor and suffering, and in holy communion with priests and bishops. She was at length consecrated a deaconess by St. Medard, donned the habit of a nun, and founded a convent at Poitiers, where the poet Fortunatus had himself ordained a priest that he might be near her. Radegonde’s memory is dear to us in England, for it was a small company of her nuns who settled on the Green Croft by the river bank below Cambridge, and founded a priory whose noble church and monastic buildings were subsequently incorporated in Jesus College when the nunnery was suppressed by Bishop Alcock in 1496.

ST. GERMAIN DES PRÉS.

St. Julien Le Pauvre.

To St. Germain of Autun, made bishop in 555, Paris owes one of her earliest ecclesiastical foundations. His influence over Childebert, king of Paris, was great. He obtained an order that those who refused to destroy pagan idols in their possession were to answer to the king, and when Childebert and his warriors, seized by an irresistible fighting impulse, marched into Spain, and were bought off the siege and sack of Saragossa by the present of the tunic of St. Vincent, he induced the king to found the abbey and church of St. Vincent (St. Germain des Prés), to receive{26} the relic. In Childebert’s reign was begun on the site of the present Cathedral of Notre Dame a splendid basilica, so magnificently decorated that it was compared to Solomon’s Temple for the beauty and the delicacy of its art. During this great outburst of zeal and devotion another monastery was established and dedicated to St. Vincent, which subsequently{27} became associated with the name of the earlier St. Germain of Auxerre (l’Auxerrois).

A curious episode is found in Gregory’s Chronicle, which is characteristic of the times, and proves that a monastery and church of St. Julien le Pauvre were already in existence. An impostor, claiming to have the relics of St. Vincent and St. Felix, came to Paris, but refused to deposit them with the bishop for verification. He was arrested and searched, and the so-called relics were found to consist of mole’s teeth, the bones of mice, some bear’s claws and other rubbish. They were flung into the Seine and the impostor was put in prison. Gregory, who was lodging in the monastery of St. Julien le Pauvre, went into the church shortly after midnight to say matins, and found the creature, who had escaped from the bishop’s prison, dead drunk on the pavement. He had him dragged away into a corner, but so intolerable was the stench that the pavement was purified with water and sweet smelling herbs. When the bishops, who were at Paris for a synod, met at dinner the next day, the impostor was identified as a fugitive slave of the bishop of Tarbes.

At the end of the sixth century we bid adieu to St. Gregory of Tours, gentlest of annalists. Courageous and independent before kings, he had a pitying heart for the poor and suffering, and bewails the loss of many sweet little babes of Christ, during the plague of 580, whom he had warmed at his breast, carried in his arms, and fed tenderly with his hands.

Clothaire II. was a pious king in his way, interested in letters, a munificent patron of the Church, but overfond of the chase and inheriting the savage instincts of his race in dealing with enemies. After quelling a Saxon revolt he is said to have killed all the warriors whose stature exceeded the length of his sword. Dagobert the Great, his son, who succeeded him in 628, was the most enlightened and mightiest of the Merovingian kings. He and his favourite minister, St. Eloy, goldsmith and bishop (founder of the{28} convent which long bore his name), are enshrined in the hearts of the people in many a song and ballad:—St. Eloy, with his good humour, his happy countenance, his eloquence, gentleness, modesty, wit, and wide charity; Dagobert, the Solomon of the Franks, the terror of the oppressor, the darling of the poor. The great king was fond of Paris and established himself there when not scouring his kingdom to administer justice or to crush his enemies. He was the second founder of the monastery of St. Denis, which he rebuilt and endowed, and to which he gave much importance by the establishment there of a great fair, which soon drew merchants from all parts of Europe. He was a patron of the arts and employed St. Eloy to make reliquaries[25] for the churches in Paris of such richness and beauty that they were admired of the whole of France.

Chaos and misery followed the brilliant reign of Dagobert. In half a century his race had faded into the feeble rois fainéants, degenerate by precocious debauchery, some of whom were fathers at fourteen or fifteen years of age and in their graves before they were thirty.[26]

In an age when human passions are untamed, the one unpardonable vice in a king is weakness, and soon the incapable, impotent and irresolute Merovingians were thrust aside by a more puissant race.{29}

CHAPTER III

THE CARLOVINGIANS—THE GREAT SIEGE OF PARIS BY THE NORMANS—THE GERMS OF FEUDALISM

AT the head of the establishment of every Merovingian chief was his mayor, or major domus, who administered his domains and acted as deputy when his master was non-resident or away at the wars. A similar official of the king’s household, the mayor of the palace, likewise presided over the royal council and tribunal in the absence or during the minority of the king.

In 622, when Dagobert became king of Austrasia, one Pepin of Landen, known as Pepin le Vieux, was made mayor of the palace and, associated with St. Arnoulf, bishop of Metz, was appointed ward of the young king. A marriage between Pepin’s daughter and the son of St. Arnoulf resulted in the birth of Pepin of Heristal, who in the anarchy that followed on Dagobert’s death succeeded in crushing Ebroin,[27] the king-maker, mayor of the palace of Neustria. Pepin then seized the royal treasury, installed Thierry III. as king of the Franks and himself as mayor of the palace. Pepin’s successor, for the office of mayor had now become hereditary, was Charles Martel, his son by Alfaide, a fair and noble concubine. He it was, who by his valour and address saved Western Europe from the Mussulman at Tours, and made glorious his name in Christendom. At his death, when crossing the Alps to defend the Pope against the Arian Lombards, the leadership of the Franks{30} passed to his sons Carloman and Pepin the Short, of whom the latter, on his brother’s retirement to the cloister at the famous Italian Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, held undivided sway.

Charles Martel, although buried with the Frankish kings at St. Denis, was content with the title of Duke of the Franks, and hesitated to proclaim himself king. He, like the other mayors of the palace, ruled through feeble and pensioned puppets when they did not contemptuously leave the throne vacant. In 751 Pepin sent two prelates to sound Pope Zacchary, who, being hard pressed by the Lombards, lent a willing ear to their suit, agreed that he who was king in fact should be made so in name, and authorised Pepin to assume the title of king. Chilperic III., like a discarded toy, was relegated to a monastery at St. Omer, and Pepin the Short anointed at Soissons by St. Boniface, bishop of Mayence, from that sacred “ampul full of chrism” which an angel of Paradise had brought to St. Rémi wherewith to anoint Clovis at Rheims. In the year 754 Stephen III., the first pope who had honoured Paris by his presence, came to ask the reward of his predecessor’s favour and was lodged at St. Denis. There he anointed Pepin anew, with his sons Charles and Carloman, and compelled the Frankish chieftains, under pain of excommunication, to swear allegiance to them and their descendants.

The city of Lutetia had much changed since the messengers of Pope Fabianus entered five centuries before. On that southern hill where formerly stood the Roman camp and cemetery were now the great basilica and abbey of St. Genevieve. The amphitheatre and probably much of the palace of the Cæsars were in ruins, all stripped of their marbles to adorn the new Christian churches. Extensive abbatial buildings and a church resplendent with marble and gold, on the west, were dedicated to St. Vincent, and were henceforth to be known as St. Germain of the Meadows (des Prés), for the saint’s body had been{31} translated from the chapel of St. Symphorien in the vestibule to the high altar of the abbey church a few weeks before the pope’s arrival at St. Denis. The Cité[28] was still held within the decayed Roman walls, and a wooden bridge, the Petit Pont, crossed the south arm of the Seine. On the site of the old pagan temple to Jupiter by the market-place stood a new and magnificent basilica to Our Lady. The devotion of the Nautæ had been transferred from Apollo to St. Nicholas, patron of shipmen, and Mercury had given place to St. Michael, and to each of those saints oratories were erected. Other churches and oratories adorned the island, dedicated to St. Stephen, St. Gervais, and St. Denis of the Prison (de la chartre), built where the saint was imprisoned by the north wall and where, abandoned by his followers, he was visited by his divine Lord, who Himself administered the sacred Host. A nunnery dedicated to St. Eloy, where three hundred pious nuns diffused the odour of Jesus Christ through the whole city, occupied a large site opposite the west front of Notre Dame. Near by stood a hospital, founded and endowed a century before by St. Landry, bishop of Paris, for the sick poor, which soon became known as the Hostel of God (Hôtel Dieu). The old Roman palace and basilica had been transformed into the official residence and tribunal of justice of the Frankish kings. On the south bank stood the church and monastery of St. Julien le Pauvre. A new Frankish city was growing on the north bank, bounded on the west by the abbey of St. Vincent le Rond, later known as St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and on the east by the abbey of St. Lawrence. Houses clustered around the four great monasteries, and suburbs were in course of formation. The Cité was still largely inhabited by opulent merchants of Gallo-Roman descent, who were seen riding along the streets in richly-decorated chariots drawn by oxen.

ST. JULIEN LE PAUVRE.

King Pepin, after proving himself a valiant champion of{32} orthodoxy by defeating the Arian Lombards, and bestowing Ravenna on the pope in perpetual sovereignty, died at Paris in 768. The kingdom of France was then shared by his sons, Charles and Carloman, and on the latter’s death in 771{33} Charles, surnamed the Great, began his tremendous career during which the interest of the French Monarchy shifts from Paris to Aix-la-Chapelle. Charlemagne during his long reign of nearly half a century was too preoccupied with his noble but ineffectual purpose of cementing by blood and iron the warring races of Europe into a united populus Christianus, and establishing, under the dual lordship of emperor and pope, a city of God on earth, to give much attention to Paris. He did, however, spend a few Christmases there, and was present at the dedication of the new church of St. Denis, completed in 775 under Abbot Fulrad. It was a typical Frankish prince whom the Parisians saw enthroned at St. Denis. He had the abundant fair hair, shaven chin and long moustache we see in the traditional pictures of Clovis. Above middle height, with bright piercing eyes and short neck, he impressed all by the majesty of his bearing in spite of a rather shrill and feeble voice and a certain asymmetrical rotundity below the belt. Abbot Fulrad was a sturdy prince and for long disputed the possession of some lands at Plessis with the bishop of Paris. The decision of the case is characteristic of the times. Two champions were deputed to act for the litigants, and met before the Count of Paris[29] in the king’s chapel of St. Nicholas in the Palace of the Cité, and a solemn judgment by the Cross was held. While the royal chaplain recited psalms and prayers, the two champions stood forth and held their arms outstretched in the form of a cross. In this trial of endurance the bishop’s deputy was the first to succumb. His fainting arms drooped and the abbot won his cause.

Paris grew but slowly under the Frankish kings. They lived ill at ease within city walls. Children of the fields and the forest, whose delight was in the chase or in war, they were glad to escape from Paris to their villas at Chelles or Compiègne.{34}

But the civil power of the Church grew apace. In the early sixth century one-third of the land of France was held and administered by the monasteries. The abbots of St. Germain des Prés held possession of nearly 90,000 acres of land, mostly arable, in various provinces of France. Their annual revenue amounted to about £24,000 of our money: they ruled over more than 10,000 serfs. From a list of the lands held in the ninth century by the abbey of St. Pierre des Fossés,[30] founded by Clovis II. about eight miles from Paris, and published in the Trésor des pièces rares ou inédites, we are able to form some idea of the vast extent of monastic possessions in the city. The names of the various properties whose boundaries touch those of the abbey lands are given. Private owners are mentioned only four times, whereas to ecclesiastical and monastic domains there are no less than ninety references.

These monastic settlements were veritable garden cities, where most of our modern fruits, flowers and vegetables were cultivated; where flocks and herds were bred and all kinds of poultry, including pheasants and peacocks, reared. Guilds of craftsmen worked and flourished; markets were held generally on saints’ days, and pilgrimages were fostered. Charlemagne was an honest coiner and a protector of foreign traders; he was tolerant of the Jews, the only capitalists of the time, and under him Paris became the “market of the peoples,” and Venetian and Syrian merchants sought her shores.

In Gallo-Roman days few were the churches outside the cities, but in the great emperor’s time every villa[31] is said to{35} have had its chapel or oratory served by a priest. Charlemagne was a zealous patron of such learning as the epoch afforded, and sought out scholars in every land. English, Irish, Scotch, Italian, Goth and Bavarian—all were welcomed. The English scholar Alcuin, master of the Cloister School at York, became his chief adviser and tutor. He would have every child in his empire to know at least his paternoster. Every abbot on election was required to endow the monastery with some books. The choice of authors was not a wide one: the Old and New Testaments; the writings of the Fathers, especially St. Augustine, the emperor’s favourite author; Josephus; the works of Bede; some Latin authors, chiefly Virgil; some scraps of Plato translated into Latin—a somewhat exiguous and austere library, but one which reared a noble and valiant line of scholars and statesmen to rule the minds and bridle the savage lusts of the coming generations of men. Under Irish and Anglo-Saxon influences the cramped, minute script of the Merovingian scribes grew in beauty and lucidity: gold and silver and colour illuminated the pages of their books. The golden age of the Roman peace seemed dawning again in a new Imperium Christianorum.

Towards the end of his reign the old emperor was dining with his court in a seaport town in the south of France, when news came that some strange, black, piratical craft had dared to attack the harbour. They were soon scattered, but the emperor was seen to rise from the table and go to a window, where he stood gazing fixedly at the retreating pirates. Tears trickled down his cheeks and none dared to approach him. At length he turned and said: “Know ye, my faithful servants, wherefore I weep thus bitterly? I fear not these wretched pirates, but I am afflicted that they should dare to approach these shores, and sorely do grieve when I foresee what evil they will work on my sons and on my people.” His courtiers deemed they were Breton or Saracen pirates, but the emperor knew better. They were the terrible Northmen, soon to prove a bloodier scourge to Gaul than Hun or Goth or Saracen; and to meet them{36} Charlemagne left an empire distracted by civil war and a nerveless, feeble prince, Louis the Pious, Louis the Forgiving, fitter for the hermit’s cell than for the throne and sword of an emperor.

In 841 the black boats of the sea-rovers for the first time entered the Seine, and burnt Rouen and Fontenelle. In 845 a fleet of one hundred and twenty vessels swept up its higher waters and on Easter Eve captured, plundered and burnt Paris, sacked its monasteries and churches and butchered their monks and priests. The futile Emperor Charles the Bald bought them off at St. Denis with seven thousand livres of silver, and they went back to their Scandinavian homes gorged with plunder—only to return year by year, increased in numbers and ferocity. Words cannot picture the terror of the citizens and monks when the dread squadrons, with the monstrous dragons carved on their prows, their great sails and three-fold serried ranks of men-of-prey, were sighted. Everyone left his home and sought refuge in flight. The monks hurried off with the bodies of the saints, the relics and treasures of the sanctuary, to hide them in far-away cities. In 852 Charles the Bald’s soldiers refused to fight, and for two hundred and eighty-seven days the pirates ravaged the valley of the Seine at their will. Never within memory or tradition were such things known. Rouen, Bayeux, Beauvais, Paris, Meaux, Melun, Chartres, Evreux, were devastated. The islands of the Seine were whitened by the bones of the victims. Similar horrors were wrought along the other rivers of France. Whole districts reverted to paganism. In 858 a body of the freebooters settled on the island of Oissel, below Rouen, and issued forth en excursion to spoil and slay and burn at their pleasure. They made of the once rich city of Paris a cinder heap; the cathedrals of St. Germain des Prés and of St. Denis alone escaped at the cost of immense bribes. Charles ordered two fortresses to be built for the defence of the approaches to the bridges, and continued his feeble policy of paying blackmail.{37}

Port des Ormes.

In 866 Robert the Strong, Count of Paris, had won the title of the Maccabeus of France, by daring to stand against the fury of the Northmen and to defeat them; but having in the heat of battle with the terrible Hastings taken off his cuirass, he was killed. In 876 began a second period of raids of even greater ferocity under the Norwegian Rollo the Gangr[32] (the walker), a colossus so huge that no horse could be found to bear him. In 884 the whole Christian people seemed doomed to perish. Flourishing cities and monasteries became heaps of smoking ruins; along the roads lay the bodies of priests and laymen, noble and peasant, freeman and serf, women and children and babes at the breast to be devoured of wolves and vultures. The very sanctuaries[33] were become the dens of wild beasts, the haunt of serpents and creeping things. Packs of wolves, three hundred strong, harried Aquitaine.

In 885 a great league of pirates—Danes, Normans, Saxons, Britons and renegade French—on their way to ravage the rich cities of Burgundy drew up before Paris; and their leader, Siegfroy, demanded passage to the higher waters. For Paris had now been put in a state of defence, the Roman walls repaired, the bridges fortified and protected by towers on the north and south banks. Bishop Gozlin, in whom great learning was wedded to incomparable fortitude, defied the pirates, warning them that the citizens were determined to resist and to hold Paris for a bulwark to the other cities of France.

Paris, forsaken by her kings and emperors for more than a century, scarred and bled by three sieges, was now to become a beacon of hope to the wretched land of France. Of{38} the fourth and most terrible of the Norman sieges of Paris, we have fuller record. A certain monk of St. Germain des Prés, Abbo by name, had endured the siege and was one day sitting in his cell reading his Virgil. Desiring to exercise his Latin, and give an example to other cities, he determined to sing of a great siege with happier issue than that of Troy.[34] Abbo saw the black hulls and horrid prows of the pirates’ boats as they turned the arm of the Seine below Paris, seven hundred strong vessels, and many more of lighter build. For two leagues and a half the very waters of the Seine were covered with them, and men asked into what mysterious caves the river had retreated. On November 26th, the attack began at the unfinished tower on the north bank. Three leaders stand eminent among the defenders of the city. Bishop Gozlin, the great warrior priest; his nephew, Abbot Ebles of St. Denis; and Count Eudes (Hugh) of Paris, son of Robert the Strong. The air is darkened with javelins and arrows. The abbot with one shaft spits seven of the besiegers, and mockingly bids their fellows take them to the kitchen to be cooked. Bishop Gozlin is wounded by a javelin early in the attack. On the morrow, reinforced by fresh troops, the assault is renewed, stones are hurled, arrows whistle: the air is filled with groans and cries. The defenders pour down boiling oil and melted wax and pitch. The hair of some of the Normans takes fire: they burn and the Parisians shout—“Jump into the Seine to cool yourselves.” One well-aimed millstone, says Abbo, sends the souls of six to hell. The baffled Northmen retire, entrench a camp at St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and prepare rams and other siege artillery.

ST. GERMAIN L’AUXERROIS.

Abbo now pauses to bewail the state of France: no lord to rule her, everywhere devastation wrought by fire and sword, God’s people paralysed at the advancing phalanx of death, Paris alone tranquil, erect and steadfast in the midst of all their thunderbolts, {39}polis ut regina {40}micans omnes super urbes, like a queenly city resplendent above all towns. The second attack begins with redoubled fury. After battering the walls of the north tower, monstrous machines on sixteen wheels are advanced and the besiegers strive to fill the fosse. Trees, shrubs, slaughtered cattle, wounded horses, the very captives slain before the eyes of the besieged, are cast in to fill the void. Bishop Gozlin brings down a Norman chieftain by a well-aimed arrow: his body, too, is flung into the fosse. The enemy cover the plain with their swords and the river with their bucklers. Fireships are loosed against the bridge. In the city women fly to the sanctuaries: they roll their hair in the dust, beat their breasts and rend their faces. They call on St. Germain: “Blessed St. Germain, succour thy servants.” The fighters on the walls take up the cry. Bishop Gozlin invokes the Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer, Star of the Sea, bright above all other stars, to save them from the cruel Danes.

On February 6th, 886, a sudden flood sweeps away the Petit Pont, and its tower, with twelve defenders, is isolated. With shouts of triumph the Northmen cross the river and surround it. The twelve refuse to yield, and fire is brought. The warriors (a touching detail) fearing lest their falcons be stifled, cut them loose. There is but one vessel wherewith to quench the flames and that soon drops from their hands. The little band rush forth, place themselves against the ruins of the bridge, and prepare to sell their lives dearly—terrible against terrible foes. The walls of the city are lined with their kinsmen and friends impotent to help. The enemies of God, doomed one day to dine at Pluto’s cauldron, press upon them. They fight till Phœbus sinks to the depths of the sea, so great is the courage of despair. They are promised their lives if they will yield, are disarmed, then treacherously slain, and their souls fly to heaven. But one, Hervé, of noble bearing and of great beauty, deemed a prince, is spared for ransom. With thunderous voice he refuses to bargain his life for gold,{41} falls unarmed on his foes and is cut to pieces. “These things,” writes Monk Abbo, “I saw with mine eyes.” He gives the names of the heroic twelve who went to receive the palm of martyrdom. They were exemplars to France and helped to save her by their desperate courage and noble self-sacrifice. Their names are inscribed on a tablet on the wing of the Hôtel Dieu in the Place au Petit Pont: Ermenfroi, Hervé, Herland, Ouacre, Hervi, Arnaud, Seuil, Jobert, Hardre, Guy, Aimard, Gossouin.

A temporary relief is afforded by the arrival of Henry of Saxony, sent with supplies by the emperor. Count Eudes sallies forth to meet him, and in his ardent courage outstrips his men, is surrounded and almost slain. The little city is revictualled. Henry returns whence he came, and again the Parisians are left to themselves. On the sixth of April Bishop Gozlin, their shield, their two-edged axe, whose shaft and bow were terrible, passes to the Lord. On May 12th, Eudes steals away to implore further help from the emperor, and as soon as he sees the imperialists on the march returns and cuts his way into Paris, to share the terrors of the siege. Henry the Saxon again appears, but is ambushed and slain and his army melts away. Yet again Paris is abandoned by her emperor and seeks help of heaven. For the waters are low, the besiegers are able to get footing on the island, they set fire to the gates and attack the walls. The body of St. Genevieve is borne about the city, and at night the ghostly figure of St. Germain is seen by the sentinels to pass along the ramparts, sprinkling them with holy water and promising salvation. Charles the Fat, the Lord’s anointed, at length appears with a multitude of a hundred tongues and encamps on Montmartre. While the Parisians are preparing to second him in crushing their foes, they learn that the cowardly emperor has bought them off with a bribe and permission to winter in Burgundy, and for the first time they ravage that opulent province. Next year, as Gozlin’s successor, Bishop Antheric, was sitting at table with Abbot Ebles, a fearful messenger brought news that the{42} acephali[35] were again in sight. Forgetting the repast, the two churchmen seized their weapons, called the city to arms, hastened to the ramparts, and the abbot slew their pilot with a well-aimed shaft. The Normans are terrified, and at length a treaty is made with their leaders, who promised not to ravage the Marne and some even entered Paris. But the ill-disciplined hordes were hard to hold in and bands of brigands, as soon as the ramparts were passed, began to plunder and slew a score of Christian men. The Parisians in their indignation sought out and—Evax! Hurrah!—found five hundred Normans in the city and slew them. But the bishop protected those that took refuge in his palace, instead of killing them as he ought to have done—potius concidere debens. For a time Paris had respite. Cowardly Charles the Fat was deposed, and in 887 Count Eudes was acclaimed king of France after his return from Aquitaine, whose duke he had brought to subjection. He counselled a gathering of all the peoples near Paris to make common cause against the Normans. Abbo saw the proud Franks march in with heads erect, the skilful and polished Aquitaines, the Burgundians too prone to flight. But nothing came of it.

At the extreme north-east of Paris the Rue du Crimée leads to a group of once barren hills, part of which is now made into the Park of the Buttes Chaumont. Here, by the Mount of the Falcon (Montfaucon[36]) in 892 King Eudes fell upon an army of Northmen, who had come against Paris, and utterly routed them. Antheric, the noble pastor, with his virgin-like face, led three hundred footmen into the fight and slew six hundred of the acephali. But Abbo’s muse now fails him. Eudes, noble Eudes, is no more worthy of his office, and Christ’s sheep are perishing. Where is the{43} ancient prowess of France? Three vices are working her destruction: pride, the sinful charms of Venus (fœda venustas veneris) and love of sumptuous garments. Her people are arrayed in purple vesture, and wear cloaks of gold; their loins are cinctured with girdles rich with precious stones. Monk Abbo wearies not of singing, but the deeds of noble Eudes are wanting. All the poet craves is another victory to rejoice Heaven; another defeat of the black host of the enemy.

But the noble Eudes was now a king with rebellious vassals. Paris was never captured again, but the acephali were devouring the land. The grim spectres of Famine and Plague made a charnel-house of whole regions of France, while Eudes was fighting the Count of Flanders, a rival king, and the ineffectual emperor, Charles the Simple. He it was who after Eudes’ death, by the treaty of St. Claire-sur-Epte in 902, surrendered to the barbarians the fair province, subsequently to be known as Normandy. The new prayer in the Litany, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord deliver us,” was heard. The dread name of Rollo now vanishes from history to live again in song, and under the title of Robert, assumed from his god-father, he reappears to win a dukedom and a king’s daughter. The Normans are broken in to Christianity, law and order; their land becomes one of the most civilized regions of France; the fiercest of church levellers are known as the greatest of church builders in Christendom. They gave their name to a style of Christian architecture in Europe and a line of kings to England,[37] Naples and Sicily.

L’Institut de France.

The new empire of Charlemagne had endured less than three generations; from its wreck were formed the seven kingdoms of France, Navarre, the two Burgundies, Lorraine, Italy and Germany. The people of France never forgot the lesson of the dark century of the invasions. A subtle change had been operating. The empire had decomposed into kingdoms; the kingdoms were segregating into lordships.{44} Men in their need were attracted to the few strong and dominant lords whose courage and resource afforded them a rallying point and shelter against disintegrating forces: the poor and defenceless huddled for protection to the seigneurs of strongholds which had withstood the floods of barbarians that were devastating the land. The seeds of feudalism were sown in the long winter of the Norman terror.{45}

CHAPTER IV

THE RISE OF THE CAPETIAN KINGS AND THE GROWTH OF PARIS

FROM 936 to the coronation of Hugh Capet at Noyon in 987, the Carlovingians exercised a slowly decaying power. The real rulers of France were Hugh the Tall and Hugh Capet,[38] grandson and great-grandson of Robert the Strong. Lay abbots of St. Martin of Tours, St. Denis, and St. Germain, Counts of Paris and Dukes of France, they pursued the policy of the mayors of the palace in Merovingian times, accepting the nominal kingship of the degenerate Carlovingians—Louis from overseas, Lothaire, and Louis the Lazy—until the time was ripe to pick up the fallen sceptre. They founded a new line of kings of France which stretches onward through history for a thousand years until the guillotine of the Revolution cut it in twain. It is Hugh Capet whom Dante, following a legend of his time, calls the son of a butcher of Paris, and whom he hears among the weeping souls cleaving to the dust and purging their avarice in the fifth cornice of Purgatory.

Their patrimony was a small one—the provinces of the Isle de France, La Brie, La Beauce, Beauvais and Valois; but their sway extended over the land of the Langue d’oil, with its strenuous northern life, le doux royaume de la France, the sweet realm of France, cradle of the great French Monarchy and home of art, learning and chivalry. The globe of the earth, symbol of universal empire, gives way to the hand of justice as the emblem of kingship. They were, it is true, little more than seigneurs over other seigneurs, some of whom{46} were almost as powerful as they; but that little, the drop of holy chrism by which they were consecrated of the Church, contained within it a potency of future grandeur. They were the Lord’s anointed, supported by the Lord’s Vicar on earth: to disobey them was to disobey God. Tribal sovereignty had now given way to territorial sovereignty. Feudal lords and abbots were supreme within their own domains. The people, long forsaken by their emperors, had in their turn forsaken them. In order “not to be at the mercy of all the great ones they surrendered themselves to one of the great ones” and in exchange for protection gave troth and service. Cities, churches and monasteries now assumed a new aspect. Paris had demonstrated the value of a walled city, for the dread Rollo himself had three times assaulted it in vain. During the latter part of the Norman terror, from all parts of North France, monks and nuns and priests had brought their holy relics within its walls as to a city of refuge. Gone were the lines of villas from Gallo-Roman times extending freely into the country. Fortifications were everywhere raised around the dwelling-places of men. The ample spaces within cities were soon to give place to crowded houses and narrow streets. The might of the archbishops, bishops and abbots increased: they sat in the councils of kings and dominated the administration of justice; the moral, social and political life of the country centred around them. Armed with the sword and the cross they held almost absolute sway over their little republics; coined money, levied taxes, disposed of small armies and went to the chase in almost regal state. The land bristled with castles and fortified towns and abbeys, and was parcelled out into territories of varying extent, from great duchies equal to a dozen modern departments, to the small domain just enough to maintain a single knight.

The advent of the year 1000 was regarded with universal terror in Christendom. A fear, based on a supposed apocalyptic prophecy that the end of the world was at hand, paralysed all political and social life. Churches{47} were too small to contain the immense throngs of fearful penitents: legacies and donations from conscience-stricken worshippers poured wealth into their treasuries. But once the awe-inspiring night of the vernal equinox that began the year 1000 had passed, and the bright March sun rose again on the fair earth, unconsumed by the wrath of God, the old world “seemed to thrill with new life; the earth cast off her out-worn garments and clothed herself in a rich and white vesture of new churches.” Everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, men strove in emulation to build the finest temples to God. The wooden roofs of the Merovingian and Carlovingian basilicas had ill withstood the ravage of war and fire. Stone took the place of wood, the heavy thrust of the roof led to increased mural strength, walls were buttressed, columns thickened. Massive towers of defence, at first round, then polygonal, then square, flanked the west fronts, veritable keeps, where the sacred vessels and relics might be preserved and defended in case of attack. Soon spaces are clamant for decoration, the stone soars into the beauty of Gothic vaulting and tracery, “the solid and lofty shafts ascend and press onward in agile files, and in the sacred gloom are like unto an army of giants that meditate war with invisible powers.”[39]

The Capets are more intimately associated with the growth of Paris than any of the earlier dynasties, and at no period in French history is the ecclesiastical expansion more marked. Under the long reign of Hugh’s son, King Robert the Pious, no less than fourteen monasteries and seven churches were built or rebuilt in or around the city. A new and magnificent palace and hall of Justice, with its royal chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas, rose on the site of the old Roman basilica and palace in the Cité. The king was no less charitable than pious. Troops of the poor and afflicted followed him when he went abroad, and he fed a thousand daily at his table. But notwithstanding his munificent piety, he was early made to feel the power of the{48} Church. His union with Queen Bertha, a cousin of the fourth degree, whom he had married a year before his accession, was condemned by the pope as incestuous, and he was summoned to repudiate her. Robert, who loved his wife dearly, resisted the papal authority, and excommunication and interdict followed.[40] Everyone fled from him; only the servants are said to have remained, who purged with fire all the vessels which were contaminated by the guilty couple’s touch. The misery of his people at length subdued the king’s spirit, and he cast off his faithful and beloved queen.

The beautiful and imperious Constance of Aquitaine, her successor, proved a penitential infliction second only in severity to the anathemas of the Church. Troops of vain and frivolous troubadours from her southern home, in all kinds of foreign and fantastic costumes, invaded the court and shocked the austere piety of the king. He perceived the corrupting influence on the simple manners of the Franks of their licentious songs, lascivious music and dissolute lives, but was powerless to dismiss them. The tyrannous temper of his new consort became the torment of his life. He was forced even to conceal his acts of charity. One day, on returning from prayers, he perceived that his lance by the queen’s orders had been adorned with richly chased silver. He looked around his palace and was not long in finding a poor, tattered wretch whom he ordered to search for a tool, and the pair locked themselves in a room. The silver was soon stripped from the lance and the king hastily thrust it into the beggar’s wallet and bade him escape before the queen discovered the loss. The poor whom he admitted to his table, despite the angry protests of the queen, at times ill repaid his charity. On one occasion a tassel of gold was cut from his robe, and on the thief being discovered the king simply remarked: “Well, perhaps he has greater need of it than I, may God bless its service to him.” The very fringe was sometimes stripped from his cloak as he walked{49} abroad, but he never could be induced to punish any of these poor spoilers of his person. There is, however, an obverse to this ardent piety and noble enthusiasm:—the merciless persecution and spoliation of the Jews and the first executions of heretics[41] recorded in France.

In 1022 two priests, one of whom had been the queen’s confessor, and eleven laymen were condemned to be burnt at the stake at Orleans for heresy. The king spent nine hours wrestling with them in prayer and argument, but in vain. As the unhappy wretches were being led to execution, Constance leaned forward, savagely struck at her old confessor and gouged out one of his eyes. She was applauded for her zeal.

The economic condition of the people was far from satisfactory. Famine and pestilence claimed their victims with appalling frequency, and between 970 and 1040, forty-eight famines and plagues are known to historians; that of 1033 is recounted by the chronicler, Raoul Glaber, with details so ghastly that the heart sickens and the hand faints at their transcription. Slavery existed everywhere: it was regarded as an integral part of the divine order of things. The Church aimed at alleviating the lot of the slave, not at abolishing slavery. At a division of serfs, held in common between the priors of two abbeys in 1087, the children were shared, male and female, without any reference to their parents. Archbishops fulminated against serfs who tried to escape from their lords, quoting the words of the apostle: “Serfs be subject in all things to your masters.” A serf was valued at so much money, like a horse or an ox. The serfs of the Church at Paris were sent to the law courts to give evidence for their bishop or prior, or to do battle for them in the event of a judicial duel. The freemen in the eleventh century began to rebel against fighting with a despised serf, and refused the duel, whereupon early in the next century{50} the king and his court decided that the serfs might lawfully testify and fight against freemen, and whoso refused the trial by battle should lose his suit and suffer excommunication. The prelates exchanged serfs, used them as substitutes in times of war, allowed them to marry outside their church or abbey only by special permission and on condition that all children were equally divided between the two proprietors. If a female serf married a freeman he and their children became serfs. Serfs were only permitted to make a will by consent of their master; every favour was paid for and liberty bought at a great price. Whole bourgades were often in a state of serfdom. Merchants even and artizans in towns owed part of their produce to the seigneur. In the eleventh century burgesses as well as serfs and Jews were given to churches, exchanged, sold or left in wills by their seigneurs. The story of mediæval France is the story of the efforts of serf and burgess to win their economic freedom[42] and of her kings to tame the insolence of disobedient vassals and to make their shadowy kingship a real thing. And the story of mediæval France is closed only by the great Revolution.

Hotel Gerouilhac

The declining years of King Robert were embittered by the impiety of rebellious sons, who were reduced to submission only at the price of a protracted and bloody campaign in Burgundy. The broken-hearted father did not long survive his victory. He died in his palace at Melun in 1031, and the benisons and lamentations of the poor and lowly winged his spirit to its rest. If we may believe some writers, pious King Robert’s memory is enshrined in the hymnology of the Church, which he enriched with some beautiful compositions: he was often seen to enter St. Denis in regal habit to lead the choir at matins, and would sometimes challenge the monks to a singing contest; once, it is said, when importuned by his queen to immortalise her name in song,{51} he began, “O Constantia Martyrum!” The delighted Constance heard no further and was satisfied.

Scarcely had the grave closed over the dead king at St. Denis when Constance plotted with some of the nobles to place Robert, her youngest and favourite son, on the throne in place of Henry, the rightful heir, who fled to Normandy to implore the aid of Duke Robert. The cultivation of the arts of peace had not enfeebled the fighting powers of the Normans. Robert fell upon the queen’s supporters with reckless[43] bravery and crushed them in three decisive battles. Henry gained his crown but at the cost of a big slice of territory which advanced the Norman boundary to within twenty leagues of Paris. The queen survived her humiliation but a short time, and her death at Melun in 1032 and Henry’s generosity to his enemies gave peace to the kingdom.

In 1053, towards the end of Henry’s almost unchronicled reign, an alarming rumour came to Paris. The priests of St. Ermeran at Ratisbon claimed to have possession of the body of St. Denis, which they alleged had been stolen from the abbey in 892 by one Gisalbert. The loss of a province would not have evoked livelier emotion, and Henry at once took measures to convince France and Christendom that the true body was still at St. Denis. Before an immense concourse of bishops, abbots, princes and people, presided over by the king, his brother and the archbishops of Rheims and of Canterbury, the remains of St. Denis and his two companions were solemnly drawn out of the silver coffers in which they had been placed, by Dagobert, together with a nail from the cross and part of the crown of thorns, all locked with two keys in a kind of cupboard richly adorned with gold and precious stones, and preserved in a vault under the high altar. After having been borne in procession they were exposed on the high altar for fifteen days and then restored to their resting-place. The stiff-necked priests{52} of Ratisbon, fortified with a papal bull of 1052, still maintained their claim to the possession of the body, but no diminution was experienced in the devotion either of the French peoples or of strangers of all nations to the relics at St. Denis.

The chief architectural event of Henry’s reign at Paris was the rebuilding on a more magnificent scale of the Merovingian church and abbey of St. Martin in the Fields (des Champs), whose blackened walls and desolate lands were eloquent of the Norman terror. The buildings stood outside Paris about a mile beyond the Cité on the great Roman road to the north, where St. Martin on his way to Paris healed a leper. The foundation, which soon grew to be one of the wealthiest in France, included a hostel for poor pilgrims endowed by Philip I. with a mill on the Grand Pont, to which the monks added the revenue from an oven.[44]

In the eighteenth century, when the monastery was secularised, the abbot was patron of twenty-nine priories, three vicarates and thirty-five parishes, five of which were in Paris. Some of the old building has been incorporated in the existing Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. The Gothic priory chapel, with its fine twelfth-century choir, is used as a machinery-room, and the refectory, one of the most precious and beautiful creations attributed to Pierre de Montereau, is now a library.

Philip I. brought to the indolent habit inherited from his father a depraved and vicious nature. After a regency of eight years he became king at the age of fifteen, and lived to defile his youth and dishonour his manhood by debauchery and adultery, simony and brigandage. Early in his career he followed the evil counsels of his provost Etienne, and purposed the spoliation of the treasury of St.{53} Germain des Prés to pay for his dissolute pleasures. “As the sacrilegious pair,” says the chronicler, “drew near the relics, Etienne was smitten with blindness and the terrified Philip fled.” Simony filled his gaping purse; bishoprics and other preferments were openly sold to the highest bidder, and one day when an abbot complained that he had been kept waiting while a rich competitor for a bishopric had been admitted, the king answered: “Wait a while until I have made my money of him; I will then accuse him of simony, and you shall have the reversion.”

Regal irresponsibility led in 1092 to a greater crime. Most popular of the twelfth-century stories sung by the trouvères of North France was that of Tortulf, the Breton outlaw, the Robin Hood of his day, who won by his prowess against the Normans the lordship of rich lands by the Loire, and with his son, Ingelar, founded the famous house of Anjou. In 1092 Foulques de Réchin, lord of Anjou—whose handsome grandson Geoffrey, surnamed Plantagenet from the sprig of broom (genêt) he wore in his helmet, was to father a race of English kings—had to wife Bertrarde, fairest of the ladies of France, whose two predecessors had been cast off like vile courtesans. Philip, when on a visit to the count at Tours became inflamed with passion at beholding her, and she was easily induced to elope with him under the promise that she should share his throne. His queen, Bertha, mother of his two children, was pitilessly driven from his bed and imprisoned at Montreuil, and two of his venal bishops were found to bestow the blessings of the Church on the new union. But the thunder of Rome came swift and terrible. Philip laid aside his crown and sceptre, grovelled before the pontiff, and implored forgiveness, but continued to live with his mistress. Next year a new pope excommunicated the guilty pair and laid their kingdom under the ban. The same Council, however, of Clermont, which fulminated against Philip, stirred Christendom to the{54} first crusade, and in the magnificent enthusiasm of the moment Philip was permitted to live outwardly submissive but secretly rebellious. He crowned Bertrarde at Troyes, and lived on his vicious life, while Bertha was dying of a broken heart in her prison at Montreuil. Monkish legends tell of the excommunicated king languishing, a scrofulous wretch, in a deserted court; but there is little doubt that the impious monarch died, tardily repentant, at his palace at Melun, after a reign of nearly half a century. It was a reign void of honour or profit to France. He left his son Louis VI. (the Lusty) a heritage of shame, a kingdom reduced to little more than a baronage over a few comtés, whose cities of Paris, Etampes, Orleans and Sens were isolated from royal jurisdiction by insolent and rebellious vassals, one of whom, the Seigneur de Puisset, had inflicted a disgraceful defeat on Philip in 1081. Many of the great seigneurs were but freebooters, living by plunder. The violence and lawlessness of these and other smaller scoundrels, who levied blackmail on merchants and travellers, made commerce almost impossible. Corruption, too, had invaded many of the monasteries and fouled the thrones of bishops, and a dual effort was made by king and Church to remedy the evils of the times. The hierarchy strove to centralise power at Rome that the Church might be purged of wolves in sheep’s clothing: the Capetian monarchs to increase their might at Paris in order to subdue insolent and powerful vassals to law and obedience.

In 1097 the Duke of Burgundy learned that Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury was about to pass through his territory with a rich escort on his way to Rome. The usual ambush was laid and the party were held up. As the duke hastened to spoil his victims, crying out—“Where is the archbishop?” he turned and saw Anselm, impassive on his horse, gazing sternly at him. In a moment the savage and lawless duke was transformed to a pallid, stammering wretch with downcast eyes, begging permission to kiss the old man’s hand and to offer him a noble escort to safeguard{55} him through his territory. It was the moral influence of prelates such as this and monks such as St. Bernard that enabled the hierarchy to enforce the celibacy of the clergy, to cleanse the bishoprics and abbeys, to wrest the privilege of conferring benefices from lay potentates and feudal seigneurs who bartered them for money, and to make and unmake kings.

The end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries saw the culmination of the power of the reformed orders. All over France, religious houses—the Grande Chartreuse, Fontevrault, Cîteaux, Clairvaux—sprang up as if by enchantment. Men and women of all stations and classes flocked to them, a veritable host of the Lord, “adorning the deserts with their holy perfection and solitudes by their purity and righteousness.” “How fair a thing it is,” exclaims St. Bernard, “to live in perfect unity! One weeps for his sins; another sings praises to the Lord. One teaches the sciences; another prays. One leads the active; another the contemplative, life. One burns with charity; another is prone in humility. Nought is here but the house of God and the very gate of heaven.”

St. Bernard was the terror of mothers and of wives. His austerity, his loving-kindness,[45] his impetuous will and masterful activity, his absolute faith and remorseless logic, his lyric and passionate eloquence, carried all before him. St. Bernard was the dictator of Christendom; he it was who with pitying gesture as of a kind father, his eyes suffused with tender joy, received Dante from the hands of Beatrice in the highest of celestial spheres, and after singing the beautiful hymn to the Virgin, led him to the heaven of heavens, to the very ecstasy and culmination of beatitude in the contemplation and comprehension of the triune God Himself. But religious no less than seculars are subdued by what they work in. Already in the tenth century Richer complained that the monks of his time were beginning to wear rich ornaments and flowing sleeves, and{56} with their tight-fitting garments[46] looked like harlots rather than monks.

In the polluting atmosphere of Philip’s reign matters grew worse. St. Bernard denounced the royal abbey of St. Denis as “a house of Satan, a den of thieves.” “The walls of the churches of Christ were resplendent with colour but His poor were naked and left to perish; their stones were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to charm the eyes of the rich.” “Bishops dressed like women; the successors of St. Peter rode about on white mules, loaded with gold and precious stones, apparelled in fine silk, surrounded with soldiers and followed by a brilliant train. They were rather the successors of Constantine.”

In 1095 the task of cleansing the Abbey of St. Maur des Fossés seemed so hopeless, that the abbot resigned in despair rather than imperil his soul, and a more resolute reformer was sought. In 1107 the bishop of Paris was commanded by Rome to proceed to the abbey of St. Eloy and extirpate the evils there flourishing. The nuns, it was reported, had so declined in grace, owing to the proximity of the court and intercourse with the world, that they had lost all sense of shame and lived in open sin, breaking the bonds of common decency. The scandal was so great that the bishop determined to cut them off from the house of the Lord. The abbey was reduced to a priory and given over to the abbot of the now reformed monastery of St. Maur, and its vast lands were parcelled out into several parishes.[47] The rights of the canons of Notre Dame were to be maintained; on St. Eloy’s day the abbot of St. Maur was to furnish them with six pigs, two and a half measures{57} of wine and three of fine wheat, and on St. Paul’s day with eight sheep, the same quantity of wine, six crowns and one obole. The present Rue de la Cité and the Boulevard du Palais give approximately the east and west boundaries of the suppressed abbey, part of whose site is now occupied by the Prefecture de Police.

But the way of the reformer is a hard one. At the Council of Paris, 1074, the abbot of Pontoise was severely ill-treated for supporting, against the majority of the Council, the pope’s decrees excluding married clerics from the churches. The reform of the canons of Notre Dame led to exciting scenes. Bishop Stephen of Senlis was sent in 1128 to introduce the new discipline, but the archdeacons and canons, supported by royal favour, resisted, and Bishop Stephen was stripped of his revenues and hastened back to his metropolitan, the archbishop of Sens. The archbishop laid Paris under interdict and the influence of St. Bernard himself was needed to compose the quarrel.

On Sunday, August 20, 1133, when returning from a visitation to the abbey of Chelles, the abbot and prior of St. Victor were ambushed and the prior was stabbed. Some years later, in the reign of Louis VII., Pope Eugene III. came to seek refuge in Paris from the troubles excited at Rome by the revolution of Arnold of Brescia. When celebrating mass before the king at the abbey church of St. Genevieve the canons had stretched a rich, silken carpet before the altar on which the pontiff’s knees might rest. When the pope retired to the sacristy to disrobe, his officers claimed the carpet, according to usage; the canons and their servants resisted, and there was a bout of fisticuffs and sticks. The king intervened, and anointed majesty himself was struck. A scuffle ensued, during which the carpet was torn to shreds in a tug-of-war between the claimants. Here was urgent need for reform. The pope decided to introduce the new discipline and appointed a fresh set of canons. The dispossessed canons met them with insults and violence, drowned their voices by howling and other indignities, and{58} only ceased on being threatened with the loss of their eyes and other secular penalties.

Louis the Lusty was the pioneer of the great French Monarchy. He had none of Philip’s indolence, and was ever on the move, hewing his way, sword in hand, through his domains, subduing the violence, and burning and razing the castles of his insolent and disobedient vassals. The famous Suger, abbot of St. Denis, was his wise and firm counsellor, and led the Church to make common cause with him and lend her diocesan militia. It was a poor bald curé who, when all else despaired, led the assault on the keep of the castle of Le Puisset; he seized on a plank of wood, assailed the palisade, calling on the hesitating royal troops to follow him; they were shamed by his bravery and the castle was won.

The social revolution known as the enfranchisement of the commons and the growth of towns begins in the reign of Louis VI. The king would have the peasant to till, the monk to pray, and the pilgrim and merchant to travel in peace. He was an itinerant regal justiciary, destroying the nests of brigands, purging the land with fire and sword from tyranny and oppression. Wise in council, of magnificent courage in battle, he was the first of the Capetians to associate the cause of the people with that of the monarchy. They loved him as a valiant soldier-king, destroyer and tamer of feudal tyrants, the protector of the Church, the vindicator of the oppressed. He lifted the sceptre of France from the mire and made of it a symbol of firm and just government.

It is in Louis VI.’s reign that we have first mention of the Oriflamme (golden flame) of St. Denis, which took the place of St. Martin’s cloak as the royal standard of France. The Emperor Henry V. with a formidable army was menacing France. Louis rallied all his friends to withstand him and went to St. Denis to pray for victory. The abbot took from the altar the standard—famed to have been sent by heaven, and formerly carried by the first liege man of the abbey, the Count de Vexin, when the monastery was in danger of attack—and handed it to the king. The sacred{59} banner was fashioned of silk in the form of a gonfalon, of the colours of fire and gold, and was suspended at the head of a gilded lance.

There was a solemn ceremony, the Remise des corps saints, at the royal abbey when the king returned with his court to give thanks and to restore the banner to the altar. He carried the relics of the holy martyrs on his shoulders in procession, then replaced them whence they were taken and made oblations. A yet more superb spectacle was given to the Parisians when Pope Innocent II., a refugee from the violence of the anti-papal party at Rome, came to celebrate the Easter mass at St. Denis. The pope and his cardinals were mounted on fair steeds, barons and seigneurs on foot led the pope’s white horse by the bridle. As he passed, the Jews presented him with a scroll of the law wrapped in a veil—“May it please God to remove the veil from your hearts,” answered the pope. The solemn mass ended, pope and cardinals repaired to the cloisters where tables were spread with the Easter feast. They first partook of the Paschal lamb, reclining on the carpet in the fashion of the ancients, then, rising, took their places at table. After the repast a magnificent procession went its way to Paris, to be met by the whole city with King Louis and Prince Philip at their head.

The manner of the young prince’s tragic death gives an insight into the state of a mediæval town. He was riding one day for amusement in the streets of Paris, attended by one esquire, when a pig ran between his horse’s feet; the lad was thrown and died before the last sacraments could be administered. He was only fourteen years of age, and all France wept for him.

The strenuous reign of Louis was marked by a great expansion of Paris, which became more than ever the ordinary dwelling-place of the king and the seat of his government. The market, now known as Les Halles, was established at a place called Champeaux, belonging to St. Denis of the Prison. William of Champeaux founded the{60} great abbey of St. Victor,[48] famed for its sanctity and learning, where Abelard taught and St. Thomas of Canterbury and St. Bernard lodged. At the urgent prayer of his wife Adelaide, the king built a nunnery at Montmartre, and lavishly endowed it with lands, ovens, the house of Guerri, a Lombard money-changer, some shops and a slaughter-house in Paris, and a small bourg, still known as Bourg-la-Reine, about five miles south of the city. Certain rights of fishing at Paris, to which Louis VII. added five thousand herrings yearly from the port of Boulogne, were also granted. The churches of Ste. Geneviève la Petite, founded to commemorate the miraculous staying of the plague of the burning sickness (les ardents); of St. Jacques de la Boucherie; and of St. Pierre aux Bœufs, so named from the heads of oxen carved on the portal, were also built.{61}

CHAPTER V

PARIS UNDER PHILIP AUGUSTUS AND ST. LOUIS

DURING the twenty-eight years of the reign of Louis VII. no heir to the crown was born. At length, on the 22nd of August, 1165, Adelaide of Champagne, his third wife, lay in child-bed and excited crowds thronged the palace. The king, “afeared of the number of his daughters and knowing how ardently his people desired a child of the nobler sex,” was beside himself with joy when the desire of his heart was held up to him. The chamber was closed, but curious eyes had espied the longed-for heir through an aperture of the door and in a moment the good news was spread abroad. There was a sound of clarions and of bells and the city as by enchantment shone with an aureole of light. An English student roused by the uproar and the glare of what seemed like a great conflagration leapt to the window and beheld two old women hurrying by with lighted tapers. He asked the cause. They answered “God has given us this night a royal heir, by whose hand your king shall suffer shame and ill-hap.” This was the birth of Philip le Dieu donné—Philip sent of Heaven—better known as Philip Augustus. Under him and Louis IX. mediæval Paris, faithfully reflecting the fortunes of the French Monarchy, attained its highest development.

When Philip Augustus took up the sceptre at fifteen years of age, the little realm of the Isle de France was throttled by a ring of great and practically independent feudatories, and in extent was no larger than half-a-dozen of the eighty-seven departments into which France is now divided. In thirty years Philip had burst through to the{62} sea, subdued the Duke of Burgundy and the great counts, wrested the sovereignty of Normandy, Brittany and Maine from the English Crown, won Poitou and Aquitaine, crushed the emperor and his vassals in the memorable battle of Bouvines, and become one of the greatest of European monarchs. The English king was humiliated by the invasion of his territory by Prince Louis, afterwards Louis VIII., who overran nearly the whole of the east of England, captured Rochester and Winchester, and received the barons’ homage at London.

The victory of Bouvines evoked that ideal of moral and material and national unity which the later kings of France were to realise. The progress of Philip towards Paris was one long triumph. Peasants and mechanics dropped their tools to gaze on the dread iron Count of Flanders, captive and wounded. The king, who had owed his life to the excellence of his armour,[49] was received in Paris with a frenzy of joy. The whole city came forth to meet him, flowers were strewn in his path, the streets were hung with tapestry, Te Deums sung in all the churches, and for seven days and nights the popular enthusiasm expressed itself in dance, in song and joyous revel. It was the first national event in France. The Count of Flanders was imprisoned in the new fortress of the Louvre, where he lay for thirteen years, with ample leisure to meditate on the fate of rebellious feudatories. “Never after was war waged on King Philip, but he lived in peace.”

Two vast undertakings make the name of Philip Augustus memorable in Paris—the beginning of the paving of the city and the building of its girdle of walls and towers.

St. Etienne du Mont and Tour de Clovis.

One day as Philip stood at the window of his palace,{63} where he was wont to amuse himself by watching the Seine flow by, some carts rattled along the muddy road beneath the window and stirred so foul and overpowering an odour that the king almost fell sick. Next day the provost and the sheriffs and chief citizens were sent for and ordered to set about paving the city with stone. The work was not however completed until the reign of Charles V., a century and a half later. It was done well and lasted till the sixteenth century, when it was replaced by the miserable cobbles, known as the pavement of the League. Whether the city grew much sweeter is doubtful; certainly Paris in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was as evil-smelling as ever. Montaigne, in the second half of the sixteenth century, complains that the acrid smell of the mud of Paris weakened the affection he bore to that fair city, and Howell writes in 1620, “the city is always dirty, and by perpetual motion the mud is beaten into a thick, black and unctuous oil that sticks so that no art can wash it off, and besides the indelible stain it leaves, gives so strong a scent that it may be smelt many miles off, if the wind be in one’s face as one comes from the fresh air of the country.”

WALL OF PHILIPPE AUGUSTE,
COUR DE ROUEN.

The great fortified wall of Philip Augustus began at the north-west water-tower, which stood just above the present Pont des Arts, and passed through the quadrangle of the Louvre where a line on the paving marks its course to the Porte St. Honoré, near the Oratoire. It continued northwards by the Rue du Jour to the Porte Montmartre, whose site is marked by a tablet on No. 30 Rue Montmartre. Turning eastward by the Painters’ Gate (135 Rue St. Denis) and the Porte St. Martin, near the Rue Grenier St. Lazare, the fortification described a curve in a south-easterly direction by the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, where traces of the wall have been found in the Cour de l’Horloge of the Mont de Piété, and of a tower at No. 57. The line of the wall continued in the same direction by the Lycée Charlemagne, No. 131 Rue St. Antoine, where stood another{64} gate, to the north-east water-tower, known as the Tour Barbeau, which stood near No. 32 Quai des Célestins. The opposite or southern division began at the south-east water-tower, La Tournelle, and the Gate of St. Bernard on the present Quai de la Tournelle, and went southward by the Rues des Fossés, St. Bernard and Cardinal Lemoine, to the Porte St. Victor, near No. 2 Rue des Ecoles. The wall then turned westward by the Rue Clovis, where at No. 7 one of the largest and best-preserved remains may be seen. It enclosed the abbey of St. Geneviève, and the Pantheon stands on the site of the Porte Papale. The south-western angle was turned near the end of the Rue Soufflot and the beginning of the Rue Monsieur le Prince. In a northerly direction it then followed the line of the latter street, crossing the Boulevard St. Germain, and continued by the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. In the Cour de Rouen, No. 61 Rue St. André des Arts, an important remnant may be seen with the base of a tower. We may now trace the march of the wall and towers by the Rues Mazarin and Guénégaud, where at No. 29 other fragments exist, to the south-west water-tower, the notorious Tour de Nesle[50] whose site is occupied by the Hôtel des{65} Monnaies. The passage of the Seine was blocked by chains, which were drawn at night from tower to tower and fixed on boats and piles. The wall was twenty years building and was completed in 1211. It was eight feet thick, pierced by twenty-four gates and fortified by about five hundred towers. Much of the land it enclosed was not built upon; the marais (marshes) on the north bank were drained and cultivated and became market and fruit gardens.

The moated château of the Louvre, another of Philip’s great buildings, stood outside the wall and commanded the valley route to Paris. It was at once a fortress, a palace and a prison. Parts of two wings of the structure are incorporated in the present palace of the Louvre, and the site of the remaining wings, the massive keep and the towers are marked out on the pavement of the quadrangle.

Many are the stories of the great king’s wisdom. One day, entering the chapter-house of Notre Dame during the election of a bishop, Philip seized a crozier and passing along the assembled canons thrust it into the hands of one of lean and poor aspect, saying: “Here, take this, that you may wax fat like your brethren.” His jester once claimed to be of his family through their common father Adam, and complained that the heritage had been badly divided. “Well,” said the king, “come to me to-morrow and I will restore what is due to thee.” Next day, in the presence of his court, he handed the jester a farthing, saying: “Here is thy just portion. When I shall have shared my wealth with each of thy brothers, barely a farthing will remain to me.”

One of the royal bailiffs coveted the land of a poor knight, who refused to sell. The knight at length died, and the widow proving equally stubborn, the bailiff went to the market-place, hired two porters whom he dressed decently, and repaired with them by night to the cemetery where the dead chevalier lay buried. His body was drawn from the tomb and held upright while the bailiff abjured it to agree before the two witnesses to a sale of the land. “Silence gives{66} consent,” said the bailiff, and placed a coin in the corpse’s hand. The tomb was closed and the land seized on the morrow, despite the widow’s protests. On the case being brought before the judgment-seat of Philip in the palace of the Cité, the two porters bore witness to the sale. The king, suspecting the truth, led one of the witnesses aside and bade him recite a paternoster. While the man was murmuring the prayer the king was heard of all the court loudly saying: “Yes, that is so: you speak truly.” The recital over, the king assured him of pardon, and returning to the second witness, admonished him also not to lie, for his friend had revealed all as truly as if he had said a paternoster. The second witness confessed. The bailiff, praying for mercy, fell prostrate before the king, who condemned the guilty man to banishment for life, and ordered the whole of his possessions to be escheated to the poor widow.

Of the impression that the Paris of Philip Augustus made on a provincial visitor, we are able, fortunately, to give some account. “I am at Paris,” writes Guy of Bazoches, about the end of the twelfth century, “in this royal city, where the abundance of nature’s gifts not only retains those that dwell there but invites and attracts those who are afar off. Even as the moon surpasses the stars in brightness, so does this city, the seat of royalty, exalt her proud head above all other cities. She is placed in the bosom of a delicious valley, in the centre of a crown of hills, which Ceres and Bacchus enrich with their gifts. The Seine, that proud river which comes from the east, flows there through wide banks and with its two arms surrounds an island which is the head, the heart, and the marrow of the whole city. Two suburbs extend to right and left, even the lesser of which would rouse the envy of many another city. These suburbs communicate with the island by two stone bridges; the Grand Pont towards the north in the direction of the English sea, and the Petit Pont which looks towards the Loire. The former bridge, broad, rich, commercial, is the centre of a fervid activity, and innumerable boats surround it laden with merchandise{67} and riches. The Petit Pont belongs to the dialecticians, who pace up and down disputing. In the island adjacent to the king’s palace, which dominates the whole town, the palace of philosophy is seen where study reigns alone as sovereign, a citadel of light and immortality.”

After Louis VIII.’s brief reign of three years, there rises to the throne of France one of the gentlest and noblest of the sons of men, a prince indeed, who, amid all the temptations of absolute power maintained a spotless life, and at death laid down an earthly crown to assume a fairer and an imperishable diadem among the saints in heaven. All that was best in mediævalism—its desire for peace and order and justice; its fervent piety, its passion to effect unity among Christ’s people and to wrest the Holy Land from the pollution of the infidel; its enthusiasm for learning and for the things of the mind; its love of beauty—all are personified in the life of St. Louis.

The young prince was eleven years of age when his father died. During his minority he was nurtured in learning and piety[51] by his mother, Blanche of Castile, whose devotion to her son, and firm and wise regency were a fitting prelude to the reign of a saintly king. Even after he attained his majority, Louis always sought his mother’s counsel and was ever respectful and submissive to her will. When the news of her death reached him in the Holy Land, he went to his oratory, fell on his knees before the altar, submissive to the will of God, and cried out with tears in his eyes, that he had loved the queen, “his most dear lady and mother, beyond all mortal creatures.”

The king’s conception of his office was summed up in two words—Gouverner bien. “Fair son,” said he one day to Prince Louis, his heir, “I pray thee win the affection of thy people. Verily, I would rather that a Scotchman came from Scotland and ruled the kingdom well and loyally than that thou shouldst govern it ill.” Joinville tells with charming{68} simplicity how the king after hearing mass in the chapel at Vincennes was wont to walk in the woods for refreshment and then, sitting at the foot of an old oak tree, would listen to the plaints of his poorer people without let of usher or other official and administer justice to them. At other times, clothed in a tunic of camlet, a surcoat of wool (tiretaine) without sleeves, a mantle of black taffety, and a hat with a peacock’s plume, he would walk with his Council in the garden of his palace in the Cité, and on the people crowding round him, would call for a carpet to be spread on the ground, on which he would sit, surrounded with his councillors, and judge the poor diligently.

So rigidly just was the good king that he would not lie even to the Saracens. On his return from the crusade, being pressed by his Council to leave a stranded ship, he called the mariners to him and asked them if they would abandon the vessel if it were charged with merchandise. All replied that they would risk their lives rather than forsake the ship. “Then,” said the king, “why am I asked to abandon it?” “Sire,” they answered, “your royal person and your queen and children cannot be valued in money nor weighed in the balance against our lives.” “Well,” said the king, “I have heard your counsel and that of my lords: now hear mine. If I leave this ship there will remain on board five hundred men, each of whom loves his life as dearly as I do mine, and who, perchance, will never see their fatherland again. Therefore will I rather put my person and my wife and children in God’s hands than do hurt to so much people.”

Vincennes.

In 1238 the king was profoundly shocked by the news that the crown of thorns was a forfeited pledge at Venice for an unpaid loan advanced by some Venetian merchants to the Emperor Baldwin of Constantinople. Louis paid the debt,[52] redeemed the pledge, and secured the relic for Paris. The king met his envoys at Sens, and barefooted, himself{69} carried the sacred treasure enclosed in three caskets, one of wood, one of silver and one of gold, to Paris. The procession took eight days to reach the city, and so great were the multitudes who thronged to see it, that a large platform was raised in a field outside the walls, from which several prelates exposed it in turn to the veneration of the people. Thence it was taken to the cathedral of Notre Dame, the king dressed in a simple tunic, and barefoot still carrying the relic. From the cathedral it was transferred to the royal chapel of St. Nicholas within the precincts of the palace. A year later the Emperor Baldwin was constrained to part with other relics, including a piece of the true cross, the blade of the lance and the sponge of the Passion. To enshrine them and the crown of thorns the chapel of St. Nicholas was demolished and the beautiful Sainte-Chapelle built in its place. The upper chapel was dedicated to the relics; the lower to the Blessed Virgin. On solemn festivals the king would himself expose the relics to the people. Louis was zealous in his devotion and for a time attended matins in the new chapel at midnight, until, suffering much headache in consequence, he was persuaded to have the office celebrated in the early morning before prime. His piety, however, was by no means austere: he had all the French gaiety of heart, dearly loved a good story, and was excellent company at table, where he loved to sit conversing with Robert de Sorbon, his chaplain. “It is a bad thing,” he said one day to Joinville, “to take another man’s goods, because rendre (to restore) is so difficult, that even to pronounce the word makes the tongue sore by reason of the r’s in it.”

LA SAINTE CHAPELLE.

At another time they were talking of the duties of a layman towards Jews and Infidels. “Let me tell you a story,” said St. Louis. “The monks of Cluny once arranged a great conference between some learned clerks and Jews. When the conference opened, an old knight who for love of Christ was given bread and shelter at the monastery, approached the abbot and begged leave to say{70} the first word. The abbot, after some protest against the irregularity, was persuaded to grant permission, and the knight, leaning on his stick, requested that the greatest scholar and rabbi among the Jews might be brought before him. ‘Master,’ said the knight, ‘do you believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus and held Him at her breast, and that she is the Virgin Mother of God?’ The Jew answered that he believed it not at all. ‘Then,’ said{71} the knight, ‘fool that thou art to have entered God’s house and His church, and thou shalt pay for it.’ Thereupon he lifted his stick, smote the rabbi under the ear and felled him to the ground. The terrified Jews fled, carrying their master with them, and so,” said St. Louis, “ended the conference. And I tell you, let none but a great clerk dispute: the business of a layman when he hears the Christian religion defamed is to defend it with his sharp sword and thrust his weapon into the miscreant’s body as far as it will go.”

Louis, however, did not apply the moral in practice. Although severe in exacting tribute from the Jews, he spent much money in converting them and held many of their orphan children at the font. To others he gave pensions, which became a heavy financial burden to himself and his successors. He was stern with blasphemers, whose lips he caused to be branded with a hot iron. “I have heard him say,” writes Joinville, “with his own mouth, that he would he were marked with a red-hot iron himself if thereby he could banish all oaths and blasphemy from his kingdom. Full twenty-two years have I been in his company, and never have I heard him swear or blaspheme God or His holy Mother or any Saint, howsoever angry he may have been: and when he would affirm anything, he would say, ‘Verily it is so, or verily it is not so.’ Before going to bed he would call his children around him and recite the fair deeds and sayings of ancient princes and kings, praying that they would remember them for good ensample; for unjust and wicked princes lost their kingdoms through pride and avarice and rapine.” The good king essayed to deal with some social evils at court, but in vain:[53] he could only give the example of a pure and chaste life. When he was in the east he heard of a Saracen lord of Egypt who caused{72} all the best books of philosophy to be transcribed for the use of young men, and he determined to do the like for the youth of Paris. Scribes were sent to copy the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers, preserved in various abbeys in France. He had a convenient and safe place built at the treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle, where he housed the books. Scholars had free access to them, and he himself was wont in his leisure time to shut himself up there for study, reading rather the Holy Fathers than the writings of the best doctors of his own time.

Louis was a steadfast friend to the religious orders. On his return from the Holy Land he brought with him six monks from Mount Carmel and established them on the north bank of the Seine, near the present Quai des Celestins; they were subsequently transferred to the University quarter, on a site now occupied by the Marché aux Carmes. The prior of the Grande Chartreuse was also prayed to spare a few brothers to found a house in Paris; four were sent, and the king endowed them with his Château de Vauvert, including extensive lands and vineyards. The château was reputed to be haunted by evil spirits, and the street leading thither as late as the last century was known as the Rue d’Enfer. Louis began a great church for them, and the eight cells, each with its three rooms and garden, were increased to thirty before the end of his reign; in later times the order became one of the richest in Paris and occupied a vast expanse of land to the south of the Luxembourg. The fine series of paintings illustrating the life of St. Bruno, by Le Sueur, now in the Louvre, was executed for the smaller cloister of the monastery. The Grands Augustins were established on the south bank of the Seine, near the present Pont Neuf, and the Serfs de la Vierge, known later as the Blancs Manteaux, from their white cloaks, in the Marais. They were subsequently amalgamated with the Guillelmites, or the Hermits of St. William, and at no. 14 of the street of that name some remains of their monastery may yet be seen. The church{73} of the Blancs Manteaux, rebuilt in the seventeenth century, also exists in the street of that name.

REFECTORY OF THE CORDELIERS.

In 1217 the first of the Preaching Friars were seen at Paris. On the 12th of September seven friars, among whom were Laurence the Englishman and a brother of St. Dominic, established themselves in a house near the parvis of Notre Dame. In 1218 the University gave them a home near St. Genevieve, opposite the church of St. Etienne des Grez (St. Stephen of the Greeks), and in the following year, when St. Dominic came to Paris, the brothers had increased to thirty. The saint himself drew up the plans of their monastery in the Rue St. Jacques, and always cherished a particular affection for the Paris house. Their church was opened in 1220, and being dedicated to St. Jacques, the Dominicans were known as Jacobins all over France. St. Louis endowed them with a school; they soon became one of the most powerful and opulent of the religious orders, and their church, a burial-place for kings and princes. The Friars Minor soon followed. St. Francis himself, in his deep affection for France, had determined to go to Paris and found a house of his order, but being dissuaded by his friend, Cardinal Ugolin, sent in 1216 a few of his disciples. These early friars, true poverelli di Dio, would accept no endowment of house or money, and supporting themselves by their hands, carried their splendid devotion among the poor, the outcast, and the lepers of Paris. In 1230 the Cordeliers, as they were called,[54] accepted the loan of a house near the walls in the south-western part of the city. St. Louis built them a church, and left them at his death part of his library and a large sum of money.[55] They too became rich and powerful and their church one of the largest and most magnificent in Paris. St. Bonaventure and Duns Scotus{74} taught at their school of theology. Their monastery in the sixteenth century was the finest and most spacious in Paris, with cells for a hundred friars and a vast refectory, which still exists. The king also founded the hospital for 300 blind beggars, known as the Quinze-Vingts (15 × 20) now in the Rue de Charenton, and left them an annual rente of thirty livres parisis, that every inmate might have a mess of good pottage at his meals. Until Cardinal de Rohan, of diamond-necklace fame, effected the sale of the buildings in 1779 to a syndicate of speculators, an act of jobbery which brought his eminence a handsome commission, the hospital was situated between the Palais Royal and the Louvre. Originally it was a night shelter, whither the poor blind might repair after their long quest in the streets of Paris. The king subsequently gave them a dress on which Philip le Bel ordered a fleur-de-lys to be embroidered, that they might be known as the “king’s poor folk.” They were{75} privileged to place collecting-boxes and to beg inside the churches. Since, however, the differences in the relative opulence of churches was great, the right to beg in certain of the richer ones was put up to auction every year, and those who promised to pay the highest premium to the funds of the hospital were adjudicated the privilege of begging there. This curious arrangement was in full vigour until the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the foundation was removed. Twelve blind brothers and twelve seeing brothers—husbands of blind women who were lodged there on condition that they served as leaders through the streets—had a share in the management of the institution. Luxury seems to have sometimes invaded the hostel, for in 1579 a royal decree forbade the sale of wine to the brethren and denounced the blasphemy with which their conversation was often tainted. In 1631 they were forbidden to use stuffs other than serge or cloth for their garments, or to use velvet for ornament.

The establishment of the abbey of St. Antoine, of the Friars of the Holy Cross and of the Sisters of St. Bega or Béguines, were also due to the king’s piety, and the whole city was surrounded with religious houses. “Even as a scribe,” says an old writer, “who hath written his book illuminates it with gold and silver, so did the king illumine his kingdom with the great quantity of the houses of God that he built.”

Louis was, however, firm in his resistance to ecclesiastical arbitrariness. The prelates complained to him on one occasion that Christianity was going to the dogs, because no one feared their excommunications, and prayed that he would order his sergeants to lend the secular arm to enforce their authority. “Yes,” answered the king, “if you will give me the particulars of each case that I may judge if your sentence be just.” They objected that that appertained to the ecclesiastical courts, but Louis was inflexible, and they remained unsatisfied.{76}

Many were the king’s benefactions to the great hospital of Paris, the Hôtel Dieu. Rules, dating from 1217, for the treatment of the sick poor were elaborated in his reign with admirable forethought. The sick, after confession and communion, were to be put to bed and treated as if they were the masters of the house. They were to be daily served with food before the nursing friars and sisters, and all that they desired was to be freely given if it could be obtained and were not prejudicial to their recovery. If the sickness were dangerous the patient was to be set apart and to be tended with especial solicitude. The sick were never to be left unguarded and even to be kept seven days after they were healed, lest they should suffer a relapse. The friars and sisters were to eat twice a day: the sick whenever they had need. A nurse who struck a patient was excommunicated. In later times, lax management and the decline of piety which came with the religious and political changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made reform urgent, and in 1505 the Parliament appointed a committee of eight bourgeois clercs to control the receipts. The buildings were much increased in 1636, but were never large enough, and in 1655 the priory of St. Julien was united to the hospital. “As many as 6000 patients,” says Félibien, writing in 1725, “have been counted there at one time, five or six in one bed.” No limitations of age or sex or station or religion or country were set. Everybody was received, and in Félibien’s time the upkeep amounted to 500,000 livres per annum. The old Hôtel Dieu was situated to the south of Notre Dame, and stood there until rebuilt on its present site in 1878.

The king was ever solicitous for the earthly weal of his subjects and made an unpopular peace with England against the advice of his Council. “Sirs,” he protested, “the land I give to the king of England I give without being held to do so, that I may awaken love between his children and mine who are cousins germain.”{77}

Rue de Venise.

Louis sought diligently over all the land for the grand sage homme who would prove an honest and fearless judge, punishing the wicked without regard to rank or riches;[56] and what he exacted of his officers he practised himself. He punished his own brother, the Count of Artois, for having forced a sale of land on an unwilling man, and ordered him to make restitution. He inflicted a tremendous fine on the Sire de Coucy, one of the most powerful of his barons, for having hanged three young fellows for poaching. The whole of the baronage appealed against the sentence, but the king was inexorable. As Joinville was on his way to join ship at Marseilles for the crusade in Palestine, he passed a ruined château:—it had been razed to the ground as a warning to tyrannous seigneurs, who robbed and spoiled merchants and pilgrims. Louis forbade the judicial duel in civil cases; he instituted the Royal Watch to police the streets of Paris; he registered and confirmed the charters of the hundred crafts of Paris and gave many privileges to the great trade guilds.

In 1720 the king put on a second time the crusader’s badge, “the dear remembrance of his dying Lord,” and met his death in the ill-fated expedition to Tunis. Louis was so feeble when he left that Joinville carried him from the Hôtel of the Count of Auxerre to the Franciscan monastery (the Cordeliers), where the old friends and fellow-warriors in the Holy Land parted for ever. When stricken with the plague the dying king was laid on a couch strewn with ashes. He called his son, the Count of Alençon, to him and gave wise and touching counsel, and, after holy communion, he recited the seven penitential psalms, invoked “Monseigneurs St. James and St. Denis and Madame St. Genevieve,” crossed his hands on his heart, gazed towards heaven and rendered his soul to his Creator.{78} Piteuse chouse est et digne de pleurer le trépassement de ce saint prince, says Joinville, to whom the story was told by the king’s son—“A piteous thing it is and worthy of tears the passing away of this holy prince.”

The bones of the dead king, from which the flesh[57] had been removed by boiling, were sent for burial to St. Denis, which he had chosen for the place of his sepulture. The Sieur de Joinville,[58] his friend and companion, from whose priceless memoirs we have chiefly drawn, ends his story thus:—“I make known to all readers of this little book that the things which I say I have seen and heard of the king are true and steadfastly shall they believe them. And the other things of which I testify but by hearsay, take them in a good sense if it please you, praying God that by the prayers of Monseigneur St. Louis it may please Him to give us those things that He knoweth to be necessary as well for our bodies as for our souls. Amen.”

King Louis was tall of stature, with a spare and graceful figure; his face was of angelic sweetness, with eyes as of a dove, and crowned with abundant fair hair. As he grew older he became somewhat bald and held himself slightly bent. “Never,” says Joinville, when describing a charge led by the king, which turned the tide of battle, “saw I so fair an armed man. He seemed to sit head and shoulders above all his knights. His helmet of gold was most fair to see, and a sword of Allemain was in his hand. Four times I saw him put his body in danger of death to save hurt to his people.{79}”

CHAPTER VI

ART AND LEARNING AT PARIS

TWO epoch-making developments—the creation of Gothic architecture and the rise of the university—synchronise with the period covered by the reigns of Philip Augustus and St. Louis, and may now fitly be considered.

CATHEDRAL OF ST. DENIS.

The memory of the Norman terror had long passed from men’s minds. The Isle de France had been purged of robber lords, and with peace and security, wealth and population had increased. The existing churches were becoming too small for the faithful and new and fairer temples replaced the old: the massive square towers, the heavy walls and thick pillars of the Norman builders blossomed into grace and light and beauty. Already in the beginning of the twelfth century the church of St. Denis was in urgent need of extension. On festival days so great were the crowds pressing to view the relics that many people had been trodden under foot, and Abbot Suger determined to build a larger and nobler church. St. Denis is an edifice of profound interest to the traveller. In the west façade (1140) we may see the round Norman arch side by side with the pointed Gothic, and the choir completed in 1144 was the earliest example of a Gothic apse. But Suger’s structure was nearly destroyed by fire in 1219, and the upper part of the choir, the nave and transepts, were rebuilt in 1231 in the pure Gothic of the time. Great was the enthusiasm of the people as the new temple rose. Noble and burgess, freeman and serf, harnessed themselves like beasts of burden to the ropes and drew the stone from the quarry. All would lend their aid in raising the new house {80}of God and of His holy martyrs, and the burial-place of their kings. In 1161 Maurice de Sully, a peasant’s son, who had risen to become bishop of Paris, determined to erect a great minster in the place of Childebert’s basilica, which was no longer adequate to the demands of the time. The old church of St. Stephen[59] and many houses were demolished together with the cathedral, and a new street, called Notre Dame, was made. Sully devoted the greater part of his life and private resources to the work. The king, the pope, seigneurs, guilds of merchants and private persons, vied with each other in making gifts. Two years were spent in digging the foundations, and in 1163 Pope Alexander III. is said to have laid the first stone. In 1182, the choir being finished, the papal legate consecrated the high altar. At Sully’s death, in 1196, the walls of the nave were erect and partly roofed. The transepts and nave were completed in 1235.

NOTRE DAME: PORTAL OF ST. ANNE.

In 1218 an ingenious and sacrilegious thief, climbing to the roof to haul up the silver candlesticks from the altar by a noose in a rope, set fire to the altar cloth, and the choir was seriously injured. Sully’s work had been Romanesque in style, and choir and apse were now rebuilt in the new style, to harmonise with the remainder of the church. The builders have preserved some of the best of the Romanesque twelfth-century work in the portal of St. Anne’s, under the south tower, and the magnificent iron hinges of old St. Stephen’s were used for its doors. The chapels round the apse and the twenty-eight figures of the royal benefactors from Childebert I. to Philip Augustus, on the west front, were not completed until the end of the thirteenth century. The choir of St. Germain des Prés and the exquisite little church of St. Julien le Pauvre were built at the end of the twelfth century, and the beautiful refectory of St. Martin des Champs was created about 1220. But the culmination of Gothic art is reached in the wondrous sanctuary that St. Louis built for the crown of thorns, “the most precious piece of Gothic,” says Ruskin,{82} “in Northern Europe.” Michelet saw a whole world of religion and poetry—tears of piety, mystic ecstasy, the mysteries of divine love—expressed in the marvellous little church, in the fragile and precious paintings of its windows.[60] The narrow cell with an aperture looking on the reliquary, which St. Louis used as an oratory, is still shown. The work was completed in three years, and has been so admirably restored by Viollet-le-Duc that the visitor may gaze to-day on this pure and peerless gem almost as St. Louis left it, for the gorgeous interior faithfully reproduces the mediæval colour and gold. During the Revolution it was used as an granary and then as a club. It narrowly escaped destruction, and men now living can remember seeing the old notices on the porch of the lower chapel—Propriété nationale à vendre. Only once a year, when the “red mass” is said at the opening of the Law Courts in November, is the church used; and all that remains of the relics has long been transferred to the treasury of Notre Dame. The old Quinze-Vingts, the Chartreux, the Cordeliers, St. Croix de la Bretonnerie, St. Catherine, the Blancs Manteaux, the Mathurins and other masterpieces of the Gothic builders have all disappeared.

Gothic architecture was eminently a product of the Isle de France. The thirteenth century rivals the finest period of Greek art for purity, simplicity, nobility and accurate science of construction. Imagination was chastened by knowledge, but not systematised into rigid rules. Each master solved his problem in his own way, and the result was a charm and a variety, a fertility of invention, never surpassed in the history of art. Early French sculpture is a direct descendant of Greek art, which made its way into France by the Phœnician trade route. French artists achieved a perfection in the representation of the human form which anticipated by a generation the work of the Pisani in Italy, for the statues on the west front of Chartres{84} Cathedral (1150-1160) are carved with a naturalness and grace which the Italian masters never surpassed, and the marvellously mature and beautiful thirteenth-century silver-gilt figure of a king, in high relief, found in 1902 immured in an old house at Bourges and exhibited in 1904 among the Primitifs Français at the Louvre, was wrought more than a century before the birth of Donatello. Some fragments of the old sculptures that adorned St. Denis and other twelfth- and thirteenth-century churches may still be found in the museums of Paris. The influence of the French architects, as Emile Bertaux has demonstrated in the first volume of his Art dans l’Italie Meridionale, extended far beyond the limits of France, and is clearly traceable in the fine hunting-palace, erected for Frederic II. in the thirteenth century, at Castello del Monte, near Andria, in Apulia. But the names of those who created these wonderful productions no man knoweth; the great masterpieces of the thirteenth century are anonymous. Jean de Chelles, one of the masons of Notre Dame, has left his name on the south portal and the date, Feb. 12, 1257, on which it was begun, “in honour of the holy Mother of Christ,” but nothing is known of him. The Sainte-Chapelle is commonly attributed to Pierre de Montereau, but the attribution is a mere guess.

13th Century Sculptures from St. Denis (Restored).

NOTRE DAME—SOUTHERN SIDE.

Nor did the love of beauty during this marvellous age express itself solely in architecture. If we were asked to specify one trait which more than any other characterises the “dark ages” and differentiates them from modern times, we should be tempted to say, love of brightness and colour. Within and without, the temples of God were resplendent with silver and gold, with purple and crimson and blue; the saintly figures and solemn legends on their porches, the capitals, the columns, the groins of the vaultings were lustrous with colour and gold. Each window was a complex of jewelled splendour: the pillars and walls were painted or draped with lovely tapestries and gorgeous banners: the shrines and altars glittered with precious stones—jasper and sardius and chalcedony, sapphire and emerald, chrysolite and beryl,{85} topaz and amethyst and pearl. The Church illuminated her sacred books with exquisite painting, bound them with precious fabrics, and clasped them with silver and gold; the robes of her priests and ministrants were rich with embroideries. So insensible, so atrophied to colour have the eyes of moderns grown amid their drab surroundings, that the aspect of a building wherein skilful hands have in some small degree essayed to realise the splendour of the past dazes the beholder; a sense of pain rather than of delight possesses him and he averts his gaze.

La Sainte Chapelle.

Nor were the churches of those early times anything more than an exquisite expression of what men were surrounded by in their daily lives and avocations. The houses[61] and oratories of noble and burgess were rich with ivories exquisitely carved, with sculptures and paintings, tapestry and enamels: the very utensils of common domestic use were beautiful. Men did not prate of art: they wrought in love and simplicity. The very word art, as denoting a product of human activity different from the ordinary daily tasks of men, was unknown. If painting was an art, even so was carpentry. A mason was an artist: so was a shoemaker. Astronomy and grammar were arts: so was spinning. Apothecaries and lawyers were artists: so was a tailor. Dante uses the word artista as denoting a workman or craftsman, and when he wishes to emphasise the degeneracy of the citizens of his time as compared with those of the old Florentine race, he does so by saying that in those days their blood ran pure even nell’ ultimo artista (in the commonest workman). Let us be careful how we speak of these ages as “dark”; at least there were “retrievements out of the night.” Already before the tenth century the basilica of St. Germain des Prés was known as St. Germain le doré (the golden), from its glowing{87} refulgence, and St. Bernard declaimed against the resplendent colour and gold in the churches of his time. Never since the age of Pericles has so great an effusion of beauty descended on the earth as during the wondrous thirteenth century in the Isle de France and especially in Paris.[62]

We pass from the enthusiasm of art to that of learning. From earliest times, schools, free to the poor, had been attached to every great abbey and cathedral in France. At the end of the eleventh century four were eminent at Paris: the schools of St. Denis, where the young princes and nobles were educated; of the Parvis Notre Dame, for the training of young clercs,[63] the famous Scola Parisiaca, referred to by Abelard; of St. Genevieve; and of St. Victor, founded by William of Champeaux. The fame of this teacher drew multitudes of young men from the provinces to Paris, among whom there came, about 1100, Peter Abelard, scion of a noble family of Nantes. By his wit, erudition and dialectical subtlety he soon eclipsed his master’s fame and was appointed to a chair of philosophy in the school of Notre Dame. William of Champeaux, jealous of his young rival, compassed his dismissal, and after teaching for a while at Melun, Abelard returned to Paris and opened a school on Mont St. Genevieve, whither crowds of students followed him. So great was the fame of this brilliant lecturer and daring thinker that his school was filled with eager listeners from all countries of Europe, even from Rome herself.

Abelard was proud and ambitious, and the highest prizes of an ecclesiastical and scholastic career seemed within his grasp. But Fulbert, canon of Notre Dame, had a niece, accomplished and passing fair, Héloïse by name, who was an enthusiastic admirer of the great teacher. It was proposed{88} that Abelard should enter the canon’s house as her tutor, and Fulbert’s avarice made the proposition an acceptable one. Abelard, like Arnault Daniel, was a good craftsman in his mother tongue, a facile master of versi d’amore, which he would sing with a voice wondrously sweet and supple. Now Abelard was thirty-eight years of age: Héloïse seventeen. Amor al cor gentil ratio s’apprende,[64] and Minerva was not the only goddess who presided over their meetings. For a time Fulbert was blind, but scandal cleared his eyes and Abelard was expelled from the house. Héloïse followed and took refuge with her lover’s sister in Brittany, where a child, Astrolabe, was born. Peacemakers soon intervened and a secret marriage was arranged, which took place early one morning at Paris, Fulbert being present. But the lovers continued to meet; scandal was again busy and Fulbert published the marriage. Héloïse, that the master’s advancement in the Church might not be marred, gave the lie to her uncle and fled to the nuns of Argenteuil. Fulbert now plotted a dastardly revenge. By his orders Abelard was surprised in his bed, and the mutilation which, according to Eusebius, Origen performed on himself, was violently inflicted on the great teacher. All ecclesiastical preferment was thus rendered canonically impossible: Abelard became the talk of Paris, and in bitter humiliation retired to the abbey of St. Denis. Before he made his vows, however, he required of Héloïse that she should take the veil. The heart-broken creature reproached him for his disloyalty, and repeating the lines which Lucan puts into the mouth of Cornelia weeping for Pompey’s death, burst into tears and consented to take the veil.

A savage punishment was inflicted by the ecclesiastical courts on Fulbert’s ruffians, who were made to suffer the lex talionis and the loss of their eyes: the canon’s property was confiscated. The great master, although forbidden to open a school at St. Denis, was importuned by crowds of young men not to let his talents waste, and soon a country{89} house near by was filled with so great a company of scholars that food could not be found for them. But enemies were vigilant and relentless, and he had shocked the timid by doubting the truth of the legend that Dionysius the Areopagite had come to France.

In 1124 certain of Abelard’s writings on the Trinity were condemned, and he took refuge at Nogent-sur-Seine, near Troyes, under the patronage of the Count of Champagne. He retired to a hermitage of thatch and reeds, the famous Paraclete, but even there students flocked to him, and young nobles were glad to live on coarse bread and lie on straw, that they might taste of wisdom, the bread of the angels. Again his enemies set upon him. He surrendered the Paraclete to Héloïse and a small sisterhood, and accepted the abbotship of St. Gildes in his own Brittany. A decade passed, and again he was seen in Paris. His enemies now determined to silence him. St. Bernard, the dictator of Christendom, denounced his writings. Abelard appealed for a hearing, and the two champions met in St. Stephen’s church at Sens before the king, the hierarchy and a brilliant and expectant audience. Abelard, the ever-victorious knight-errant of disputation, stood forth, eager for the fray, but St. Bernard simply rose and read out seventeen propositions from his opponent’s works, which he declared to be heretical. Abelard in disgust left the lists, and was condemned unheard to perpetual silence. The pope, to whom he appealed, confirmed the sentence, and the weary soldier of the mind, old and heart-broken, retired to Cluny. He gave up the struggle, was reconciled to his opponents, and died absolved by the pope near Chalons in 1142. His ashes were sent to Héloïse, and twenty years later she was laid beside him at the Paraclete. A well-known path, worn by generations of unhappy lovers, leads to a monument in Père-la-Chaise Cemetery at Paris which marks the last resting-place of Abelard and Héloïse, whose remains were transferred there in 1817.

It is commonly believed that Abelard’s school on Mont{90} St. Genevieve was the origin of the Latin Quarter in Paris, but the migration to the south had probably begun before Abelard came, and was rather due to the overcrowding of the episcopal schools. Teachers and scholars began to swarm to the new quarter over the bridge where quiet, purer air and better accommodation were found. Ordinances of Bishop Gilbert, 1116, and Stephen, 1124, transcribed by Félibien, make this clear. So disturbed were the canons by the numbers of students in the cloister, that externes were to be no longer admitted, nor other schools allowed on the north side where the canons lodged. The growing importance of the new schools, which tended to the advantage of the abbey of St. Genevieve, soon alarmed the bishops, and the theologians were ordered to lecture only between the two bridges (the Petit and Grand Ponts.) But it was Abelard’s brilliant career that attracted like a lodestar the youth of Europe to Paris, and made that city the “oven where the intellectual bread of the world was baked.” Providence, it was said, had given Empire to Germany, Priestcraft to Italy, Learning to France. What a constellation of great names glows in the spiritual firmament of Paris: William of Champeaux, Peter Lombard, Maurice de Sully, Pierre de Chartreux, Abelard, Gilbert[65] l’Universel, John of Salisbury, Adrian IV., St. Thomas of Canterbury. Small wonder that the youth of the twelfth century sought the springs of learning at Paris!

NOTRE DAME AND PETIT PONT.

The Seine from Pont de la Concorde.

There was no discipline or college life among the earliest students. Each master, having obtained his license from the bishop’s chancellor, rented a room at his own cost, and taught what he knew—even, it was sometimes complained, what he did not know. We read of one Adam du Petit Pont, who, in the twelfth century, expounded Aristotle in the back-room of a house on the bridge amid the cackle of cocks and hens, whose clientèle had many a vituperative contest with the fish-fags of the neighbourhood. The students grouped themselves according to nationalities, and{91} with their masters held meetings in any available cloister, refectory, or church. When funds were needed, a general levy was made; any balance that remained was spent in a festive gathering in the nearest tavern. The aggregation of thousands of young men, some of whom were cosmopolitan vagabonds, gave rise to many evils. Complaints are frequent among the citizens of the depredations and immoralities of riotous clercs, who lived by their wits or by{92} their nimble fingers, or by reciting or singing licentious ballads: the paouvres escolliers, whose miserable estate, temptations, debauchery, ignoble pleasures, remorse and degradation have been so pathetically sung by François Villon, master of arts, poet, bohemian, burglar and homicide. The richer scholars often indulged in excesses, and of the vast majority who were poor, some died of hunger. It was the spectacle of half-starving clercs begging for bread that evoked the compassion of pious founders of colleges, which originally were simply hostels for needy scholars. On the return of Louis VII. from a pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine, his brother Robert founded about 1180 the church of St. Thomas of Canterbury and a hostel for fifteen students, who, in 1217, were endowed with a chapel of their own, dedicated to St. Nicholas, and were then known as the poor scholars of St. Nicholas.[66] In the same year a London merchant, passing through Paris on his return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was touched by the sight of some starving students begging their bread. He founded a hostel for eighteen poor scholars at the Hôtel Dieu, who in return for lodging and maintenance were to perform the last Christian rites to the friendless dead. This was the college of the Dix-huit, afterwards absorbed in the Sorbonne. In 1200 Etienne Belot and his wife, burgesses of Paris, founded a hostel for thirteen poor scholars who were known as the bons enfants. In all, some dozen colleges were in being when St. Louis came to the throne. In 1253, St. Louis’ almoner, Robert of Cerbon or Sorbon, a poor Picardy village, founded[67] a modest college of theology, and obtained from Blanche of Castile a small house above the palace of the Thermæ. Here he was able to maintain a few poor scholars of theology and to facilitate their studies. Friends{93} came to his aid and soon sixteen were accommodated, to whom others, able to maintain themselves, were added. In 1269 a papal bull confirmed the establishment of the pauvres maistres estudiants in the faculty of theology at Paris. Even when enriched by later founders it was still called la pauvre Sorbonne. By the renown of their erudition, the doctors of the Sorbonne were the great court of appeal in the Middle Ages in matters of theology, and the Sorbonne became synonymous with the university. Some of the hostels were on a larger scale. The college of Cardinal Lemoine, founded in 1302 by the papal legate, housed sixty students in arts and forty in theology. Most were paying residents, but a number of bourses (scholarships) were provided for those whose incomes were below a certain amount. Each boursier was given daily two loaves of white bread of twelve ounces, “the common weight in the windows of Paris bakers.”

In 1304, Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, founded the college of Navarre for seventy poor scholars, twenty in grammar, thirty in philosophy, and twenty in theology. The maintenance fund seems, however, to have been inadequate or mismanaged, for we soon read of the scholars of the college walking the streets of Paris every morning crying—“Bread, bread, good people, for the poor scholars of Madame of Navarre!”

TOWER IN RUE NALETTE IN
WHICH CALVIN IS SAID TO HAVE LIVED.

Some forty colleges were in existence by the end of the fourteenth century and had increased to fifty by the end of the fifteenth; in the seventeenth, Evelyn gives their number as sixty-five. In Félibien’s time some had disappeared, for in his map (1725) forty-four colleges only are marked. Nearly the whole of these colleges clustered around the slopes of Mont St. Genevieve, which at length became that Christian Athens that Charlemagne dreamt of. Each college had its own rules. Generally students were required to attend matins (in summer at 3 a.m., winter at 4), mass, vespers and compline. When the curfew of Notre Dame sounded, they retired to their dormitories. Leave to sleep{94} out was granted only in very exceptional cases. Tennis was allowed, cards and dice were forbidden. The college of Montaigue, which housed eighty-two poor scholars in memory of the twelve apostles and seventy disciples, was reformed in the fifteenth century; so severe was the discipline that the college became the terror of the youth of Paris, and fathers were wont to sober their libertine sons by threatening to make capetes[68] of them. This was Calvin’s college, where he was known as the “accusative,” from his austere piety. To obtain admission to the college of Cluny (1269) the scholar must pass an entrance examination. He then spent two years at logic, three at metaphysics, two in Biblical studies; he held weekly disputations and preached every fortnight in French; he was interrogated every evening by the president on his studies during the day. If students evinced no aptitude for learning they were dismissed; if only moderate progress were made, the secular duties of the college devolved upon them. It was the foundation of these colleges which organised themselves,{95} about 1200, into powerful corporations of masters and scholars (universitates magistrorum et scholiarum) that gave the university its definite character.

When the term “university” first came into use is unknown. It is met with in the statutes (1215) which, among other matters, define the limits of age for teaching. A master in the arts must not lecture under twenty-one; of theology under thirty-five. Every master must undergo an examination as to qualification and moral fitness at the Episcopal Chancellor’s court. Early in the twelfth century the four faculties of Law, Medicine, Arts and Theology were formed and the national groups reduced to four: French, Picards, Normans and English.[69] Each group elected its own officers, and in 1245 at latest the Quatre Nations were meeting in the church of St. Julien le Pauvre[70] to choose a common head or rector, who soon superseded the chancellor as head of the university. The rectors in process of time exercised almost sovereign authority in the Latin Quarter. They ruled a population of ten thousand masters and students, who were exempt from civic jurisdiction. In 1200 some German students ill-treated an innkeeper who had insulted their servant. The provost of Paris and some armed citizens attacked the students’ houses and blood was shed, whereupon the masters of the schools complained to the king, who was fierce in his anger, and ordered the provost and his accomplices to be cast into prison, their houses demolished and vines uprooted. The provost was given the choice of imprisonment for life or the ordeal by water. Then followed a series of ordinances which abolished secular jurisdiction over the students and made them subject to ecclesiastical courts alone.

HÔTEL OF THE PROVOST OF PARIS.

In the reign of Philip le Bel a provost of Paris dared to hang a scholar. The rector immediately closed all classes until reparation was made, and on the Feast of the Nativity{96} of the Virgin the curés of Paris assembled and went in procession, bearing a cross and holy water to the provost’s house, against which each cast a stone, crying, in a loud voice—“Make honourable reparation, thou cursed Satan, to{97} thy mother Holy Church, whose privileges thou hast injured, or suffer the fate of Dathan and Abiram.” The king dismissed his provost, caused ample compensation to be made, and the schools were reopened.

In 1404 some pages belonging to the royal chamberlain brutally spurred their horses through a procession of scholars wending to the church of St. Catherine. They were stoned by the angry scholars, whereupon they drew sword and attacked them, pursuing them even into the church. The rector demanded satisfaction, but the chamberlain, Charles de Savoisy, was a court functionary, and nothing was done. The rector then closed all the schools and the king ordered the Parlement to do instant justice. The sentence was an exemplary one. The chamberlain’s house was to be demolished, an annuity of one hundred livres to be paid for the maintenance of five chaplaincies under the patronage of the university, a thousand livres compensation to be paid to the injured scholars and a like sum to the university. Three of the chamberlain’s men were to do penance in their shirts, torch in hand, before the churches of St. Genevieve, St. Catherine and St. Sévérin, to suffer a whipping at the cross roads, and to be banished for three years. In 1406 permission was given for the house to be rebuilt, but the university resisted the decree and only gave way one hundred and twelve years later, on condition that the terms of the original condemnation and sentence were inscribed on the new house.

The famous Prés aux Clercs (Clerks’ Meadow) was the theatre of many a fight with the powerful abbots of St. Germain des Prés. From earliest times the students had been wont to take the air in the meadow, which lay between the monastery and the river, and soon claimed the privilege as an acquired right. In 1192 the inhabitants of the monastic suburb resented their insolence, and a free fight ensued, in which several scholars were wounded and one was killed. The rector inculpated the abbot, and each appealed to Rome, with what result is unknown. After nearly a{98} century of strained relations and minor troubles the abbots in 1278 had walls and other buildings erected on the way to the meadow. The scholars met in force and demolished them. The abbot, who was equal to the occasion, rang his bells, called his vassals to arms and sent a force to seize the gates of the city that gave on the suburb, to prevent reinforcements reaching the scholars. His retainers then attacked the rioters, killed several and wounded many. The rector complained to the papal legate and threatened to close the schools if reparation were not made and justice done within fifteen days, whereupon the legate ordered the provost of the monastery to be expelled for five years. The royal council forced the abbot to exile ten of his vassals, to endow two chantries for the repose of the souls of slain clercs and compensate their fathers by fines of two hundred and four hundred livres respectively, and to pay the rector two hundred livres to be distributed among poor scholars.

The rector claimed right of jurisdiction over the parchments exposed for sale in Paris and its neighbourhood, and attended with his sworn experts the great Fair of Landry at St. Denis, instituted in 877. The students accompanied him with much uproar. At this season the Landry gifts were made by the students to the masters, consisting of a lemon larded with pieces of gold or silver in a crystal glass. The ceremony was accompanied by the sound of drums and musical instruments and was followed by a holiday. Innumerable were the complaints on this and other occasions of the rowdyism of the scholars, their practical jokes and dissolute habits.

Many circumstances contributed to make Paris the capital of the intellectual world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. France has ever been the home of great enthusiasms and has not feared “to follow where airy voices lead.” The conception and enforcement of a Truce of God (Trève de Dieu) whereby all acts of hostility in private or public wars ceased during certain days of the week or on church festivals; the noble ideal of Christian{99} chivalry; the first crusade—all had their origin in France. The crusaders carried the prestige of the French name and diffused the French idiom over Europe. It was a French monk preaching in France who gave voice to the general enthusiasm; a French pope approved his impassioned oration; a French shout “Dieu le veut” became the crusader’s war-cry. The conquest of the Holy Land was organised by the French, its first Christian king was a French knight, its laws were indited in French, and to this day every Christian in the East is a Frank whatever tongue he may speak. In the thirteenth century Brunetto Latini wrote his most famous work, the Livres dou Trésor, in French, because it was la parleure plus delitable, il plus commune à toutes gens (“the most delightful of languages and the most common to all peoples.”) Martin da Canale composed his story of Venice in French for the same reason, and Marco Polo dictated his travels in French in a Genoese prison. When St. Francis was sending the brothers to establish the order in distant lands, he himself chose France, but was dissuaded by his friend, Cardinal Ugolin. “When inebriated with love and compassion for Christ,” says the writer of the Speculum, “and overflowing with sweetest melody of the Spirit, ofttimes would he find utterance in the French tongue; the strains of the divine whisperings which his ear had caught he would express in a French song of joyous exultation, and making the gestures of one playing a viol, he would sing in French of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Never in the history of civilisation were men possessed with such passion for the spiritual life or such faith in the reasoning faculty as in the thirteenth century in Paris. The holiest mysteries were analysed and defined; everywhere was a search for new things. Conservative Churchmen became alarmed and complained of disputants and blasphemers exercising their wits at every street corner. The four camel-loads of manuscripts, the works and commentaries of Aristotle, brought by the Jews from{100} Spain—a monstrous and mutilated version translated from Greek into Arabic and from Arabic into Latin—became the battle-ground of the schools. The Church at first forbade the study of Aristotle, then by the genius of Aquinas, Christianised and absorbed him. His works became a kind of intellectual tennis-ball bandied between the Averroists, who carried their teachings to a logical consequence, and the more orthodox followers of Aquinas. For three years the faculty was torn asunder by the rival factions. Siger of Brabant, whose eternal light Dante saw refulgent amid other doctors of the Church in the heaven of the Sun, was an Averroist; Siger—

The Rue du Fouarre (Straw), where Siger taught and perhaps Dante studied, was the street of the Masters of the Arts. Every house in it was a school. It still exists, though wholly modernised, opposite the foot of the Petit Pont. Its name has been derived from the straw spread on the floor of the schools or on which the students sat, but there is little doubt that Benvenuto da Imola’s[72] explanation, that it was so named from a hay and straw market held there, is the correct one.

Le Petit Pont.

The wonderful thirteenth century saw the meridian glory of the university. It was the age of the great Aristotelian schoolmen who all taught at Paris—Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Roger Bacon, their candid critic, who carried the intellectual curiosity of the age beyond the tolerance of his Franciscan superiors and twice suffered disciplinary measures at Paris.{101}

In the fourteenth century the university was as renowned as ever. Among many tributes from great scholars we choose that of Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham, who in his Philobiblon writes: “O Holy God of gods in Zion, what a mighty stream of pleasure made glad our hearts whenever we had leisure to visit Paris, the Paradise of the world, and to linger there; where the days seemed ever few for the greatness of our love! There are delightful libraries more aromatic than stores of spicery; there are luxuriant parks of all manners of volumes; there are Academic meads shaken by the tramp of scholars; there are lounges of Athens; walks of the Peripatetics; peaks of Parnassus; and porches of the Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all arts and sciences Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most excellent in doctrine, so far as relates to this passing sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures epicycles and eccentric apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures and numbers; there Paul reveals the mysteries; there his neighbour Dionysius arranges and distinguishes the hierarchies; there the virgin Carmentis reproduces in Latin characters all that Cadmus collected in Phœnician letters; there indeed opening our treasures and unfastening our purse-strings we scattered money with joyous heart and purchased inestimable books with mud and sand.”

In 1349 the number of professors (maistres-regents) on the rolls was 502: in 1403 they had increased to 709, to which must be added more than 200 masters of theology and canon law. “The University,” wrote Pope Alexander IV. in a papal bull, “is to the Church what the tree of life was to the earthly Paradise, a fruitful source of all learning, diffusing its wisdom over the whole universe; there the mind is enlightened and ignorance banished and Jesus Christ gives to His spouse an eloquence which confounds all her enemies.”

But already decadence had set in. The multiplication and enrichment of colleges proved fatal to the old democratic{102} vigour and equality. Some colleges pretended to superiority and the movement lost its unity. Scholasticism had done its work and no new movement took its place. Teachers lost all originality and did but ruminate and comment on the works of their great predecessors. Schools declined in numbers and scholars in attendance. Ordinances were needed to correct the abuses covered by the title of scholar. The Jacobin and Cordelier teachers, moreover, had exhausted much life from the university; but its fame continued, and Luther in his early conflicts with the papacy appealed against the pope to the university. But it made the fatal blunder of opposing the Reform and the Renaissance, instead of absorbing them, and the interest of those great movements centres around the college of France.{103}

CHAPTER VII

THE PARLEMENT—THE STATES-GENERAL—CONFLICT WITH BONIFACE VIII.—THE DESTRUCTION OF THE KNIGHTS-TEMPLARS

THE court of Philip III., pitiful scion of a noble king, is associated with a dramatic judicial murder at Paris. Among the late-repentant souls temporarily exiled from purification who crowd around Dante at the foot of the Mont of Purgatory is that of Pierre de la Brosse, “severed from its body through hatred and envy and not for any sin committed.” Unhappy Pierre was St. Louis’ chamberlain and had been present at his death. He filled the same high office under his son, became his favourite minister and all-powerful at court. In 1276 the king’s eldest son by his first queen died under suspicion of poison. The second queen, sister of the Duke of Brabant, being envious of Pierre’s ascendency, began insidiously to abuse the king’s ear. Pierre met the queen’s move by clandestinely spreading a report that the prince was sacrificed to secure the succession to her own offspring. The king was then persuaded by the queen’s friends to consult a famous prophetess, who declared her innocent, and Pierre’s death was plotted by the queen, her brother of Brabant, and some discontented and jealous nobles. One morning Paris was startled by the arrest of the omnipotent minister, who was tried before a commission packed by his enemies, and hanged on 30th June 1278, by the common hangman, at the gibbet on Montfaucon, in the presence of the Duke of Brabant and others of his enemies. The popular belief was that he had been accused of an attempt on the queen’s chastity: actually his destruction {104}had been compassed by a charge of treason, based on some forged letters. The tragic end of Pierre de la Brosse excited universal interest and discussion. Benvenuto da Imola says that Dante, when in Paris, diligently sought out the truth and convinced himself of the great minister’s innocence.

A prince of far different calibre was the Fourth Philip, surnamed the Fair, who grappled with and humiliated the great pontiff, Boniface VIII.—the most resolute upholder of the papacy in her claim to universal secular supremacy—and thus achieved a task which had baffled the mighty emperors themselves; a prince who, in Dante’s grim metaphor, scourged the shameless harlot of Rome from head to foot, and dragged her to do his will in France.

PALAIS DE JUSTICE, CLOCK TOWER AND CONCIERGERIE.

Philip’s reign is remarkable for the establishment of the Parlement and the first convocation of the States-General in Paris. From earliest times of the Monarchy, the kings had dispensed justice, surrounded by the chief Churchmen and nobles of the land, thus constituting an ambulatory tribunal, which was held wherever the sovereign might happen to be. In 1302 Philip fixed the tribunal at Paris, restricted it to judicial functions, and housed it in his palace of the Cité, which, in 1431, when the kings ceased to dwell there, became the Palais de Justice. The palace was rebuilt by Philip. A vast hall, divided by a row of columns adorned with statues of the kings of France, and said to have been the most spacious and most beautiful Gothic chamber in France, with other courts and offices, accommodated the Parlement. The tribunal was at first composed of twenty-six councillors or judges, of whom thirteen were lawyers, presided over by the royal chancellor. It sat twice yearly for periods of two months, and consisted of three chambers or courts.[73] The nobles who at first sat among the lay members gradually ceased to attend owing to a sense of their legal inefficiency, and the Parlement became at length a purely legal body. During the imprisonment of the French king, John the Good, in England, the{105} Parlement[74] sat en permanence, and henceforth became the cour souveraine et capitale of the kingdom. The purity of its members was maintained by severest penalties. In 1336 one of the presidents was convicted of receiving bribes and hanged. Twelve years later the falsification of some depositions was punished with the same severity, and in 1545 a corrupt chancellor was fined 100,000 livres, degraded, and imprisoned for five years. The chief executive officer of the Parlement, known as the Concierge, appointed the bailiffs of the court and had extensive local jurisdiction over dishonest merchants and craftsmen, whose goods he could burn. His official residence, known as the Conciergerie, subsequently became a prison, and so remains to this day. The entrance flanked by the two ancient tours de César et d’Argent, is one of the most familiar objects in Paris. There the Count of Armagnac was assassinated and the cells are still shown where Marie Antoinette, Madame Roland, Danton, Robespierre, and many of the chief victims of the Terror were lodged before their execution.

The same year (1302) saw the ripening of Philip’s long quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII. and the first meeting of the States-General. The king knew he had embarked on a struggle in which the mightiest potentates had been worsted: he determined to appeal to the patriotism of all classes of his subjects and fortify himself on the broad basis of such popular opinion as then existed. The meeting of the States-General after the burning of the papal bull in Paris on the memorable Sunday of 11th February 1302, made an epoch in French history. For the first time members of the Tiers Etat (the Third Estate, or Commons), sat beside the two privileged orders of clergy and nobles, and were recognised as one of the legitimate orders of the realm. The assembly was convoked to meet in Notre Dame on the 10th of April. The question was the old one which had rent Christendom{107} asunder for centuries: Was the pope to be supreme over the princes and peoples of the earth in secular as well as in spiritual matters? The utmost enthusiasm prevailed, and though the prelates spoke with a somewhat timid voice the assembled members swore to risk their lives and property rather than sacrifice the honour of the crown and their own liberties to the insolent usurpation of the pope. Excommunication followed, but the king had ordered all the passes from Italy to be guarded, so that no papal letter or messenger should enter France. “Boniface, who,” says Villani, the Florentine chronicler, “was proud and scornful, and bold to attempt every great deed, magnanimous and puissant, replied by announcing the publication of a bull deposing the king from his throne and releasing his subjects from their allegiance.” Philip, at an assembly in the garden of the palace in the Cité, and in presence of the chief ecclesiastical, religious and lay authorities, again laid his case before the people and read an appeal against the pope to a future Council of the Church.

The bull of deposition was to be promulgated on 8th September. On 7th September, while the aged pope was peacefully resting at his native city of Anagni, Guillaume de Nogaret, bearing the royal banner of France, Sciarra Colonna and other disaffected Italian nobles, with three hundred horsemen, flung themselves into Anagni, crying—“Death to Pope Boniface.” The papal palace was unguarded; at the first alarm the cardinals fled and hid themselves, and all but a few faithful servants forsook their master. The defenceless pope believed that his hour was come, but, writes Villani, “Great-souled and valiant as he was, he said, ‘Since like Jesus Christ I must be taken by treachery and suffer death, at least I will die like a pope.’ He commanded his servants to robe him in the mantle of Peter, to place the crown of Constantine on his head and the keys and crozier in his hands.” He ascended the papal throne and calmly waited. Guillaume, Sciarra and the other leaders burst into the apartment, sword{108} in hand, uttering the foulest of insults; but awed and cowed by the indomitable old pontiff, who stood erect in appalling majesty, their weapons dropped and none durst lay a hand upon him. They set a guard outside the room and proceeded to loot the palace. For three days the grand old pontiff—he was eighty-six years of age—remained a prisoner, until the people of Anagni rallied and rescued him, and he returned to Rome. In a month the humiliated Boniface died of a broken heart, and before two years were passed his successor in Peter’s chair, Pope Clement V., revoked all his bulls and censures, expunged them from the papal register, solemnly condemned his memory and restored the Colonna family to all their honours. Dante, who hated Boniface as cordially as Philip did, and cast him into hell, was yet revolted at the cruelty of the “new Pilate, who had carried the fleur-de-lys into Anagni, who made Christ captive, mocked Him a second time, renewed the gall and vinegar, and slew Him between two living thieves.” But the “new Pilate was not yet sated.” The business at Anagni had only been effected spendendo molta moneta; the disastrous battle of Courtrai and the inglorious Flemish wars had exhausted the royal treasury; the debasement of the coinage had availed nought, and Philip turned his lustful eyes on a once powerful lay order, whose wealth and pride were the talk of Christendom.

Ile de la Cité.

After the capture of Jerusalem and the establishment there of a Christian kingdom, pilgrims flocked to the holy places. Soon, however, piteous stories reached Jerusalem of the cruel spoliation and murder of unarmed pilgrims on their journey from the coast by hordes of roving lightly-armed Bedouins, against whom the heavily-armed Franks were powerless. The evil was growing well-nigh intolerable when, in 1118, two young French nobles, Hugh of Payens and Godfrey of St. Omer, with other seven youths of highest birth, bound themselves into a lay community, with the object of protecting the pilgrims’ way. They took the usual vow of poverty, charity and obedience; St. Bernard drew{109} up their Rule—and we may be sure it was austere enough—pope and patriarch confirmed it. Their garb was a mantle of purest white linen with a red cross embroidered on the shoulder. The order was housed in a wing of the king’s palace, which was built on the site of Solomon’s Temple, hard by the Holy Sepulchre, and its members called themselves the Poor Soldiers of Christ and of Solomon’s Temple. Their banner, half of black, half of white, was inscribed with the device “non nobis Domine.” Their battle-cry “Beauceant,” and their seal, two figures on horseback, have not been satisfactorily interpreted—the latter probably portrays a knight riding away with a rescued pilgrim. Soon the little band of nine was joined by hundreds of devoted youths from rich and noble families; endowments to provide them with arms and horses and servants flowed in, and thus was formed the most famous, the purest and the most heroic body of warriors the world has ever seen. Hugh de Payens had gathered three hundred Knights-Templars around him at Jerusalem: in five years nearly every one had been slain in battle. But enthusiasm filled the ranks faster than they were mowed down: none ever surrendered and the order paid no money for ransom. When hemmed in by overwhelming numbers, they fought till the last man fell, or died, a wounded captive, in the hands of the Saracens. Of the twenty-two Grand Masters seven were killed in battle, five died of wounds, and one of voluntary starvation in the hands of the infidel.

When Acre was lost, and the last hold of the Christians in the Holy Land was wrested from them, only ten Knights-Templars of the five hundred who fought there escaped to Cyprus. They chose Jacques de Molay for Grand Master, replenished their treasury and renewed their members; but their mission was gone for ever. The order was exempt from episcopal jurisdiction and subject to the pope alone: its wealth, courage and devotion were rusting for lack of employment. Boniface VIII., with that grandeur and daring which make of him despite his faults, so magnificent a{110} figure in history, conceived the idea of uniting them with the other military orders—the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights—and making of the united orders an invincible army to enforce on Europe the decrees of a benevolent and theocratic despotism. They soon became suspected and hated by bishops and kings alike, and at length were betrayed by the papacy itself to their enemies.

In 1304, a pair of renegade Templars,[75] who for their crimes were under sentence of imprisonment for life in the prison at Toulouse, sought an introduction to the king, and promised in return for their liberty to give information of certain monstrous crimes and sacrileges of common and notorious occurrence in the order. Depositions were taken and sent to the king’s creature, Pope Clement V. Some communication passed between them, but no action was taken and the matter seemed to have lapsed. About a year after these events the pope wrote an affectionate letter to Jacques de Molay, inviting him to bring the treasure of the order and his chief officers to France, to confer with himself and the king respecting a new crusade. Jacques and his companions, suspecting nothing, came and were received by pope and king with great friendliness: the treasure, twelve mules’ load of gold and silver, was stored in the vaults of the great fortress of the Templars at Paris. Some rumours reached de Molay of the delation made by the Toulousian prisoners, but the pope reassured him in an interview, April 1307, and lulled him into security. On 14th September of the same year all the royal officers of the realm were ordered to hold themselves armed for secret service on 12th October, and sealed letters were handed to them to be opened on that night. At dawn on the 13th, all the Templars in France were arrested in their beds and flung into the episcopal gaols, and the bishops then proceeded to “examine” the prisoners. One hundred and forty were dealt with in Paris, the centre of the order.{111} The charges and a confession of their truth by the Grand Master were read to them: denial, they were told, was useless; liberty would be the reward of confession, imprisonment the penalty of denial.

PALACE OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF SENS.

A few confessed and were set free. The remainder were “examined.” Starvation and torture of the most incredible ferocity did their work. Thirty-six died under torture in Paris, and many others in other places: most of the remainder confessed to anything the inquisitors required. The pope, warned by the growing feeling in Europe, now became alarmed, and the next act in the drama opens at Paris, where a papal commission sat at the Abbey of St. Genevieve, to hear what the Templars had to say in their defence. All were invited to give evidence and promised immunity in the name of the pope. Hundreds came to Paris to defend their order,[76] but having been made to understand by the bishops that they would be burned as heretics if they retracted their confessions, they held back for a time until solemnly assured by the papal commissioners that they had nothing to fear, and might freely speak. Ponzardus de Gysiaco, preceptor of Payens, then came forward and disclosed the atrocious means used to extort confessions, and said if he were so tortured again he would confess anything that were demanded of him. He would face death, however horrible, even by boiling and fire, in defence of his order, but long-protracted and agonising torture was beyond human endurance. He was sent back to confinement and the warders were bidden to see that he suffered naught for what he had said. The rugged old master, Jacques de Molay, scarred by honourable wounds, the marks of many a battle with the infidel, was brought before the court and his alleged confession was read to him. He was stupefied, and swore that if his enemies were not priests he would know how to deal with them. A second{112} time he was examined and preposterous charges of unnatural crimes were preferred against the order by the king’s chancellor, Guillaume de Nogaret. They were drawn from a chronicle at St. Denis, and based on certain statements alleged to have been made by Saladin, Sultan of Babylon (Egypt). Again he was stupefied, and declared he had never heard of such things. And now the Templars’ courage rose. Two hundred and thirty-one came forward, emaciated, racked and torn; among them one poor wretch was carried in, whose feet had been burnt off by slow fires. Nearly all protested that the confessions had been wrung from them by torture, that their accusers were perjurers, and that they would maintain the purity of their order usque ad mortem (“even unto death”). Many complained that they were poor, illiterate soldiers, neither able to pay for legal defence nor to comprehend the charges indicted in Latin against them. When the commissioners went to interrogate twenty Templars detained in the abbey of St. Genevieve, a written petition was handed to them by the prisoners, with a prayer to the papal notaries to correct the bad Latin. It was Philip’s turn now to be alarmed, but the prelates were equal to the crisis. The archbishop of Sens, metropolitan of Paris and brother of the king’s chief adviser, convoked a provincial court at his palace in Paris, and condemned to the stake fifty-four of the Knights who had retracted their confessions. On the 10th of May the papal commissioners were appealed to: they expressed their sorrow that the episcopal court was beyond their jurisdiction, but would consider what might be done. Short time was allowed them. The stout-hearted archbishop was not a man to show weakness; he went steadily on with his work, and in spite of appeals from the papal judges for delay, the fifty-four were led forth on the afternoon of the 12th[77] to the open country{113} outside the Porte St. Antoine, near the convent of St. Antoine des Champs, and slowly roasted to death. They bore their fate with the constancy of martyrs, each protesting his innocence with his last breath, and declaring that the charges alleged against the order were false. Two days later, six more were sent to the stake at the Place de Grève. In spite of threats, the prelates went on with their grim work of terror. Many of the bravest Templars still gave the lie to their traducers, but the majority were cowed: further confessions were obtained, and the pope was satisfied. The proudest, bravest and richest order in Christendom was crushed or scattered to the four corners of the world. Their vast estates were nominally confiscated to the Knights Hospitallers; but our “most dear brother in Christ, Philip the king, although he was not moved by avarice nor intended the appropriation of the Templars’ goods”[78] had to be compensated for the expense of the prosecution. The treasure of the order failed to satisfy the exorbitant claims of the crown, and the Hospitallers were said to have been impoverished rather than enriched by the transfer.

The last act was yet to come. On 11th March 1314, a great stage was erected in the parvis of Notre Dame, and there, in chairs of state, sat the pope’s envoy, a cardinal, the archbishop of Sens, and other officers of Christ’s Church on earth. The Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and three preceptors were exposed to the people, their alleged confession and the papal bull suppressing the order, and condemning them to imprisonment for life, were read by the cardinal. But, to the amazement of his Eminence, when the clauses specifying the enormities to which the accused had confessed were being recited, the veteran Master and the preceptor of Normandy rose, and in loud voices, heard of all the people, repudiated the confession, and declared that they were wholly guiltless, and ready to suffer death. They had not long to wait. Hurried counsel was held with{115} the king, and that same night Jacques de Molay and the preceptor of Normandy were brought to a little island on the Seine, known as the Isle of the Trellises,[79] and burnt to death, protesting their innocence to the last.

“God pays debts, but not in money.” An Italian chronicler relates that the Master, while expiring in the flames, solemnly cited pope and king to meet him before the judgment-seat of God. In less than forty days Clement V. lay dead: in eight months Philip IV. was thrown by his horse and went to his account. Seven centuries later the grisly fortress of the Templars opened its portals, and the last of the unbroken line of the kings of France, Louis XVI., was led forth to a bloody death.

Those who would read the details of the dramatic examination at Paris before the papal commissioners, may do so in the minutes published by Michelet.[80] The great historian declares that a study of the evidence shook his belief in the Templars’ innocence, and that if he were writing his history again, he must needs alter his attitude towards them. Such is not the impression left on the mind of the present writer. Moreover it has been pointed out that there is a suspicious identity in the various groups of testimonies, corresponding to the episcopal courts whence such testimonies came. The royal officers, after the severest search, could find not a single compromising document in the Templars’ houses: nothing but a few account books, works of devotion and copies of St. Bernard’s Rule. There were undoubtedly unworthy and vicious knights among the fifteen thousand Templars belonging to the order, but the charges brought against them are too monstrous for belief.{116} The call which they had responded to so nobly, however, had long ceased. They were wealthy, proud and self-absorbed. Sooner or later they must infallibly have gone the way of all organisations which have outlived their use and purpose. It is the infamy of their violent destruction for which pope and king must answer at the bar of history.

The Seine at Alfortville.

{117}

CHAPTER VIII

ETIENNE MARCEL—THE ENGLISH INVASIONS—THE MAILLOTINS—MURDER OF THE DUKE OF ORLEANS—ARMAGNACS AND BURGUNDIANS

WITH the three sons of Philip who successively became kings of France, the direct line of the Capetian dynasty ends: with the accession of Philip VI. in 1328, the house of Valois opens the sad century of the English wars—a period of humiliation and defeat, of rebellious and treacherous princes, civil strife, famine and plague, illumined only by the heroism of a peasant-girl, who, when king and nobles were sunk in shameless apathy or sullen despair, saved France from utter extinction. Pope after pope sought to make peace, but in vain: Hui sont en paix, demain en guerre (“to-day peace, to-morrow war”) was the normal and inevitable situation until the English had wholly subjected France or the French driven the English to their natural boundary of the Channel.

Never since the days of Charlemagne had the French Monarchy been so powerful as when the Valois came to the throne: in less than a generation Crecy and Poitiers had made the English name a terror in France, and a French king, John the Good, was led captive to England. Once again, as in the dark Norman times, Paris rose and determined to save herself. Etienne Marcel, provost of the merchants, whose statue now stands near the site of the Maison aux Piliers, the old Hostel de Ville which he bought for the citizens of Paris, became the leader of the movement. The Dauphin,[81] who had assumed the title of Lieutenant-General, convoked the States-General at Paris,{118} but he was forced by Marcel and his party to grant some urgent reforms, and a Committee of National Defence was organised by the provost, who became virtually dictator of Paris. The Dauphin fled to Compiègne to rally the nobles. During the ensuing anarchy the poor, dumb, starving serfs of France, in their hopeless misery and despair, rose in insurrection and swept like a flame over the land. Froissart, who writes from the distorted stories told him by the seigneurs, has woefully exaggerated the atrocities of the Jacquerie.[82] There was much arson and pillage, but barely thirty of the nobles are known to have perished. Of the merciless vengeance taken by the seigneurs there is ample confirmation. The wretched peasants were easily out-manœuvred and killed like rats by the mail-clad nobles and their men-at-arms; so many were butchered in the market-place of Meaux that weariness stayed the arms of the slaughterers, and fire completed their work. Twenty thousand are estimated to have perished between the Seine and the Marne. Meanwhile the Dauphin was marching on Paris: Marcel had seized the Louvre, repaired and extended the wall of Paris, and raised an army. The provost turned for support to the Jacques, and on their suppression essayed to win over King Charles of Navarre, whose aid would decide the issue. Plot and counterplot followed. On 31st July 1358, Marcel was inspecting the gates of Paris, and at the Bastille[83] St. Denis ordered the keys to be given up to the treasurer of the king of Navarre, who was with him. The guards refused, and Jean Maillart, Marcel’s sheriff and bosom friend, leapt on his horse, rode to the Halles, and crying;—“Au roi, au roi, mont-joie St. Denis,” called the king’s friends to arms, and hastened to intercept the provost at the Bastille St. Antoine. Marcel was holding the keys in his hand when they arrived. “Stephen,{119} Stephen!” cried Maillart, “what dost thou here at this hour?” “I am here,” answered the provost, “to guard the city whose governor I am.” “Par Dieu,” retorted Maillart, “thou art here for no good,” and turning to his followers, said, “Behold the keys which he holds to the destruction of the city.” Each gave the other the lie. “Good people,” protested Marcel, “why would you do me ill? All I wrought was for your good as well as mine.” Maillart for answer smote at him, crying, “Traitor, à mort, à mort!” There was a stubborn fight, and Maillart felled the provost by a blow with his axe; six of the provost’s companions were slain, and the remainder haled to prison. Next day the Dauphin entered Paris in triumph, and the popular leaders were executed on the Place de Grève. The provost’s body was dragged to the court of the church of St. Catherine du Val des Ecoliers, where it lay naked that it might be seen of all: after a long exposure it was cast into the Seine. All the reforms were revoked by the king, but the remembrance of the time when the merchants and people of Paris had dared to speak to their royal lord face to face of justice and good government, was never obliterated.

Meanwhile the land was a prey to anarchy. Law there was none. Bands of routiers, or organised brigands, English and French, ravaged and pillaged without let or hindrance. Eustache d’Aubrecicourt, with 10,000 men-at-arms, raided Champagne at his will and held a dozen fortresses. The peasants posted sentinels in the church towers while they worked in the fields, and took refuge by night in boats moored in the rivers.

The English invasion of 1359 resembled a huge picnic or hunting expedition. The king of England and his barons brought their hunters, falcons, dogs and fishing tackle. They marched leisurely to Bourg-la-Reine, less than two leagues from Paris, pillaged the surrounding country and turned to Chartres, where tempest and sickness forced Edward III. to come to terms. After the treaty of Bretigny, in 1360, the Parisians saw their good King John again, who{120} was ransomed for a sum equal to about ten million pounds of present-day value. The memory of this and other enormous ransoms exacted by the English endured for centuries, and when a Frenchman had paid his creditors he would say,—j’ai payé mes Anglais.[84] (“I have paid my English.”) A magnificent reception was accorded to the four English barons who came to sign the Peace at Paris. They were taken to the Sainte-Chapelle and shown the fairest relics and richest jewels in the world, and each was given a spine from the crown of thorns, which he deemed the noblest jewel that could be presented to him.

In 1364, after sowing dragons’ teeth in France by bestowing in appanage the duchy of Burgundy on his youngest son Philip the Bold, King John the Good returned to captivity and death at London in chivalrous atonement for the breaking of parole by his second son, Louis of Anjou, who had been interned at Calais as a hostage under the treaty of 1360. The Dauphin, now Charles V., by careful statesmanship succeeded in restoring order to the kingdom and to its finances[85] and in winning some successes against the English. The dread companies of routiers, after defeating and slaying Jacques de Bourbon and capturing one hundred French chevaliers, were bribed by Pope Innocent VI. to pass into Lombardy, or induced to follow du Guesclin, the national hero of the wars against the English, in a crusade against Pedro the Cruel in Spain.

In 1370 the English camp fires were again seen outside Paris: Charles refused battle and allowed them to ravage the suburbs with impunity. Before the army left, an English knight swore he would joust at the gates of the city, and spurred lance in hand against them. As he turned to ride back, a big butcher lifted his pole-axe, smote the knight on the neck and felled him; four others battered him to{121} death, “their blows,” says Froissart, “falling on his armour like strokes on an anvil.”

By wise counsel rather than by war Charles won back much of his dismembered country. He was a great builder and patron of the arts. He employed Raymond of the Temple, his “beloved mason,” to transform the Louvre into a sumptuous palace with apartments for himself and his queen, the princes of the blood and the officers of the royal household. Each suite of apartments was furnished with a private chapel, those of the king and queen being carved with much “art and patience.” A gallery was built for the minstrels and players of instruments. A great garden was planted towards the Rue St. Honoré on the north, and the old wall of Philip Augustus on the east, in which were an “Hôtel des Lions,” or collection of wild beasts, and a tennis court, where the king and princes played. The palace accounts still exist, with details of payments for “wine for the stone-cutters which the king our lord gave them when he came to view the works.” Jean Callow and Geoffrey le Febre were paid for planting squares of strawberries, hyssop, sage, lavender, balsam, violets, and for making paths, weeding and carrying away stones and filth; others were paid for planting bulbs of lilies, double red roses and other good herbs. The first royal library was founded by Charles, and Peter the Cage-maker was employed to protect the library windows from birds and other beasts by trellises of wire. An interesting payment of six francs in gold, made to Jacqueline, widow of a mason “because she is poor and helpless and her husband met his death in working for the king at the Louvre,” demonstrates that royal custom had anticipated modern legislation.

CHAPEL OF FORT VINCENNES

Charles surrendered his palace in the Cité to the Parlement, and erected an immense palace (known as the Hôtel St. Paul) in the east of Paris, outside the old wall, where he could entertain the whole of the princes of the blood and their suites. It was an irregular group of exquisite Gothic mansions and chapels, furnished with sumptuous magnificence and surrounded{122} by tennis courts, falconries, menageries, delightful and spacious gardens—a hostel solennel des grands esbattements (“a solemn palace of great delights.”) This royal city within a city covered a vast space, now roughly bounded by the Rue St. Paul, the river, the Rue de l’Arsenal and the Rue St. Antoine. Charles VII. was the last king who dwelt there; the buildings fell to ruin, and between 1519 and 1551 were gradually sold. No vestige of this palace of delight now remains, nothing but the memory of it in a few street names,—the streets of the Fair Trellis, of the Lions of St. Paul, of the Garden of St. Paul, and of the Cherry Orchard. To Charles V. is also due the beautiful chapel of Vincennes and the completion of Etienne Marcel’s wall. This fourth enclosure, began at the Tour de Billi, which stood at the angle formed by the Gare de l’Arsenal and the Seine, extended north by the Boulevard Bourdon, the Place de la Bastille, and the line of the inner Boulevards to the Porte St. Denis; it then turned south-west by the old Porte Montmartre, the Place des Victoires and across the garden of the Palais Royal to the Tour de Bois, opposite the present Pont du Carrousel. It was fortified by a double moat and square towers. The south portion was never begun. To defend the Porte St. Antoine, Charles laid the foundation of the Bastille of{123} sinister fame—ever a hateful memory to the citizens, for it was completed by the royal provost when the provost of the merchants had been suppressed by Charles VI. in 1383.

“Woe to the nation whose king is a child!” During the minority and reign of Charles VI. France lay prostrate under a hail of evils that menaced her very existence, and Paris was reduced to the profoundest misery and humiliation. The breath had not left the old king’s body before his elder brother, the Count of Anjou, who was hiding in an adjacent room, hastened to seize the royal treasure and the contents of the public exchequer. No regent had been appointed, and the four royal dukes, the young king’s uncles of Anjou, Burgundy, Bourbon, and Berri, began to strive for power.

In 1382 Anjou, who had been suffered to hold the regency, sought to enforce an unpopular tax on the merchants of Paris. The people revolted, armed themselves with the loaded clubs (maillotins) stored in the Hôtel de Ville for use against the English, attacked the royal officers and opened the prisons. The court temporised, promised to remit the tax and to grant an amnesty; but with odious treachery caused the leaders of the movement to be seized, put them in sacks and flung them at dead of night into the Seine. The angry Parisians now barricaded their streets and closed their gates against the king. Negotiations followed and by payment of 100,000 francs to the Duke of Anjou the citizens were promised immunity and the king and his uncles entered the city. But the court nursed its vengeance, and after the victory over the Flemings at Rosebecque the king and his uncles with a powerful force marched on Paris. The Parisians, 20,000 strong, stood drawn up in arms at Montmartre to meet him. They were asked who were their chiefs and if the Constable de Clisson might enter Paris. “None other chiefs have we,” they answered “than the king and his lords: we are ready to obey their orders.” “Good people of Paris,” said the Constable on his arrival at their camp, “what meaneth this? meseems you would fight against your king.” They replied that their purpose was{124} but to show the king the puissance of his good city of Paris. “‘Tis well,” said the Constable, “if you would see the king return to your homes and put aside your arms.”

On the morrow, 11th January 1383, the king and his court, with 12,000 men-at-arms, appeared at the Porte St. Denis, and there stood the provost of the merchants with the chief citizens in new robes, holding a canopy of cloth of gold. The king, with a fierce glance, ordered them back. The gates were unhinged and flung down: the royal army entered as in a conquered city. A terrible vengeance ensued. The President of the Parlement and other civil officers, with three hundred prominent citizens, were arrested and cast into prison. In vain was the royal clemency entreated by the Duchess of Orleans, the rector of the university and chief citizens all clothed in black. The bloody diurnal work of the executioner began and continued until a general pardon was granted on March 1st on payment of an enormous fine. The liberties of the city met the same fate. The provostship of the merchants, and all the privileges of the Parisians, were suppressed, and the hateful taxes reimposed. Never had the heel of despotism ground them down so mercilessly.

On the Quai des Grands Augustins.

After cruelty and debauchery came madness. As Charles one sultry August day was riding in the forest of le Mans he suddenly drew his sword, wounded some of his escort and attacked the Duke of Orleans. The demented king was seized by the Duke of Burgundy and carried senseless and bound into the city. In 1393, when he had somewhat recovered, a grand masked ball was given to celebrate the wedding of one of the ladies of honour who was a widow. The marriage of a widow was always the occasion of riotous mirth, and the king disguised himself and five of his courtiers as satyrs. They were sewed up in tight-fitting vestments of linen, which were coated with resin and pitch and covered with rough tow; on their heads they wore hideous masks. While the ladies of the court were celebrating the marriage the king and his{125} companions rushed in howling like wolves and indulged in the most uncouth gestures and jokes. The Duke of Orleans, drawing too near with a torch to discover their identity, set fire to the tow and in a second they were enveloped in so many shirts of Nessus. Unable to fling off their blazing dresses they madly ran hither and thither, suffering the most excruciating agony and uttering piteous cries. The king happened to be near the young Duchess of Berri who, with admirable presence of mind, flung her robe over him and rescued him from the flames. One knight saved himself by plunging into a large tub of water in the kitchen, one died on the spot, two died on the second day, another lingered for three days in awful torment. The horror of the scene[86] so affected Charles that his madness returned more violently than ever.

TOWER AT THE CORNER OF THE RUE VIEILLE DU TEMPLE AND THE RUE BARBETTE.

The bitterness of the avuncular factions was now intensified. The House of Burgundy by marriage and other means had grown to be one of the most powerful in Europe and was at bitter enmity with the House of Orleans. At the death of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, his son Jean sans Peur, sought to assume his father’s supremacy as well as his title: the Duke of Orleans, strong in the queen’s support, determined to foil his purpose. Each fortified his hôtel in Paris and assembled an army. Friends, however, intervened; they were reconciled, and in November 1407 the two dukes attended mass at the Church of the Grands Augustins, took the Holy Sacrament and dined together. As Jean rose from table the Duke of Orleans placed the Order of the Porcupine round his neck; swore bonne amour et fraternité, and they kissed each other with tears of joy. On 23rd November a forged missive was handed to the Duke of Orleans, requiring his attendance on the queen at the Hôtel St. Paul, whither he often went to visit her. He set forth, attended only by two squires and five servants carrying torches. It was a sombre night, and as the unsuspecting prince rode up the{126} Rue Vieille du Temple behind his little escort, humming a tune and playing with his glove, a band of assassins fell upon him from the shadow of the postern La Barbette,[87] crying “à mort, à mort,” and he was hacked to death. Then{127} issued from a neighbouring house at the sign of Our Lady, a tall figure concealed in a red cloak, lantern in hand, who gazed at the mutilated corpse. “C’est bien,” said he, “let’s away.” They set fire to the house to divert attention and escaped. Four months before, Jean sans Peur had hired the house on the pretext of storing provisions, and for two weeks a score of assassins had been concealed there, biding their time. On the morrow, Jean with the other princes went to asperse the dead body with holy water in the church of the Blancs Manteaux, and as he drew nigh, exclaiming against the foul murder, blood is said to have issued from the wounds. At the funeral Jean held a corner of the pall, but his guilt was an open secret, and though he braved it out for a time he was forced to flee to his lands in Flanders for safety. In a few months, however, he was back in force at Paris, and a doctor of the Sorbonne pleaded an elaborate justification of the deed before the assembled princes, nobles, clergy and citizens at the Hôtel St. Paul. The poor demented king was made to declare publicly that he bore no ill-will to his dear cousin of Burgundy and later, on the failure of a conspiracy of revenge by the queen and the Orleans party, to grant full pardon for a deed “committed for the welfare of the kingdom.” The cutting of the Rue Etienne Marcel has exposed the strong machicolated tower still bearing the arms of Burgundy (two planes and a plumb line), which Jean sans Peur built to fortify the Hôtel de Bourgogne, as a defence and refuge against the Orleans faction and the people of Paris. The Orleans family had for arms a knotted stick, with the device “Je l’ennuis”: the Burgundian arms with the motto, “Je le tiens,” implied that the knotted stick was to be planed and levelled.

The arrival of Jean sans Peur, and the fortification of his hôtel were the prelude to civil war, for the Orleanists and their allies had rallied to the Count of Armagnac, whose daughter the new Duke of Orleans had married, and fortified themselves in their stronghold on the site now occupied by the Palais Royal.{128}

The Armagnacs, for so the Orleanists were now called, thirsted for revenge, and for five years Paris was the scene of frightful atrocities as each faction gained the upper hand and took a bloody vengeance on its rivals. At length the infamous policy of an alliance with the English was resorted to. The temptation was too great for the English king, and in 1415 Henry V. met the French army, composed almost entirely of the Armagnacs, at Agincourt, and inflicted on it a defeat more disastrous than Crecy or Poitiers. The famous oriflamme of St. Denis passed from history in that fatal year of 1415. The Count of Armagnac hurried to Paris, seized the mad king and the Dauphin, and held the capital.

TOWER OF JEAN SANS PEUR.

In 1417 the English returned under Henry V. The{129} Burgundians had promised neutrality, and the defeated Armagnacs were forced in their need to “borrow[88] of the saints.” But hateful memories clung to them in Paris and they were betrayed. On the night of 29th May 1418, the son of an ironmonger on the Petit Pont, who had charge of the wicket of the Porte St. Germain, crept into his father’s room and stole the keys while he slept. The gate was then opened to the Burgundians, who seized the person of the helpless and imbecile king. Some Armagnacs escaped, bearing the dauphin with them, and the remainder were flung into prison. The Burgundian partisans in the city, among whom was the powerful corporation of the butchers and fleshers, now rose, and on Sunday, 14th June, ran to the prisons.

Before dawn fifteen hundred Armagnacs were indiscriminately butchered under the most revolting circumstances. The count himself perished, and a strip of his skin was carried about Paris in mockery of the white scarf of the Armagnacs. Jean sans Peur and Queen Isabella[89] entered the city, amid the acclamation of the people, and soon after a second massacre followed, in spite of Jean’s efforts to prevent it. He was now master of Paris, but the Armagnacs were swarming in the country around and the English marching without let on the city. In these straits he sought a reconciliation with the dauphin and his Armagnac counsellors at Melun, on 11th July 1419. On 10th September a second conference was arranged, and duke and dauphin, each with ten attendants, met in a wicker enclosure on the bridge at Montereau. Jean doffed his cap and knelt to the dauphin, but before he could rise was felled{130} by a blow from an axe and stabbed to death.[90] In 1521 a monk at Dijon showed the skull of Jean sans Peur to Francis I., and pointing to a hole made by the assassin’s axe, said: “Sire, it was through this hole that the English entered France.”

On receipt of the news of his father’s murder, the new Duke of Burgundy, Philip le Bon, thirsting for vengeance, flung himself into the arms of the English, and by the treaty of Troyes on May 20, 1420, Henry V. was given a French princess to wife and the reversion of the crown of France, which, after Charles’ death, was to be united ever more to that of England. But the French crown never circled Henry’s brow: on August 31, 1422, he lay dead at Vincennes. He was buried with great pomp in the royal abbey of St. Denis, leaving an infant son of nine months to inherit the dual monarchy. Within a few weeks of Henry’s death the hapless king of France was entombed under the same roof; a royal herald cried “for God’s pity on the soul of the most high and most excellent Charles, king of France, our natural sovereign lord,” and in the next breath hailed “Henry of Lancaster, by the grace of God, king of France and of England, our sovereign lord.” All the royal officers reversed their maces, wands and swords as a token that their functions were at an end. At the next festival the Duke of Bedford was seen in the Sainte Chapelle of the palace of St. Louis, exhibiting the crown of thorns to the people as Regent of France, and a statue of Henry V. of England was raised in the great hall, following on the line of the kings of France from Pharamond to Charles.{131}

CHAPTER IX

JEANNE D’ARC—PARIS UNDER THE ENGLISH—END OF THE ENGLISH OCCUPATION

THE occupation of Paris by the English was the darkest hour in French history, yet amid the universal misery and dejection the treaty of Troyes was hailed with joy. When the two kings entered Paris after its signature, the whole way from the Porte St. Denis to Notre Dame was filled with people crying, “Noël, noël!”

The university, the parlement, the queen-mother, the whole of North France, from Brittany and Normandy to Flanders, from the Channel to the line of the Loire, accepted the situation, and the Duke of Burgundy, most powerful of the royal princes, was a friend of the English. Yet a few French hearts beat true. While the regent Duke of Bedford was entering Paris, a handful of knights unfurled the royal banner at Melun, crying—“Long live King Charles, seventh of the name, by the grace of God king of France!” And what a pitiful incarnation of national independence was this to whom the devoted sons of France were now called to rally!—a feeble youth of nineteen, indolent, licentious, mocked at by the triumphant English as the “little king of Bourges.”

The story of the resurrection of France at the call of an untutored village girl is one of the most enthralling dramas of history. When all men had despaired; when the cruelty, ambition and greed of the princes of France had wrought her destruction; when the miserable dauphin at Chinon was prepared to seek safety by an ignominious flight to Spain or Scotland; when Orleans, the key to the southern provinces, was about to fall into English hands—the{132} means of salvation were revealed in the ecstatic visions of a simple peasant maid. With that divine inspiration vouchsafed alone to faith and fervent love, she saw with piercing insight the essential things to be done. The siege of Orleans must be raised and the dauphin anointed king at Rheims. “The originality of the Maid,” says Michelet, “and the cause of her success was her good sense amid all her enthusiasm and exaltation.” We may not here narrate the story of those miraculous three months of the year 1429 (27th April-16th July), which saw the relief of Orleans, the victories of Jargeau, of Patay (where invincible Talbot was made prisoner), of the surrender of ill-omened Troyes and of the solemn coronation at Rheims. Jeanne deemed her mission over after Rheims, but to her ill-hap was persuaded to follow the royal army after the retreat of the English from Senlis, and on 23rd August she occupied St. Denis. She declared at her trial that her voices told her to remain at St. Denis, but that the lords made her attack Paris. On the 8th September the assault was made, but it was foiled by the king’s apathy, the incapacity and bitter jealousy of his counsellors, and the action of double-faced Burgundy. In the afternoon Jeanne, while sounding the depth of the fosse with her lance,[91] was wounded by an arrow in the thigh. She remained till late evening, when she was carried away to St. Denis, at whose shrine she hung up her arms—her mysterious sword from St. Catherine de Fierbois and her banner of pure white, emblazoned with the fleur-de-lys and the figure of the Saviour, with the device “Jesu Maria.”

Notre Dame from the North

Six months later, while Charles was sunk in sloth at the château of Sully, Jeanne was captured by the Burgundians at the siege of Compiègne, and her enemies closed on her like bloodhounds. The university and the Inquisition wrangled for her body, but English gold bought her from her Burgundian captors and sent her to a martyr’s death at{133} Rouen. Those who would read the sad record of her trial may do so in the pages of Mr Douglas Murray’s translation of the minutes of the evidence, and may assist in imagination at the eighteen days’ forensic baiting of the hapless child (she was but nineteen years of age), whose lucid simplicity broke through the subtle web of theological chicanery which was spun to entrap her by the most cunning of the Sorbonne doctors.

A summary of Jeanne’s answers was sent to “Our Mother, the University of Paris.” The condemnation was a foregone conclusion[92] and after a forced retractation, the virgin saviour of France was led to her doom in the market-place of Rouen. As she passed the lines of English soldiers, their eyes flashing fierce hatred upon her, a cry escaped her, “O Rouen, Rouen, must I then die here?” With her last breath she protested that her voices had not deceived her and were of God; and calling on “Jesus!” her head sank in the flames. “We are lost,” said an English spectator; “we have burnt a saint!”

Some contemporary letters from Venetian merchants in the cities of France have recently been published, which give valuable testimony to the sympathy evoked among foreign residents by the career of Jeanne the Maid. To them she was a zentil anzolo, “a gentle angel sent of God to save the good land of France, the most noble country in the world, which having purged its sins and pride God snatched from the brink of utter destruction. For even as by a woman, our Lady St. Mary, He saved the human race, so by this young maiden pure and spotless He hath saved the fairest pearl of Christendom.”

“The English burnt her,” says one of the merchants, writing from Bruges, “thinking that fortune would turn in their favour, but may it please Christ the Lord that the{134} contrary befall them!” And so in truth it happened. Disaster after disaster wrecked the English cause; the Duke of Bedford died, Philip of Burgundy and Charles were reconciled and Queen Isabella went to a dishonoured grave. The English were driven out of Paris, and in 1453, of all the “large and ample empery” of France, won at the cost of a hundred years of bloodshed and cruel devastation, a little strip of land at Calais and Guines alone remained to the English crown. Charles, who with despicable cowardice had suffered the heroic Maid to be done to death by the English without a thought of intervention, was moved to call for a tardy reparation of the atrocious injustice at Rouen; and a quarter of a century after the Te Deum sung in Notre Dame for her capture, another, a very different scene, was witnessed in the cathedral. “The case for her rehabilitation,” says Mr Murray, “was solemnly opened there, and the mother and brothers of the Maid came before the court to present their humble petition for a revision of her sentence, demanding only ‘the triumph of truth and justice.’ The court heard the request with some emotion. When Isabel d’Arc threw herself at the feet of the Commissioners, showing the papal rescript and weeping aloud, so many joined in the petition that at last, we are told, it seemed that one great cry for justice broke from the multitude.”

The story of Paris under the English is a melancholy one. Despite the rigid justice and enlightened policy of Bedford’s regency they failed to win the affection of the Parisians. Rewards to political friends, punishments and confiscations inflicted on the disaffected, the riotous and homicidal conduct of some of the English garrison, the depression in commerce and depreciation of property brought their inevitable consequences—a growing hatred of the English name.[93] The chapter of Notre Dame was{135} compelled to sell the gold vessels from the treasury. Hundreds of houses were abandoned by their owners, who were unable to meet the charges upon them. In 1427 by a royal instrument the rent of the Maison des Singes was reduced from twenty-six livres to fourteen, “seeing the extreme diminution of rents.”

CLOISTER OF THE BILLETES,
FIFTEENTH CENTURY, RUE DE L’HOMME ARMÉ.

Some curious details of life in Paris under the English have come down to us. By a royal pardon granted to Guiot d’Eguiller, we learn that he and four other servants of the Duke of Bedford, and of our “late very dear and very beloved aunt the Duchess of Bedford whom God pardon,” were drinking one night at ten o’clock in a tavern where hangs the sign of L’Homme Armé.[94] Hot words arose between them and some other tipplers, to wit, Friars Robert, Peter and William of the Blancs Manteaux, who were disguised as laymen and wearing swords. Friar Robert lost his temper and struck at the servants with his naked sword. The friar, owing to the strength of the wine or to inexperience in the use of secular weapons, cut off the leg of a dog instead of hitting his man; the friars then ran away, pursued by three of the{136} servants—Robin the Englishman, Guiot d’Eguiller and one Guillaume. The fugitive friars took refuge in a deserted house in the Rue du Paradis (now des Francs Bourgeois), and threw stones at their pursuers. There was a fight, during which Guillaume lost his stick and snatching Guiot’s sword struck at Friar Robert through the door of the house. He only gave one “cop,” but it was enough, and there was an end of Friar Robert.

A certain Gilles, a povre homme laboureur, went to amuse himself at a game of tennis in the hostelry kept by Guillaume Sorel, near the Porte St. Honoré, and fell a-wrangling with Sorel’s wife concerning some lost tennis balls. Madame Sorel clutched him by the hair and tore out some handfuls. Gilles seized her by the hood, disarranged her coif, so that it fell about her shoulders, “and in his anger cursed God our Creator.” This came to the bishop’s ears, and Gilles was cast for blasphemy into the bishop’s oven, as the episcopal prison was called, where he lay in great misery. He was examined and released on promising to offer a wax candle of two pounds’ weight before the image of our Lady of Paris at the entrance of the choir of Notre Dame.

Many of the religious foundations had suffered by the wars, for in 1426 the glovers of Paris were authorised to re-establish the guild of the blessed St. Anne, founded by some good people, smiths and ironmongers, which during the wars and mutations of the last twenty years had come to an end. In 1427, “our well-beloved, the money-changers of the Grand Pont in our good town of Paris were permitted to found a guild in the church of St. Bartholomew in honour of our Creator and His very glorious Mother and St. Matthew their patron.” In 1430 was granted the humble supplication of the shoemakers, who desired to found a confraternity to celebrate mass in the chapel at Notre Dame, dedicated to “the blessed and glorious martyrs, Monseigneur Crispin the Great, and Monseigneur Crispin the Less, who in this life were shoemakers.”

Our Lady of Paris—Early Fifteenth Century.

{137}The fifteen years of English rule at Paris came to a close in 1446. In 1443 a goldsmith was at déjeuner with a baker and a shoemaker, and they fell a-talking of the state of trade, of the wars and of the poverty of the people of Paris. The goldsmith[95] grumbled loudly and said that his craft was the poorest of all; people must have shoes and bread, but none could afford to employ a goldsmith. Then, thinking no evil, he said that good times would never return in Paris until there were a French king, the university full again, and the Parlement obeyed as in former times. Whereupon Jean Trolet, the shoemaker, added that things could not last in their present state, and that if there were only five hundred men who would agree to begin a revolution, they would soon find thousands leagued with them. The general unrest which this incident illustrates soon burst forth in plot after plot, and on 13th April, 1446, the Porte St. Jacques was opened by some citizens to the Duke of Richement, Constable of France, who, with 2000 knights and squires, entered the city and, to the cry of Ville gagnée! the fleur-de-lys waved again from the ramparts of Paris. The English garrison under Lord Willoughby fortified themselves in the Bastille of St. Antoine but capitulated after two days. Bag and baggage, out they marched, circled the walls as far as the Louvre, and embarked for Rouen amid the execrations of the people. Never again did an English army enter Paris until the allies marched in after Waterloo in 1815.{138}

CHAPTER X

LOUIS XI. AT PARIS—THE INTRODUCTION OF PRINTING

SIX centuries have failed to efface from the memory of the French people the misery and devastation wrought by the hundred years’ wars, as travellers in rural France will know. Paris saw little of Charles who, after the temporary activity excited by the expulsion of the English, had sunk into his habitual torpor, and his bondage to women. In 1461 the wretched monarch, morbid and half-demented, died of a malignant disease, all the time haunted by fears of poison and filial treachery. The people named him Charles le bien servi (the well-served), for small indeed was the praise due to him for the great deliverance.

When the new king, Louis XI., quitted his asylum at the Burgundian court to be crowned at Rheims and to repair to St. Denis, he was shocked by the contrast between the rich cities and plains of Flanders and the miserable aspect of the country he traversed—ruined villages, fields that were so many deserts, starving creatures clothed in rags, and looking as if they had just escaped from dungeons. The “Universal Spider,” as the Duke of Burgundy called Louis, was ever on the move about France, riding on his mule from dawn to eve. “Our king,” says De Comines, “used to dress so ill that worse could not be—often wearing bad cloth and a shabby hat with a leaden image stuck in it.” When he entered Abbeville with the magnificent Duke of Burgundy, the people said “Benedicite! is that a king of France? Why, his horse and clothes together are not worth twenty francs!” A Venetian ambassador was amazed to see the most mighty and most Christian king take his dinner in a tavern on the market-place of Tours, after hearing mass in the cathedral.{139}

It is not within our province to describe in detail the successful achievement of Louis’ policy of concentrating the whole government in himself as absolute sovereign of France by the overthrow of feudalism and the subjection of the great nobles with their almost royal power and state. His indomitable will, his consummate patience, his profound knowledge of human motives and passions, his cynical indifference to means, make him one of the most remarkable of the kings of France. In 1465, menaced by a coalition of nobles, the so-called League of the Public Good, Louis hastened to the capital. Letters expressing his tender affection for his dear city of Paris preceded him—he was coming to confide to them his queen and hoped-for heir; rather than lose his Paris, which he loved beyond all cities of the world, he would sacrifice half his kingdom. But the Parisians at first were sullen and would not be wooed, for they remembered his refusal to accord them some privileges granted to other cities. The university declined to arm her scholars, Church and Parlement were hostile. The idle, vagabond clercs of the Palais and the Cité composed coarse gibes and satirical songs and ballads against his person. Louis, however, set himself with his insinuating grace of speech to win the favour of the Parisians. He chose six members from the Burgesses, six from the Parlement and six from the university, to form his Council. With daring confidence, he decided to arm Paris. A levy of every male able to bear arms between sixteen and sixty years of age was made, and the citizen army was reviewed near St. Antoine des Champs, in the presence of the king and queen. From 60,000 to 80,000 men, half of them well-armed, marched past, with sixty-seven banners of the trades guilds, not counting those of the municipal officers, the Parlement and the university. The nobles were checkmated, and they were glad to accede to a treaty which gave them ample spoils and Louis, time to recover himself. The “Public Good” was barely mentioned.{140}

The king refused to occupy the palace of the Louvre and chose to dwell in the new Hôtel des Tournelles, near the Porte St. Antoine, built for the Duke of Bedford and subsequently presented to Louis when Dauphin by his royal father; for thither a star led him one evening as he left Notre Dame. Often would he issue en bourgeois from the Tournelles to sup with his gossips in Paris.

The institution of the mid-day Angelus, in 1472, was due to Louis’ devotion to the Virgin. He ordained that the great bell of Notre Dame should be rung at noon as a signal that the good people of Paris should recite the Ave Maria. When in Paris scarcely a day passed without the king being seen at mass, and at leaving he always gave an offering.

In 1475, Louis’ old enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, was seeking an alliance with Edward IV. of England, and once more a mighty army entered France to reassert the claims of the English kings to the French crown. Louis, by his usual policy of flattery and bribery, succeeded in leading Edward to negotiate. If he had had to meet in the flesh the lion rampant on the English king’s escutcheon, he could not have taken ampler precautions. A bridge was built over the Somme, near Amiens, “and in the middle thereof was a strong trellis of wood such as is made for cages of lions, and the holes between the bars were no larger than a man could put his arm through.” On either side of this cage the monarchs and a score of courtiers met and conversed. Louis had divided his enemies; each in turn was cajoled and bribed, and the “Hucksters’ Peace” was concluded.

Porch of St. Germain L’auxerrois

“When King Louis,” says De Comines, “retired from the interview he spake with me by the way and said he found the English king too ready to visit Paris, which thing was not pleasing to him. The king was a handsome man and very fond of women; he might find some affectionate mistress there, who would speak him so many fair words that she would make him desire to return; his predecessor had come too often to Paris and Normandy, and he did not like his company this side the sea, but beyond the{141} sea he was glad to have him for friend and brother.” De Comines was informed next day by some English that the peace had been made by the Holy Ghost, for a white dove was seen resting on the king of England’s tent during the interview, and for no noise soever would she move; “but,” said a sceptical Gascon gentleman, “it simply happened to have rained during the day, and the dove settled on the tent which was highest to dry her wings in the sun.”

Louis had long desired to punish the Count of St. Pol for treachery, and as a result of a treaty with Charles of Burgundy, in 1475, had him at length in the Bastille. Soon on a scaffold in the Place de Grève his head rolled from his body, and a column of stone twelve feet high erected where he fell, gave terrible warning to traitorous princes, however mighty; for the count was Constable of France, the king’s brother-in-law, a member of the Imperial House of Luxemburg, and connected with many of the sovereign families of Europe.

Two years later another noble victim, the Duke of Nemours, fell into the king’s power and saw the inside of one of Louis’ iron cages in the Bastille. The king, who had learnt that the chains had been removed from the prisoner’s legs, commanded his jailer not to let him budge from his cage except to be tortured (gehenné) and the duke wrote a piteous letter, praying for clemency and signing himself le pauvre Jacques. In vain: him, too, the headsman’s axe sent to his account.

The news of the humiliating Peace of Peronne, after the king had committed the one great folly of his career by gratuitously placing himself in Charles the Bold’s power,[96] was received by the Parisians with many gibes. The royal herald proclaimed at sound of trumpet by the crossways of Paris: “Let none be bold or daring enough to say anything opprobrious against the Duke of Burgundy, either by word of mouth, by writing, by signs, paintings, roundelays, ballads, songs or gestures.” On the same day a commission{142} seized all the magpies and jackdaws in Paris, whether caged or otherwise, which were to be registered according to their owners, with all the pretty words that the said birds could repeat and that had been taught them: the pretty word that these chattering birds had been taught to say was “Peronne.” Louis’ abasement at Peronne was, however, amply avenged by the battle of Granson, when the mighty host of “invincible” Charles was overwhelmed by the Switzers in 1476. A year later, the whole fabric of Burgundian ambition was shattered and the great duke lay a mutilated and frozen corpse before the walls of Nancy. Louis’ joy at the destruction of his enemy was boundless. The great provinces of Burgundy, of Anjou, of Maine, Provence, Alençon and Guienne soon fell under the sovereignty of France, whose boundaries now touched the Alps. But in the very culmination of his success Louis was struck down by paralysis, and though he rallied for a time the end was near. Haunted by fear of treachery, he immured himself in the gloomy fortress of Plessis. The saintly Francesco da Calabria, relics from Florence, from Rome, the Holy Oil from Rheims, turtles from Cape Verde Islands—all were powerless; the arch dissembler must now face the ineluctable prince of the dark realms, who was not to be bribed or cajoled even by kings.

When at last the king took to his bed, his physician, Jacques Cottier, told him that most surely his hour was come. Louis made his confession, gave much political counsel and some orders to be observed by le Roi, as he now called his son, and spoke, says De Comines, “as dryly as if he had never been ill. And after so many fears and suspicions Our Lord wrought a miracle and took him from this miserable world in great health of mind and understanding. Having received all the sacraments and suffering no pain and always speaking to within a paternoster of his death, he gave orders for his sepulture. May the Lord have his soul and receive him in the realm of Paradise!”

It was in Louis’ reign that the art of printing was introduced{143} into Paris. As early as 1458 the master of the mint had been sent to Mainz to learn something of the new art, but without success. In 1463, Fust and his partner, Schöffer, had brought some printed books to Paris, but the books were confiscated and the partners were driven out of the city, owing to the jealousy of the powerful corporation of the scribes and booksellers, who enjoyed a monopoly from the Sorbonne of the sale of books in Paris; and in 1474 Louis paid an indemnity of 2500 crowns to Schöffer for the confiscation of his books and for the trouble he had taken to introduce printed books into his capital. In 1470, at the invitation of two doctors of the Sorbonne, Guillaume Fichet and Jean de la Puin, Ulmer Gering of Constance and two other Swiss printers set up a press near Fichet’s rooms in the Sorbonne. In 1473 a press was at work at the sign of the Soleil d’Or (Golden Sun), in the Rue St. Jacques, under the management of two Germans, Peter Kayser, Master of Arts, and John Stohl, assisted by Ulmer Gering. In 1483 the last-named removed to the Rue de la Sorbonne, where the doctors granted to him and his new partner, Berthold Rumbolt of Strassburg, a lease for the term of their lives. They retained their sign of the Soleil d’Or, which long endured as a guarantee of fine printing. The earliest works had been printed in beautiful Roman type, but unable to resist the favourite Gothic introduced from Germany, Gering was led to adopt it towards the year 1480, and the Roman was soon superseded. From 1480 to 1500 we meet with many French printers’ names: Antoine Vérard, Du Pré, Cailleau, Martineau, Pigouchet—clearly proving that the art had then been successfully transplanted.

The re-introduction of Roman characters about 1500 was due to the famous house of the Estiennes, whose admirable editions of the Latin and Greek classics are the delight of bibliophiles. Robert Estienne was wont to hang proof sheets of his Greek and Latin classics outside his shop, offering a reward to any passer-by who pointed out a misprint or corrupt reading. Their famous house was the meeting-place{144} of scholars and patrons of literature. Francis I. and his sister Margaret of Angoulême, authoress of the Heptameron, were seen there, and legend says that the king was once kept waiting by the scholar-printer while he finished correcting a proof. All the Estienne household, even the children, conversed in Latin, and the very servants are said to have grown used to it. In 1563 Francis I. remitted 30,000 livres of taxes to the printers of Paris, as an act of grace to the professors of an art that seemed rather divine than human. But in spite of royal favour printing was a poor career. The second Henry Estienne, who composed a Greek-Latin lexicon, died in poverty at a hospital in Lyons; the last of the family, the third Robert Estienne, met a similar miserable end at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris. So great was the re-action in the university against the violence of the Lutherans and the daring of the printers, that in 1534 all the presses were ordered to be closed. In 1537 no book was allowed to be printed without permission of the Sorbonne, and in 1556 an order was made, it is said at the instance of Diane de Poitiers, that a copy in vellum of every book printed by royal privilege should be deposited at the royal library. After Gering’s death the forty presses then working in Paris were reduced to twenty-four, in order that every printer might have sufficient work to live by and not be tempted by poverty to print prohibited books or execute cheap and inferior printing.{145}

CHAPTER XI

FRANCIS I.—THE RENAISSANCE AT PARIS

THE advent of the printing-press and the opening of a Greek lectureship by Gregory Tyhernas and Hermonymus of Sparta at the Sorbonne warns us that we are at the end of an epoch. With the accession of Charles VIII. and the beginning of the Italian wars a new era is inaugurated. Gothic architecture had reached its final development and structural perfection, in the flowing lines of the flamboyant style.[97] Painting and sculpture, both in subject, matter and style, assume a new aspect. The diffusion of ancient literature and the discovery of a new world, open wider horizons to men’s minds, and human thought and human activity are directed towards other, and not always nobler, ideals. Mediævalism passes away and Paris begins to clothe herself in a new vesture of stone.

The Paris of the fifteenth century was a triple city of narrow, crooked, unsavoury streets, of overhanging timbered houses, “thick as ears of corn in a wheat-field,” from which emerged the innumerable spires and towers of her churches and palaces and colleges. In the centre was the legal and ecclesiastical Cité, with its magnificent Palais de Justice; its cathedral and a score of fair churches enclosed in the island, which resembled a great ship moored to the banks of the Seine by five bridges all crowded with houses. One of the most curious characteristics of Old Paris was the absence of any view of the river, for a man might traverse its streets and bridges without catching a glimpse of the Seine.{146}

The portal of the Petit Châtelet at the end of the Petit Pont opened on the university and learned district on the south bank of the Seine, with its fifty colleges and many churches clustering about the slopes of the mount of St. Genevieve, which was crowned by the great Augustine abbey and church founded by Clovis. Near by stood the two great religious houses and churches of the Dominicans and Franciscans (Jacobins and Cordeliers), the Carthusian monastery and its scores of little gardens, the lesser monastic buildings and, outside the walls, the vast Benedictine abbatial buildings and suburb of St. Germain des Prés, with its stately church of three spires, its fortified walls, its pillory and its permanent lists, where judicial duels were fought. On the north bank lay the busy, crowded industrial and commercial district known as the Ville, with its forty-four churches, the hôtels of the rich merchants and bankers, the fortified palaces of the nobles, all enclosed by the high walls and square towers of Charles the Fifth’s fortifications, and defended at east and west by the Bastille of St. Antoine and the Louvre. To the east stood the Hôtel St. Paul, a royal city within a city, with its manifold princely dwellings and fair gardens and pleasaunces sloping down to the Seine; hard by to the north was the Duke of Bedford’s Hôtel des Tournelles, with its memories of the English domination. At the west, against the old Louvre, were, among others, the hôtels of the Constable of Bourbon and the Duke of Alençon, and out in the fields beyond, the smoking kilns of the Tuileries (tile factories).

Rue Royale.

TOWER OF ST. JACQUES.

North and east and west of the municipal centre, the Maison des Piliers, or old Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, was a maze of streets filled with the various crafts of Paris. The tower of St. Jacques de la Boucherie, as yet unfinished, emerged from the butchers’ and skinners’ shops and slaughter-houses, which at the Rue des Lombards met the clothiers and furriers; the cutlers and the basketmakers were busy in streets now swept away to give place to the Avenue Victoria. Painters, glass-workers and colour{147} merchants, grocers and druggists, made bright and fragrant the Rue de la Verrerie, weavers’ shuttles rattled in the Rue de la Tixanderie (now swallowed up in the Rue de Rivoli); curriers and tanners plied their evil-smelling crafts in the Rue (now Quai) de la Mégisserie, and bakers crowded along the Rue St. Honoré. The Rue des Juifs sheltered the ancestral traffic of the children of Abraham. At the foot of the Pont au Change, on which were the shops of the goldsmiths and money-lenders, stood the grim thirteenth-century fortress of the Châtelet, the municipal guardhouse and prison; further on stood the episcopal prison, or Four de l’Evêque (the bishop’s oven). Round the Châtelet was a{148} congeries of narrow, crooked lanes, haunts of ill-fame, where robbers lurked and vice festered. A little to the north were the noisy market-place of the Halles and the cemetery of the Innocents with its piles of skulls, and its vaulted arcade painted (1424) with the Dance of Death. Further north stood the immense abbey of St. Martin in the Fields, with its cloister and gardens and, a little to the west, the grisly fortress of the Knights-Templars. This is the Paris conjured from the past with such magic art by Victor Hugo in “Notre Dame,” and gradually to be swept away in the next centuries by the Renaissance, pseudo-classic and Napoleonic builders and destroyers, until to-day scarcely a wrack is left behind.

With the Italian campaigns of Charles VIII. and of the early Valois-Orleans kings, France enters the arena of European politics, wrestles with the mighty Emperor Charles V. and embarks on a career of transalpine conquest. But in Italy, conquering France was herself conquered by the charm of Italian art, Italian climate and Italian landscape. When Charles VIII. returned from his expedition to Naples he brought with him a collection of pictures, tapestry, and sculptures in marble and porphyry, that weighed thirty-five tons; by him and his successors Italian builders, Domenico da Cortona and Fra Giocondo, were employed. The latter rebuilt the Petit Pont and after the destruction of the last wooden Pont Notre Dame in 1499—when the whole structure, with its houses and shops, fell with a fearful crash into the river—he was employed to replace it with a stone bridge, which was completed in 1507. This, too, was lined with tall, gabled houses of stone, seventeen each side, their façades decorated with medallions of the kings of France, which alternated with fine Renaissance statues of male and female figures bearing baskets of fruit and flowers on their heads. These houses were the first in Paris to be numbered, odd numbers on one side, even on the other, and were the first to be demolished when, on the eve of the Revolution, Louis XVI. ordered the bridge to be cleared.{149}

PONT NOTRE DAME.

Worthy Friar Giocondo wrought well, for the bridge still exists, though refaced and altered. Louis XII., with his own hand, entreated Leonardo da Vinci to come to France, and his great minister, the Cardinal of Amboise, employed Solario at the château of Gaillon.[98] But the French Renaissance is indissolubly associated with Francis I., who in 1515 inherited a France welded into a compact[99] and absolute monarchy, inhabited by a prosperous and loyal people, for the twelfth Louis had been a good and wise ruler, who to the amazement of his people returned to them the{150} balance of a tax levied to meet the cost of the Genoese Expedition, which had been overestimated, saying, “It will be more fruitful in their hands than in mine.” Commerce had so expanded that it was said that for every merchant seen in Paris in former times there were, in his reign, fifty. Louis introduced the cultivation of maize and the mulberry into France, and so rigid was his justice that poultry ran about the open fields without risk. It was the accrued wealth of his reign, and the love inspired by “Louis, father of his people,”[100] that supported the magnificence, the luxury and the extravagance of Francis I., the patron of the Italian Renaissance. The architectural creations of the new art were first seen in Touraine, in the royal palaces of Blois and Chambord, and other princely and noble chateaux along the luscious and sunny valleys of the Loire. Italian architecture was late in making itself felt in Paris, where the native art made stubborn resistance.

Portrait of Francis I. Jean Clouet.

The story of the state entry of Francis I. into Paris after the death of Louis XII. is characteristic. Clothed in a gorgeous suit of armour and mounted on a barbed charger, accoutred in white and cloth of silver, the young king would not remain under the royal canopy, but pricked his steed and made it prance and rear that he might display his horsemanship, his fine figure and his dazzling costume before the ladies. “Born between two adoring women,” says Michelet, “the king was all his life a spoilt child.” Money flowed through his hands like water[101] to gratify his ambition, his passions and his pleasures. Doubtless his interviews with Da Vinci at Amboise, where he spent much of his time in the early years of his reign, fired that enthusiasm for art, especially for painting, which never wholly left him; for the veteran artist, although old and paralysed in the right hand,{151} was otherwise in possession of all his incomparable faculties.

CHAPEL, HÔTEL DE CLUNY.

The question as to the existence of an indigenous school of painting before the Italian artistic invasion is still a subject of acrimonious discussion among critics; there is none, however, as to its existence in the plastic arts. The old French tradition died hard, and not before it had stamped upon Italian Renaissance architecture the impress of its native genius and adapted it to the requirements of French life and climate. The Hôtel de Cluny, finished in 1490, still remains to exemplify the beauty of the native French domestic architecture modified by the new style. The Hôtel de Ville, designed by Dom. da Cortona and submitted to Francis in 1532, is dominated by the French style, and it was not until nearly a century after the first Italian Expedition that the last Gothic builders were superseded. The fine Gothic church of St. Merri was begun as late as 1520 and not finished till 1612, and the transitional churches of St. Etienne and St. Eustache remind one, by the mingling of Gothic and Renaissance features, of the famous metamorphosis of Agnel and Cianfa in Dante’s Inferno, and one is tempted to exclaim, Ome come ti muti! Vedi che già non sei nè duo nè uno![102]

WEST DOOR OF ST. MERRI.

TOWER OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT.

After the death of Da Vinci Francis never succeeded in{152} retaining a first-rate painter in his service. Andrea del Sarto and Paris Bordone did little more than pay passing visits, and the famous school of Fontainebleau was founded by Rosso and Primaticcio, two decadent followers of Michel Angelo. The adventures of that second-rate artist and first-rate bully, Benvenuto Cellini, at Paris, form one of the most piquant episodes in artistic autobiography. After a gracious welcome from the king he was offered an annual retaining fee of three hundred crowns. He at once dismissed his two apprentices and left in a towering rage, only returning on being offered the same appointments that had been enjoyed by Leonardo da Vinci—seven hundred crowns a year, and payment for every finished work. The Petit Tour de Nesle was assigned to Cellini and his pupils as a workshop, the king assuring him that force would be needed to evict the possessor, adding, “Take great care you are not assassinated.” On complaining to the king of the difficulties he met with and the insults offered to him on attempting to gain possession, he was answered: “If you are the Benvenuto I have heard of, live up to your reputation; I give you full leave.” Cellini took the hint, armed himself, his servants and two apprentices, and frightened the occupants and rival claimants out of their wits. It was at this Tour de Nesle that the king paid Cellini a surprise visit with his mistress Madame d’Estampes, his sister Margaret of Valois,{153} the Dauphin and his wife, Catherine de’ Medici, the Cardinal of Lorraine, Henry II. of Navarre, and a numerous train of courtiers. The artist and his merry men were at work on the famous silver statue of Jupiter for Fontainebleau, and amid the noise of the hammering the king entered unperceived. Cellini had the torso of the statue in his hand, and at that moment a French lad who had caused him some little displeasure had felt the weight of the master’s foot, which sent him flying against the king. But Cellini had done a bad day’s work by violently evicting a servant of Madame d’Estampes from the Tower, and the injured lady and Primaticcio, her protégé, decided to work his ruin. When Cellini arrived at Fontainebleau with the statue, the king ordered it to be placed in the grand gallery decorated by Rosso. Primaticcio had just arranged there the casts which he had been commissioned{154} to bring from Rome, and Cellini saw what was meant—his own work was to be eclipsed by the splendour of the masterpieces of ancient art. “Heaven help me!” cried he, “this is indeed to fall against the pikes!” Now the god held the globe of the earth in the left hand, the thunderbolt in the right. Cellini contrived to thrust a portion of a large wax candle as a torch between the flames of the bolt, and set the statue up on its gilded pedestal. Madame entertained the king late at table, hoping that he would either forget or see the work in a bad light; but when the king entered the gallery late at night, followed by his courtiers, “which by God’s grace was my salvation,” says Cellini, the statue was illuminated by a flood of light from the torch which so enhanced its beauty that the king was ravished with delight, and expressed himself in ecstatic praise, declaring the statue to be more beautiful and more marvellous than any of the antique casts around. His enemies were thus discomfited, and on Madame d’Estampes endeavouring to depreciate the work, she was grossly mocked by the artist in a very characteristic and quite untranscribable way. Benvenuto was more than ever patronised by the king, who did him the great honour of accosting him as mon ami, and approving his scheme for the fortification of Paris. The artist often remembered with pleasure the four years he spent with the gran re Francesco at Paris.

“The French are remembered in Italy only by the graves they left there,” said De Comines, and once again the Italian campaigns ended in disaster. At the defeat of Pavia, in 1525—the Armageddon of the French in Italy—the efforts and sacrifices of three reigns were lost and the gran re went captive to the king of Spain in Madrid, whence he issued, stained by perjury and three years later, signed “the moral annihilation of France in Europe,” at Cambray.

Boulevard St. Michel.

During the tranquil intervals that ensued on this rude awakening from dreams of an Italian Empire, and the third and fourth wars with the emperor, the king was able to give effect to a project that had long been dear to him. “Come,” says{155} Michelet, “in the still, dark night, climb the Rue St. Jacques, in the early winter’s morning. See you yon lights? Men, even old men, mingled with children, are hurrying, a folio under one arm, in the other an iron candlestick. Do they turn to the right? No, the old Sorbonne is yet sleeping snug in her warm sheets. The crowd is going to the Greek schools. Athens is at Paris. That man with the fine beard in majestic ermine is a descendant of emperors—Jean Lascaris; that other doctor is Alexander, who teaches Hebrew.”

The schools they were pressing to were those of the Royal College of France. Already in 1517 Erasmus had been offered a salary of a thousand francs a year, with promise of further increment, to undertake the direction of the college, but declined to leave his patron the emperor. The prime movers in the great scheme were the king’s confessor, Guillaume Parvi, and the famous Grecian, Guillaume Budé, who in 1530 was himself induced to undertake the task which Erasmus had declined. Twelve professors were appointed in Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, philosophy, rhetoric and medicine, each of the twelve with a salary of two hundred gold crowns (about £80), and the dignity of royal councillors. The king’s vast scheme of a great college and magnificent chapel, with a revenue of 50,000 crowns for the maintenance (nourriture) of six hundred scholars, where the most famous doctors in Christendom should offer gratuitous teaching in all the sciences and learned languages, was never executed. Too much treasure had been wasted in Italy, and it was not till the reign of Louis XIII. that it was partially carried out. The first stone was laid in 1610, but the college as we now see it was not completed till 1770; before the construction the professors taught in the colleges of Treguier and Cambray. Chairs were founded for Arabic by Henry III., for surgery, anatomy and botany by Henry IV., and for Syrian by Louis XIV. Little is changed to-day; the placards, so familiar to students in Paris, announcing the lectures, are indited in French instead of in Latin as of old; the lectures{156} are still free to all, and the most famous scholars of the day teach there, but in French and not in Latin.[103]

How dramatic are the contrasts of history! While the new learning was organising itself amid the pomp of royal patronage, while the young Calvin was sitting at the feet of its professors and the Lutheran heresy germinating at Paris, Ignatius Loyola, an obscure Spanish soldier and gentleman of thirty-seven years of age, was sitting—a strange mature figure—among the boisterous young students at the College of St. Barbara, patiently preparing himself for dedication to the service of the menaced Church of Rome; and in 1534, on the festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a little group of six companions met around the fervent student, in the crypt of the old church at Montmartre, and decided to found on the holy hill of St. Denis’ martyrdom the first house of the Society of Jesus.

In 1528, says the writer of the so-called Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, the king began to pull down the great tower of the Louvre, in order to transform the château into a logis de plaisance, “yet was it great pity for the castle was very fair and high and strong, and a most proper prison to hold great men.”

The tall, massive keep, which darkened the royal apartments in the south wing, was the tower here meant, and after some four months’ work, and an expenditure of 2500 livres, the grim pile, with its centuries of history, was cleared away. Small progress, however, had been made with the restoration of the old château up to the year 1539, when the heavy cost of preparing the west wing for the reception of the Emperor Charles V., induced Francis to consider a plan which involved the replacement of the whole fabric by a palace in the new Renaissance style. In 1546 Pierre{157} Lescot was appointed architect without salary, but given the office of almoner to the king, and made lay abbot of Clermont. Pierre Lescot was an admirable artist, who has left us some of the finest examples of early French Renaissance architecture in Paris. But Francis lived only to see the great scheme begun, most of Lescot’s work being done under Henry II.

From the same anonymous writer we learn something of Parisian life in the reign of Francis I. One day a certain Monsieur Cruche, a popular poet and playwright, was performing moralities and novelties on a platform in the Place Maubert, and among them a farce, “funny enough to make half a score men die of laughter, in which the said Cruche, holding a lantern, feigned to perceive the doings of a hen and a salamander.”[104] The amours of the king with the daughter of a councillor of the Parlement, named Lecoq, were only too plainly satirised. But it is ill jesting with kings. A few nights later, Monsieur Cruche was visited by eight disguised courtiers, who treated him to a supper in a tavern at the sign of the Castle in the Rue de la Juiverie, and induced him to play the farce before them. When the unhappy player came to the first scene, he was set upon by the king’s friends, stripped and beaten almost to death with thongs. They were about to put him in a sack and throw him into the Seine, when poor Cruche, crying piteously, discovered his priestly tonsure, and thus escaped.

Public festivities were held with incredible magnificence. When the English envoys entered Paris in 1518, there was the finest triumph ever seen. The king, the royal princes, five cardinals and a train of lords and dukes and counts, with a gorgeous military pageant, met them and conducted them to Notre Dame, whose interior was almost hidden under decorations of tapestry and of cloth of silver and of gold. A pavilion of cloth of gold, embroidered with the royal salamander, moult riche et fort triomphante, supported by four columns of solid{158} silver, was erected, and was so large that some of the masonry between the choir and the high altar had to be removed to give it place. The banquet by night at the Bastille was the most solemn and sumptuous ever seen; the whole courtyard was draped and the edifice lighted by ten thousand torches; words fail to describe the triumph of the meats and table decorations. The feast ended at midnight and was followed by dances of moriscos attired in cloth of silver and of gold, by jousts and princely gifts. The extravagance of Francis was prodigious; a Venetian ambassador estimated the annual ordinary expenses of the court at 1,500,000[105] crowns; another describes the people as “eaten to the bone by taxes.” Cellini declares that the king on his travels was accompanied by a train of 12,000 horse.

After the defeat at Pavia, the king became excessively pious. By trumpet cry at the crossways, games—quoits, tennis, contre-boulle—were prohibited on Sundays; children were forbidden to sing along the streets, going to and from school. Blasphemers[106] were to be severely punished. In 1527 a notary was burned alive in the Place de Grève for a great blasphemy of our Lord and His holy Mother. In June of the next year some Lutherans struck down and mutilated an image of the Virgin and Child at a street corner near St. Gervais; the king was so grieved and angry that he wept violently, and offered a reward of one hundred gold crowns, but the offenders could not be found. Daily processions came from the churches to the spot, and all the religious orders, clothed in their habits, followed, “singing with such great fervour and reverence, that it was fair to see.” The rector and doctors, masters and bachelors, scholars of the university, and children with lighted tapers, went there in great reverence. On Corpus Christi day the street was draped and a fair canopy stretched over the{159} statue. The king himself walked in procession, bearing a white taper, his head uncovered in moult gran révérence; hautboys, clarions and trumpets played melodiously. Cardinals, prelates, great seigneurs and nobles, each with his taper of white wax, followed, with the royal archers of the guard in their train. On the morrow a procession from all the parishes of Paris, with banners, relics and crucifixes, accompanied by the king and nobles, brought a new and fair image of silver, two feet in height, which the king had caused to be made. Francis himself ascended a ladder and placed it where the other image had stood, then kissed it and descended with tears in his eyes. Thrice he kneeled and prayed, the bishop of Lisieux, his almoner, reciting fair orisons and lauds to the honour of the glorious Virgin and her image. Again the trumpets, clarions and hautboys played the Ave Regina cælorum, and the king, the cardinal of Louvain, and all the nobles presented their tapers to the Virgin. Next day the Parlement, the provost and sheriffs, came and put an iron trellis round the silver image for fear of robbers.[107]

Never were judicial and ecclesiastical punishments so cruel and recurrent as during the period of the Renaissance. It is a common error to suppose that judicial cruelty reached its culmination in the Middle Ages. Punishments are described with appalling iteration in the pages we are following. The Place de Grève was the scene of mutilations, tortures, hangings and quarterings of criminals and traitors, the king and his court sometimes looking on. Coiners of false money were boiled alive at the pig-market; robbers and assassins were broken on the wheel and left to linger in slow agony (tant qu’ils pourraient languir). The Lutherans were treated like vermin, and to harbour them, to possess or print or translate one of their books,{160} meant a fiery death. In 1525 a young Lutheran student was put in a tumbril and brought before the churches of Notre Dame and St. Genevieve, crying mercy from God and Mary and St. Genevieve; he was then taken to the Place Maubert, where, after his tongue had been pierced, he was strangled and burnt. A gendarme of the Duke of Albany was burnt at the pig-market for having sown Lutheran errors in Scotland; before his execution his servant was whipped and mutilated before him at the cart-tail, but was pardoned on recantation.

On Corpus Christi day, 1532, a great procession was formed, the king and provost walking bare-headed to witness the burning of six Lutherans—a scene often repeated. The Fountain of the Innocents, the Halles, the Temple, the end of the Pont St. Michel, the Place Maubert, and the Rue St. Honoré were indifferently chosen for these ghastly scenes. Almost daily the fires burnt. A woman was roasted to death for eating flesh on Fridays. In 1535, so savage were the persecutions, that Pope Paul III., with that gentleness which almost invariably has characterised Rome in dealing with heresy, wrote to Francis protesting against the horrible and execrable punishments inflicted on the Lutherans, and warned him that although he acted from good motives, yet he must remember that God the Creator, when in this world, used mercy rather than rigorous justice, and that it was a cruel death to burn a man alive; he therefore prayed and required the king to appease the fury and rigour of his justice and adopt a policy of mercy and pardon. This noble protest was effective, and some clemency was afterwards shown. But in 1547 the fanatical king, a mass of physical and moral corruption, soured and gloomy, went to his end amid the barbarities wreaked on the unhappy Vaudois Protestants. The cries of three thousand of his butchered subjects and the smoke from the ruins of twenty-five towns and hamlets were the incense of his spirit’s flight.{161}

LA FONTAINE DES INNOCENTS.

CHAPTER XII

RISE OF THE GUISES—HUGUENOT AND CATHOLIC—THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW

“BEWARE of Montmorency and curb the power of the Guises,” was the counsel of the dying Francis to his son. Henry II., dull and heavy-witted that he was, neglected the advice, and the Guises flourished in the sun of royal favour. The first Duke of Guise and founder of his renowned house was Claude, a poor cadet of René II., Duke of Lorraine. He succeeded in allying by marriage his eldest son and successor, Francis, to the House of Bourbon; his second son, Charles, became Cardinal of Lorraine, and his daughter, wife to James V. of Scotland. Duke Francis, by his military genius and wise statesmanship; Charles, by his learning and subtle wit, exalted their house to the lofty eminence it enjoyed during the stirring period that now opens. In 1558, after the disastrous defeat of Montmorency at St. Quentin, when Paris lay at the mercy of the Spanish and English armies, the duke was recalled from Italy and made Lieutenant-General of the{162} realm. By a short and brilliant campaign, he expelled the English from Calais, and recovered in three weeks the territory held by them for more than two hundred years. Francis gained an unbounded popularity, and rose to the highest pinnacle of success; but short time was left to his royal master wherein to enjoy a reflected glory. On the 27th June 1559, lists were erected across the Rue St. Antoine, between the Tournelles and the Bastille. The peace with Spain, and the double marriage of the king’s daughter to Philip II. of Spain and of his sister to the Duke of Savoy, were to be celebrated by a magnificent tournament in which the king, proud of his strength and bodily address, was to hold the field with the Duke of Guise and the princes against all comers. For three days the king distinguished himself by his triumphant prowess, and at length challenged the Duke of Montgomery, captain of the Scottish Guards; the captain prayed to be excused, but the king insisted and the course was run. Several lances were broken, but in the last encounter the stout captain failed to lower his shivered lance quickly enough, and the broken truncheon struck the royal visor, lifted it and penetrated the king’s eye. Henry fell senseless and was carried to the palace of the Tournelles, where he died after an agony of eleven days. Fifteen years later, Montgomery was captured fighting with the Huguenots, and beheaded on the Place de Grève while Catherine de’ Medici looked on “pour goûter,” says Félibien quaintly, “le plaisir de se voir vangée de la mort de son mary.” The tower in the interior of the Palais de Justice, where the unhappy Scottish noble was imprisoned after his capture, was known as the Tour Montgomery, until demolished in the reign of Louis XVI. There was, however, little love lost between Henry’s queen, Catherine de’ Medici, and her royal husband, who had long neglected her for the maturer charms of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers.

WEST WING OF LOUVRE BY PIERRE LESCOT.

Henry saw Lescot’s admirable design for the reconstruction of the west wing of the Louvre completed. The{163} architect had associated a famous sculptor, Jean Goujon, with him, who executed the beautiful figures in low relief which still adorn the quadrangle front between the Pavilion de l’Horloge and the south-west angle, and the noble Caryatides, which support the musicians’ gallery in the Salle Basse, or Salle des Fêtes, now known as the Salle des Caryatides. The agreement, dated 5th September 1550, awards forty-six livres each for the four plaster models and eighty crowns each for the four carved figures. Lescot preserved the external wall of the old château as the kernel of his new wing, and the enormous strength of the original building of Philip Augustus may be estimated by the fact that the embrasures of each of the five casements of the first floor looking westwards now serve as offices. So grandement satisfait was Henry with the perfection of Lescot’s work, that he determined to continue it along the remaining three wings, that the court of the Louvre might be a cour non-pareille. The south wing was, however, only begun when his tragic death occurred, and the present inconsequent and huge fabric is the work of a whole tribe of architects, whose intermittent activities extended over the reigns of nine French sovereigns.

Lescot and Goujon were also associated in the construction of the most beautiful Renaissance fountain in Paris, the Fontaine des Innocents, which formerly stood against the old church of the Innocents at the corner of the Rue aux Fers. Pajou added a fourth side in 1786, when the fountain was removed to the Square des Innocents. It was while working on one of the figures of this fountain that Jean Goujon is said to have been shot as a Huguenot during the massacre of St. Bartholomew.

Luxembourg Gardens.

Europe was now in travail of a new era, and unhappy France reeled under the tempest of the Reformation. A daring spirit of enquiry and of revolt challenged every principle on which the social fabric had been based, and the only refuge in the coming storm in France was the Monarchy. Never had its power been more absolute. The{165} king’s will was law—a harbour of safety, indeed, if he were strong and wise and virtuous: a veritable quicksand, if feeble and vicious. And to pilot the state of France in these stormy times, Henry II. left a sickly progeny of four princes, miserable puppets, whose favours were disputed for thirty years by ambitious and fanatical nobles, queens and courtesans.

Francis II., a poor creature of sixteen years, the slave of his wife Marie Stuart and of the Guises, was called king of France for seventeen months. He it was who sat daily by Mary in the royal garden, on the terrace at Amboise overlooking the Loire, and, surrounded by his brothers and the ladies of the court, gazed at the revolting and merciless executions of the Protestant conspirators,[108] who, under the Prince of Condé, had plotted to destroy the Guises and to free the king from their influence. It was the first act in a horrible drama, a dread pursuivant of the civil and religious wars in France. The stake was a high one, for the victory of the reformers would sound the death-knell of the Catholic cause in Europe. There is little reason to doubt that the queen-mother, Catherine de’ Medici, who now emerges into prominence, was genuinely sincere in her disapproval of the horrors of Amboise, and in her efforts to bring milder counsels to bear in dealing with the Huguenots; but the fierce passions roused by civil and religious hatred were uncontrollable. When the Huguenot noble, Villemongis, was led to the scaffold at Amboise, he dipped his hands in the blood of his slaughtered comrades, and, lifting them to heaven, cried: “Lord, behold the blood of Thy children; Thou wilt avenge them.” A savage lust for blood among the Christian sectaries on either side, drawing its stimulus from the records of the ferocity of semi-barbarian Jewish tribes, smothered the gentle voice of Jesus, and during thirty years was never slaked. Treachery and assassination were the interludes of plots and battles. In 1563 the Duke of Guise was shot by a fanatical Huguenot{166} with a pistol loaded with poisoned balls. In 1569, when the Protestant leader, Admiral Coligny, was surprised and attacked by the forces of the Duke of Anjou, Prince Condé, although wounded in the arm, hastened to his succour. As the prince passed on, his leg was broken by a kick from a vicious horse. Still charging forward, he cried: “Remember how a Louis of Bourbon goes to battle for Christ and Fatherland!” His horse was killed, himself captured; as he was handing over his sword to his captors, the Baron de Montesquieu, “brave et vaillant gentilhomme,” says Brantôme, arrived on the scene, and, on learning what was passing, exclaimed, “Mort Dieu! kill him! kill him!” and blew out Condé’s brains with a pistol. The body of the heroic Bourbon was then tied on an ass, and a mocking epitaph set upon it:—

The defeated Protestants were, however, soon roused to enthusiasm by the arrival of Jeanne of Navarre at their camp, leading her son Henry by one hand and the eldest son of Condé by the other. “Here,” cried the widowed queen, “are two orphans I confide to you; two leaders that God has given you.” One of these orphans was to become Henry IV. of France.

Tritons and Nereids from the old Fontaine des Innocents.
Jean Goujon.

The treaty of St. Germain, which has so often been charged on Catherine as an act of perfidy, was rather an imperative necessity, if respite were to be had from the misery into which the land had fallen. Its conditions were honourably carried out, and Catholic excesses were impartially and severely repressed. Charles IX., who was now twenty years of age, began to assert his independence of the queen-mother and of the Guises,[109] and{167} his first movement was in the direction of conciliation. The young king offered the hand of his sister, Princess Marguerite, to Henry of Navarre, and received Coligny and Jeanne of Navarre with much honour at court. Pressure was brought to bear upon him, but, pope or no pope, the king said he was determined to conclude the marriage. The Catholic party, and especially Paris, were furious. The capital, with the provost, the Parlement, the university, the prelates, the religious orders, had always been hostile to the Huguenots. The people could with difficulty be restrained at times from assuming the office of executioners as Protestants were led to the stake. Any one who did not uncover as he passed the image of the Virgin at the street corners, or who omitted to bend the knee as the Host was carried by, was attacked as a Lutheran. When the heralds published the peace with the Huguenots at the crossways of Paris, filth and mud were thrown at them, and they went in danger of their lives: now Coligny and his Huguenots were holding their heads high in Paris, proud and insolent, and the heretic prince of Navarre was to wed the king’s sister.

Jeanne of Navarre died soon after her arrival at court,[110] but the alliance was hurried on. The betrothal took place in the Louvre, and, on Sunday, 17th August 1572, a high daïs was erected outside Notre Dame for the celebration of the marriage. When the ceremony had been performed by the Cardinal de Bourbon, Henry conducted his bride to the choir of the cathedral, and went walking in the bishop’s garden while mass was sung. The office ended, he returned and led his wife to the bishop’s palace to dinner, and a magnificent state supper at the Louvre concluded this momentous day. Three days of balls, masquerades and tourneys followed, amid the murmuring of a sullen populace. These were{168} the noces vermeilles—the red nuptials—of Marguerite of France and Henry of Navarre.

Meanwhile Catherine and Coligny had differed on a matter of foreign policy, and the king, bent on freeing himself from his mother’s yoke, openly favoured the Huguenot leader. Catherine, terrified at the result of her own work, determined to regain her ascendency, and she conspired with her third son, the Prince of Anjou (later Henry III.), to destroy and have done with the Protestants. Coligny had often been warned of the danger he would run in Paris, but the stout old soldier knew no fear, and came to take part in the festivities of the wedding. The sounds of revelry had barely died away when Coligny, who was returning from the Louvre to his hotel, walking slowly and reading a petition, was fired at from a window as he passed the cloister of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and wounded in the arm. He stopped and noted the house whence the shot came: it was the house of the preceptor of the Duke of Guise. The king was playing at tennis when the news came to him: he flung down his racquet, exclaiming, “What! shall I never be in peace? must I suffer new trouble every day?” and went moody and pensive to his chamber. In a few moments Prince Condé and Henry of Navarre burst in, uttering indignant protests, and begged permission to leave Paris. Charles assured them he would do justice, and that they might safely remain. In the afternoon the king, his mother and the princes, went to visit the admiral. The king asked to be left alone in the wounded man’s chamber, remained a long time with him, and protested that though the wound was his friend’s, the grief was his own, and he swore to avenge him.

Portrait of Elizabeth of Austria, Wife of Charles IX.
François Clouet.

Coligny once again was warned by his friends to beware of the court, but he refused to distrust the king. Many and conflicting are the reports of what followed. We shall not be accused of any Protestant bias if we base our story mainly on that of the two learned Benedictines[111]{169} who are responsible for five solid tomes of the Histoire de la Ville de Paris. On the morrow of the attempt on Coligny’s life, the queen-mother invited Charles and his brother of Anjou to walk, after dinner, in the garden of her new palace in the Tuileries: they were joined by the chief Catholic leaders, and a grand council was held. The queen dwelt on the perilous situation of the monarchy and the Catholic cause, and urged that now was the time to act: Coligny lay wounded; Navarre and Condé were in their power at the Louvre; for ten Huguenots in Paris the Catholics could oppose a thousand armed men; rid France of the Huguenot chiefs and a formidable evil were averted. Her course was approved, but the leaders shrank from including the two princes of Navarre and Condé: they were to be given their choice—recantation or death. By order of the king 12,000 arquebusiers were placed along the river and the streets, and arms were carried into the Louvre. The admiral’s friends, alarmed at the sinister preparations, protested to Charles but were reassured and told to take Cosseins and fifty arquebusiers to guard his house. The provost of Paris was then summoned by the Duke of Guise and ordered to arm and organise the citizens and proceed to the Hôtel de Ville at midnight. The king, Guise said, would not lose so fair an opportunity of exterminating the Huguenots. The Catholic citizens were to tie a piece of white linen on their left arm and place a white cross in their caps that they might be recognised by their friends. At midnight the windows of their houses were to be illuminated by torches, and at the first sound of the great bell at the Palais de Justice the bloody work was to begin. Midnight drew near. Catherine was not sure of the king, and repaired to his chamber with Anjou and her councillors to fix his wavering purpose; she heaped bitter reproaches upon him, worked on his fears with stories of a vast Huguenot conspiracy and hinted that cowardice prevented him from seizing the fairest opportunity that God had ever offered, to free himself from his enemies. She repeated an{170} Italian prelate’s vicious epigram: “Che pietà lor ser crudel, che crudeltà, lor ser pietosa,”[112] and concluded by threatening to leave the court with the Duke of Anjou rather than witness the destruction of the Catholic cause. Charles, who had listened sullenly, was stung by the taunt of cowardice and broke into a delirium of passion; he called for the death of every Huguenot in France, that none might be left to reproach him afterwards.

Catherine gave him no time for farther vacillation. The great bell of St. Germain l’Auxerrois was rung, and at two in the morning of Sunday, St. Bartholomew’s Day, 24th August 1572, the Duke of Guise and his followers issued forth to do their Sabbath morning’s work. Cosseins saw his leader coming and knew what was expected of him. Coligny’s door was forced, his servants were poignarded, and Besme, a German in the service of Guise, followed by others, burst into the admiral’s room. The old man stood erect in his robe de chambre, facing his murderers. “Art thou the admiral?” demanded Besme. “I am he,” answered Coligny with unfaltering voice and, gazing steadily at the naked sword pointed at his breast, added, “Young man, thou shouldst show more respect to my white hairs; yet canst thou shorten but little my brief life.” For answer he was pierced by Besme’s sword and stabbed to death by his companions. Guise stood waiting in the street below and the body was flung down to him from the window. He wiped the blood from the old man’s face, looked at it, and said, “It is he!” Spurning the body with his foot he cried, “Courage, soldiers! we have begun well; now for the others, the king commands it. “Meanwhile the bell of the Palais de Justice, answering that of St. Germain, was booming forth its awful summons, and the citizens hastened to perform their part. Some passing the body of Coligny cut off the head and took it to the king and queen, others mutilated the trunk,{171} which, after being dragged about the streets for three days, was hanged by the feet on the gibbet at Montfaucon, where Charles and Catherine are said to have come to gaze on it.

All the Huguenot nobles dwelling near the admiral were pitilessly murdered, and a similar carnage took place at the Louvre. Marguerite, the young bride of Navarre, in her Memoirs, tells of the horrors of that morning, how, when half-asleep, a wounded Huguenot nobleman rushed into her chamber, pursued by four archers, and flung himself on her bed imploring protection. A captain of the guard entered, from whom she gained his life. She entreated the captain to lead her to her sister’s room, and as she fled thither, more dead than alive, another fugitive was hewn down by a hallebardier only three paces from her; she fell fainting in the captain’s arms. Meanwhile Charles, the queen-mother, and Henry of Anjou, after the violent scene in the king’s chamber, had lain down for two hours’ rest and then went to a window which overlooked the basse-cour of the Louvre, to see the “beginning of the executions.” If we may believe Henry’s story, they had not been there long before the sound of a pistol shot filled them with dread and remorse, and a messenger was sent to bid Guise to spare the admiral and to stay the whole undertaking; but the nobleman who had been sent returned saying that Guise had told him it was too late: the admiral was dead, and the executions had begun all over the city. A dozen Protestant nobles of the suites of Condé and Navarre, who had taken refuge in the Louvre, were seized; one was even dragged from a sick-bed: all were taken to the courtyard and hewn in pieces by the Swiss guards under the eyes of Charles, who cried: “Let none escape.” Meantime the Catholic leaders had been scouring the streets on horseback, shouting to the people that a Huguenot conspiracy to murder the king had been discovered, and that it was the king’s wish that all the Huguenots should be destroyed.{172}

A list of the Huguenots in Paris had been prepared and all their houses marked. None was spared. Old and young, women and children, were pitilessly butchered. All that awful Sunday the orgy of slaughter and pillage went on; every gate of the city had been closed and the keys brought to the king. Night fell and the carnage was not stayed. Two days yet and two nights the city was a prey to the ministers of death, and some Catholics, denounced by personal enemies, were involved in the massacre. The resplendent August sun, the fair sky and serene atmosphere were held to be a divine augury, and a whitethorn in the cemetery of the Innocents blooming out of season was hailed as a miracle and a visible token from God that the Catholic religion was to blossom again by the destruction of the Huguenots. A famous professor at the university was flung out of a window by the scholars, his body insulted and dragged in the mud. The murders did not wholly cease until 17th September. Various were the estimates of the slain—20,000, 5,000, 2,000. A goldsmith named Cruce went about displaying his robust arm and boasting that he had accounted for 400 Huguenots. The streets, the front of the Louvre, the public places were blocked by dead bodies; tumbrils[113] were hired to throw them into the Seine, which literally for days ran red with blood.

The princes of Navarre and Condé saw the privacy of their chambers violated by a posse of archers on St. Bartholomew’s morning; they were forced to dress and were haled before the king, who, with a fierce look and glaring eyes, swore at them, reproached them for waging war upon him, and ordered them to change their religion. On their refusal he grew furious with rage, and by dint of threats wrung from them a promise to go to mass.

The Louvre—Galerie D’Apollon.

Charles is said to have stood at a window in the Petite{173} Galerie of the Louvre and to have fired across the river with a long arquebus on some Huguenots who, being lodged on the southern side, had escaped massacre, and were riding up to learn what was passing. The statement is much canvassed by authorities. It is at least permissible to doubt the assertion, since the first floor[114] of the Petite Galerie, where the king is traditionally believed to have placed himself, was not in existence before the time of Henry IV. If the ground floor be meant, a further difficulty arises from the fact that the southern end was not furnished with a window in Charles IX.’s time.

On the 26th of August the king boldly avowed responsibility before the Parlement for measures which he alleged had been necessary to suppress a Huguenot insurrection aiming at the assassination of himself and the royal family and the destruction of the Catholic religion in France. The ears of the Catholic princes of Europe and of the pope were abused by this specious lie; they believed that the Catholic cause had been saved from ruin; the so-called victory was hailed with transports of joy, and a medal was struck in Rome to celebrate the defeat of the Huguenots.[115]

Similar horrors were enacted in the chief provincial towns. Some few governors, to their honour, declined to carry out the orders of the court, and the public executioner at Troyes refused to take part in the butchery, protesting that his office was not to kill untried persons. At Angers some of the rich Huguenots were imprisoned and their property confiscated by order of Henry of Anjou. “Monseigneur, we can make more than 150,000 francs out of them,” wrote his agent.

Such was the massacre of St. Bartholomew. The death-roll of the victims is known to the Recording Angel alone. It was a tremendous folly no less than an indelible crime, for it steeled the heart of every Protestant to avenge his slaughtered brethren.{174}

PETITE GALERIE OF THE LOUVRE.

Many of the Huguenot leaders escaped from Paris while the soldiers sent to despatch them were pillaging, and the flames of civil strife burst forth fiercer than ever. The court had prepared for massacre, not for war; and while the king was receiving the felicitations of the courts of Spain and Rome, he was forced by the Peace of La Rochelle to concede liberty of conscience to the Protestants and to restore their sequestered estates and offices. After two years of agony of mind and remorse, Charles IX. lay dying of consumption, abandoned by all save his faithful Huguenot nurse. The blood flowing from his nostrils seemed a token of God’s wrath; and moaning “Ah! ma mie, what bloodshed! what murders! I am lost! I am lost!” the poor crowned wretch passed to his account. He had not yet reached his twenty-fourth year.{175}

PLAN OF PARIS WHEN BESIEGED BY HENRY IV. IN 1590.

CHAPTER XIII

HENRY III.—THE LEAGUE—SIEGE OF PARIS BY HENRY IV.—HIS CONVERSION, REIGN AND ASSASSINATION

WHEN the third of Catherine’s sons, having resigned the sovereignty of Poland, was being consecrated at Rheims, the crown is said to have twice slipped from his head, the insentient diadem itself shrinking in horror from the brow of a prince destined to pollute it with deeper shame. Treacherous and bloody, Henry mingled grovelling piety with debauchery, and made of the court a veritable Alsatia, where paid assassins who stabbed from behind and mignons who struck to the face, were part of the train of every prince. The king’s mignons, with their insolent bearing, their extravagant and effeminate dress, their hair powdered and curled, their neck ruffles so broad that their heads resembled the head of John the Baptist on a charger,—gambling, blaspheming swashbucklers—were hateful alike to Huguenot and Catholic.

Less than four years after St. Bartholomew the Peace of 1576 gave the Huguenots all they had ever demanded or hoped for. In 1582 died the Duke of Alençon, Catherine’s last surviving son and heir to the throne; Henry gave no hope of posterity and the Catholic party were confronted by the possibility of the sceptre of St. Louis descending to a relapsed heretic. A tremendous wave of feeling ran through France, and a Holy League was formed to meet the danger, with the Duke of Guise as leader. The king tried in vain to win some of the Huguenot and League partisans by the solemn institution of the Order of the Holy Ghost,[116] in the church of the Augustinians, to commemorate his elevation to the thrones of Poland and France on the{176} day of Pentecost. The people were equally recalcitrant. When Henry entered Paris after the campaign of 1587, they shouted for their idol, the Balafré,[117] crying, “Saul has slain his thousands but David his tens of thousands.” The king in his jealousy and disgust forbade Guise to enter Paris; Guise coolly ignored the command, and a few months later arrived at the head of a formidable train of nobles, amid the joyous acclamation of the people, who greeted him with chants of “Hosannah, Filio David!” Angry scenes followed. The duke sternly called his master to duty, and warned him to take vigorous measures against the Huguenots or lose his crown; the king, pale with anger, dismissed him and prepared to strike.

Catherine de’ Medici.
French School, 16th Century.

On the night of the 11th May a force of Royal Guards and 4000 Swiss mercenaries entered Paris, but the Parisians, with that genius for insurrection which has always characterised them, were equal to the occasion. The sixteen sections of the city met; in the morning the people were under arms; and barricades and chains blocked the streets. The St. Antoine section, ever to the front, stood up to the king’s Guards and to the Swiss advancing to occupy their quarter, defeated them, and with exultant cries rushed to threaten the Louvre itself. Henry was forced to send his mother to treat with the duke; she returned with terms that meant a virtual abdication. Henry took horse and fled, vowing he would come back only through a breach in the walls. But Guise was supreme in Paris, and the pitiful monarch was soon forced to yield; he signed the terms of his own humiliation, and went to Blois to meet Guise and the States-General with bitterness in his heart, brooding over his revenge. Visitors to Blois will recall the scene of the tragic end of Guise, the incidents of which the official guardians of the château are wont to recite with dramatic gesture. Fearless and impatient of warnings, the great captain fell into the trap prepared for him; he was done to death in the{177} king’s chamber, like a lion caught in the toils. Henry, who had heard mass and prayed that God would be gracious to him and permit the success of his enterprise, hastened to his mother, now aged and dying. “Madame,” said he, “I have killed the king of Paris and am become once more king of France.”[118] The Cardinal of Lorraine, separated from the king’s chamber only by a partition, paled as he heard his nephew’s struggles. “Yes,” said his warder, “the king has some accounts to settle with you.” Next morning the old cardinal was led out and hacked to pieces. The two bodies were burnt and the ashes scattered to the winds to prevent their being worshipped as relics. It was Christmas Eve of 1588.

The stupid crime brought its inevitable consequences—

Paris and the Leaguers were stung to fury; the Sorbonne declared the king deposed; the pope banned him and a popular preacher called for another bloodletting. Henry, in a final act of shame and despair, flung himself into the king of Navarre’s arms, and on the 30th July 1589, the two Henrys encamped at St. Cloud and threatened Paris with an army of 40,000 men. On the morrow Jacques Clement, a young Dominican friar, after preparing himself by fasting, prayer and holy communion, left Paris with a forged letter for the king, reached the camp and asked for a private interview. While Henry was reading the letter the friar snatched a dagger from his sleeve and mortally stabbed him. He lingered until 2nd August, and after pronouncing Henry of Navarre his lawful successor and bidding his Council swear allegiance to the new dynasty, the last of the thirteen Valois kings passed to his doom. Catherine de’ Medici had already preceded him,{178} burdened with the anathemas of the Cardinal of Bourbon. The people of Paris swore that if her body were brought to St. Denis they would fling it to the shambles or into the Seine, and a famous theologian, preaching at St. Bartholomew’s church, declared to the faithful that he knew not if it were right to pray God for her soul, but that if they cared to give her in charity a Pater or an Ave they might do so for what it was worth. This was the reward of her thirty years of devoted toil, of vigils and of plots to further the Catholic cause. Not until a quarter of a century had passed were her ashes laid beside those of her husband in the rich Renaissance tomb, which still exists, in the royal church of St. Denis. When the news of the king’s death reached Paris, the Duchess of Montpensier, whom he had threatened to burn alive when he entered, leapt into her carriage and drove through the streets crying, “Good news, friends! Good news! The tyrant is dead!” Jacques Clement, who had been cut to pieces by the king’s Guards, was worshipped as a martyr, and his mother rewarded for having given birth to the saviour of France.

St. Gervais.

Henry of Navarre, unable to carry on the siege with a divided army, directed his course for Normandy. The exultant Parisians proclaimed the Cardinal of Bourbon king, under the title of Charles X., and the Duke of Mayenne, with a large army, marched forth to give battle to Henry. So confident were the Leaguers of victory, that their leaders hired windows along the Rue St. Antoine, to witness the return of the duke bringing the “Bearnais”[119] dead or a prisoner. Henry did indeed return, but it was after a victorious campaign. He captured the Faubourg St. Jacques, and fell upon the abbey of St. Germain des Prés while the astonished monks were preparing to sing mass. Henry seized the monastery, climbed the steeple of the church and gazed on Paris. He refreshed his troops,{179} suffered them to pillage the city south of the Seine, and turned to the west to fix his capital at Tours. In 1590 he won at Ivry on the Eure, about fifty miles south of Rouen, the brilliant victory over the armies of the League and of Spain which Macaulay has popularised in a stirring poem. The village ever since has been known as Ivry-la-Bataille.

The road to Paris was now open, and the city endured another and most terrible siege. The Leaguers fought and suffered with the utmost constancy. Reliquaries were melted down for money, church bells for cannon. The clergy and religious orders were caught by the military enthusiasm. The bishop of Senlis and the prior of the Carthusians, two valiant Maccabees, were seen, crucifix in one hand, and a pike in the other, leading a procession of armed priests, monks and scholars through the streets. Friars from the mendicant orders were among them, their habits tucked up, hoods thrown back, casques on their heads and cuirasses on their breasts. All marched sword by side, dagger in girdle, musket on shoulder, the strangest army of the church militant ever seen. As they passed the Pont Notre Dame the papal legate was crossing in his carriage, and was asked to stop and give his blessing. After this benediction a salvo of musketry was called for, and some of the host of the Lord, forgetting that their muskets were loaded with ball, killed a papal officer and wounded a servant of the ambassador of Spain.

Luxembourg Palace.

Four months the Parisians endured starvation and all the attendant horrors of a siege, the incidents of which, as described by contemporaries, are so ghastly that the pen recoils from transcribing them. At length, when they were at the last extremity, the Duke of Parma arrived with a Spanish army, forced Henry to raise the siege, and revictualled the city. After war, anarchy. In November 1591 it was discovered that secret letters were passing between Brizard, an officer in the service of the Duke of Mayenne in Paris, and a royalist at{180} St. Denis. The sections demanded Brizard’s instant execution, and on his discharge by the Parlement the curé of St. Jacques fulminated against that body and declared that cold steel must be tried (faut jouer des couteaux). A secret revolutionary committee of ten was appointed, and a papier rouge or list of suspects in all the districts of Paris was drawn up under three categories: P. (pendus), those to be hung; D. (dagués), those to be poignarded; C. (chassés), those to be expelled. On the night of the 15th November a meeting was held at the house of the curé of St. Jacques, and in the morning the president of the Parlement, Brisson, was seized and dragged to the Petit Châtelet, where a revolutionary tribunal, in black cloaks, on which were sewn large red crosses, condemned him to death. Meanwhile two councillors of the Parlement, Larcher and Tardif, had been seized, the latter by the curé of St. Cosme, and haled to the Châtelet. All three were dragged to a room, and the executioner was forced to hang them from a beam. The bodies were then stripped, an inscription was hung about their necks, and they were suspended from the gallows in the Place de Grève. The sections believed that Paris would rise: they only shocked the more orderly citizens. The Duke of Mayenne, who was at Lyons, on the receipt of the news hastened to Paris, temporised a while and, when sure of support, seized four of the most dangerous leaders of the sections and hanged them without trial in the Salle basse of the Louvre. All save the more violent partisans were now weary of the strife. The Leaguers themselves were divided. The sections aimed at a theocratic democracy; another party favoured the Duke of Mayenne; a third, the Duke of Guise; a fourth, the Infanta of Spain. It was decided to convoke the States-General at Paris. They met at the Louvre in 1593, and a conference was arranged with Henry’s supporters at Suresnes. Crowds flocked there, crying, “Peace, peace; blessed be they who bring it;{181} cursed they who prevent it.” Henry knew the supreme moment was come. France was still profoundly Catholic; he must choose between his religion and France. He chose to heal his country’s wounds and perhaps to save her very existence. Learned theologians were deputed to confer with him at Paris, whom he astonished and confounded by his knowledge of Scripture; they declared that they had never met a heretic better able to defend his cause. But on 23rd July 1573, he professed himself convinced, and the same evening wrote to his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, that he had spoken with the bishops, and that a hundred anxieties were making St. Denis hateful to him. “On Sunday,” he adds, “I am to take the perilous leap. Bonjour, my heart; come to me early to-morrow. It seems a year since I saw you. A million times I kiss the fair hands of my angel and the mouth of my dear mistress.”

On Sunday, under the great portal of St. Denis, the archbishop of Bourges sat enthroned in a chair covered with white damask and embroidered with the arms of France and of Navarre. He was attended by many prelates and the prior and monks of St. Denis, and the cross and the book of the Gospels were held before him. Henry drew nigh. “Who are you?” demanded the archbishop. “I am the king.” “What do you ask?” “I wish to be received in the bosom of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church.” “Is it your will?” “Yes, I will and desire it.” Henry then knelt and made profession of his faith, kissed the prelate’s ring, received his blessing and was led to the choir, where he knelt before the high altar and repeated his profession of faith on the holy Gospels amid cries of “Vive le roi!”

The clerical extremists in Paris anathematised all concerned. Violent curés again donned their armour, children were baptised and mass was sung by cuirassed priests. The curé of St. Cosme seized a partisan, and with other fanatics of the League hastened to the Latin Quarter to raise the{182} university. But the people were heartsick of the whole business; and when Henry entered Paris after his coronation at Chartres, resplendent in velvet robes embroidered with gold and seated on his dapple grey charger, his famous helmet with its white plumes ever in his hand saluting the ladies at the windows, he was hailed with shouts of joy. Shops were reopened, the artisan took up his tools and the merchant went to his counter with a sigh of relief. A general amnesty was proclaimed, and the Spanish garrison were allowed to depart with their arms. As they filed out of the Porte St. Denis in heavy rain, three thousand strong, the king was sitting at a window above the gates. “Remember me to your master,” he cried, “but do not return.” On the morrow the provost and sheriffs and chief citizens came to the Louvre bearing presents of sweetmeats, sugar-plums and malmsey wine. “Yesterday I received your hearts, to-day I receive your sweets,” the king remarked; all were charmed by his wit, his forbearance and generosity. The stubborn university was last to give way, but when the doctors of theology learnt that Henry had touched for the king’s evil and that many had been cured, they too were convinced. Paris, “well worth a mass,” was wooed and won. The memorable Edict of Nantes established liberty of worship and political equality for the Protestants. The war with Spain was brought to a successful issue, and Henry, with his minister the Duke of Sully, probably the greatest financial genius France has ever known, by wise and firm statesmanship lifted the country from bankruptcy to prosperity and contentment.

HÔTEL DE SULLY.

Henry, like one of his predecessors, had of bastards et bastardes une moult belle compagnie, but as yet no legitimate heir. A divorce from Marguerite of Valois and a politic marriage with the pope’s niece, Marie de’ Medici,[120] gave him{183} a magnificent dowry, an additional bond to the papacy, and several children.

Henri Quatre, hero of Voltaire’s famous epic, is the most popular and romantic figure in the gallery of French kings. His statue on the Pont Neuf was spared for a while by the revolutionists, who made every passer-by in a carriage alight and bow to it. Born among the mountains, Henry was patient of fatigue and hardships. In good or evil fortune his gaiety of heart never failed him. Brave and generous, courteous and witty, he endeared himself to all his subjects, save a few fanatics, and won a desperate cause by sheer personal magic and capacity. Like all his race, Henry was susceptible to the charms of the daughters of Eve, but, unlike his descendants, he never sacrificed France to their tears and wiles. When the question of the succession was urgent he thought of marrying Gabrielle d’Estrées, whom he had created Duchess of Beaufort. But Sully opposed the union, and the impatient Gabrielle sought her royal lover, and used all her powers of fascination to compass the dismissal of the great minister. Henry, however, stood firm, and Gabrielle burst into passionate reproaches. It was of no avail. “Let me tell you,” answered Henry, calmly, “if I must choose between you and the duke, I would sooner part with ten mistresses such as you than one faithful servant such as he.”

In 1610 the king was making great preparations for a war with Austria, and, on the 14th May, desiring to consult Sully, who was unwell in his rooms at the Arsenal, he determined to spare him the fatigue of travelling to the Louvre, and to drive to the Arsenal.

With much foreboding the king had agreed to the coronation of Marie de’ Medici, which had been celebrated at St. Denis with great pomp. The ceremony was attended by two sinister incidents. The Gospel for the day, taken from Mark x., included the answer of Jesus to the Pharisees who tempted Him by asking—“Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?”—the Gospel was hurriedly changed. And when{185} the usual largesse of gold and silver pieces was thrown to the crowd not a voice cried, “Vive le roi,” or “Vive la reine.” That night the king tossed restless on his bed, pursued by evil dreams. On the morrow his counsellors begged him to defer his journey, but nineteen plots to assassinate him had already failed: he gently put aside their warnings, and repeated his favourite maxim that fear had no place in a generous heart. It was a warm day, and the king entered his open carriage, attended by the Dukes of Epernon and Montbazon and five other courtiers; a number of valets de pied followed him. In the narrow Rue de la Ferronnerie the carriage was stopped by a block in the traffic, and the servants were sent round by the cemetery of the Innocents. While the king was listening to the reading of a letter by the Duke of Epernon, one Francis Ravaillac, who had been watching his opportunity for twelve months, placed his foot on a wheel of the coach, leaned forward, and plunged a knife into the king’s breast. Before he could be seized he pulled out the fatal steel and doubled his thrust, piercing him to the heart. “Je suis blessé,” cried Henry, and never spoke again. The widened Rue de la Ferronnerie still exists; the tragedy took place opposite the present no. 3. The regicide was seized, and all the tortures that the most refined cruelty could invent were inflicted upon him. He was dragged to the Place de Grève, his right hand cut off and, with the fatal knife, flung into the flames; the flesh was torn from his arms, breast and legs; melted lead and boiling oil were poured into the wounds. Horses were then tied to each of his four limbs, and were lashed for an hour, when at length the body was torn to pieces and burnt to ashes. Some writers have inculpated the Jesuits for the murder, but it may more reasonably be attributed to the fury of a crazy fanatic. Certain it is that Henry’s heart was given to the Jesuits for the church of their college of la Flèche, which was founded by him.{186}

The first Bourbon king has left his impress on the architecture of Paris. Small progress had been made during the reign of Henry II.’s three sons with their father’s plans for the rebuilding of the Louvre. The work had been continued along the river front after Lescot’s death in 1578 by Baptiste du Cercan, and Catherine de’ Medici had erected the gallery on the south, known as the Petite Galerie—a ground-floor building with a terrace on top, intended for a meeting-place and promenade and not for residence; she had also begun the palace of the Tuileries in 1564, but abandoned it on being warned by her astrologer, Ruggieri, that she should die under the ruins of a house near St. Germain.[121] Henry, soon after he had entered Paris, elaborated a vast scheme for finishing the Tuileries, demolishing the churches of St. Thomas and St. Nicholas, quadrupling the size of the old Louvre and joining the two palaces by continuing the Grande Galerie, already begun by Catherine, to the west. Towards the east the hôtels d’Alençon, de Bourbon and the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois were to be demolished, and a great open space was to be levelled between the new east front of the Louvre and the Pont Neuf. At Henry’s accession Catherine’s architects, Philibert de l’Orme and Jean Bullant, had completed the superb domed central pavilion of the Tuileries, with its two contiguous galleries, and begun the end pavilions. The gardens, with the famous maze or dedalus and Palissy’s beautiful grotto, had been completed in 1476, and for some years were a favourite promenade for Catherine and her court. Henry’s plans were so far carried out that on New Year’s day, 1608, he could walk along the Grande Galerie to the Pavilion de Flore at the extreme west of the river front, and enter the south wing of the Tuileries which had been extended to meet it. The Pavilion de Flore thus became the angle of junction between the two palaces. An upper floor was{187} imposed on the Petite Galerie, and adorned with paintings representing the kings of France. Henry intended the ground floor of the Grande Galerie for the accommodation of painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, tapestry weavers, smiths, and other craftsmen. The quadrangle, however, remained as the last Valois had left it—half Renaissance, half Gothic—and the north-east and south-east towers of the original château were still standing to be drawn by Sylvestre towards the middle of the seventeenth century.

Domenico da Cortona’s unfinished Hôtel de Ville was taken in hand after more than half-a-century and practically completed.[122] The larger, north portion of the Pont Neuf was built, the two islets west of the Cité were incorporated with the island to form the Place Dauphine and the ground that now divides the two sections of the bridge—a new street, the Rue Dauphine, being cut through the garden of the Augustins and the ruins of the college of St. Denis. The Place Royale (now des Vosges) was built, that charming relic of seventeenth and eighteenth century fashionable Paris, where Molière’s Précieuses lived.

PLACE DES VOSGES.

Place des Vosges.

How different is the present aspect of this once courtly square! Here noble gentlemen in dazzling armour jousted, while, from the windows of each of the thirty-five pavilions, gentle dames and demoiselles smiled gracious guerdon to their cavaliers. Around the bronze statue of Louis XIII., proudly erect on the noble horse cast by Daniello da Volterra, in the middle of the gardens, fine ladies were carried in their sedan-chairs and angry gallants fought out their quarrels. And now on the scene of these brilliant revels, peaceful inhabitants of the east of Paris sun themselves and children play. Bronze horse and royal rider went to the melting pot of the Revolution to be forged into the cannon that defeated and humbled the allied kings of Europe, and a feeble marble equestrian statue, erected under the Restoration, occupies{188} its place. Henry also partly rebuilt the Hôtel Dieu, created new streets, and widened others.[123] New fountains and quays were built; the Porte du Temple was reopened, and the Porte des Tournelles constructed. Unhappily, some of the old wooden bridges remained, and on Sunday, 22nd December 1596, the Pont aux Meuniers (Miller’s Bridge), just below the Pont au Change, suddenly collapsed, with all its shops and houses, and sixty persons perished. They were not much regretted, for most of them had enriched themselves by the plunder of Huguenots, and during the troubles of the League. The bridge was rebuilt of wood, at the cost of the captain of the corps of archers, and as the houses were painted each with the figure of a bird, the new bridge was known as the Pont aux Oiseaux (Bridge of Birds). It spanned the river from the end of the Rue St. Denis and the arch of the Grand Châtelet to the Tour de l’Horloge of the Palais de Justice.{189} In 1621, however, it and the Pont au Change were consumed by fire in a few hours and, in 1639, the two wooden bridges were replaced by a bridge of stone, the Pont au Change, which stood until rebuilt in 1858.

It was in Henry’s reign that the Penitents, a regularised order of reformed Franciscan Tertiaries, were established at Picpus, a small village south-east of the Porte St. Antoine, and the friars became known to the Parisians as the Picpuses. The buildings are now occupied by the nuns of the Sacré Cœur, whose church contains a much venerated statuette of the Virgin, which, in Henry’s reign, stood over the portal of the Capucin convent in the Rue St. Honoré. Readers of Les Misérables will remember that it was over the high walls of this convent that Jean Valjean escaped with Cosette from his pursuers. At the end of the garden lie buried in the cemetery of Picpus the victims of the Revolution who were guillotined on the Place du Trône Renversé (now du Trône).

OLD HOUSES NEAR PONT ST. MICHEL, SHOWING SPIRE OF THE STE. CHAPELLE.

Pont St. Michel.

We are able to give the impression which the Paris of Henri Quatre made on an English traveller, a friend of Ben Johnson and author of Coryat’s Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months’ Travell. The first objects that met Coryat’s eye are characteristic. As he travelled along the St. Denis road he passed “seven[124] faire pillars of freestone at equal distances, each with an image of St. Denis and his two companions, and a little this side of Paris was the fairest gallows I ever saw, built on Montfaucon, which consisted of fourteene fair pillars of freestone.” He notes “the fourteene gates of Paris, the goodly buildings, mostly of fair, white stone and”—a detail always unpleasantly impressed on travellers—“the evil-smelling streets, which are the dirtiest and the most stinking I ever saw in any city in my life. Lutetia! well dothe it brooke being so called from the Latin word lutum, which signifieth dirt.” Coryat was impressed by the bridges—“the goodly bridge of white freestone nearly finished (the Pont Neuf); a famous bridge that far exceedeth this, having one of the fairest streets in{190} Paris called our Ladies street; the bridge of Exchange where the goldsmiths live; St. Michael’s bridge, and the bridge of Birds.” He admires the “Via Jacobea, full of bookesellers’ faire shoppes, most plentifully furnished with bookes, and the fair building, very spacious and broad, where the Judges sit in the Palais de Justice, the roofs sumptuously gilt and embossed, with an exceeding multitude of great, long bosses hanging downward.” Coryat next visited the fine quadrangle of the Louvre, whose outside was exquisitely wrought with festoons,{191} and decked with many stately pillars and images. From Queen Mary’s bedroom he went to a room[125] “which excelleth not only all that are now in the world but also all that were since the creation thereof, even a gallery, a perfect description whereof would require a large volume, with a roofe of most glittering and admirable beauty. Yea, so unspeakably fair is it that a man can hardly comprehend it in his mind that hath not seen it with his bodily eyes.” The Tuileries gardens were the finest he ever beheld for length of delectable walks.

Next day Coryat saw the one thing above all he desired to see, “that most rare ornament of learning Isaac Casaubon,” who told him to observe “a certain profane, superstitious ceremony of the papists—a bedde carried after a very ethnicall manner, or rather a canopy in the form of a bedde, under which the Bishop of the city, with certain priests, carry the Sacrament. The procession of Corpus Christi,” he adds, “though the papists esteemed it very holy, was methinks very pitiful. The streets were sumptuously adorned with paintings and rich cloth of arras, the costliest they could provide, the shews of Our Lady street being so hyperbolical in pomp that it exceedeth all the rest by many degrees. Upon public tables in the streets they exposed rich plate as ever I saw in my life, exceeding costly goblets and what not tending to pomp; and on the middest of the tables stood a golden crucifix and divers other gorgeous images. Following the clergy, in capes exceeding rich, came many couples of little singing choristers, which, pretty innocent punies, were so egregiously deformed that moved great pity in any relenting spectator, being so clean shaved round about their heads that a man could perceive no more than the very rootes of their hair.”

At the royal suburb Coryat saw “St. Denis, his head enclosed in a wonderful, rich helmet, beset with exceeding abundant pretious stones,” but the skull itself he “beheld not plainly, only the forepart through a pretty, crystall glass, and by light of a wax candle.”{192}

CHAPTER XIV

PARIS UNDER RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN

LOUIS XIII. was nine years of age when he came to the throne in 1610. For a time the regent, Marie de’ Medici, was content to suffer the great Sully to hold office, but soon favouritism and the greed of princes, to the ill-hap of France, drove him in the prime of life from Paris into the retirement of his château of Villebon, and a feeble and venal Florentine, Concini, took his place. The Prince of Condé, now a Catholic, the Duke of Mayenne, and a pack of nobles who professed solicitude for the wrongs of the pauvre peuple, fell upon the royal treasury like hounds on their quarry. The court, to meet their demands, neglected to pay the poor annuitants of the Hôtel de Ville, and this was the only result to the pauvre peuple. In 1614, so critical was the financial situation, that the States-General were called to meet in the Salle Bourbon,[126] but to little purpose. Recriminations were bandied between the noblesse and the Tiers Etat. The insolence of the former was intolerable. One member of the Tiers was thrashed by a noble and could obtain no redress. The clergy refused to bear any of the public burdens. The orator of the Tiers, speaking on his knees according to usage, warned the court that despair might make the people conscious that a soldier was none other than a peasant bearing arms, and that when the vine-dresser took up the arquebus he might one day cease to be the anvil and become the hammer. But there was no thought for the common weal; each{193} order wrangled for its own privileges, and their meeting-place was closed on the pretext that the hall was wanted for a royal ballet. No protest was raised, and the States-General never met again until the fateful meeting at Versailles, in 1789, when a similar pretext was tried, with very different consequences. Among the clergy, however, sat a young priest of twenty-nine years of age, chosen for their orator, Armand Duplessis de Richelieu, who made rapid strides to fame.

In 1616 the nobles were once more in arms, and Condé was again bought off. The helpless court was in pitiful straits and the country drifting to civil war, when Richelieu, who, meanwhile, had been made a royal councillor and minister for foreign affairs, took the Condé business in hand. He had the prince arrested in the Louvre itself and flung into the Bastille; the noble blackmailers were declared guilty of treason, and three armies marched against them. The triumph of the court seemed assured, when Louis XIII., now sixteen years of age, suddenly freed himself from tutelage, and with the help of the favourite companion of his pastimes, Albert de Luynes, son of a soldier of fortune, determined to rid himself of Concini. The all-powerful Florentine, on 24th April 1617, was crossing the bridge that spanned the fosse of the Louvre when the captain of the royal Guards, who was accompanied by a score of gentlemen, touched him on the shoulder and told him he was the king’s prisoner. “I, a prisoner!” exclaimed Concini, moving his hand towards his sword. Before he could utter another word he fell dead, riddled with pistol shots; Louis appeared at a window, and all the Louvre resounded with cries of “Vive le roi!” Concini’s wife, to whom he owed his ascendency over the queen-mother, was accused of sorcery, beheaded and burnt on the Place de Grève; Marie was packed off to Blois and Richelieu exiled to his bishopric of Luçon. De Luynes, enriched by the confiscated wealth of the Concini, now became supreme, only to demonstrate a pitiful incapacity.{194} The nobles had risen and were rallying round Marie; the Protestants were defying the state; but Luynes was impotent, and soon went to a dishonoured grave, leaving chaos behind him.

Pont Neuf.

Richelieu’s star was now in the ascendant. The king drew near to his mother and both turned to the one man who seemed able to knit together the distracted state. A cardinal’s hat was obtained for him from Rome, and the illustrious churchman ruled France for eighteen years. Everything went down before his commanding genius, his iron will and his indefatigable industry. “I reflect long,” said he, “before making a decision, but once my mind is made up, I go straight to the goal. I mow down all before me, and cover all with my scarlet robe.” The Huguenots, backed by the English, aimed at founding an independent republic: Richelieu captured La Rochelle[127] and wiped them out as a political party. The great nobles sought to divide power with the crown: he demolished their fortresses, made them bow their necks to the royal yoke or chopped off their heads. They defied the king’s edict against duelling: the Count of Bouteville, the most notorious duellist of his time, and the Count of Les Chapelles were sent to the scaffold for having defiantly fought duels in the Place Royale in open noonday, at which the Marquis of Buffy was killed. The execution made a profound impression, for the count was a Montmorency, and the Condés, the Orleans, the Montmorencys and all the most powerful nobles brought pressure to bear on the king and swore that the sentence should never be carried out. But Richelieu was firm as a tower. “It is an infamous thing,” he told the king, “to punish the weak alone; they cast no baleful shade: we must keep discipline by striking down the mighty.” Richelieu crushed the Parlement and revolutionised the provincial administrations. He maintained seven armies in the field, and two navies on the seas at one and the same time.{195} He added four provinces to France—Alsace, Lorraine, Artois and Rousillon, humiliated Austria and exalted his country to the proud position of dominant factor in European politics. He foiled plot after plot and crushed rebellion. The queen-mother, Gaston Duke of Orleans her second son and heir to the throne, the Marquis of Cinq-Mars the king’s own favourite—each tried a fall with the great minister, but was thrown and punished with pitiless severity. Marie herself was driven to exile—almost poverty—at Brussels, and died a miserable death at Cologne. The despicable Gaston, who twice betrayed his friends to save his own skin, was watched, and when the queen, Anne of Austria, gave birth to a son after twenty years of marriage, he was deprived of his dignities and possessions and interned at Blois. The Marquis of Cinq-Mars, and the last Duke of Montmorency, son and grandson of two High Constables of France, felt the stroke of the headsman’s axe.

In 1642, when the mighty cardinal had attained the highest pinnacle of success and fame, a mortal disease declared itself. His physicians talked the usual platitudes of hope, but he would have none of them, and sent for the curé of St. Eustache. “Do you pardon your enemies?” the priest asked. “I have none, save those of the state,” replied the dying cardinal, and, pointing to the Host, exclaimed, “There is my judge.” “At my entry to office,” he wrote to Louis XIII. in his political testament, “your Majesty divided the powers of the state with the Huguenots; the great nobles demeaned themselves as if they were not your subjects; the governors of provinces acted as independent sovereigns. In a word, the majesty of the crown was degraded to the lowest depths of debasement and was hardly recognisable at all.” We have seen how the cardinal changed all that; yet Louis heard of his death without emotion, and simply remarked—“Well, a great politician has gone.” In six months his royal master was gone too. Louis has one claim to distinction; he was the first king of France since St. Louis who lived a clean life.{196}

THE MEDICI FOUNTAIN, LUXEMBOURG GARDENS.

Paris, under Marie de’ Medici and Richelieu, saw many and important changes. In 1612 a new Jacobin monastery was founded in the Rue St. Honoré for the reformed Dominicans, destined to be later the theatre of Robespierre’s{197} triumphs and to house the great Jacobin revolutionary club.[128] In the same year the queen-regent bought a château and garden from the Duke of Piney-Luxembourg, and commissioned her architect, Solomon Debrosse, to build a new palace in the style of the Pitti at Florence. The work was begun in 1615, and resulted in the picturesque but somewhat Gallicised Italian palace which, after descending to Gaston of Orleans and his daughter the Grande Mademoiselle, ends a chequered career as palace, prison, house of peers, socialist-meeting place by becoming the respectable and dull Senate-house of the third Republic. The beautiful Renaissance gardens have suffered but few changes; adorned with Debrosse’s picturesque fountain, they form one of the most charming parks in Paris. The same architect was employed to restore the old Roman aqueduct of Arceuil and finished his work in 1624. In 1614 the equestrian statue in bronze of Henry IV., designed by Giovanni da Bologna, and presented to Marie by Cosimo II. of Tuscany, reached Paris after many vicissitudes and was set up on the Pont Neuf by Pierre de Fouqueville, who carved for it a beautiful pedestal of marble, whereon were inscribed the most signal events and victories of Henry’s reign. This priceless statue was melted down for cannon during the Revolution, and for years its site was occupied by a café. In 1818, during the Restoration, another statue of Henry IV., by Lemot, cast from the melted figure of Napoleon I. on the top of the Vendôme column, was erected where it now stands. The founder, who was an imperialist, is said to have avenged the emperor by placing pamphlets attacking the Restoration in the horse’s belly.

In the seventeenth century the Pont Neuf was one of the busiest centres of Parisian life. Streams of coaches and multitudes of foot-passengers passed by. Booths of all kinds displayed their wares; quacks, mountebanks, ballad-singers and puppet-shows, drew crowds of listeners. Evelyn describes the footway as being three to four feet higher than the road; and at the foot of the bridge, says the traveller, is{198} a water-house, “whereon, at a great height, is the story of our Saviour and the Woman of Samaria pouring water out of a bucket. Above is a very rare dyall of several motions with a chime. The water is conveyed by huge wheels, pumps and other engines, from the river beneath.” This was the famous Château d’Eau, or La Samaritaine, erected in 1608 to pump water from the Seine and distribute it to the Louvre and the Tuileries palaces. The timepiece was an industrieuse horloge, which told the hours, days, and months.

PONT NEUF.

In 1624 Henry the Fourth’s great scheme for enlarging and completing the Louvre was committed by Richelieu to his architect, Jacques Lemercier, and the first stone of the Pavilion de l’Horloge was laid on 28th June by the king. Lemercier was great enough and modest enough to adopt his predecessor’s design, and having erected the pavilion, continued Lescot’s west wing northwards, turned the north-west angle and carried the north wing to about a fourth of its designed extent.{199} The Pavilion de l’Horloge thus became the central feature of the west wing, which was exactly doubled in extent. The south-east and north-east towers of the eastern wing of the old Gothic Louvre, however, remained intact, and even as late as 1650 Sylvestre’s drawing shows us the south-east tower still standing and the east wing only partly demolished. Lemercier also designed a grand new palace for the cardinal north of the Rue St. Honoré, which was completed in 1636. Richelieu’s passion for the drama led him to include two theatres as part of his scheme: a small one to hold about six hundred spectators, and a larger one, which subsequently became the opera-house, capacious enough to seat three thousand. Magnificent galleries, painted by Philippe de Champaigne and other artists, represented the chief events in the cardinal’s reign, and were hung with the portraits of the great men of France. The courts were adorned with carvings of ships’ prows and anchors, symbolising the cardinal’s function as Grand Master of Navigation; spacious gardens, with an avenue of chestnut trees, which cost 300,000 francs to train, added to its splendours.

In this palace the great minister—busy with a yet vaster scheme for building an immense Place Ducale, north of the palace—passed away leaving its stately magnificence to the king, whose widow, Anne of Austria, inhabited it during the regency with her sons, Louis XIV. and Philip Duke of Orleans, the founder of the Bourbon-Orleans family. The famous architect, François Mansard, was employed by her to extend the Palais Royal as it was then called, which subsequently became infamous as the scene of the orgies of Philip’s son during his regency. The buildings were further extended by Philip Egalité, who destroyed the superb plantation of chestnut trees and erected shops along the sides of the gardens, which as cafés and gambling-saloons became a haunt of fashionable vice and dissipation in the late eighteenth century. The gardens of the royal palaces had always been open to well-dressed citizens, but notices forbade entrance to beggars, servants, and all ill-clad persons under pain of{200} imprisonment, the carcan, and other graver penalties. Egalité, however, to win popularity, opened his gardens without restriction, and they soon became the forum of the revolutionary agitation. Here Camille Desmoulins declaimed his impassioned orations and called Paris to arms. The gambling-hells, of which there were over three hundred, survived the Revolution, and Blucher and many an officer of the allied armies lost immense sums there. The Palais Royal became subsequently the residence of the Orleans family, and now serves as the meeting-place of the Conseil d’Etat.

In the early seventeenth century nine lovers of literature associated themselves for the purpose of holding a friendly symposium, where they discoursed of books, and read and criticised each other’s compositions; the meetings were followed by a modest repast and a peripatetic discussion. The masterful cardinal, who would rule the French language as well as the state, called the nine together, and in 1635 organised them into an Académie Française, whose function should be to perfect and watch over the purity of the French tongue. The Parlement granted letters-patent, limited the number of academicians to forty, and required them to take cognisance of French authors and the French language alone. The original nine, however, were far from gratified, and always regretted the “golden age” of early days. Richelieu established the Jardin des Plantes for the use of medical students, where demonstrations in botany were given; he rebuilt the college and church of the Sorbonne where his monument,[129] a masterpiece of sculpture by Girardon from Lebrun’s designs, may still be seen. He cheapened the postal service,[130] established the Royal Press at the Louvre which in twenty years published seventy Greek, Latin,{201} Italian and French classics. He issued the first political weekly gazette in France, was a liberal patron of men of letters and of artists, and saw the birth and fostered the growth of the great period of French literary and artistic supremacy.

Another of Henry the Fourth’s plans for the aggrandisement of Paris was carried out by the indefatigable minister. As early as 867 the bishops of Paris had been confirmed by royal charter in their possession of the two islands east of the Cité, the Isle Notre Dame and Isle aux Vaches. From time immemorial these had been used as timber-yards, and in 1616 the chapter of the cathedral was induced to treat with Christophe Marie, contractor for the bridges of France and others, who agreed to fill in the channel,[131] which separated the islands; to cover them with broad streets of houses and quays, and to build certain bridges; but expressly contracted never to fill up the arm of the Seine between the Isle Notre Dame, and the Cité. The first stone of the new bridge which was to connect the islands with the north bank was laid by Louis XIII. in 1614 and named Pont Marie, after the contractor. In 1664 a church, dedicated to St. Louis, was begun on the site of an earlier chapel by Levau, but not completed until 1726 by Donat.

The new quarter soon attracted the attention of rich financiers, civic officers, merchants and lawyers, some of whose hôtels were designed by Levau, and decorated by Lebrun and Leseur. Madame Pompadour’s brother lived there; the Duke of Lauzan, husband of the Grande Mademoiselle, lived in his hôtel on the Quai d’Anjou (No. 17); Voltaire lived with Madame du Châtelet in the Hôtel Lambert (No. 1 Quai d’Anjou). To the précieuses of Molière’s time the Isle St. Louis (for so it was called) became the Isle de Delos, around whose quays the gallants and ladies of the period were wont to promenade at nightfall. The Isle, as it is now familiarly known, is one of the most peaceful{202} quarters of Paris, and has a strangely provincial aspect to the traveller who paces its quiet streets.

In 1622 Paris was raised from its subjection to the Metropolitan of Sens, and became for the first time the seat of an archbishopric; the diocese was made to correspond to the old territories of the Parisii.

Among the many evils attendant on a monarchy, which Samuel recited to the children of Israel, that of the possibility of a regency might well have found place. Louis XIV. was less than five years of age when his father died, and once again the great nobles turned the difficulties of the situation to their own profit. The queen-regent, Anne of Austria, had retained in office Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu’s faithful disciple, chosen by him to continue the traditions of his policy. The new cardinal-minister, scion of an old Sicilian family, was a typical Italian; he had none of his predecessor’s virile energy and directness of purpose, but ruled by his subtle wit and cool, calculating patience. “Time and I,” was his device. He was an excellent judge of men, and profoundly distrusted “the unlucky,” always satisfying himself that a man was “lucky,” before he employed him. Conscious of his foreign origin, Mazarin hesitated to take strong measures, and advised a policy of conciliation with the disaffected nobles. Anne filled their pockets, and for a time the whole language of the court is said to have consisted of the five little words “La reine est si bonne.” But the ambitious courtiers soon aimed at higher game, and a plot was discovered to assassinate the foreign cardinal. The Duke of Beaufort, chief conspirator, a son of the Duke of Vendôme, and grandson of Henry IV., by Gabrielle d’Estrées, was imprisoned in the keep at Vincennes, and his associates interned at their châteaux.

The finances which Richelieu had left in so flourishing a condition were soon exhausted by the lavish benevolence of the court, and were unhappily in the hands of Emery (a clever but cynical official, who had formerly been a fraudulent bankrupt), whose rigorous exactions and indifference{203} to public feeling aroused the indignation of the whole nation. In 1646 23,800 defaulters lay rotting in the jails, and an attempt to enforce an odious tax on all merchandise entering Paris led to an explosion of popular wrath. The Parlement, by the re-assertion of its claims to refuse the registration of an obnoxious decree of the crown, made itself the champion of public justice. The four sovereign courts of the Parlement met in the hall of St. Louis, and refused to register the tax. “The Parlement growled,” said the Cardinal de Retz, “and the people awoke and groped about for laws and found none.” Anne was furious and made the boy-king hold a “bed[132] of justice” to enforce the registration of the decree. But the Parlement stood firm, declared itself the guardian of the public and private weal, claiming even to reform abuses and to discuss and vote on schemes of taxation. So critical was the situation that the court was forced to bend, and to postpone the humiliation of the Parlement to a more convenient season. The glorious issue of the campaigns of Condé against the Houses of Spain and Austria seemed to offer a fitting occasion. On 26th August 1648, while a Te Deum was being sung at Notre Dame for the victory of Lens, and a grand trophy of seventy-three captured flags was displayed to the people, three of the most stubborn members of the Parlement were arrested. One escaped, but while the venerable Councillor Broussel was being hustled into a carriage, a cry was raised, which stirred the whole of Paris to insurrection. In the excitement a street porter was shot by a captain of the Guards, the Marquis of Meilleraye, and the next morning the court, aroused by cries of “Liberty and Broussel,” found the streets of Paris barricaded and the citizens in arms, even children of five or six years carrying poignards. De Retz, the suffragan archbishop of Paris, came in his robes to entreat Anne to appease the people, but{204} was snubbed for his pains. “It is a revolt,” the queen cried, “to imagine a revolt possible; these are silly tales of those who desire it: the king will enforce order.” De Retz, angry and insulted, left to join the insurrection and to become its leader. The venerable president of the Parlement, Molé, and the whole body of members next repaired to the Palais Royal with no better success: the queen’s only answer was a gibe. As they returned crestfallen from the Palais Royal they were driven back by the infuriated people, who threatened them with death, and clamoured for Broussel’s release or Mazarin as a hostage. Nearly all the councillors fled, but the president, with exalted courage, faced them and, answering gravely, as if in his judgment-seat, said, “If you kill me, all my needs will be six feet of earth”: he strode on with calm self-possession, amid a shower of missiles and threats, to the hall of St. Louis. The echo of Cromwell’s triumph in England, however, seemed to have reached the Palais Royal, and the queen-regent was at length induced to treat. The demands of the people were granted and Broussel was liberated, amid scenes of tumultuous joy.

In February of the next year the regency made an effort to reassert its authority. The queen and the royal princes left Paris for the palace of St. Germain and gathered an army under Condé: the Parlement taxed themselves heavily, tried their hands at organising a citizen militia, and allied themselves with the popular Duke of Beaufort, now at liberty, and leader of a troop of brilliant but giddy young nobles. The Bastille was captured by the Parlement, and the university promised its support and a subsidy. This was the origin of the civil war of the Fronde, one of the most extraordinary contests in history; its name is derived from the puerile street fights with slings of the printers’ devils and schoolboys of Paris. The incidents of the war read like scenes in a comic opera. A hundred thousand armed citizens were besieged by eight thousand soldiers. The evolution of a burlesque form of cavalry, called the corps of the Portes Cochères, formed by a conscription of one horseman for every{205} house with a carriage gate, became the derision of the royal army. They issued forth, beplumed and beribboned, and fled back to the city, amid the execrations of the people, at the sight of a handful of troops. Every defeat—and the Parisians were always defeated—formed a subject for songs and mockery. Councils of war were held in taverns, and De Retz was seen at a sitting of the Parlement in the hall of St. Louis with a poignard sticking out of his pocket: “There is the archbishop’s prayer-book,” said the people. The more public-spirited members of the Parlement soon, however, tired of the folly. Mazarin won over De Retz by the offer of a cardinal’s hat, and a compromise was effected with the court, which returned to Paris in April 1649. The people were still bitter against Mazarin, and invaded the Palais de Justice, demanding the cardinal’s signature to the treaty, that it might be burned by the common hangman.

Successful generals are bad masters, and the jackboot was now supreme at court. Soon Condé’s insolent bearing and extravagant demands, and the vanity of his entourage of young nobles, dubbed petits maîtres, became intolerable: he was arrested at the Louvre and sent to the keep at Vincennes. But Mazarin, thinking himself secure, delayed the promised reward to De Retz, who joined the disaffected friends of Condé: and the court, again foiled, was forced to release Condé, surrender the two princes, and exile the hated Mazarin, who, none the less, ruled the storm by his subtle policy from Cologne. Condé, disgusted alike with queen and Parlement, now fled to the south, and raised the standard of rebellion.

Notre Dame.

The second phase of the wars of the Fronde became a more serious matter. Turenne, won over by the court, was given command of the royal forces and moved against Condé. The two armies, after indecisive battles, raced to Paris and fought for its possession outside the Porte St. Antoine. The Frondeurs occupied what is now the Faubourg St. Antoine: the royalists the heights of{206} Charonne to the east. It was a stubborn and bloody contest. The armies were led by the two greatest captains of the age, and fought under the eyes of their king, who with the queen-mother watched the struggle from the eminence now crowned by the cemetery of Père la Chaise. “I have seen not one Condé to-day, but a dozen,” cried Turenne, as victory inclined to the Royalists. The last word was, however, with the Duke of Orleans: while he sat hesitating in the Luxembourg, the Grande Mademoiselle ordered the guns of the Bastille to be turned against Turenne, and the citizens opened the gates to Condé. Again his incorrigible insolence and brutality made Paris too hot for him, and with the disaffected princes he returned to Flanders to seek help from his country’s enemies. It was a fatal mistake, and Mazarin was not slow to turn it to advantage. He prudently retired while public feeling was won over to the young king, who was soon entreated by the Parlement and citizens to return to Paris. When the time was ripe, Mazarin had the Duke of Orleans interned at Blois, Condé was condemned to death in contumacio: De Retz was sent to Vincennes. Ten councillors of the Parlement were imprisoned or degraded, and in three months Mazarin returned to Paris with the pomp and equipage of a sovereign. It was the end of the Fronde, and of the attempt of the Parlement, a venal body[133] devoid of representative basis, to imitate the functions of the English House of Commons. The crown emerged from the contest more absolute than before, and Louis never forgot the days when he was a fugitive with his mother, and driven to lie on a hard mattress at the palace of St. Germain. In 1655 the Parlement of Paris met to prepare remonstrances against a royal edict: the young king heard of it while hunting at Vincennes, made his way to the hall of St. Louis{207} booted[134] and spurred, rated the councillors and dissolved the sitting.

The years following on the internal peace were a period of triumphant foreign war and diplomacy. Mazarin achieved his purpose of marrying the Infanta of Spain to his royal master; he added to and confirmed Richelieu’s territorial gains and guided France at last to triumph over the Imperial House of Austria. On 9th March 1661, after handing Louis a code of instructions for future guidance and commending his ministers to the royal favour, the great Italian, “whose heart was French if his tongue were not,” confronted death at Vincennes with firmness and courage. Mazarin was, however, a costly servant, who bled his adopted country to satisfy his love for the arts and splendours of life, to furnish dowries to his nieces, and to exalt his family. His vast palace (now the Bibliothèque Nationale), with its library of 35,000 volumes, was furnished with princely splendour. He left 2,000,000 livres to found a college for the gratuitous education of sixty sons of gentlemen from the four provinces—Spanish, Italian, German and Flemish—recently added to the crown, in order that French culture and grace might be diffused among them; they were to be taught the use of arms, horsemanship, dancing, Christian piety and belles-lettres. A vast domed edifice was raised on the site of the Tour de Nesle, and became famous as the college of the Four Nations. It was subsequently expropriated and given by the Convention to the five learned academies of France, and is now known as the Institut de France.{208}

THE INSTITUT DE FRANCE.

{209}

CHAPTER XV

THE GRAND MONARQUE—VERSAILLES AND PARIS

THE century of Louis XIV., whose triumphs have been so extravagantly celebrated by Voltaire, saw the culmination and declension of French military glory, literary splendour, and regal magnificence. Never did king of France inherit a more capable and patriotic generation of public servants, trained as they had been under the two greatest administrators the land had ever seen; never did king grasp the sceptre with more absolute and unquestioned power. “L’Etat c’est moi,” if not Louis’ words, were at least his guiding principle. Gone were the times of cardinal dictators. When the ministers came after Mazarin’s death to ask the king whom they should now address themselves to, the answer came like a thunderbolt: “To me!” and the Secretary for War, with affrighted visage, hastened to the queen-mother, who only laughed. Alone among his colleagues Mazarin knew his king, and warned them that there was enough stuff in Louis to make four kings and one honest man.

What brilliant constellations of great men cast their fair influences over the birth of Louis XIV.! “Sire,” said Mazarin, when dying “I owe you all—but I can partially acquit myself by leaving you Colbert.” Austere Colbert was a merchant’s son of Rheims; his Atlantean shoulders bore the burden of five modern ministries; his vehement industry, admirable science and sterling honesty created order out of financial chaos and found the sinews of war for an army of 300,000 men before the Peace of Ryswick and 450,000 for the war of the{210} Spanish succession; he initiated, nurtured and perfected French industries; he created a navy that crushed the combined English and Dutch fleets off Beachy Head, swept the Channel for weeks, burnt English ports, carried terror into English homes, and for a time paralysed English commerce. Louvois, his colleague, organised an army that made his master the arbiter of Europe; Condé and Turenne were its victorious captains. Vauban, greatest of military engineers, captured towns in war and made them impregnable in peace; fortified 333 cities and places, and shared with Louvois the invention of the combined musket and bayonet, the deadliest weapon of war as yet contrived. De Lionne, by masterly diplomacy, prepared and cemented the conquests of victorious generals. Supreme in arts of peace were Corneille, Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Lebrun, Claude Lorrain, Puget, Mansard, and Perrault. We shall learn in the sequel what the Grand Monarque did with this unparalleled inheritance.

None of the great ones of the earth is so intimately known to us as the magnificent histrion, whose tinselled grandeur and pompous egoism has been laid bare by the Duke of St. Simon, prince of memoirists. Never has the frippery of a court been shrivelled by such fierce and consuming light glaring like a fiery sun on its meretricious splendours. And what a court it is! What a gilded crowd of princes and paramours, harlots and bastards, struts, fumes, intrigues through the Memoirs of the Duke of St. Simon! By a few strokes of his pen he etches for us, in words that bite like acid, the fools and knaves, the wife-beaters and adulterers, the cardsharpers and gamesters, the grovelling sycophants with their petty struggles for precedence or favour, their slang, their gluttony and drunkenness, their moral and physical corruption.

Place du Carrousel.

External grandeur and regal presence,[135] a profound belief in his divinely-appointed despotism, and in earlier years a{211} capacity for work rare among his predecessors, the lord of France certainly possessed. “He had a grand mien,” says St. Simon, “and looked a veritable king of the bees.” Much has been made of Louis’ incomparable grace and respectful courtesy to women; but the courtesy of a king who doffs his hat to every serving wench yet contrives a staircase to facilitate the debauching of his queen’s maids-of-honour, and exacts of his mistresses and the ladies of his court submission to his will and pleasure, even under the most trying of physical disabilities, is at least wanting in consistency. The king’s mental equipment was less than mediocre; he was barely able to read and write, was ignorant of the commonest facts of history, and fell into the grossest blunders in public. Like all small-minded men, Louis was jealous of superior merit and preferred mediocrity rather than genius in his ministers. Small wonder that his reign ended in shame and disaster.

On the 6th of June 1662, the young king, notwithstanding much public misery consequent on two years of bad harvests, organised a magnificent carrousel (tilting) in the garden that fronted the Tuileries. Five companies of nobles, each led by the king or one of the princes, were arrayed in gorgeous costumes as Romans, Persians, Turks, Armenians and Savages. Louis, who of course led the Romans, was followed by a superb train of many squires, twenty-four pages, fifty horses each led by two grooms, and fifty footmen dressed as lictors, carrying gilded fasces. The royal princes headed similar processions. So great was the display of jewels that all the precious stones in the world seemed brought together; so richly were the costumes of the knights and the trappings of the horses embroidered with gold and silver that the cloth beneath could barely be seen. The king and the princes rode by with a prodigious quantity of diamonds and rubies glittering on their costumes and equipages; an immense amphitheatre afforded seats for a multitude of spectators, and in a smaller pavilion, richly gilded, sat the two queens of{212} France, the queen of England, and the royal princesses. The first day was spent in tilting at Medusa heads and heads of Moors: the second at rings. Louis is said to have greatly distinguished himself by his skill. Maria Theresa, his young queen, distributed the prizes, and the garden was afterwards named the Place du Carrousel.

Louis, however, hated Paris, for his forced exile during the troubles of the Fronde rankled in his memory. Nor were the associations of St. Germain any more pleasant. A lover of the chase and all too prone to fall into the snares of “fair, fallacious looks and venerial trains,” the retirement of his father’s hunting lodge at Versailles, away from the prying eyes and mocking tongues of the Parisians, early attracted him. There he was wont to meet his mistress, Madame de la Vallière, and there he determined to erect a vast pleasure-palace and gardens. The small château, built by Lemercier in the early half of the seventeenth century, was handed over to Levau in 1668, who, carefully respecting his predecessor’s work in the Cour de Marbre, constructed two immense wings, which were added to by J. H. Mansard, as the requirements of the court grew. The palace stood in the midst of a barren, sandy plain, but Louis’ pride demanded that Nature herself should bend to his will, and an army of artists, engineers and gardeners was concentrated there, who at the sacrifice of incredible wealth and energy, had so far advanced the work that the king was able to come into residence in 1682.

In spite of seas of reservoirs fed by costly hydraulic machinery at Marly, which lifted the waters of the Seine to an aqueduct that led to Versailles, the supply was deemed inadequate, and orders were given to divert the river Eure between Chartres and Maintenon to the gardens of the palace. For years an army of thirty thousand men were employed in this one task, at a cost of money and human life greater than that of many a campaign. So heavy was the mortality in the camp that it was forbidden to speak of{213} the sick, and above all of the dead, who were carried away in cartloads by night for burial. All that remains of this cruel folly are a few ruins at Maintenon.

After the failure of this scheme, subterranean water-courses were contrived. The plaisir du roi must be sated at any cost, and at length a magnificent garden was created, filled with a population of statues and adorned with gigantic fountains. Soon the king tired of the bustle and noise of Versailles, and a miserable and swampy site at Marly, the haunt of toads and serpents and creeping things, was transformed into a splendid hermitage. Hills were levelled, great trees brought from Compiègne, most of which soon died and were as quickly replaced; fish-ponds, adorned by exquisite paintings, were made and unmade; woods were metamorphosed into lakes, where the king and a select company of courtiers disported themselves in gondolas; cascades refreshed their ears in summer heat. Precious paintings, statues and costly furniture charmed the eye inside the hermitage—and all to receive the king and his intimates from Wednesday to Saturday on a few occasions in the year. St. Simon writes of what he saw, and estimates that Marly cost more than Versailles.[136] Nothing remains to-day of all this splendour: it was neglected by Louis’ successors and sold in lots during the Revolution.

After a life of wanton licentiousness, Louis, at the age of forty, was captivated by the mature charms of a widow of forty-three, a colonial adventuress of noble descent, who after the death of her husband, the crippled comic poet Scarron, became governess to the king’s illegitimate children by Madame de Montespan. Soon after the death of the queen Maria Theresa, the widow Scarron, known to history as Madame de Maintenon, was secretly married to her royal lover, who for the remainder of his life was her docile slave.{214} At the famous military manœuvres at Compiègne after the Peace of Ryswick, organised to display the resources of the country and to enable the court to witness the circumstance of a great siege, Louis was seen, hat in hand, bending over Madame de Maintenon’s sedan-chair, which stood at a coign of vantage on the ramparts, explaining to her the various movements of the troops. “I could describe the scene,” says St. Simon, “as clearly forty years hence as I do now.” An aide-de-camp, approaching from below to ask the king’s orders, was dumbfoundered by the sight and could scarcely stammer out his message. The effect on the soldiers was indescribable: every one asked what that chair meant over which the king was bending uncovered.

Versailles—Le Tapis Vert.

A narrow bigot in matters of religion and completely under the influence of fanatics, Madame de Maintenon persuaded Louis that a crusade against heresy would be a fitting atonement for his past sins. In 1681 she writes, “The king is seriously thinking of his salvation and of that of his subjects, and if God spares him to us there will soon be but one religion in his kingdom.” Colbert, who had always stood by the Protestants, died (1683) in disfavour, protesting that if he had done for God what he had done for the king, he would have been saved ten times over. At first political pressure and money were tried; a renegade Protestant was given control of a “conversion fund,” and six livres were paid for each convert. Children were seduced from their parents; brutal dragoons were quartered on Protestant families, and as a result many of the wretched people submitted. “Every post,” wrote Madame de Maintenon, “brings tidings which fill the king with joy; conversions take place daily by thousands.” Thousands too, proved stubborn, and on 22nd October 1685, the first blow was struck. By the revocation of the Edict of Nantes the charter of Protestant liberties was destroyed, and those who had given five out of ten marshals to France, including the great Turenne, were denied the right of civil existence. Whole cities were depopulated; tens of thousands (for the Huguenots had{215} long ceased to exist as a political force) of law-abiding citizens expatriated themselves and carried their industries to enrich foreign lands.[137] Many pastors were martyred, and drummers were stationed at the foot of the scaffold to drown their exhortations to the spectators. Let us not say persecution is ineffective; Duruy estimates the Calvinist population of France before the revocation of the Edict at 1,000,000: in 1870 at 15,000 to 18,000. On the whole, the measure was approved by the nation; Racine, La Fontaine, the great Jansenist Arnault, as well as Bossuet and Massillon, applauded. The king was hailed a second Constantine, and believed he had revived the times of the apostles. But the consequences to France were far-reaching and disastrous. In less than two months the Catholic James II. of England was a discrowned fugitive, and the Calvinist William of Orange, the inveterate enemy of France, sat in his place; England’s pensioned neutrality was turned to bitter hostility, and every Protestant power in Europe stirred to fierce resentment. Seven years of war followed, which exhausted the immense resources of France; seven years,[138] rich in glory perhaps, but lean years indeed to the dumb millions who paid the cost in blood and money. “Nearly the tenth part of the nation,” writes Vauban, after the Peace of Ryswick, “is reduced to beggary; of the nine other parts, five are little removed from the same condition; three-tenths are very straitened; the remaining tenth counts no more than a hundred thousand, of which not ten thousand may be classed as very well off” (fort à l’aise.)

Three short years of peace and recuperation ensued, when the acceptance of the crown of Spain by Louis’ grandson, Philip of Anjou, in spite of Maria Theresa’s solemn{216} renunciation for herself and her posterity of all claim to the Spanish succession, roused all the old jealousy of France and brought her secular enemy, the House of Austria, to a new coalition against her.

Woe to the nation whose king is thrall to women. The manner in which this momentous step was taken is characteristic of Louis. Two councils were held in Madame de Maintenon’s room; her advice was asked by the king; and apparently turned the scale in favour of acceptance. “For a hundred years,” says Taine, “from 1672 to 1774, every time a king of France made war it was by pique or vanity, by family or private interest, or by condescension to a woman.” Still more amazing is the fact that, for years, the court of Madrid was ruled by a Frenchwoman, Madame des Ursins, the camerera major of Philip’s queen, who made and unmade ministers, controlled all public appointments, and even persuaded the French ambassador to submit all dispatches to her before sending them to France. Madame de Maintenon was equally omnipotent at Versailles; she decided what letters should or should not be shown to the king, kept back disagreeable news, and held everybody in the hollow of her hand, from humblest subject to most exalted minister. This was the atmosphere from which men were sent to meet the new and more potent combination of States that opposed the Spanish succession. Chamillart, a pitiful creature of Madame de Maintenon’s, sat in Colbert’s place. Gone were Turenne and Condé and Luxembourg; the armies of the descendant of St. Louis were led by the Duke of Vendôme, a foul lecher, whose inhuman vices went far to justify the gibe of Mephistopheles that men use their reason “um thierischer als jedes Thier zu sein.”

The victories of the Duke of Marlborough and of Prince Eugene spread consternation at court. When, in 1704, the news of Blenheim oozed out at Versailles, the king’s grief was piteous to see. Scarce a noble family but had{217} one of its members killed, wounded, or a prisoner. Two years later came the defeat of Ramillies, to be followed in three months by the disaster at Turin. The balls and masquerades and play at Marly went merrily on; but at news of the defeat of Oudenarde and the fall of Lille, even the reckless courtiers were subdued, and for a month gambling and even conversation ceased. At the sound of an approaching horseman they ran hither and thither, with fear painted on their cheeks. Wildest schemes for raising money were tried; a large sum was wasted on mining for gold in the Pyrenees; taxes were levied on baptisms and marriages. Sums raised for the relief of the poor and the maintenance of highways were expropriated, and the wretched peasants were forced to repair the roads without payment, some dying of starvation at their work. The coinage was debased. King and courtiers, with ill-grace, sent their plate to the mint. A plan for the recapture of Lille was mooted, in which Louis was to take part, but, for lack of money, the king’s ladies were not to accompany him to the seat of war as they had hitherto done.[139] The expedition was to remain a secret; but the infatuated Louis could withhold nothing from Madame de Maintenon, and she never rested until she had foiled the whole scheme and disgraced Chamillart, who had concealed the preparations from her.

The court had now grown so accustomed to defeats that Malplaquet was hailed as half a victory; but, in 1710, so desperate was the condition of the treasury, that a financial and social débâcle was imminent. The Dauphin, on leaving the opera at Paris, had been assailed by crowds of women shouting, “Bread! bread!” He only escaped by throwing them money and promises, and never dared show his face in Paris again. To appease the people, the poor were set to level the boulevard near St. Denis, and were paid in doles{218} of bread—bad bread. Even this failed them one morning, and a woman who made some disturbance was dragged to the pillory by the archers of the watch. An angry mob released her, and proceeded to raid the bakers’ shops. The ugly situation was saved only by the firmness and sagacity of the popular Marshal Boufflers. Another turn of the financial screw was now meditated, and, as the taxes had already “drawn all the blood from his subjects, and squeezed out their very marrow,” the conscience of the lord of France was troubled. His Jesuit confessor, Le Tellier, promised to consult the Sorbonne, whose learned doctors decided that, since all the wealth of his subjects rightly belonged to the king, he only took what was his own.

Grand Palais and Pont Alexandre.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the quarrel between the Jansenists and the Jesuits concerning subtle doctrinal differences had grown acute through the publication of Pascal’s immortal Lettres Provinciales, and by Quesnel’s Réflexions Morales which the Jesuits had succeeded in subjecting to papal condemnation. In 1709, Le Tellier induced his royal penitent[140] to decree the destruction of one of the two Jansenist establishments, and Port Royal des Champs, between Versailles and Chevreuse, rendered famous by the piety and learning of Arnault, Pascal and Nicolle, was doomed. On the night of 28th October 1709, the convent was surrounded by Gardes Françaises and Suisses, and on the following morning the chief of the police, with a posse of archers of the watch entered, produced a lettre de cachet, and gave the nuns a quarter of an hour to prepare for deportation. The whole of the sisters were then brutally expelled, “comme on enlève les créatures prostituées d’un lieu infâme,” says St. Simon, and scattered among other religious houses in all directions. The friends of the{219} buried were bidden to exhume their dead, and all unclaimed bodies were flung into a neighbouring cemetery, where dogs fought for them as for carrion. The church was profaned, and all the conventual buildings were razed like houses of regicides; the materials were sold in lots, and not one stone was left on another; the very ground was ploughed up and sown, “not, it is true with salt,” adds St. Simon, and that was the only favour shown.

Two years after the scene at Port Royal, amid the heartless gaiety of the court, the Angel of Death was busy in Louis’ household. On 14th April 1711, the old king’s only lawful son, the Grand Dauphin, expired; on 12th February 1712, the second Dauphiness, the sweet and gentle Adelaide of Savoy, the king’s darling, died of a malignant fever; six days later the Duke of Burgundy, her husband, was struck down; on 8th March, the Duke of Brittany, their eldest child, followed them. Three Dauphins had gone to the vaults of St. Denis in less than a year; mother, father, son, had died in twenty-four days—a sweep of Death’s scythe, enough to touch even the hearts of courtiers. In a few days the king gave orders for the usual play to begin at Marly, and the dice rattled while the bodies of the Dauphin and Dauphiness lay yet unburied. Well may St. Simon exclaim, “Are these princes made like other men?”

In 1712, some successes in Flanders enabled Louis to negotiate the Peace of Utrecht. France retained her old boundaries, and a Bourbon remained on the throne of Spain; but she was debased from her proud position of arbiter of Europe, and the substantial profits of the war went to England[141] and Austria.

In May 1714, the Duke of Berri, son of the Grand Dauphin, died, and the sole direct heir to the throne was now the king’s great-grandson, the Duke of Anjou, a{220} sickly child of five years. On September 1715, the Grand Monarque made a calm and an edifying end to his long reign of seventy-two years, declaring that he owed no man restitution, and trusted in God’s mercy for what he owed to the realm. He called the young child, who was soon to be Louis XV., to his bedside, and apparently without any sense of incongruity, exhorted him to remember his God, to cherish peace, to avoid extravagance, and study the welfare of his people. After receiving the last sacraments he repeated the prayers for the dying in a firm voice and, calling on God’s aid, passed peacefully away. None but his official attendants, his priest and physicians, saw the end: two days before, Madame de Maintenon had given away all her furniture, and retired to St. Cyr.

The demolition of what remained of mediæval Paris proceeded apace during Louis XIV.’s lifetime, and, at his death, the architectural features of its streets were substantially those of the older Paris of to-day. Colbert had taken up the costly legacy of the unfinished Louvre before the petrified banalities of Versailles and Marly had engulfed their millions, and, in 1660, the Hôtel de Bourbon was given over to the housebreakers to make room for the new east wing of the palace. So vigorously did they set to work that when Molière, whose company performed there three days a week in alternation with the Italian opera, came for the usual performance, he found the theatre half demolished. He applied to the king, who granted him the temporary use of Richelieu’s theatre in the Palais Royal, and his first performance there was given on 20th January 1661.

Portion of the East Façade of the Louvre from Blondel’s Drawing, showing Perrault’s base.

Levau was employed to carry on Lemercier’s work on the Louvre, and had succeeded in completing the north wing and the river front when Colbert stayed further progress and ordered him to prepare a model in wood of his proposed east wing. Levau was stupefied, for he had elaborated with infinite study a design for this portion of{221} the palace, which he regarded as of supreme importance, and which he hoped would crown his work. He had already laid the foundations and erected the scaffolding when the order came. Levau made his model, and a number of architects were invited to criticise it: they did, and unanimously condemned it. Competitive designs were then submitted to Colbert, who took advantage of Poussin’s residence at Rome to send them to the great Italian architects for their judgment. The Italians delivered a sweeping and general condemnation, and Poussin advised that Bernini should be employed to design a really noble building. Louis was delighted by the suggestion, and the loan of the architect of the great colonnade of St. Peter’s was entreated of the pope by the king’s own hand.

Bernini came to Paris where he was treated like a prince, and drew up a scheme of classic grandeur. Levau’s work on the east front was destroyed, and in October 1665, Bernini’s foundations were begun. The new design, however, ignored the exigencies of existing work and of internal convenience, and gave opportunities for criticisms and intrigue, which the French architects, forgetting for the moment all domestic rivalry, were not slow to make the most of. The offended Italian left to winter in Rome, and was never seen in Paris again. A munificent gift of 3000 gold louis and a pension of 12,000 livres solaced his pride.

Among the designs originally submitted to Colbert was one which had not been sent to Rome. It was the work of an amateur, Claude Perrault, a physician by profession, whose brother, Charles Perrault, was chief clerk in the Office of Works. This was now brought forth, and a commission, consisting of Levau, Lebrun, and Claude Perrault, appointed to report on its practicability. Levau promptly produced his own discarded designs, which won Lebrun’s approval, and both were submitted to the king for a final decision. Louis was fascinated by the stately classicism of Perrault’s design, and this was adopted. “Architecture must be in a bad state,” said his rivals, “since it is put in{222} the hands of a physician.” The new wing was raised and found to be seventy-two feet too long, whereupon the whole of Levau’s river front was masked by a new façade, rendered necessary to correct the mistake, if mistake it were, and the whole south wing[142] is in consequence much thicker than any of the others which enclose the great quadrangle. Poor Levau is said to have died of vexation and grief. Even to this day the north-east end of Perrault’s façade projects un-symmetrically beyond the line of the north front. Perrault’s work has been much criticised and much praised. It evoked Fergusson’s ecstatic admiration, and is eulogised by another critic as one of the finest pieces of architecture in any age. Strangely enough, neither of these ever saw, nor has anyone yet seen, more than a partial and stunted realisation of Perrault’s design (which involved a broad and deep fosse), for, as the accompanying reproduction of a drawing by Blondel demonstrates, the famous east front of the Louvre is like a giant buried up to the knees, and the present first-floor windows were an afterthought, their places having been designed as niches to hold statues. The exactitude of Blondel’s elevations was finally proved in 1903 by the admirable insight of the present architect of the Louvre, Monsieur G. Redon, who was led to undertake the excavations which brought to light a section of Perrault’s decorated basement, by noticing that the windows of the ground floor evidently implied a lower order beneath. This basement, seven and a half metres in depth, now buried, was in Perrault’s scheme designed to be exposed by a fosse of some fifteen to twenty metres in width, and the whole elevation and symmetry of the wing would have immensely gained by the carrying out of his plans.

Hotel des Invalides.

The construction, begun in 1665 was, however, interrupted in 1676, owing to the king’s abandonment of Paris. Colbert strenuously protested against the neglect of the{223} Louvre, and warned his master not to squander his millions away from Paris and suffer posterity to measure his grandeur by the ell of Versailles. It availed nothing. In 1670, 1,627,293 livres were allotted to the Louvre; in 1672 the sum had fallen to 58,000 livres; in 1676 to 42,082; in 1680 the subsidies practically ceased, and the great palace was utterly neglected until 1754 when Perrault’s work was feebly continued by Gabriel and Soufflot.

Two domed churches in the south of Paris—the Val de Grâce and St. Louis of the Invalides—were also erected during Louis XIV.’s lifetime. Among the many vows made by Anne of Austria during her twenty-two years’ unfruitful marriage was one made in the sanctuary of the nunnery of the Val de Grâce, to build there a magnificent church to God’s glory if she were vouchsafed a Dauphin. At length, on 1st April 1645, the proud queen was able to lead the future king, a boy of seven years, to lay the first stone. The church was designed by F. Mansard on the model of St. Peter’s at Rome, and was finished by Lemercier and others. The thirteenth-century nunnery had been transferred to Paris from Val Profond in 1624, and was liberally patronised by Anne.

A refuge had been founded as early as Henry IV.’s reign in an old abbey in the Faubourg St. Marcel, for old and disabled soldiers. Louis XIV., the greatest creator of invalides France had seen, determined in 1670 to extend the foundation, and erect a vast hospital, capable of accommodating his aged, crippled or infirm soldiers. Bruant and J. H. Mansard[143] among other architects were employed to raise the vast pile of buildings which, when completed, are said to have been capable of housing 7,000 men. A church dedicated to St. Louis was comprehended in the scheme, and, in 1680, a second Eglise Royale was erected, whose gilded dome is so conspicuous an object in south Paris; the{224} Eglise Royale, which Mansard designed, was subsequently added to the church of St. Louis, and became its choir. Louis XIV., anticipating Napoleon’s maxim that war must support war, raised the funds needed for the foundation by ingeniously requiring all ordinary and extraordinary treasurers of war to retain two deniers[144] on every livre that passed through their hands.

The old city gates of the Tournelle, Poissonnière (or St. Anne), St. Martin, St. Denis, the Temple, St. Jacques, St. Victor, were demolished, and triumphal arches, which still remain, erected to mark the sites of the Portes St. Denis and St. Martin. Another arch, of St. Antoine, was designed to surpass all existing or ancient monuments of the kind, and many volumes were written concerning the language in which the inscription should be composed, but the devouring maw of Versailles had to be filled, and the arch was never completed. The king for whose glory the monument was to be raised, cared so little for it, that he suffered it to be pulled down.

RIVER AND PONT ROYAL.

Many new streets[145] were made, and others widened, among them the ill-omened Rue de la Ferronnerie. The northern ramparts were levelled and planted with trees from the Porte St. Antoine in the east to the Porte St. Honoré in the west, and in 1704 it was decided to continue the planting in the south round the Faubourg St. Germain. The Place Louis le Grand (now Vendôme), and the Place des Victoires were created; the river embankments were renewed and extended, and a fine stone Pont Royal by J. H. Mansard, the most beautiful of the existing bridges of Paris, was built to replace the old wooden structure that led from the St. Germain quarter to the Tuileries. This in its turn had replaced a ferry (bac) established by the Guild of Ferrymen, to transport the stone needed for the construction of the{225} Tuileries, and the street which leads to the bridge still bears the name of the Rue du Bac. The Isle Louviers was acquired by the Ville, and the evil-smelling tanneries and dye-houses that disfigured the banks of the Seine between the Grève and the Châtelet were cleared away; many new fountains embellished the city, and ten new pumps increased the supply of water. The poorer quarters were, however, little changed from their old insanitary condition. A few years later Rousseau, fresh from Turin, was profoundly disappointed by the streets of Paris as he entered the city by the Faubourg St. Marceau. “I had imagined,” he writes, “a city as fair as it was great, and of a most imposing aspect, whose superb streets were lined with palaces of marble and of gold. I saw only filthy, evil-smelling, mean streets, ugly houses black with dirt, a general air of uncleanness and of poverty, beggars and carters, old clothes shops and tisane sellers.”

It is now time to ask what had been done with the magnificent inheritance which the fourteenth Louis had entered upon at the opening of his reign: he left to his successor a France crushed by an appalling debt of 2,400,000,000 livres; a noblesse and an army in bondage to money-lenders; public officials and fund-holders unpaid, trade paralysed, and the peasants in some provinces so poor that even straw was lacking for them to lie upon, many crossing the frontiers in search of a less miserable lot. Scarcity of bread made disease rampant at Paris, and as many as 4,500 sick poor were counted at one time in the Hôtel Dieu alone. Louis left a court that “sweated hypocrisy through every pore,” and an example of licentious and unclean living and cynical disregard of every moral obligation, which ate like a cancer into the vitals of the aristocracy.{227}

CHAPTER XVI

PARIS UNDER THE REGENCY AND LOUIS XV.—THE BROODING STORM

UNDER the regency of the profligate Philip of Orleans, a profounder depth was sounded. The vices of Louis’ court were at least veiled by a certain regal dignity, and the Grand Monarque was always keenly sensitive, and at times nobly responsive, to any attack upon the honour of France; but under the regent, libertinage and indifference to national honour were flagrant and shameless. The Abbé Dubois, a minister worthy of his prince, was, says St. Simon, “a mean-looking, thin little man, with the face of a ferret, in whom every vice fought for mastery.” This creature profaned the seat of Richelieu and Colbert, and rose to fill a cardinal’s chair. The revenues of seven abbeys fed his pride and luxury, and his annual income was estimated at 1,534,000 livres, including his bribe from the English Government. His profanity was such that he was advised to economise time by employing an extra clerk to do his swearing for him, and during a fatal operation, rendered necessary by a shameful disease, he went to his account blaspheming and gnashing his teeth in rage at his physicians.

Visitors to Venice whose curiosity may have led them into the church of S. Moisè, will remember to have seen there a monument to a famous Scotchman—John Law. This is the last home of an outlaw, a gambler, and an adventurer, who, by his amazing skill and effrontery, plunged the regency into a vortex of speculation, and for a time controlled the finances of France. He persuaded{228} the regent that by a liberal issue of paper money he might wipe out the accumulated national deficit of 100,000,000 livres, revive trade and industry, and inaugurate a financial millennium. In 1718 Law’s Bank, after a short and brilliant career as a private venture, was converted into the Banque Royale, and by the artful flotation of a gigantic trading speculation called the Mississippi Company, the bank-notes and company shares were so manipulated that the latter were inflated to twenty times their nominal value. The whole city of Paris seethed in a ferment of speculation. The premises of the Banque Royale in the Rue Quincampoix were daily besieged by a motley crowd of princes, nobles, fine ladies, courtesans, generals, prelates, priests, bourgeois and servants. A hunchback made a fortune by lending his back as a desk; lacqueys became masters in a day, and a parvenu footman, by force of habit, jumped up behind his own carriage in a fit of abstraction. The inevitable catastrophe came at the end of 1719. The Prince of Conti was observed taking away three cartloads of silver in exchange for his paper. A panic ensued, every holder sought to realise, and the colossal fabric came down with a crash, involving thousands of families in ruin and despair. Law, after bravely trying to save the situation and narrowly escaping being torn in pieces, fled to poverty and death at Venice, and the financial state of France was worse than before. Law was not, however, absolutely a quack; there was a seed of good in his famous system of mobilising credit, and the temporary stimulus it gave to trade permanently influenced mercantile practices in Europe.

In 1723, Louis XV. reached his legal majority. The regent became chief minister, and soon paid the penalty of his career of debauchery, leaving as his successor the Duke of Bourbon, degenerate scion of the great Condé and one of the chief speculators in the Mississippi bubble. A perilous lesson had two years before been instilled into the mind of the young Louis. After his recovery from{229} an illness, an immense concourse of people had assembled at a fête given in the gardens of the Tuileries palace; enormous crowds filled every inch of the Place du Carrousel and the gardens; the windows and even the roofs of the houses were alive with people crying “Vive le roi!” Marshal Villeroi led the little lad of eleven to a window, showed him the sea of exultant faces turned towards him, and exclaimed, “Sire, all this people is yours; all belongs to you. Show yourself to them, and satisfy them; you are the master of all.”

The Infanta of Spain, at four years of age, had been betrothed to the young king, and in 1723 was sent to Paris to be educated for her exalted future. She was lodged in the Petite Galerie of the Louvre, over the garden still known as the Garden of the Infanta,[146] and after three years of exile the homesick little maid was returned to Madrid; for Louis’ weak health made it imperative that a speedy marriage should be contracted if the succession to the throne were to be assured. The choice finally fell on the daughter of Stanislaus Leczynski, a deposed king of Poland and a pensioner of France. Voltaire relates that the poor discrowned queen was sitting with her daughter Marie in their little room at Wissembourg when the father, bursting in, fell on his knees, crying, “Let us thank God, my child!” “Are you then recalled to Poland?” asked Marie. “Nay, daughter, far better,” answered Stanislaus, “you are the queen of France.” A magnificent wedding at Fontainebleau, exalted gentle, pious Marie from poverty to the richest queendom in Europe; to a life of cruel neglect and almost intolerable insult.

The immoral Duke of Bourbon was followed by Cardinal Fleury, and at length France experienced a period of honest administration, which enabled the sorely-tried{230} land to recover some of its wonted elasticity. The Cardinal was, however, dominated by the Jesuits, and both Protestants and Jansenists felt their cruel hand. During the persecution of the Jansenists in 1782 a deacon, named Pâris, died and was canonised by the popular voice. Miracles were said to have been wrought at his sepulchre in the cemetery of St. Médard; fanatics flung themselves down on the tomb and writhed in horrible convulsions. So great was the excitement and disorder that the Archbishop of Paris denounced the miracles as the work of Satan, and the Government ordered the cemetery to be closed. The next morning a profane inscription was found over the entrance to the cemetery:—

Colonne Vendome.

Before Louis sank irrevocably into the slothful indulgence that stained his later years, he was stirred to essay a kingly rôle by Madame de Chateauroux, the youngest of four sisters who had successively been his mistresses. She fired his indolent imagination by appeals to the memory of his glorious ancestors, and the war of the Austrian succession being in progress, Louis set forth with the army of the great Marshal Saxe for Metz, where in August 1744 he was stricken down by a violent fever, and in an access of piety was induced to dismiss his mistress and return to his abused queen. As he lay on the brink of death, given up by his physicians and prepared for the end by the administration of the last sacraments, a royal phrase admirably adapted to capture the imagination of a gallant people came from his lips. “Remember,” he said to Marshal Noailles, “remember that when Louis XIII. was being carried to the grave, the Prince of Condé won a battle for France.” The agitation of the Parisians as the king hovered between life{231} and death was indescribable. The churches were thronged with sobbing people praying for his recovery; when the courtiers came with news that he was out of danger they were borne shoulder high in triumph through the streets, and fervent thanksgiving followed in all the churches. People hailed him as Louis le Bien-Aimé (the Well-Beloved); even the callous heart of the king was pierced by their loyalty and he cried, “What have I done to deserve such love?” So easy was it to win the affection of his warm-hearted people.

The brilliant victories of Marshal Saxe, and the consequent Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, brought some years of prosperity to France. Wealth increased; Paris became more than ever a centre of intellectual splendour and social refinement, where the arts administered to luxurious ease. But it was a period of regal licentiousness unparalleled even in the history of France. Louis XIV. at least exacted good breeding and wit in his mistresses, but his descendant enslaved himself to the commonest and most abandoned of women.

For twenty years the destinies of the French people, and the whole patronage of the Government, the right to succeed to the most sacred and exalted offices in the Church, were bartered and intrigued for in the chamber of a harlot and procuress. Under the influence of the Pompadours and the Du Barrys a crowned roué allowed the state to drift into financial, military and civil[148] disaster.

“Authentic proofs exist,” says Taine, “demonstrating that Madame de Pompadour cost Louis XV. a sum equal to about seventy-two millions of present value (£2,880,000).” She would examine the plans of campaign of her marshals in her boudoir, and mark with patches (mouches) the places to be defended or attacked. Such was the foolish extravagance of the court that to raise money recourse was had to an attempted taxation of the clergy, which the prelates{232} successfully resisted; the old quarrel with the Jansenists was revived, and soon Church and Crown were convulsed by an agitation that shook society to its very base. During the popular ferment the king was attacked in 1757 by a crack-brained fanatic named Damiens, who scratched him with a penknife as he was entering his coach at Versailles. The poor crazy wretch, who at most deserved detention in an asylum, was first subjected to a cruel judicial torture, then taken to the Place de Grève, where he was lacerated with red-hot pincers and, after boiling lead had been poured into the wounds, his quivering body was torn to pieces by four horses, and the fragments burned to ashes.

A few years later the long-suffering Jansenists were avenged with startling severity. The Jesuits, to their honour be it said, shocked by the infamies of the royal seraglio in the Parc aux Cerfs, made use of their ascendency at court to awaken in the king’s mind some sense of decency: they did but add the bitter animosity of Madame de Pompadour to the existing hostility of the Parlement of Paris. Louis, urged by his minister the Duke of Choiseul, and by the arts of his mistress, abandoned the Jesuits to their enemies; the Parlement suppressed the Society in France, secularised its members and confiscated its property.

The closing years of the Well-Beloved’s reign were years of unmitigated ignominy and disaster to France. Her rich Indian conquests were muddled away, and the gallant Dupleix died broken-hearted and in misery at Paris. Canada was lost. During the Seven Years’ War the incapacity and administrative corruption of Madame de Pompadour’s favourites made them the laughing-stock of Paris. In 1770 the Duke of Choiseul refused to tolerate the vile Du Barry, whom we may see in Madame Campan’s Memoirs sitting on the arm of Louis’ chair at a council of state, playing her monkey tricks to amuse the old sultan, snatching sealed orders from his hand and making the foolish monarch chase her round the council chamber. She{233} swore to ruin the duke and, aided by a cabal of Jesuit sympathisers and noble intriguers, succeeded in compassing his dismissal. The Parlement of Paris paid for its temerity; it and the whole of the parlements in France were suppressed, and seven hundred magistrates exiled by lettres de cachet. Every patriotic Frenchman now felt the gathering storm. Madame Campan writes that twenty years before the crash came it was common talk in her father’s house (he was employed in the Foreign Office) that the old monarchy was rapidly sinking and a great change at hand. Indeed, the writing on the wall was not difficult to read. The learned and virtuous Malesherbes and many another distinguished member of the suppressed parlements warned the king of the dangers menacing the crown, but so sunk was its wearer in bestial stupefaction that he only murmured: “Well, it will last my time,” and with his flatterers and strumpets uttered the famous words—“Après nous le déluge.” So lost to all sense of honour was Louis, that he soiled his hands with bribes from tax-farmers who ground the faces of the poor, and became a large shareholder in an infamous syndicate of capitalists that bought up the corn of France in order to export it and then import it at enormous profit. This abominable Pacte de Famine created two artificial famines in France; its authors battened on the misery of the people, and for any who lifted their voices against it the Bastille yawned.

In 1768 the poor abused, injured and neglected queen, Marie Leczynski died. The court went from bad to worse: void of all dignity, all gaiety, all wit and all elegance, it drifted to its doom. Six years passed, and Louis was smitten by confluent small-pox and a few poor women were left to perform the last offices on the mass of pestiferous corruption that once was the fifteenth Louis of France.[149] None could be found to embalm the corpse,{234} and spirits of wine were poured into the coffin which was carried to St. Denis without pomp and amid the half-suppressed curses of the people. Before the breath had left the body, a noise as of thunder was heard approaching the chamber of the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette: it was the sound of the courtiers hastening to grovel before the new king and queen. Warned that they had now inherited the awful legacy of the French monarchy, they flung themselves in tears on their knees, and exclaimed—“O God, guide and protect us! We are too young to govern.”

Place du Châtelet and Tour St. Jacques.

The degradation of the monarchy during the reign is reflected in the condition of the royal palace in the capital. Henry IV.’s great scheme, which Louis XIII. had inherited and furthered, included a colossal equestrian statue, which was to stand on a rocky pedestal in the centre of a new Place, before the east front of the Louvre, but the regency revoked the scheme, and for thirty years nothing was done. It had even been proposed under the ministry of Cardinal Fleury to pull the whole structure down and sell the site. The neglect of the palace during these years is almost incredible. Perrault’s fine façade was hidden by the half-demolished walls of the Hôtels de Longueville, de Villequier, and de Bourbon. The east wing itself was unroofed on the quadrangle side and covered with rotting boarding. Perrault’s columns on the outer façade were unchannelled, the capitals unfinished, the portal unsculptured, and the post-office stabled its horses along the whole of the wing from the middle entrance to the north angle. The royal apartments of Anne of Austria in the Petite Galerie were used as stables; so, too, were the halls where now is housed the collection of Renaissance sculpture. The Infanta’s garden was a yard where grooms exercised their horses: a colony of poor artists and court attendants were lodged in the upper floors, and over most of the great halls entresols were constructed to increase this kind of accommodation. The building was described as a huge{235} caravanserai, where each one lodged and worked as he chose, and over which might have been placed the legend, “Ici on loge à pied et à cheval.” Worse still, an army of squatters, ne’er-do-weels, bankrupts and defaulting debtors took refuge in the wooden sheds left by the contractors, or built others—a miserable gangrene of hovels—against the east façade. Perrault’s base had been concealed by rubbish and apparently forgotten. Stove-pipes issued from the broken windows of the upper floors, the beautiful stone-work was blackened by smoke, cracked by frost and soiled by rusting iron clamps; the quadrangle was a chaos of uncut stone, rubbish and filth, in the centre of which, where the king’s statue was designed to stand, the royal architect had built himself a large house; a mass of mean houses encumbered the Carrousel, and the almost ruined church of St. Nicholas was a haunt of beggars. Such a grievous eyesore was the building that the provost in 1751 offered, in the name of the citizens, to repair and complete the palace if a part were assigned to them as an Hôtel de Ville. In 1754 Madame de Pompadour’s brother had been appointed Commissioner of Works, and Louis was persuaded to authorise the repair and completion of the Louvre. Gabriel being made architect set about his work by clearing out the squatters and the accumulated rubbish in the quadrangle, and evicting the occupants of the stables. The ruins of the Hôtels de Longueville, de Villequier, and de Bourbon were demolished, grass plots laid before Perrault’s east front, which was restored and for the first time made visible. The west front, giving on the quadrangle, was then repaired and the third order nearly completed, when funds were exhausted and it was left unroofed. An epigram, put into the mouth of the king of Denmark, who visited Paris in 1768, tersely describes the condition of the palace at this time:—

SOUTH DOOR OF NOTRE DAME.

During Louis XVI.’s reign little or nothing was done. Soufflot was making feeble efforts to complete Perrault’s north front when the Revolution came to arrest his work. So lost to reverence and devoid of artistic sentiment were the official architects of this period, that a sacrilege worse than any wrought by revolutionists was perpetrated at the instance of the canons of Notre Dame. Louis XIV. had begun the vandalism by demolishing the beautiful old Gothic high altar and replacing it by a huge, ponderous anachronism in marble, on whose foundation stone, laid in 1699, was placed an inscription to the effect that Louis the Great, son of Louis the Just, having subdued heresy, established the true religion in his realm and ended wars gloriously by land and sea, built the altar to fulfil the vow of his father, and dedicated it to the God of Arms and Master of Peace and Victory under the invocation of the Holy Virgin, patroness and protector of his States. Many of the fine old Gothic tombs of marble and bronze in the church, the monuments of six centuries, were destroyed. But to the reign of Louis the Well-Beloved was reserved the crowning infamy: in 1741 the glorious old stained-glass windows, rivalling those of Chartres in richness, were destroyed by Levreil and replaced by grisaille with yellow fleur-de-lys ornamentation. Happily the replacing of the rose windows was deemed too expensive, and they escaped destruction. The famous colossal statue of St. Christopher, the equestrian monument of Philip le Bel, and a popular statue of the Virgin, were broken down by these clerical iconoclasts. In 1771 the canons instructed Soufflot to throw down the pillar of the central porch, with its beautiful statue of Christ, to make room for their processions to enter. The priceless{237} sculpture of the tympanum was cut through to make a loftier and wider entrance, and the whole symmetry of the west front was grievously destroyed.[151] This hideous architectural deformity remained until a son of the Revolution, Viollet-le-Duc, restored the portal to its original form. After the havoc wrought at Notre Dame, Soufflot’s energies were diverted to the holy mount of St. Genevieve. Louis XV. had attributed his recovery at Metz to the intercession of the saint, and in 1754, when the abbot complained to the king of the almost ruined condition of the abbey church, he found a sympathetic listener. Soufflot and the chapter, who shared the prevalent contempt of Gothic, decided to abandon the venerable old pile, with its millennial associations of the patron saint of Paris, and to build a grand domed classic temple on the abbey lands to the west. Funds for the sacred work were raised by levying a tax on public lotteries. The old church, with the exception of the tower, was finally demolished in 1802, when the rude stone coffin which had held the body of St. Genevieve until it was burnt by revolutionary fanatics, was transferred to St. Etienne du Mont.

Mont S. Geneviève from L’ile S. Louis.

INTERIOR OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT.

On 6th September 1764, the crypt of the new St. Genevieve being completed, the Well-Beloved laid the first stone of the church. Scarcely was the scaffolding removed after thirteen years of constructive labour, and the expenditure of sixteen millions of livres, when it became necessary to call in Soufflot’s pupil Rondelet, to shore up the walls and strengthen the columns which had proved too weak to sustain the weight of the huge cupola. Before the temple was consecrated the Revolutionists came, and noting its monumental aspect used it with admirable fitness as a Panthéon Français for the remains of their heroes; the dome designed to cover the relics of St. Genevieve soared over the ashes of Voltaire, Mirabeau, Rousseau and Marat.{239} Thrice has this unlucky fane been the prize of Christian and Revolutionary reactionaries. In 1806 Napoleon I. restored it to Christian worship, and in 1822 the famous inscription—“Aux grands Hommes la Patrie reconnaissante” (“A grateful country to her great men”)—was removed by Louis XVIII., and replaced by a dedication to God and St. Genevieve; in 1830 Louis Philippe, the citizen king, transferred it to secular and monumental uses, and restored the former inscription; in 1851 the perjured Prince-President Napoleon, while the streets of Paris were yet red with the blood of his victims, again surrendered it to the Catholic Church; in{240} 1885 it was reconverted to a national Walhalla for the reception of Victor Hugo’s remains.

The Pantheon has the most magnificent situation and, except the new church of the Sacré Cœur, is the most dominant building in Paris. Its dome, seen from nearly every eminence commanding the city, has a certain stately, almost noble, aspect; but the spacious interior, despite the efforts of the artists of the third Republic, is chilling to the spectator. It has few historical or religious associations, and it is devoid of human sentiment. The choice of painters to decorate the interior was an amazing act of official insensibility. The most discordant artistic temperaments were let loose on the devoted building. Puvis de Chavannes, the only painter among them who grasped the limitation of mural art, has painted with restraint and noble simplicity incidents in the life of St. Genevieve, and Jean Paul Laurens is responsible for a splendid but incongruous representation of her death. A St. Denis, scenes in the lives of Clovis, Charlemagne, St. Louis, and Jeanne d’Arc, by Bonnat, Blanc, Levy, Cabanel and Lenepveu, are all excellent work of the kind so familiar to visitors at the Salon, but are lacking in harmony and in inspiration. The angel appearing to Jeanne d’Arc seems to have been modelled from a figurante at the opera.

St. Sulpice

In 1618 the Grande Salle of the Palais de Justice, the finest of its kind in Europe, decorated by Fra Giocondo, was gutted by fire, and its rich stained glass, its double vaultings resplendent with blue and gold, its long line of the statues of the kings of France from Pharamond to Henry IV., were utterly destroyed. Debrosse, who built the new Salle in 1622, left a noble and harmonious Renaissance chamber, which, again restored after the fire of 1776, endured until its destruction by fire during the Commune. The old palace was clung to by a population of hucksters, whose shops and booths huddled round the building. The Grande Salle, far different from the present bare Salle des Pas Perdus, was itself a busy mart,{241} booksellers especially predominating, most of whom had stations there, much as we see them to-day, round the Odéon theatre. Every pillar had its bookseller’s shop. Verard’s address was—“At the image of St. John the Evangelist, before Notre Dame de Paris, and at the first pillar in the Grande Salle of the Palais de Justice, before the Chapelle where they sing the mass for Messieurs of the Parlement.” Gilles Couteau’s address was—“The Two Archers in the Rue de la Juiverie and at the third pillar at the Palais.” In the Galerie Mercière (now the Galerie Marchande) at the top of the stairway ascending from the Cour du Mai, lines of shops displayed fans, gloves, slippers and other dainty articles of feminine artillery. The further Galeries were also invaded by the traders, who were not finally evicted until 1842. Much rebuilding and restoration were again needed after the great fire of 1776, and the old flight of steps of the Cour du Mai, at the foot of which criminals were branded and books condemned by the Parlement were burnt, was replaced by the present fine stairway.

The Grande Chambre (now the Tribunal de Première Instance) entered from the Grande Salle, was renamed the Salle d’Egalité by the Revolutionists, and used for the sittings of the Revolutionary Tribunal. As the dread work increased, a second court was opened in the Salle St. Louis, renamed the Salle de Liberté! Here Danton was tried, whose puissant voice penetrated to the opposite side of the Seine.

It was through Debrosse’s restored Grande Salle that the Girondins trooped after condemnation to the new prisoners’ chapel, built after the fire, and passed the night there, hymning the Revolution and discoursing of the Fatherland before they issued by the nine steps, unchanged to-day, on the right in the Cour du Mai, to the fatal tumbrils awaiting them.

The pseudo-classic church of St. Sulpice, begun in 1665 and not completed until 1777, is a monument of the degraded taste of this unhappy time. At least three{242} architects, Gamart, Levau and the Italian Servandoni, are responsible for this monstrous pile, whose towers have been aptly compared by Victor Hugo to two big clarionets. The building has, however, a certain puissante laideur, as Michelet said of Danton, and is imposing from its very mass, but it is dull and heavy and devoid of all charm and imagination. Nothing exemplifies more strikingly the mutation of taste that has taken place since the eighteenth century than the fact that this church is the only one mentioned by Gibbon in the portion of his autobiography which refers to his first visit to Paris, where it is distinguished as “one of the noblest structures in Paris.”{243}

CHAPTER XVII

LOUIS XVI.—THE GREAT REVOLUTION—FALL OF THE MONARCHY

CROWNED vice was now succeeded by crowned folly. The grandson of Louis XV., a well-meaning but weak and foolish youth, and his thoughtless, pleasure-loving queen, were confronted by state problems that would have taxed the genius of a Richelieu in the maturity of his powers. Injustice, misery, oppression, discontent, were clamant and almost universal; taxes had doubled since the death of Louis XIV.; there were 30,000 beggars in Paris alone. The penal code was of inhuman ferocity; law was complicated, ruinous and partial and national credit so low that loans could be obtained only against material pledges and at interest five times as great as that paid by England. Wealthy bishops and abbots[152] and clergy, noblesse and royal officials were wholly exempt from the main incidents of taxation; for personal and land taxes, tithes and forced labour, were exacted from the common people alone. No liberty of worship, nor of thought: Protestants were condemned to the galleys by hundreds; booksellers met the same fate. Authors and books were arbitrarily sent by lettres de cachet to the Bastille. Yet in spite of all repression a generation of daring, witty, emancipated thinkers in Paris were elaborating a weapon of scientific, rationalistic and liberal doctrine that cut at the very roots of the old régime. And while France was in travail of the palingenesis of the modern world, the{244} futile king was trifling with his locks and keys and colouring maps, the queen playing at shepherdesses at Trianon or performing before courtiers, officers and equerries the rôles of Rosina in the Barbier de Seville and of Colette in the Devin du Village, the latter composed by the democratic philosopher, whose Contrat Social was to prove the Gospel of the Revolution.[153] Jean Jacques Rousseau, the solitary self-centred Swiss engraver and musician, has described for us in words that will bear translation how an ineffaceable impression of the sufferings of the people was burnt into his memory, and the germs of an unquenchable hatred of their oppressors were sown in his breast. Journeying on foot between Paris and Lyons he was one day diverted from his path by the beauty of the landscape, and wandered about, seeking in vain to discover his way. “At length,” he writes, “weary and dying of thirst and hunger I entered a peasant’s house, not a very attractive one, but the only one I could see. I imagined that here as in Switzerland every inhabitant of easy means would be able to offer hospitality. I entered and begged that I might have dinner by paying for it. The peasant handed me some skim milk and coarse barley bread, saying that was all he had. The milk seemed delicious and I ate the bread, straw and all, but it was not very satisfying to one exhausted by fatigue. The man scrutinised me and judged by my appetite the truth of the story I had told. Suddenly, after saying that he perceived I was a good, honest youth and not there to spy upon him he opened a trap door, descended and returned speedily with some good wheaten bread, a ham appetising but rather high, and a bottle of wine which rejoiced my heart more than all the rest. He added a good thick omelette and I enjoyed a dinner such as those alone who travel on foot can know. When it came to paying, his anxiety and fears again seized him; he would have none of my money and pushed it aside, exceedingly troubled, nor could I imagine what he was afraid of. At{245} last he uttered with a shudder the terrible words ‘commis, rats de cave’ (“assessors, cellar rats”). He made me understand that he hid the wine because of the aides,[154] and the bread because of the tailles[155] and that he would be a ruined man if it were supposed that he was not dying of hunger. That man, although fairly well-off, dared not eat the bread earned by the sweat of his brow, and could only escape ruin by pretending to be as miserable as those he saw around him. I issued forth from that house indignant as well as affected, deploring the lot of that fair land where nature had lavished all her gifts only to become the spoil of barbarous tax-farmers (publicans).” The elder Mirabeau has told how he saw a bailiff cut off the hand of a peasant woman who had clung to her kitchen utensils when distraint was made on her poor possessions for dues exacted by the tax-farmer. It is related in Madame Campan’s Memoirs that Louis XV., hunting one day in the forest of Senard, about fifteen miles south of Paris, met a man on horseback carrying a coffin. “Whither are you carrying that coffin?” asked the king. “To the village of ——.” “Is it for a man or a woman?” “For a man.” “What did he die of?” “Hunger,” bluntly returned the villager. The king spurred his horse and said no more.

Half a century had elapsed since that meal in the peasant’s house and the royal colloquy with the villager in the forest of Senard, when the Nemesis that holds sleepless vigil over the affairs of men stirred her pinions and, like a strong angel with glittering sword, prepared to avenge the wrongs of a people whose rulers had outraged every law, human and divine, by which human society is held together. King, nobles,{246} and prelates had a supreme and an awful choice. They might have led and controlled the Revolution: they chose to oppose it, and were broken into shivers as a potter’s vessel.

After the memorable cannonade at Valmy, a knot of defeated German officers gathered in rain and wind moodily around the circle where they durst not kindle the usual camp-fire. In the morning the army had talked of nothing but spitting and devouring the whole French nation: in the evening everyone went about alone; nobody looked at his neighbour, or if he did, it was but to curse and swear. “At last,” says Goethe, “I was called upon to speak, for I had been wont to enliven and amuse the troop with short sayings. This time I said, ‘From this day forth, and from this place, a new era begins in the history of the world and you can all say that you were present at its birth.’” This is not the place to write the story of the French Revolution. Those who would read the tremendous drama may be referred to the pages of Carlyle. As a formal history, that work of transcendent genius may be open to criticism. Indeed to the present writer the magnificent and solemn prosody seems to partake of the nature of a Greek chorus—the comment of an idealised spectator, assuming that the hearer has the drama unfolding before his eyes. Recent researches have supplemented and modified our knowledge. It is no longer possible to accept the more revolting representations of the misery[156] of the French peasantry as true of the whole of France, for France before the Revolution was an assemblage of many provinces of varying social conditions, subjected to varying administrative laws. Nor can we accept Carlyle’s portraiture of Robespierre as history, after Louis Blanc’s great work. So far from Robespierre having been the bloodthirsty protagonist of the later Terror, it was precisely his determination to make an end of the more savage excesses of the extreme{247} Terrorists and to chastise their more furious pro-consuls, such as Carrier and Fouché, that brought about his ruin. It was men like Collot d’Herbois, Billaud Varenne and Barrère, the bloodiest of the Terrorists, who, to save their own skins, united to cast the odium of the later excesses on Robespierre, and to overthrow him. During the forty-five days that preceded his withdrawal from the sittings of the Committee of Public Safety, 577 persons were guillotined: during the forty-five days that succeeded, 1285 went to their doom. Of the twelve decrees that have been discovered signed by Robespierre during the four last decades, only one had any relation to the system of terror. But whatever defects there be in Carlyle, his readers will at least understand the significance of the Revolution, and why it is that the terrible, but temporary excesses which stained its progress have been so unduly magnified by reactionary politicians, while the cruelties of the White Terror[157] are passed by.

Few of the buildings associated with the Revolution remain at Paris. The Salle du Manège, the Feuillants and Jacobin clubs were swept away by Napoleon’s Rue de Rivoli. But at Versailles little is changed; the broad Avenue de Paris, once filled with double uninterrupted files of brilliant equipages, racing with furious speed from morning to evening along the five leagues between Versailles and Paris, is now silent and deserted. Here, outside the gates of the château were seen in 1775 that vast “multitude in wide-spread wretchedness, with their sallow faces, squalor and winged raggedness, presenting in legible, hieroglyphic writing their petition of grievances, and for answer two were hanged on a new gallows forty feet high.” Here the traveller may see at the corner of the Rue St. Martin in the Avenue de Paris, that Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs, where the States-General sat, 5th May 1789, and where the Commons{248} took the bit in their mouths by declaring themselves the National Assembly, whether the two privileged orders sat with them or not, and decided to set about the task of regenerating France. Here under the elm trees on the Paris road stood the Deputies in the drizzling rain when they found the doors of the hall closed, by royal order, against them, while giggling courtiers looked mockingly on. We may trace their footsteps as they angrily paced to the Rue St. François; we may stand in the very tennis-court whose walls echoed to the solemn oath sworn by their 700 voices never to separate until they had given a constitution to France. Hard by, in the Rue Satory, is the church of St. Louis, where they met the next day on finding the court retained for a tennis-party by the king’s brother, the Count of Artois. We may return to the Menus Plaisirs, where the king’s messenger, de Brézé, ordering them to disperse after the famous royal sitting, heard Mirabeau’s leonine voice bidding him go back to his master and tell him that they were there by the people’s will, and that nothing but the force of bayonets should drive them forth.[158] We may enter the royal apartments, the famous ante-room of the Œil de Bœuf with its oval ox-eyed windows, the king’s bed-chamber, and the council hall; we may look on the foolish faces of the later Bourbons, of the princesses his daughters whom Louis XV. dubbed Rag, Tatter, Snip, and Pig. In the opera-house built for Mesdames Pompadour and Du Barry, we may recall that mad scene of 1st October, when the officers of the bodyguard, having invited their comrades of the Regiment of Flanders to a dinner on the stage, were shaking the roof with cries of “Vive le roi!” while the orchestra played the air, “O Richard! O mon roi! l’univers t’abandonne,” the king suddenly appeared in the royal box facing them, leading the queen, who bore the Dauphin in her arms. Then was the air repeated, and amid a scene of wild enthusiasm the royal family were{249} rapturously acclaimed with clapping of hands and deafening shouts of “Vive le roi! Vive la reine! Vive le dauphin!” Ladies distributed white cockades, the Bourbon colour, and the tricolor was trodden underfoot. Intoxicated soldiers danced under the king’s balcony, and next morning it was discussed at a breakfast given at the hôtel of the bodyguards whether they should march against the National Assembly. And this within three months of the taking of the Bastille and when Paris was in the grip of famine!

The news of the mad orgy goaded the people to fury, and on 5th October an insurrectionary army of 10,000 women advanced on Versailles and encamped on the vast open space in front of the gates. As we stand in the Cour de Marbre, we may lift our eyes to that balcony of the first floor where, on 6th October, Marie Antoinette stood bravely forth, holding her two children by the hand and confronting the vociferating people. At their cry, “No children!” she gently pushed the little Dauphin and his sister back into the room, and with folded arms, for she at least lacked not courage, gazed calmly at them in regal dignity, to be answered by shouts of “Vive la reine!” It was the last time she trod the palace of Versailles. The same day king, queen and children went their way amid that strange procession to Paris, the women crying: “We need not die of hunger now. Here are the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy.” The palace of the Tuileries was hastily prepared for their reception and for the first time Louis XVI. entered its gates.

Camille Desmoulins has described in his Memoirs how on 11th July he was lifted on a table in front of the Café Foy, in the garden of the Palais Royal, and delivered that short but pregnant oration which preceded the capture of the Bastille on the 14th, warning the people that a St. Bartholomew of patriots was contemplated, and that the Swiss and German troops in the{250} Champ de Mars were ready for the butchery. As the crowd rushed to the Hôtel de Ville, shouting “To arms!” they were charged by the Prince de Lambesc at the head of a German regiment, and the first blood of the Revolution in Paris was shed.

The Bastille, like the monarchy, was the victim of its past sins. That grisly fortress, with the jaws of its cannon opening on the most populous quarter of Paris, and its sinister memories of the Man in the Iron Mask,[159] embodied in the popular mind all that was hateful in the old régime, though it had long ceased to be more than occasionally used as a state prison. If we would restore its aspect we must imagine the houses at the ends of the Rue St. Antoine and the Boulevard Henri IV. away and the huge mass erect on their site and on the lines marked in white stone on the present Place de la Bastille. A great portal, always open by day, yawned on the Rue St. Antoine and gave access to the first quadrangle which was lined with shops: then came a second gate, with entrances for carriages and for foot passengers, each with its drawbridge. Beyond these a second quadrangle was entered, to the right of which stood the Governor’s house and an armoury. Another double portal gave entrance across the old fosse once fed by the waters of the Seine, to the prison fortress itself, with its eight tall blackened towers and its crenelated ramparts.

Montmartre from Buttes Chaumont.

The Bastille, first used in Richelieu’s time as a permanent state prison, was filled under Louis XIV. with Jansenists and Protestants, who were thus separated from the prisoners of the common jails; and, later, under Louis XV. by a whole population of obnoxious pamphleteers{251} and champions of philosophy. Books as well as their authors were incarcerated, and released when considered no longer dangerous; the tomes of famous Encyclopédie spent some years there. From the opening of the eighteenth century the horrible, dark and damp dungeons, half underground and sometimes flooded, formerly inhabited by the lowest type of criminals, were reserved as temporary cells for insubordinate prisoners, and since the accession of Louis XVI. they were no more used. The Bastille during the reigns of the three later Louis was the most comfortable prison in Paris, and detention there rather than in the other prisons was often sought for and granted as a favour; the prisoners might furnish their rooms, have their own libraries and food. In the middle of the seventeenth century certain rooms were furnished at the king’s expense for those who were without means. The rooms were warmed, the prisoners well fed, and sums varying from three francs to thirty-five francs per day, according to condition,[160] were allotted for their maintenance. A considerable amount of personal liberty was allowed to many and indemnities were in later years paid to those who had been unjustly detained. But a prison where men are confined indefinitely without trial and at a king’s arbitrary pleasure is none the less intolerable, however its bars be gilded. Prisoners were sometimes forgotten, and letters are extant from Louvois and other ministers, asking the governor to report how many years certain prisoners had been detained, and if he remembered what they were charged with. In Louis XIV.’s reign 2228 persons were incarcerated there; in Louis XV.’s, 2567. From the accession of Louis XVI. to the destruction of the prison the number had fallen to 289. Seven were found there when the fortress was captured—four accused of forgery, two insane; one, the Count of Solages, accused of a monstrous crime, was detained there to spare{252} the feelings of his family. The Bastille, some time before its fall, was already under sentence of demolition, and various schemes for its disposal were before the court. One project was to destroy seven of the towers, leaving the eighth standing in a dilapidated state. On the site of the seven a pedestal formed of chains and bolts from the dungeons and gates was to bear a statue of Louis XVI. in the attitude of a liberator, pointing with outstretched hand towards the remaining tower in ruins. But Louis XVI. was always too late, and the Place de la Bastille, with its column raised to those who fell in the Revolution of July, 1830, now recalls the second and final triumph of the people over the Bourbon kings. Some stones of the Bastille were, however, built into the new Pont Louis Seize, subsequently called Pont de la Revolution and now known as Pont de la Concorde: others were sold to speculators and were retailed at prices so high that people complained that Bastille stones were as dear as the best butcher’s meat. Models of the Bastille, dominoes, inkstands, boxes and toys of all kinds were made of the material and had a ready sale all over France.

Far to the west and on the opposite side of the Seine is the immense area of the Champ de Mars, where, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was enacted the fairest scene of the Revolution. The whole population of Paris, with their marvellous instinct of order and co-operation, spontaneously set to work to dig the vast amphitheatre which was to accommodate the 100,000 representatives of France, and 400,000 spectators, all united in an outburst of fraternal love and hope to swear allegiance to the new Constitution before the altar of the Fatherland. The king had not yet lost the affection of his people. As he came to view the marvellous scene an improvised bodyguard of excavators, bearing spades, escorted him about. When he was swearing the oath to the Constitution, the queen, standing on a balcony of the Ecole militaire, lifted up the dauphin as if to{253} associate him in his father’s pledge. Suddenly the rain which had marred the great festival ceased, the sun burst forth and flooded in a splendour of light, the altar, Bishop Talleyrand, his four hundred clergy, and the king with upraised hand. The solemn music of the Te Deum mingled with the wild pæan of joy and enthusiasm that burst from half a million throats.

The unconscionable folly, the feeble-minded vacillation and miserable trickery by which this magnificent popularity was muddled away is one of the saddest tragedies in the stories of kings. The people, with unerring instinct, had fixed on the queen as one of the chief obstacles to what might have been a peaceful revolution. Neither Marie Antoinette nor Louis Capet comprehended the tremendous significance of the forces they were playing with—the resolute and invincible determination of a people of twenty-six millions to emancipate itself from the accumulated and intolerable wrongs of centuries. The despatches and opinions of American ambassadors during this period are of inestimable value. The democratic Thomas Jefferson, reviewing in later years the course of events, declared that had there been no queen there would have been no revolution. Governor Morris, whose anti-revolutionary and conservative leanings made him the friend and confidant of the royal family, writes to Washington on January 1790: “If only the reigning prince were not the small beer character he is, and even only tolerably watchful of events, he would regain his authority,” but “what would you have,” he continues scornfully, “from a creature who, in his situation, eats, drinks and sleeps well, and laughs, and is as merry a grig as lives. He must float along on the current of events and is absolutely a cypher.” But the court would not forego its crooked ways. “The queen is even more imprudent,” Morris writes in 1791, “and the whole court is given up to petty intrigues worthy only of footmen and chambermaids.” Moreover, in its amazing ineptitude, the monarchy had already toyed with republicanism by{254} lending active military support to the revolutionists in America, at a cost to the already over-burdened treasury of 1,200,000,000 livres.

The American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, was crowned at court with laurel as the apostle of liberty, and in the very palace of Versailles medallions of Franklin were sold, bearing the inscription: “Eripui coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis” (“I have snatched the lightning from heaven and the sceptre from tyrants”). The revolutionary song, Ça ira, ça ira (“That will go, that will go”), owes its origin to Franklin’s invariable response to inquiries as to the progress of the American revolutionary movement. There was explosive material enough in France to make playing with celestial fire perilous, and while the political atmosphere was heavy with the threatening change, thousands of French soldiers returned saturated with enthusiasm and sympathy for the American revolution. Already before the Feast of the Federation the queen had been in secret correspondence with the émigrés at Turin and at Coblenz who were conspiring to throttle the nascent liberty of France. Plots had been hatched to carry off the royal family. Madame Campan relates that the queen made her read a confidential letter from the Empress Catherine of Russia, concluding with these words: “Kings ought to proceed in their career undisturbed by the cries of the people, as the moon pursues her course unimpeded by the howling of dogs.” Mirabeau was already in the pay of the monarchy; soon after the return of the court to St. Cloud the queen had a secret interview with him in the park, and boasted to Madame Campan how she had flattered the great tribune.

As early as December 1790 the court had been in secret communication with the foreigner. Louis’ brother, the Count of Artois (afterwards Charles X.), with the queen’s and king’s approval, had made a secret treaty with the house of Hapsburg, the hereditary enemy of France, by which the sovereigns of Austria, Prussia and Spain{255} agreed to cross the frontier at a given signal, and close on France with an army a hundred thousand strong. It was an act of impious treachery, and the beginning of the doom of the French monarchy. Yet if but some glimmer of intelligence and courage had characterised the preparations for the flight of the royal family to join the armed forces waiting to receive them near the frontier, their lives at least had been saved.

The incidents of the four months’ “secret” preparations to leave the Tuileries as described by Madame Campan read like scenes in a comic opera. The disguised purchases of elaborate wardrobes of underlinen and gowns; the making of a dressing-case of “enormous size, fitted with many and various articles from a warming-pan to a silver porringer”; the packing of the diamonds; the building of the new berline, that huge, lumbering Noah’s ark which was to bear them swiftly away! The story of the pretended flight of the Russian baroness and her family; the start delayed by the queen turning into the Carrousel instead of into the Rue de l’Echelle, where the king and her children were awaiting her in the glass coach; the colossal folly of the whole business has been told by Carlyle in one of the most dramatic chapters in history.

The Assembly declared on hearing of Louis’ flight that the government of the country was unaffected and that the executive power remained in the hand of the ministers. After voting a levy of three hundred thousand National Guards to meet the threatened invasion, they passed calmly to the discussion of the new Penal Code.

The king returned to Paris through an immense and silent multitude. “Whoever applauds the king,” said placards in the street, “shall be thrashed; whoever insults him, hung.” The idea of a republic as a practical issue of the situation was now for the first time put forward by the extremists, but met with little sympathy, and a Republican demonstration in the Champ de Mars was suppressed by the Assembly by martial law at the cost of many lives. Owing to the{256} aversion felt by Marie Antoinette to Lafayette, who with affectionate loyalty more than once had risked his popularity and life to serve the crown, the court made the fatal mistake of opposing his election to the mayoralty of Paris and paved the way for the triumph of Petion and of the Dantonists. To the famous manifesto of Pilnitz by the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia in August 1791, calling on the sovereigns of Europe to support them in an armed intervention to restore the rights and prerogatives of the French king, the Assembly replied that, while they must regard as enemies those who tolerated hostile preparations against France, they offered good neighbourship, the amity of a free and puissant country to the nations of Europe. They desired no conquests and would respect the laws and constitutions of others if they evinced the same respect towards those of France: if the German princes favoured military preparations directed against the French, the French would carry among them, not fire and sword, but liberty. “Let them ponder on the consequences of an awakening of the nations.”

Meanwhile the Assembly renewed some laws of the ancien régime against émigrés, who were threatened with the confiscation of their property without prejudice to the rights of their wives and children and lawful creditors if they did not return within a definite time. The foreign monarchies reasserted the lawfulness of their acts and war became inevitable.

Place de la Concorde

At the news of the first defeats the king added to his amazing tale of follies by vetoing the formation of a camp near Paris and by turning a deaf ear to the earnest entreaties of the brave, loyal and sagacious Dumouriez and accepting his resignation. He sent a secret agent with confidential instructions to the émigrés and the coalesced monarchies, and when Lafayette, after the first demonstration against the Tuileries, hastened to Paris and strove to stir the ill-fated king to resolute action he was coldly received, and with bitterness in his heart returned to his army at the frontier.{257} The ill-starred proclamation[161] of the Duke of Brunswick completed the destruction of the monarchy. While the French were smarting under defeat and stung by the knowledge that their natural defender, the king, was leagued with their enemies, this foreign commander warned a high-spirited and gallant nation that he was come to restore Louis XVI. to his authority, and threatened to treat as rebellious any town that opposed his march, to shoot all persons taken with arms in their hands, and in the event of any insult being offered to the royal family to take exemplary and memorable vengeance by delivering up the city of Paris to military execution and complete demolition. When the proclamation reached Paris at the end of July 1792, it sounded the death knell of the king and the triumph of the Republicans. Paris was now to become, in Goethe’s phrase, the centre of the “world whirlwind”—a storm centre launching forth thunderbolts of terror. After the Assembly had twice refused to bring the king to trial, the extremists were able to organise and direct an irresistible wave of popular indignation towards the Tuileries, and on 10th August the palace was stormed. While a band of brave and devoted Swiss guards was being cut to pieces in hundreds, the feeble and futile king had fled to the Assembly and was sitting safely with his wife and children in a box behind the president’s chair. Thorwaldsen’s monument to the fallen Swiss, carved in the granite rock at Lucerne, recalls that piteous scene at the Tuileries when these poor Republican mercenaries, true to their salt, stood faithful unto death in defence of an empty palace.

No room for compromise now. The printed trial of Charles I. was everywhere sold and read. “This,” people said, “was how the English dealt with an impossible king and became a free nation.” Old and new were in death-grapple, and the lives of many victims, for the people lost{258} heavily,[162] had sealed the cause of the Revolution with a bloody consecration. Unhappily, the city of Paris, like all great towns in times of scarcity (and since 1780 scarcity had become almost permanent), had been invaded by numbers of starving vagabonds—the dregs that always rise to the surface in periods of political convulsion, ready for any villainy. When news came of the capture of Verdun, of the indecent joy of the courtiers, and that the road to Paris was open to the avenging army of Prussians, the horrors of the Armagnac massacres were renewed during four September days at the prisons of Paris, while the revolutionary ministry and the Assembly averted their gaze and, to their everlasting shame, abdicated their powers. The September massacres were the application by a minority of desperate and savage revolutionists of the ultima ratio of kings to a desperate situation. The tragedy of King Louis is the tragedy of a feeble prince called to rule in a tremendous crisis where weakness and well-meaning folly are the fatalest of crimes. How pathetic are the incidents of the penalty of wrong! The dreadful heritage of the sins of the later French monarchy had fallen on the head of one of the best-intentioned and least guilty, though most foolish and feeblest of men.

On 21st September 1792 royalty was formally abolished, and on the 22nd, when “the equinoctional sun marked the equality of day and night in the heavens,” civil equality was proclaimed by the representatives of France.{259}

CHAPTER XVIII

EXECUTION OF THE KING—PARIS UNDER THE FIRST REPUBLIC—THE TERROR—NAPOLEON—REVOLUTIONARY AND MODERN PARIS

AN inscription opposite No. 230 Rue de Rivoli indicates the site of the old Salle du Manége, or Riding School, of the Tuileries, where the destinies of modern France were debated. Three Assemblies—the Constituent, the Legislative and the prodigious National Convention—filled its long, poorly-furnished amphitheatre, decorated with the tattered flags captured from the Prussians and Austrians, from 7th November 1789 to 9th May 1795.

There, on Wednesday, 16th January 1793, began the solemn judgment of Louis XVI. by 721 representatives of the people of France. The sitting opened at ten o’clock in the morning, but not till eight in the evening did the procession of deputies begin, as the roll was called, to ascend the tribune, and utter their word of doom. All that long winter’s night, and all the ensuing short winter’s day, the fate of a king trembled in the balance as the judgment, death—banishment: banishment—death, with awful alternation echoed through the hall. Amid the speeches of the deputies was heard the chatter of fashionable women in the boxes, pricking with pins on cards the votes for and against death, and eating ices and oranges brought to them by friendly deputies. Above, in the public tribunes, sat women of the people, greeting the words of the deputies with coarse gibes. Betting went on outside. At every entrance cries hoarse and shrill were heard of hawkers selling “The Trial of Charles I.” Time-serving Philip Egalité, Duke of Orleans, voted la mort, but failed to save his skin. An Englishman was there—Thomas Paine, author of the{260} Rights of Man and deputy for Calais. His voice was raised for clemency, for temporary detention, and banishment after the peace. “My vote is that of Paine,” cried a member, “his authority is final for me.” One deputy was carried from a sick-bed to cast his vote in the scale of mercy; others slumbering on the benches were awakened and gave their votes of death between two yawns. At length, by eight o’clock on the evening of the 17th, exactly twenty-four hours after the voting began, the President rose to read the result. “A silence most august and terrible reigns in the Assembly as President Vergniaud rises and pronounces the sentence ‘Death’ in the name of the French nation.” The details of the voting as given in the Journal de Perlet, 18th January 1793, are as follows: “Of the 745 members one had died, six were sick, two absent without cause, eleven absent on commission, four abstained from voting. The absolute majority was therefore 361. Three hundred and sixty-six voted for death, three hundred and nineteen for detention and banishment, two for the galleys, twenty-four for death with various reservations, eight for death with stay of execution until after the peace, two for delay with power of commutation.” Three Protestant ministers and eighteen Catholic priests voted for death. Louis’ defenders were there and asked to be heard: they were admitted to the honours of the sitting. At eleven o’clock the weary business of thirty-seven hours was ended, only, however, to be resumed the next morning, for yet another vote must decide between delay or summary execution. Again the voice of Paine was heard pleading for mercy, but without avail. At three o’clock on Sunday morning the final voting was over. Six hundred and ninety members were present, of whom three hundred and eighty voted for death within twenty-four hours.

Eiffel Tower.

To the guillotine on the fatal Place de la Révolution, formerly Place Louis XV., the very scene of a terrible panic at his wedding festivities which cost the lives of hundreds of sightseers, the sixteenth Louis of France was led on the morning of 21st January 1793. As he turned to address{261} the people, Santerre ordered the drums to beat—it was the echo of the drums reverberating through history which had smothered the cries of the Protestant martyrs sent to the scaffold by the fourteenth Louis a century before. This was the beginning of that année terrible, into which was crowded the most stupendous struggle in modern history. Threatened by the monarchies of Europe, who were united in an unholy crusade to crush the Revolution, France, in the tremendous words of Danton, flung to the coalesced kings the head of a king as gage of battle. A colossal energy, an unquenchable devotion were evoked by the supreme crisis, and directed by a committee of nine inexperienced young civilians, sitting in a room of the Tuileries at Paris, to whom later Carnot, an engineer officer, was added. “The whole Republic,” they proclaimed, “is a great besieged city: let France be a vast camp. Every age is called to defend the liberty of the Fatherland. The young men will fight: the married will forge arms. Women will make clothes and tents: children will tear old linen for lint. Old men shall be carried to the market-place to inflame the courage of all.” In twenty-four hours 60,000 men were enrolled; in two months fourteen armies organised. Saltpetre for powder failed; it was torn from the bowels of the earth. Steel, too, and bronze were lacking: iron railings were transmuted into swords, and church bells and royal statues into cannon. Paris became a vast armourer’s shop. Smithy fires in hundreds roared and anvils clanged in the open places—one hundred and forty at the Invalides, fifty-four at the Luxembourg. The women sang as they worked:—

{262}

The smiths chanted to the rhythm of their strokes:—

“Forgeons, forgeons, forgeons bien!”

On the new standards waving in the breeze ran the legend: “The French people risen against Tyrants.” Toulon was in the hands of the English; Lyons in revolt. With enemies in her camp, with one arm tied by the insurrection in La Vendée, the Revolution hurled her ragged and despised sans-culottes, shod in pasteboard or straw bands, mantled in a piece of matting skewered above their shoulders, against her enemies. How vain is the wisdom of the great! Burke thought that the Revolution had expunged France in a political sense out of the system of Europe, and his opinion was shared by every statesman in Europe, but before the year closed the proud and magnificently accoutred armies of kings were scattered over the borders, civil war was crushed at home, the Revolution triumphant. The Convention fixed the day of victory. It ordered its generals to end the war of La Vendée by 20th October: by the 17th four defeats had been inflicted on the insurgents, and 60,000 men, women and children were driven over the Loire. Soon the “dwarfish, ragged sans-culottes, the small, black-looking Marseillaise dressed in rags of every colour,” whom Goethe saw tramping out of Mayence “as if the goblin king had opened his mountains and sent forth his lively host of dwarfs,” had forced Prussia, the arch-champion of monarchy, to make peace and leave its Rhine provinces in the hands of regicides. Meanwhile terror reigned in Paris. In the frenzy of mortal strife the Revolution struck out blindly and cut down friend as well as foe; the innocent with the guilty. At least the guillotine fell swiftly and mercifully. Gone were the days of the wheel, the rack, the boiling lead and the stake. Under the ancien régime the torture of accused persons was one of the sights shown to foreigners in Paris. Evelyn, when visiting the city in 1651, was taken to see the torture of an alleged thief in the Châtelet, who was “wracked{263} in an extraordinary manner, so that they severed the fellow’s joints in miserable sort.” Then, failing to extort a confession, “they increased the extension and torture, and then placing a horne in his mouth, such as they drench horses with, poured two buckets of water down, so that it prodigiously swelled him.” There was another “malefactor” to be dealt with, but the traveller had seen enough, and he leaves reflecting that it represented to him “the intolerable sufferings which our Blessed Saviour must needs undergo when His body was hanging with all its weight upon the nailes of the Crosse.”

Too much prominence has been given by historians to the dramatic and violent activities of the men of ’93, to the exclusion of acts of peaceful and constructive statesmanship. Among the 11,210 decrees issued by the National Convention in Paris from September ’92 to October ’95, the following are cited by Louis Blanc:—

It appointed a Commission to examine and report upon works relating to the moral and physical education of children and opened a competition for the composing of elementary books.

It systematised the teaching of the French language.

It ordered an inventory to be taken of collections of works of art.{264}

It fulminated against the degradation of public monuments.

It founded national rewards for great discoveries.

It gave lavish help to artists and savants.

It offered a prize for the perfecting of the art of spinning.

It ordered the publication of a translation of Bacon’s works found among the papers of one of the condemned on the 9th of Thermidor.

It decided that scientific voyages should be organised at the expense of the State, and that the Republic be charged with the maintenance of artists sent to Rome.

It decreed the adoption, began the discussion, and voted the most important articles of the civil code.

It inaugurated the telegraph and the decimal system, established the uniformity of weights and measures, the bureau of longitudes, reformed the calendar, instituted the Grand Livre, increased and completed the Museum of Natural History, opened the Museum of the Louvre, created the Conservatoire of the Arts and Crafts, the Conservatoire of Music, the Polytechnic School and the Institute.

The truly great work of education initiated by the Convention can only be appreciated by recalling its previous condition. The old colleges were utterly neglected. In such as survived, little more than Latin (and that inefficiently) and a few scraps of history were taught. The natural sciences were wholly neglected; the children of the noblesse were educated by private tutors, and only in showy accomplishments. Madame Campan relates that the Princess Louise had not even mastered the alphabet at twelve years of age.

The Convention abolished negro slavery in the French colonies, and Wilberforce reminded a hostile House of Commons that infidel and anarchic France had given example to Christian England in the work of emancipation. In 1793 it was reported to the Convention that the aged Goldoni had been in receipt of a pension from the ancien régime and was{265} now dependent on the slender resources of a compassionate nephew: the Convention at once decreed as an act of justice and beneficence that the pension of 4000 livres should be renewed, and all arrears paid up. This is but one of many acts of grace and succour among the records of the Convention. The same day, 7th February, an artist of Toulouse was awarded 3000 livres. It is curious to read in the journals of early ’93 how fully assured the revolutionists were of the sympathy of England, “that proud and generous nation, whose name alone, like that of Rome, evokes ideas of liberty and independence,” their appeals to the English nation, whose example they had followed, not to allow the quarrels of kings to embroil them in a conflict fatal to humanity. At the meetings of the Jacobins, flags of England, America and France were unfurled, with cries of “Vivent les trois peuples libres.”

The closing months of ’95 were sped with those whiffs of grape shot from the Pont Royal and the Rue St. Honoré, that shattered the last attempt, this time by the Royalists, at government by insurrection. The Convention closed its stupendous career, and five Directors of the Republic met in a room furnished with an old table, a sheet of paper and an ink-bottle, and set about organising France for a normal and progressive national life. But Europe had by her fatuous interference with the internal affairs of France sown dragons’ teeth indeed. A nation of armed men had sprung forth, nursing hatred of monarchy and habituated to victory. “Eh, bien, mes enfants,” cried a French general before an engagement when provisions were wanting to afford a meal for his troops, “we will breakfast after the victory.” But militarism invariably ends in autocracy. The author of those whiffs of grape shot was appointed in 1796 Commander-in-Chief of the army of Italy, and a new and sinister complexion was given to the policy of the Republic. “Soldiers,” cries Napoleon, “you are half-starved and almost naked; the Government owes you much but can do nothing for you. Your patience, your courage{266} do you honour, but win for you neither glory nor profit. I am about to lead you into the most fertile plains of the world; you will find there great cities and rich provinces; there you will reap honour, glory and riches. Soldiers of Italy, will you lack courage?” This frank appeal to the baser motives that sway men’s minds, this open avowal of a personal ambition, was the beginning of the end of Jacobinism in France. Soon the wealth of Italy streamed into the bare coffers of the Directory:—20,000,000 of francs from Lombardy, 12,000,000 from Parma and Modena, 35,000,000 from the Papal States, an equally large sum from Tuscany; one hundred finest horses of Lombardy to the five Directors, “to replace the sorry nags that now draw your carriages”; convoys of priceless manuscripts and sculpture and pictures to adorn the galleries of Paris. So persistent were these raids on the collections of art in Italy that Napoleon is known there to this day as il gran ladrone. The chief duty of the new French officials in Italy, said Lucien Bonaparte, is to supervise the packing of pictures and statues for Paris. No less than 5233 of these works of art were confiscated by the Allies in 1815, and returned to their former owners.

In less than a decade the rusty old stage properties and the baubles of monarchy were furbished anew, sacred oil from the little phial of Rheims anointed the brow of a new dynast, and a Roman Pontiff blessed the crown with which a once poor, pensioned, disaffected Corsican patriot crowned himself lord of France in Notre Dame. The old pomposities of a court came strutting back to their places:—Arch Chancellors, Grand Electors, Constables, Grand Almoners, Grand Chamberlains, Grand Marshals of the Palace, Masters of the Horse, Masters of the Hounds, Madame Mère and a bevy of Imperial Highnesses with their ladies-in-waiting. Only one thing was wanting, as a Jacobin bitterly remarked—the million of men who were slain to end all that mummery. The fascinating story of how this amazing transformation was effected cannot be told here. The magician who{267} wrought it was possessed of a soaring, visionary imagination, of a mental instrument of incomparable force and efficiency, of an iron will, a prodigious intellectual activity, and a piercing insight into the conditions of material success, rarely, if ever before, united in the same degree in one man. Napoleon Bonaparte was of ancient, patrician Florentine blood, and perchance the descendant of one of those of Fiesole—

He cherished a particular affection for Italy, and, so far as his personal aims allowed, treated her generously. His descent into Lombardy awakened the slumbering sense of Italian nationality. In more senses than one, says Mr Bolton King, the historian of Italian unity, Napoleon was the founder of modern Italy.

The reason of Napoleon’s success in France is not far to seek. Two streams of effort are clearly traceable through the Revolution. The earlier thinkers, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot and the Encyclopedists, whose admiration for England was unbounded, aimed at reforming the rotten state of France on the basis of the English parliamentary and monarchical system. It was a middle-class movement for the assertion of its interests in the state and for political freedom. The aim of the Jacobin minority, inspired by the doctrines of the Contrat Social of Rousseau, was to found a democratic state based on the principle of the sovereignty of the people. If the French crown and the monarchies of Europe had allowed the peaceful evolution of national tendencies, the Constitutional reformers would have triumphed, but in their folly they tried to sweep back the tide, with the result we have seen.{268} For when everything is put to the touch, when victory is the price of self-sacrifice, it is the idealist who comes to the front. As the nineteenth century prophet Mazzini taught, men will lay down their lives for principles but not for interests.

Let us not forget that it was the Jacobin minority which saved the people of France. Led astray by their old guides, abandoned in a dark and trackless waste, their heads girt with horror, menaced by destruction on every side, they groped, wandering hither and thither seeking an outlet in vain. At length a voice was heard, confident, thrilling as a trumpet call: “Lo this is the way! follow, and ye shall emerge and conquer!” It may not have been the best way, but it was a way and they followed.

Arc de Triomphe—Place du Carrousel.

It is easy enough to pour scorn on the Contrat Social as a political philosophy, but an ideal, a faith, a dogma are necessary to evoke enthusiasm, the contempt of material things and of death itself. These the Contrat Social gave. Its consuming passion for social justice, its ideal of a state founded on the sovereignty of the people became the gospel of the time. Men and women conned its pages by heart and slept with the book under their pillows. Napoleon himself in his early Jacobin days was saturated with its doctrines, and in later times astutely used its phrases as shibboleths to cloak his acts of despotism. But in that terrible revolutionary decade the Jacobins had spent their lives and their energies. A profound weariness of the long and severe tension, and a yearning for a return to orderly civil life came over men’s minds. The masses were still sincerely attached to the Catholic faith; the middle-classes hailed with relief the advent of the strong man who proved himself able to crush faction; the peasants were won by a champion of the Revolution who made impossible the return of the evil days of the ancien régime and guaranteed them the possession of the confiscated émigré and ecclesiastical lands; the army idolised the great captain who promised them glory and profit; the Church rallied to an autocrat who{269} restored the hierarchy. Moreover, the brilliancy of Napoleon’s military genius was balanced by an all-embracing political sagacity. The chief administrative decrees of the Convention, especially those relating to education and the civil and penal codes, were welded into form by ceaseless energy. Everything he touched was indeed degraded from the Republican ideal, but he drove things through and imposed his own superhuman activity into his subordinates, and became one of the chief builders of modern France. “The gigantic entered into our very habits of thought,” said one of his ministers. But his efforts to maintain the stupendous twenty years’ duel with the combined forces of England and the continental monarchies, and his own over-weening ambition, broke him at length, and he fell to fret away his life caged in a lonely island in mid-Atlantic.

The new ideas were none the less revolutionary of social life. The salon, that eminently French institution, soon felt their power. The charming irresponsible gaiety and frivolity of the old régime gave place to more serious preoccupation with political movements. The fusing power of Rousseau’s genius had melted all hearts; the solvent wit of Voltaire and the precise science of the Encyclopedists were a potent force even among the courtiers themselves. The centre of social life shifted from Versailles to Paris and the salons gained what the court lost. Fine ladies had the latest pamphlet of Siéyès read to them at their toilette, and maids caught up the new phrases from their mistresses’ lips. Did a young gallant enter a salon excusing himself for being late by saying, “I have just been proposing a motion at the club,” every fair eye sparkled with interest. A deputy was a social lion, and a box for the National Assembly exchanged for one at the opera at a premium of six livres. Speeches were rehearsed at the salons and action determined. Chief of the hostesses was Madame[165] Necker: at her crowded receptions might be seen Abbé Siéyès, the{270} architect of Constitutions; Condorcet, the philosopher; Talleyrand, the patriotic bishop; Madame de Stäel, with her strong, coarse face and masculine voice and gestures. More intimate were the Tuesday suppers at which a dozen chosen guests held earnest communion. Madame de Beauharnais was noted for her excellent table, and her Tuesday and Thursday dinners: at her rooms the masters of literature and music had been wont to meet. Now came Buffon the naturalist; Bailly of Tennis Court oath fame; Clootz, the friend of humanity. The widow of Helvetius, with her many memories of Franklin, welcomed Volney, author of the Ruins of Empires, and Chamfort, the candid critic of Academicians. At the salon of Madame Pancroute, Barrère, the glib orator of the Revolution, was the chief figure.

Julie Talma was famed for her literary and artistic circle. Here Marie Joseph Chenier, the revolutionary dramatic poet of the Comédie Française, declaimed his couplets. Here came Vergniaud, the eloquent chief of the ill-fated Gironde; Greuze, the painter; Roland, the stern and minatory minister, who spoke bitter words, composed by his wife, to the king; Lavoisier, the chemist, who begged that the axe might be stayed while he completed some experiments, and was told that the Republic had no need of chemists. Madame du Deffand, whose hotel in the Rue des Quatre Fils still exists, welcomed Voltaire, D’Alembert, Montesquieu and the Encyclopedists.

In the street, the great open-air salon of the people, was a feverish going to and fro. Here were the tub-thumpers of the Revolution holding forth at every public place; the strident voices of ballad-singers at the street corners; hawkers of the latest pamphlets hot from the Quai des Augustins; the sellers of journals crying the Père Duchesne, L’Ami du Peuple, the Jean Bart, the Vieux Cordelier. Crowds gathered round Bassett’s famous shop for caricature at the corner of the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue des Mathurins. The walls of Paris were a mass{271} of variegated placards and proclamations. The charming signs of the old régime the Pomme rouge, the Rose Blanche, the Ami du Cœur, the Gracieuse, the Trois Fleurs-de-lys couronnées gave place to the “Necker,” the “National Assembly,” the “Tiers,” the “Constitution”—these, too, soon to be effaced by more Republican appellations. For on the abolition of the monarchy and the inauguration of the Religion of Nature, the words “royal” and “saint” disappear from the revolutionary vocabulary. A new calendar is promulgated: streets and squares are renamed: rues des Droits de l’Homme, de la Revolution, des Piques de la Lois, efface the old landmarks. We must now say Rue Honoré, not St. Honoré, and Mont Marat for Montmartre. Naturalists had written of the queen bee: away with the hated word! She is now named of all good patriots the abeille pondeuse, the egg-laying bee. No more emblems on playing cards of king, queen, and knave: allegorical figures of Genius, Liberty and Equality take their places, and since Law alone is above them all, Patriotism, as it flings down its biggest card, shall cry no longer, “Ace of trumps,” but “Law of trumps,” and “Genius of trumps.” Furniture is of Spartan simplicity. The people lie down on patriotic beds and eat and drink from patriotic mugs and platters. Silver buckles are needed by the national war chest: shoes shall now be clasped by patriotic buckles of copper. The monarchial “vous” (you) shall give place to “toi” (thou); and “monsieur” and “madame” to “citoyen” and “citoyenne.” The formal subscriptions to letters, “Your humble servant,” “Your obedient servant,” shall no more recall the old days of class subjection; we write now “Your fellow citizen,” “Your friend,” “Your equal.” Every house bears an inscription, giving the names and ages of the occupants, decorated with patriotic colours of red, white and blue, with figures of the Gallic cock and the bonnet rouge. Over every public building runs the legend, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death”—it is even{272} seen over the cages of the wild beasts at the Jardin des Plantes.

Nowhere did the revolutionary ploughshare cut deeper than among the clergy and the religious orders. Nearly forty monasteries and convents were suppressed in Paris, and strange scenes were those when the troops of monks and friars issued forth to secular life, some crying, “Vive Jesus le Roi et la Revolution,” for the new ideas had penetrated even the cloister. The barbers’ shops were invaded, and strange figures were seen smoking their pipes along the Boulevards. Some went to the wars; others, especially the Benedictines, appealed for teaching appointments; many, faithful to their vows, went forth to poverty, misery and death.

The nuns and sisters gave more trouble, and the scenes that attended their expulsion and that of the non-juring clergy burned deep into the memories of the pious. “What do they take from me?” cried the curé of St. Marguerite in his farewell sermon. “My cure? All that I have is yours, and it is you they despoil. My life? I am eighty-four years of age, and what of life remains to me is not worth the sacrifice of my principles.” Descending the pulpit the venerable priest passed through a sobbing congregation to a garret in one of the Faubourgs. There were but few, however, who imitated the dignified protest of the curé of St. Marguerite. Many a pulpit rang with fiery denunciations, which recalled the savage fanaticism of the league. Some of the younger clergy and a few of the bishops were on the side of the early Revolutionists. The Abbé Fouchet was the Peter the Hermit of the crusade for Liberty, and so popular were his sermons in Notre Dame that a seat there fetched twenty-four sous. But the corruption and apostasy of the hierarchy as a whole, and their betrayal of the people, had borne its acrid fruit of popular contempt and hostility, resulting in the monstrous profanation of Notre Dame and other churches of Paris by the fanatics of the worship of Nature and the puerile Deistic{273} theatricalities of Robespierre’s Feasts of the Supreme Being. Compromise became impossible and the Revolutionists found arrayed against them the most universal and the deepest of human sentiments, the strongest cementing force in civil life. Less than eight years after Robespierre’s solemn comedy of the Etre Suprème all the hierarchy of the old religion returned—sixty archbishops and bishops, and an army of priests. A gorgeous Easter Mass in Notre Dame celebrated the re-establishment of the Catholic faith by Napoleon, the heir of the Revolution.

It is not within the scope of the present work to deal with the later annals of France. Superficial students of her modern history have freely charged her with political irresponsibility and fickleness; no charge could be less warranted by facts. For a thousand years her people were loyal and faithful subjects of a monarchy, and endured for a century and a half an infliction of misgovernment, oppression and grinding taxation such as probably no other European people would have tolerated. With touching fidelity and indomitable steadfastness the French people have cherished the principles of the Great Revolution, in whose name they swept the shams and wrongs of the ancien régime away. There is a profounder truth than perhaps Alphonse Karr imagined in his famous epigram, Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. Every political upheaval of the nineteenth century in Paris has been at bottom an effort to realise the revolutionary ideals of political freedom and social equality in the face of external violence or internal corruption and treachery. Twice the hated Bourbons were re-imposed on the people of Paris by the bayonets of the foreigner; twice they rose and chased them away. A compromise followed—that of a citizen king, Louis Philippe of Orleans, once a Jacobin doorkeeper and a soldier of the Revolution, who had fought valiantly at Valmy and Jemappes. But he too identified himself with reactionary ministers, and became a fugitive to England, the bourne of deposed kings. The Second Republic which followed grew distrustful of the{274} people and disfranchised at one stroke 3,000,000 citizens: one of the causes of the success of the coup d’état of Napoleon III. was an astute edict which restored universal suffrage.

During the negation of political rectitude and decency which characterised the period of the Second Empire a little band of Republicans refused to bow the knee to the new pinchbeck Cæsar, and, inspired by Victor Hugo, their fiery poet and seer, whose Châtiments have the passionate intensity of an Isaiah, braved exile, poverty, calumny and flattery. They “stooped into a dark, tremendous sea of doubt, pressed God’s lamp to their breasts and emerged” to witness a sad and bitter day of reckoning, when the corruption and vice of the Second Empire were swallowed up in shame and disaster at Sedan. The Third Republic, with admirable energy and patriotism, rose to save the self-respect of France. The first and Imperial war, up to Sedan, was over in a month; the second national and popular war endured for five months.

The Louvre—Eastern Entrance.

Dynastic and ecclesiastical ambition die hard, and the new Republic has had to weather many a storm in her career of a third of a century. Carducci in a fine poem has imagined Letizia, mother of the Bonapartes, a wandering shade haunting the desolate house at Ajaccio and recalling the tragic fate of her children:—a Corsican Niobe standing on her threshold and fiercely stretching forth her arms to the savage Ocean, calling, calling, that from America, from Britain, from burning Africa, some one of her tragic progeny may come to find a haven in her breast. But the assegais of South African savages laid low the last hope of the Imperialists, and it may reasonably be predicted that neither the shades nor the living descendants of Bonaparte or Bourbon will ever trouble again the internal peace of France nor her people be ruled by one “regnant by right divine and luck o’ the pillow.” Throughout the whole land a profound desire of peace possesses men’s minds[166] and{275} a firm determination to effect a material and moral recuperation from the disasters of the Empire. Two facts in modern France have impressed the present writer in his travels since 1870—the extraordinary number of new schools that have been raised and staffed throughout the length and breadth of the land and the wonderful activity of the Catholic church as shown by new churches and foundations.

The beneficent results of the Great Revolution have leavened the whole world. In no small degree may it be said of France that by her stripes we have been healed. With true insight the Revolutionists perceived that liberty is the one essential element of national progress—

But the great work is yet incomplete. Political liberty and equality have been won. A more tremendous task awaits the peoples of the old and new worlds alike—to achieve industrial emancipation and inaugurate a reign of social justice. And we know that Paris will have no small part in the solution of this problem.

It now remains to consider the impress which this stormy period left on the architecture of Paris. We have seen that the Convention assigned the royal Palace of the Louvre for the home of a national museum. The neglect of the fabric, however, continued. Already Marat had appropriated four of the royal presses and their accessories for the Ami du Peuple, and the types founded for Louis XIV. were used to print the diatribes of the fiercest advocate of the Terror. All along the south façade, print and cook shops were seen, and small huckstering went on unheeded. In 1794 the ground floor of the Petite Galerie was used as a Bourse. On the Place du Carrousel, and the site of the Squares du Louvre were a mass of mean houses which remained{276} even to comparatively recent times. In 1805 the masterful will and all-embracing activity of Napoleon were directed to the improvement of Paris, which he determined to make the most beautiful capital in the world. His architects, Percier and Fontaine, were set to work on the Louvre, and yet another vast plan was elaborated for completing the Palace. A northern wing, corresponding to Henry IV.’s south wing, was to be built eastwards along the new Rue de Rivoli, from the Pavilion de Marsan at the north end of the Tuileries; the Carrousel was to be traversed by a building, separating the two palaces, designed to house the National Library, the learned Societies and other bodies. Of this ambitious plan, however, all that was carried out was a portion of the Rue de Rivoli façade, from the Pavilion de Marsan to the Pavilion de Rohan, which latter was finished under the Restoration. Some external decorative work was carried out on the south façade. Perrault’s Colonnade was restored, the four façades of the quadrangle were completed, and a new bridge to lead to the “Palace of the Arts” was built. Little or nothing was done to further Napoleon’s plan until the Republic of 1848 decreed the completion of the north façade, which was actually achieved under the Second Empire by Visconti in 1857, who built other structures, each with three courts, inside the great space enclosed by the north and south wings to correct their want of parallelism. Later (1862-1868), Henry the Fourth’s long gallery and the Pavilions de Flore and Lesdiguières were rebuilt, and smaller galleries were added to those giving on the Cour des Tuileries. After the disastrous fire which destroyed the Tuileries in 1871, the Third Republic restored the Pavilions de Flore and de Marsan.

But the vicissitudes of this wonderful pile of architecture are not yet ended. The discovery of Perrault’s base at the east and of Lemercier’s at the north, will inevitably lead to their proximate disclosure. Ample space remains at the east for the excavation of a wide and deep fosse, which would expose the wing to view as Perrault intended it; but{277} on the Rue de Rivoli side the problem is more difficult, and probably a narrow fosse, or saut de loup, will be all that space will allow there.

Napoleon I.’s new streets near the Tuileries and the Louvre soon became the fashionable quarter of Paris. The Italian arcades and every street name recalled a former victory of the Consulate in Italy and Egypt. The military glories of a revolutionary empire, which at one time transcended the limits of that of Charlemagne; which crashed through the shams of the old world and toppled in the dust their imposing but hollow state, were wrought in bronze on the Vendôme Column, cast from the cannon captured from every nation in Europe. The Triumphal Arch of the Carrousel, crowned by the bronze horses from St. Mark’s at Venice; the majestic Triumphal Arch of the Etoile—a partially achieved project—all paraded the Emperor’s fame. Of more practical utility were the quays built along the south bank of the Seine; the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena, which latter Blücher would have blown up had Wellington permitted it.

The erection of the new church of the Madeleine, begun in 1764, had been interrupted by the Revolution, and in 1806, Napoleon ordered that it should be completed as a Temple of Glory. The Restoration transformed it to a Catholic church, which was finally completed under Louis Philippe in 1842. It is now the most fashionable place of worship in Paris. Napoleon drove sixty new streets through Paris, cleared away the posts that marked off the footways, began the raised pavements and kerbs, and ordered the drainage to be diverted from the gutters in the centre of the roadway.

The Restoration erected two basilicas—Notre Dame de Lorette and St. Vincent de Paul—the latter made famous by Flandrin’s masterly frescoes, painted on a gold ground around the nave and choir. The Expiatory Chapel raised to the memory of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette on the site of the old cemetery of the Madeleine—where{278} they lay, until transferred to St. Denis, in one red burial with the brave Swiss Guards who vainly spent their lives for them—is now threatened with demolition. Three new bridges—of the Invalids, the Archevêché and Arcole—were added, and fifty-five new streets.

Under the citizen king, Napoleon’s Arch of Triumph of the Etoile was completed, and the Columns of Luxor, on the Place de la Concorde, and of July on the Place de la Bastille, were raised. It was the period of the admirable architectural restorations of Viollet le Duc. The great architect has described how his passion for Gothic was stirred when, taken as a boy to Notre Dame, the rose window of the south seized upon his imagination. While gazing at it the organ began to play, and he thought that the music came from the window—the shrill, high notes from the light colours, the solemn, bass notes from the dark and more subdued hues. It was a reverent and admiring spirit such as this which inspired the famous architect’s loving treatment of the Gothic restoration in Paris and all over France. To him more than to any other artist we owe the preservation of such masterpieces as Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle.

But the great changes which have made modern Paris were effected under the Second Empire. In 1854, when the Haussemannisation of the city began, the Paris of the First Empire and of the Restoration remained essentially unaltered. It was a city of a few grand streets and of many mean ones. Pavements were still rare, and drainage was imperfect. In a few years the whole aspect was changed. Twenty-two new boulevards and avenues were created. Streets of appalling uniformity and directness were ploughed through Paris in all directions. “Nothing is more brutal than a straight line,” says Victor Hugo, and there is little of interest in the monotonous miles of dreary coincidence which constitute the architectural legacy of the Second Empire.

Rue Drouet and Sacré Cœur.

HOTEL DE VILLE FROM RIVER.

The sad task of the Third Republic has been to heal the{279} wounds and cover up the destruction wrought by the Civil War of 1871. The chief architectural creations of the Third Republic are the Hôtel de Ville, the new Sorbonne, the Trocadero, and the completion of the magnificent and colossal temple, rich with precious marble and stone of every kind, which, at a cost of £10,000,000 sterling, has been raised to the Muses at the end of the Avenue de l’Opéra. The Church, too, has lavished her millions on the mighty basilica of the Sacré Cœur, which dominates Paris from the heights of Montmartre. But some of the glory of past ages remains hidden away in corners of the city; some has been recovered from the{280} vandalism of iconoclastic eighteenth-century architects, canons, revolutionists and nineteenth-century prefects.

Let us now wander awhile about the great city and refresh our memories of her dramatic past by beholding somewhat of the interest and beauty which have been preserved to us; for “to be in Paris itself, amid the full, delightful fragrance of those dainty visible things which Huguenots despised—that, surely, were the sum of good fortune!{281}”

CHAPTER XIX

HISTORICAL PARIS—THE CITÉ—THE UNIVERSITY QUARTER—THE VILLE—THE LOUVRE—THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE—THE BOULEVARDS

NOTRE DAME, SOUTH SIDE.

THERE are few spots in Europe where so many associations are crowded together as on the little island of the Cité in Paris. In Gallo-Roman times it was, as we have seen, even smaller, three islets having been incorporated with it since the thirteenth century. Some notion of the changes that have swept over its soil may be conceived on scanning Félibien’s 1725 map, where no less than eighteen churches are marked, scarce a wrack of which now remains on the island. We must imagine the old mediæval Cité as a labyrinth of crooked and narrow streets, with the present broad Parvis of Notre Dame of much smaller extent encumbered with shops and at a lower level. Thirteen steps led up to the Cathedral, and the Bishop’s gallows stood facing them. Against the north tower leaned the Baptistry (St. Jean le Rond) and St. Denis du Pas against the apse. St. Pierre aux Bœufs, whose façade has been transferred to St. Severin’s on the south bank, stood at the east corner, St. Christopher at the west corner of the present Hôtel Dieu which covers the site of eleven streets and three churches. The old twelfth-century hospital, demolished in 1878, occupied the whole space, south of the Parvis between the present Petit Pont and the Pont au Double. It possessed its own bridge, the Pont St. Charles, over which the buildings stretched, and joined the annexe (1606), which still exists on the opposite side of the river. Behind Notre Dame in mediæval times was an open space of waste{282} land, the Motte aux Papelards, where the servants of the Cathedral disported themselves. To the east and north-east stood the cloisters and canons’ dwellings, a veritable city within a city, with four gates and fifty-one houses. Canon Fulbert’s house stood on the site of No. 10 Rue Chanoinesse, and at No. 9 Quai aux Fleurs an inscription marks the site of the house of Heloise and Abelard. The Rue and Pont d’Arcole have cleared away the old church of St. Landry and the port of that name, where up to the reign of Louis XIII. a market was held, at which foundling children from the hospital on the Parvis could be bought for thirty sous. The scandal was abolished by the efforts{283} of the gentle St. Vincent de Paul, Anne of Austria’s confessor. Until comparatively recent times the church of St. Marine was used as a joiner’s workshop, and one of the chapels of the Madeleine, the parish church of the water-sellers, served as a wine merchant’s store! And where are the Sanctuaries of Ste. Geneviève des Ardents, St. Pierre aux Liens, St. Denis de la Chartre, St. Germain le Vieux, St. Aignan, Ste. Croix, St. Symphorien, St. Martial, St. Bartholomew, and the church of the Barnabites, which replaced that of St. Anne, which replaced the old abbey church of St. Eloy, all clustering around their parent church of Our Lady, like nuns under their patroness’ mantle? Some remains of the pavement of St. Aignan’s, with the almost effaced lineaments and inscriptions on the flat tombstones of those, now forgotten, who in their day were doubtless famous churchmen, may be seen in the court of No. 26 Rue Chanoinesse; but the only ancient buildings that rest on the old Cité are Notre Dame and some portions of the Palais, including the Sainte Chapelle. Not a street retains its old aspect. The clock tower of the Palais dates from 1849, and the face of Germain Pilon’s famous clock has been re-carved. The Quai de l’Horloge, once named of the morfondus (chilled), because of its cold, northern, sunless aspect, where Madame Roland spent her childhood in her father’s house, has been widened and lowered. There, at least, is a fine relic of old Paris, the picturesque, mediæval towers of the Conciergerie, in olden times the principal entrance to the Palace. A fifteenth-century tower called of Dagobert, in the Rue Chanoinesse, is shown to travellers by the courtesy of Messieurs Allez Frères, and marks the site of the old port of St. Landry.

Versailles—Bassin de Neptune.

If the traveller will place himself on the Pont Royal or on the Pont du Carrousel, and look towards the Cité when the tall buildings, the spire of the Sainte Chapelle and the massive grey towers of Notre Dame are ruddy with the setting sun, he will enjoy a scene of beauty not easily{284} surpassed in Europe. Across the picture, somewhat marred by the unlovely Pont des Arts, marches the procession of the arches of the Pont Neuf with their graceful curves. Below is the little green patch of garden and the cascade of the weir; in the centre the bronze horse with its royal rider, almost hidden by the trees, stands facing the site of the old garden of the Palais, now the Place Dauphine, where St. Louis sat on a carpet judging his people, and whence Philip the Fair watched the flames that were consuming the Grand Master and his companion of the Knights Templars. To the left are the picturesque mediæval towers of the Conciergerie and the tall roof of the belfry of the Palais. Around all are the embracing waters of the Seine breaking the light with their thousand facets. The island, when seen from the east as one sails down the river, is not less imposing, for the great mother church of Notre Dame, with the graceful buttresses of the apse like folded pinions, seems to brood over the whole Cité.

As we turn southwards from the Cité across the Petit Pont we see the old Roman road, now Rue St. Jacques, rising before us, and on the annexe of the Hôtel Dieu, in the Place du Petit Pont, are inscribed their names[167] who nearly twelve centuries ago dared—

ST. SÉVERIN.

The Observatory.

To left and right are two of the most interesting churches in Paris—St. Julien le Pauvre, where the University held its first sittings, and St. Séverin, built on the site of the oratory of Childebert I., where St. Cloud was shorn and took his vows. Both churches were destroyed by the Normans. The former was rebuilt in the twelfth century, the latter from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. The portal of St. Séverin has{285} been, as we have already mentioned, transferred from the thirteenth-century church of St. Pierre aux Bœufs, in the Cité. Two small lions in relief, between which the curés of the church in olden times are said to have exercised justice, have been replaced on either side of the north door of the tower. This beautiful Gothic temple, with its magnificent stained glass, was used during the Revolution as a powder magazine. Hard by, in the picturesque old Rue de la Parchmenerie, two houses, Nos. 6 and 7, were once the property of the canons of Norwich Cathedral, who maintained a number of scholars there. Turning out of this street, the Rue Boutebrie, was in olden times the Rue des Enlumineurs (illuminators), famous for those who practised the art “che alluminare chiamato è in Parisi.” A street (Rue Dante), which bears the name of the great poet, from whom this line is taken, leads to the Rue du Fouarre (Straw Street), in one of whose colleges the author of the Divina Commedia probably sat as scholar. The houses are all modernised, and the name alone remains. Southwards again, the Rue des Anglais reminds us that there the English scholars lived; and to the east is the Place Maubert, of dread memories, for there were burnt many a Protestant martyr, and the famous printer-philosopher, Etienne Dolet, whose statue in bronze stands on the Place. Yet further south, near the site of the old Carmelite monastery in the Rue des Carmes, stood, at No. 15, the Italian College (Collége des Lombards). Much of this “hostel of the poor Italian scholars of the charity of Our Lady,” as rebuilt in 1681 by the efforts of two Irish priests, Michael Kelly and Patrick Moggin, still remains, including the chapel, and is occupied by a Catholic Workmen’s Club. It formerly gave shelter to forty Irish missionary priests and an equal number of poor Irish scholars. Some idea of the vast extent of the ancient foundation will be gained by walking round to the Rue de la Montagne, where the principal portal may be seen. If we turn westwards by the Rue des Ecoles, we shall pass the famous Collége de France, and soon reach the Hôtel de Cluny, and the remains of the{287} Roman palace and baths. The ruins and ground were purchased by the Abbots of Cluny in 1340, and the present beautiful late Gothic mansion was completed for them in 1490. It was often let by the abbots, and was occupied by James V. of Scotland when he came to Paris in 1536 to celebrate his marriage with Magdalen, daughter of Francis I. In the frigidarium of the baths are the remains of the altar to Jupiter found under Notre Dame, a statue of the Emperor Julian, and many a relic of Roman Paris.

TOWER AND COURTYARD OF HOTEL CLUNY.

The abbots’ delightful old mansion is filled with a rich collection of mediæval statues, altar paintings, wood carvings, ivories, reliquaries, stained glass, tapestries (among them the Lady and Unicorn series, the finest ever wrought), embroideries and textile fabrics, enamels and goldsmiths’ work—all of wondrous beauty and interest. The rooms themselves, with their fine Renaissance chimney-pieces, where on winter days wood fires, fragrant and genial, burn, are not the least charming part of the museum. Many of the objects (about 11,000) exhibited are uncatalogued, and the old catalogue, long out of date, might well be classed among the antiquities.

South of the Cluny are the vast buildings of the new{288} Sorbonne, the modern University of Paris, where some 12,000 students are gratuitously taught. The vestibule, grand staircase and amphitheatre are of noble and impressive architecture, and adorned with mural paintings, among which Puvis de Chavannes’ great decorative composition in the amphitheatre is of chiefest interest. The paintings of the vestibule illustrate scenes in the history of the University of Paris. Of Richelieu’s Sorbonne, the chapel alone exists to-day: all the remainder has been swept away, together with the north cloister and church of St. Benoist, where François Villon assassinated his rival Chermoyé.

We are now on Mont St. Genevieve, crowned by the Panthéon, below which, at No. 14 Rue Soufflot, an inscription marks the site of the Dominican monastery, where Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas taught. To the north is the extensive library of St. Genevieve, on the site of the Collége Montaigue. Behind are the church of St. Etienne du Mont the burial-place of Racine and Pascal, with its beautiful jubé, or choir screen, and the Lycée Henri IV., enclosing the tower of Clovis, all that remains of the fine old abbey church of St. Genevieve. Hard by is the Rue Descartes, where stood the college of Navarre, which was demolished to give place to the Ecole Polytechnique. Farther south, the Rue de Navarre leads to the ruins of the great Roman amphitheatre.

OLD ACADEMY OF MEDICINE.

West of the Boulevard St. Michel are the fine modern buildings of the Ecole de Médecine, which, from 1369 to the times of Louis XV., was situated further eastwards in the Rue de la Bûcherie, where (No. 13) some remains of the old hall of the Faculty may yet be seen. It was here that an anatomical and surgical theatre was built in 1617. The old Franciscan refectory (No. 15 Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine) is all that remains of the great monastery of the Cordeliers. Here the body of Marat was laid on an altar, after his assassination by Charlotte Corday in a house on whose site{289} his statue stands. The refectory is now used as a pathological museum for medical students. The famous revolutionary club of the Cordeliers, where the gentler rhetoric of Camille Desmoulins vied with the thunderous declamation of Danton to stir Republican fervour, met in the Hall of Theology. At No. 5 are some remains of the school of surgery, or Guild of St. Cosimo and St. Damian, founded by St. Louis; adjacent stood the church of St. Cosimo (St. Cosme), famous for the fiery zeal of its curé during the times of the League.

The surgeons were by their charter compelled to give professional assistance to the poor every Monday, and in 1561 the curé and churchwardens of St. Cosme obtained a papal bull authorising them to erect in their church a suitable consulting hall for the accommodation of poor patients. In 1694 the surgeons built an anatomical theatre of their own at St. Cosme, which was enlarged in 1710. The buildings are now used as a school of decorative art. The magnificent Franciscan church, where many a queen of France lay buried, stood on the site of the present Place de l’Ecole de Médecine.

South of these is the Luxembourg Palace, whose charming Renaissance gardens, unhappily, owing to the erection of the Observatory in 1672, reduced by more than one-third of their former extent, are the delight of the Parisians of the south bank of the Seine. The old Orangery, restored and enlarged, is used as a public museum of contemporary French art, chiefly painting and sculpture. Here are exhibited the works of modern artists which have been deemed worthy of acquisition by the State. They display great talent and technical skill, but the visitor will leave, impressed by few works of great distinction. The English traveller will, however, be envious of a collection whose catholicity embraces examples of the work of two great modern masters, Londoners by option—Legros and Whistler. Any impression of modern French painting that may be left on the mind of the visitor by an{291} inspection of the examples hung in the Luxembourg should however be supplemented and corrected by a visit to the decorative works in the great public edifices, such as the Hôtel de Ville, the Sorbonne, the Panthéon, and the churches of Paris.

North of the Museum loom the massive gloomy towers of the church of St. Sulpice, which contains, among much mediocre painting, a chapel to the right of the entrance adorned by some of Delacroix’s finest work. Still further northward is the old abbey church of St. Germain des Prés. But before entering we may cross the Rue de Rennes and visit (No. 50) the picturesque Cour du Dragon, so-called from the eighteenth-century figure of the dragon over the portal. At the end of this curious courtyard, paved as old Paris was paved, with the gutter in the centre of the street, will be seen two interesting old towers enclosing stairways.

COUR DU DRAGON.

The Louvre from the South-East.

The grey pile of St. Germain des Prés, the burial-place of the Merovingian kings, once refulgent with gold and colour, has been wholly restored; but on the west porch, over the main entrance, a well-preserved, Romanesque relief of the Last Supper may be noted. The admirable frescoes in the interior by Flandrin are among the noblest achievements of modern French art. Part of the Abbots’ Palace of the sixteenth century is left standing in the Rue de l’Abbaye, but of all the fortress-monastery, with its immense domain of lands and cloisters, walls and towers, over which those puissant lords held sway, only a memory remains: the walls were razed in the seventeenth century and replaced by artizans’ houses. The Rue du Four recalls the old feudal oven. Lower down the Rue Bonaparte is the little visited but most interesting Ecole des Beaux Arts, once the monastery of the Petits Augustins, now rich in examples of early Renaissance architecture and other artistic treasures. It is a great teaching centre, and trains some fifteen hundred students in sculpture, painting and architecture. Westward of this, the artists’ quarter of{292} Paris, is the select and aristocratic, but dull Faubourg St. Germain—the noble Faubourg—where many of the descendants of the noblesse who escaped from the wreck of their order during the Revolution, dwell in petulant isolation and haughty aversion from the Third Republic and all its ways. Further westward are the great hospital and church of the Invalides, with Napoleon’s majestic monument, and the military school of the Champ de Mars.

Two parallel historic roads named of St. Martin and St. Denis cut northwards through the masses of habitations that crowd the northern bank of the Seine. The former was the great Roman street, leading to the provinces of the north: the latter, the Grande Chaussée de Monseigneur St. Denis, led to the shrine of the patron saint and martyr of Lutetia. Along this, the richest and finest street of mediæval Paris, the kings of France and Henry V. of England passed in solemn state to Notre Dame. Four gates, whose sites are known in each of these two streets, mark the successive stages of the growth of the city. In 1141 a sloping bank of sand (grève), a little to the east of the Rue St. Martin and facing the old port of the Naut at St. Landry on the island of the Cité, was ceded by royal charter to the burgesses of Paris for a payment of seventy livres. “It is void of houses,” says the charter, “and is called the gravia, and is situated where the old market-place (vetus forum) existed.” This was the origin of the famous Place de Grève where throbbed the very heart of civic, commercial and industrial Paris. Here Etienne Marcel purchased for the Hôtel de Ville the Maison aux Piliers (House of the Pillars), a long, low building, whose upper floor was supported by columns. Here every revolutionary and democratic movement has been organised from the days of Marcel to those of the Communes of 1789—when the last Provost of the Merchants met his death—and of 1871, when Domenico da Cortona’s fine Renaissance hotel was destroyed by fire.{294}

ST. GERVAIS.

The place of sand was much smaller in olden times, and from 1310, when Philip the Fair burned three heretics, to July 1830, when the last murderer was hung there, has soaked up the blood of many a famous enemy of State and Church and of innumerable notorious and obscure criminals. A permanent gibbet stood there and a market cross. Every St. John’s eve—the church and cloister of St. Jean stood{295} behind the Hôtel de Ville—a great bonfire was lighted in the Place de Grève, fireworks were let off, and a salvo of artillery celebrated the festival. When the relations between Crown and Commune were felicitous the king himself would take part in the fête and fired the pile with a torch of white wax which was decorated with crimson velvet. A royal supper and ball in the Grande Salle concluded the revels. Not infrequently the ashes at the stake where a poor wretch had met his doom were scarcely cool before the joyous flames and fireworks of the Feu de St. Jean burst forth. The very day after the execution of the Count of Bouteville the people were dancing round the fires of St. John. The Place was often flooded by the Seine until the embankment was built in 1675. The present Hôtel de Ville, completed in 1882, is one of the finest modern edifices in Europe.

PLACE DES VOSGES, MAISON DE VICTOR HUGO.

To the east of the hotel stands the church of St. Gervais, whose façade by Debrosse (1617) “is regarded,” says Félibien (1725), “as a masterpiece of art by the best architectural authorities” (“les plus intelligens en architecture”). The church, which has been several times rebuilt, occupies the site of the old sixth-century building, near which stood the elm tree where suitors waited for justice to be done by the early kings. “Attendre sous l’orme” (“To wait under the elm”) is still a proverbial expression for waiting till Doomsday. To the east of the Rue St. Martin is the quarter of the Marais (marsh) at whose eastern limit a group of street names recalls the royal palace-city of St. Paul. At the south of the Rue du Figuier, on the Place de l’Ave Maria, stands the Hôtel of the Archbishops of Sens, and near by, in the Passage Charlemagne, is the Hôtel of the royal Provost of Paris. As we cross the Rue St. Antoine to the old Place Royale (des Vosges), we may note at No. 21 the Hôtel de Mayenne—where the chamber still exists in which the leaders of the League met and decided to assassinate Henry III.—and at No. 62, the Hôtel de Sully, where Henry the Fourth’s great minister and,{296} later, Turgot dwelt. The Place Royale occupies the site of the palace of the Tournelles built for the Duke of Bedford during the English occupation, near which Henry II. lost his life in the fatal tournament. The palace became hateful to Catherine de’ Medici, and she had it demolished.{297} The site was subsequently used as a horse market, and there three mignons of Henry III. fought their bloody duel with three bullies of the Duke of Guise. The architecture of Henry IV. Place is little changed; the king’s and queen’s pavilions stood south and north; Richelieu occupied the present No. 21, and at No. 6 dwelt Marshal Lavardin, who was sitting in the coach when his royal master, Henry IV., was stabbed. Later this house was occupied by Victor Hugo, and is now maintained as a museum of much interest to lovers of the darling poet of nineteenth-century Paris. A little to the west, in the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, is the Hôtel Carnarvalet, built in 1544 by Jean Bullant, the architect of the Tuileries, to the design of Pierre Lescot. Jean Goujon carved, among other decorative works, the fine reliefs of the four Seasons in the quadrangle where now stands a bronze statue of Louis XIV. by Coyzevox, brought from the old Hôtel de Ville. In this noble Renaissance mansion, enlarged by F. Mansard and others, lived for twenty years Madame de Sévigné, queen of letter writers, and her Carnarvalette, as she lovingly called it, is now the civic museum of Paris, devoted to objects illustrating the history of the city. It is especially rich in exhibits bearing on the Great Revolution. Passing along the Rue des Francs Bourgeois we may note (No. 38) an old inscription which marks the scene of the assassination of the Duke of Orleans by Jean sans Peur. At the north corner of the Rue des Archives is the entrance to the National Archives, housed in the fine pseudo-classical Hôtel de Soubise, constructed in 1704 on the site of the Hôtel of the Constable de Clisson, of which the old Gothic (restored) portal exists in the Rue des Archives. It was at the Hôtel de Clisson that Charles VI., after his terrible vengeance on the revolted burgesses, agreed to remit further punishment, and for a time the mansion was known as the Hôtel des Grâces.

ARCHIVES NATIONALES IN HÔTEL SOUBISE, SHOWING TOWERS OF HÔTEL DE CLISSON.

Lower down the Rue des Archives are the Rue de {298}l’Homme Armé and the fifteenth-century cloisters of the monastery of the Billettes, founded at the end of the thirteenth century to commemorate the miracle of the sacred Host, which had defied the efforts of the Jew Jonathan to destroy it by steel, fire and boiling. The chapel, built in 1294 on the site of the Jew’s house, was rebuilt in 1754, and is now used as a Protestant church. The miraculous Host was preserved as late as Félibien’s time in St. Jean en Grève, and carried annually in procession on the octave of Corpus Christi. At the north end of the Rue des Archives is the site, now a square and a market, of the grisly old fortress of the Knights Templars, whose walls and towers and round church were still standing a century ago. The enclosure was a famous place of refuge for insolvent debtors and political offenders, and sheltered Rousseau in 1765 when a lettre de cachet was issued for his arrest. In the gloomy keep, which was not destroyed until 1811, were imprisoned the royal family of France after the abandonment of the Tuileries on 10th August 1792. The old market of the Temple, the centre of the petites industries of Paris, is being demolished as we write. West of this is the huge Museum of the Arts and Crafts (Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers), on the site of the abbatial buildings and lands of St. Martin of the Fields, still preserving in its structure the beautiful thirteenth-century church and refectory of the Abbey. As we turn southwards again by the Rue St. Martin we shall pass on our left one of the most curious remains of old Paris, the narrow Rue de Venise, a veritable mediæval street formerly known as the Ruelle des Usuriers, the home of the Law speculators where men almost rent each other in pieces in their mad scramble for fortune. At No. 27, the corner of the Rue Quincampoix, is the famous old inn of the Epée de Bois, now A l’Arrivée de Venise, where De Horn, a member of a princely German family, and two gentlemen assassinated and robbed a financier in open day, and were broken alive on the wheel in the Place de Grève. Marivaux and L. Racine are said, with other wits, to have{300} frequented the old inn, and Mazarin granted letters-patent to a company of dancing masters, who met there under the management of the Roi des Violins. From these modest beginnings grew the National Academy of Dancing.

At the south end of the Rue St. Martin rises the beautiful flamboyant Gothic tower, all that remains of the great church of St. Jacques de la Boucherie. This fine monument of the past was saved by the good sense of the architect Giraud, who, when it was sold to the housebreakers during the Revolution, inserted a clause in the warrant of sale exempting the tower from demolition; it was used as a lead foundry, and twice narrowly escaped destruction by fire. Purchased later by the city it seemed safe at last, but in 1853 the prolongation of the Rue de Rivoli again threatened its existence; luckily, however, the line of the new street passed by on the north. The statue of Pascal, under the vaulting, reminds the traveller that the great thinker conducted some of his barometrical experiments on the summit, and the nineteen statues in the niches mostly represent the patron saints of the various crafts that settled under its shadow. On the Place du Châtelet, at the foot of the Pont au Change, stood the massive Grand Châtelet, originally built by Louis the Lusty near the site of the old fortress, which, during the Norman invasions defended the approach to the Grand Pont as the Petit Châtelet did the approach to the Petit Pont on the south. The Grand Châtelet, demolished in 1802, was the official seat and prison of the Provost of Paris, where he held his criminal court and organised the city watch. The Column and Fountain of Victory which now stand in the Place commemorate the victories of Napoleon in Egypt and Italy.

S. Eustache.

Nowhere in Paris has the housebreaker’s pick been plied with greater vigour than in the parallelogram enclosed by the Boulevard de Sebastopol, the Rues Etienne Marcel and du Louvre, and the Seine. The site of the immense{301} necropolis of the Innocents[168] is now partly occupied by the Square des Innocents adorned by Lescot’s fountain.

A curious early fifteenth-century story is associated with this charnel house. One morning the wife of Adam de la Gonesse and her niece, two bourgeoises of Paris, went abroad to have a little flutter and eat two sous’ worth of tripe in a new inn. On their way they met Dame Tifaigne the milliner, who recommended the tavern of the “Maillez,” where the wine was excellent. Thither they went and drank not wisely but too well. When fifteen sous had already been spent, they determined to make a day of it and ordered roast goose with hot cakes. After further drinking, gauffres, cheese, peeled almonds, pears, spices and walnuts were called for and the feast ended in songs. When the “bad quarter of an hour” came they had not enough money to pay, and parted with some of their finery to meet the score. At midnight they left the inn dancing and singing,—

The streets of Paris, however, at midnight were unsafe even for sober ladies, and these soon fell among thieves, were stripped of the rest of their clothing, then taken up for dead by the watch and flung into the mortuary in the Cemetery of the Innocents; but to the terror of the gravedigger were found lying outside the next morning singing,—

{302}

The huge piles of skulls and human remains that grinned from under the gable roof of the gallery painted with the Dance of Death were in 1786 carted away to the catacombs under Paris, formed by the old Gallo-Roman quarrymen as they quarried the stone used to build Lutetia. An immense area of picturesque Halles and streets:—the Halle aux Draps; the Marché des Herboristes, with their mysterious stores of simples and healing herbs and leeches; the Marché aux Pommes de Terre et aux Oignons; the butter and cheese markets; the fish market; the queer old Rue de la Tonnellerie, under whose shabby porticoes, sellers of rags, old clothes, iron and furniture, crowded against the bread market; the Marché des Prouvaires, beloved of thrifty housewives—all are swallowed up by the vast modern structure of iron and glass, known as Les Halles. The Halle au Blé, or corn market, last to disappear, was built on the site of the Hôtel de la Reine which Catherine de’ Medici had erected when frightened from the Tuileries by her astrologer Ruggieri. The site is now occupied by the Bourse de Commerce. One curious decorated and channelled column, however, which conceals a stairway used by Catherine and her Italian familiar when they ascended to the roof to consult the stars, was preserved and made into a fountain in 1812. It still stands against the new Bourse in the Rue de Viarmes. North of the Halles the small Rue Pirouette recalls the old revolving pillory of the Halles, and yet further north, between Nos. 100 and 102 Rue Réamur, a dingy old passage leads to the Cour des Miracles, which Victor Hugo has made famous in Notre Dame. There, too, was the gambling hell kept by Jean Dubarry, paramour of Jeanne Vaubernier, who was the daughter of a monk and became the famous mistress of Louis XV. She was married by Louis to Guillaume, brother of Jean Dubarry, to give her some standing at court.

Winged Victory of Samothrace.

St. George and the Dragon.
Michel Colombe.

At the south angle of the Rue Montmartre the majestic transitional church of St. Eustache towers over the{303} Halles. We descend the Rue Vauvilliers, formerly of the Four (oven) St. Honoré, in which two of the houses still display old painted signs: others retain their quaint appellations—The Sheep’s Trotter, The Golden Sun, The Cat and Ball. Turning westward by the Rue St. Honoré, we shall find at the corner of the Rue de l’Arbre Sec the fine fountain of the Croix du Trahoir erected in the reign of Francis I. and rebuilt by Soufflot in 1775: here tradition places the cruel death of Queen Brunehaut. Lower down, where the street intersects the Rue de Rivoli, an inscription on the corner house to the left marks the site of the Hôtel de Montbazan, where Coligny was assassinated, and yet lower down the Rue de l’Arbre Sec we note the Hôtel des Mousquetaires, the dwelling of the famous D’Artagnan of Dumas’ Trois Mousquetaires, opposite the apse of the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. After examining the interior of the church, especially the beautiful fifteenth-century Chambre des Archives, and the porch of the same date, we are brought face to face with the principal entrance to the Louvre.

NEAR THE PONT NEUF.

{304}

No other edifice in the world forms so vast a treasure house of rich and varied works of art as the great Palace of the Louvre whose growth we have traced in our story. The nucleus of the gallery of paintings was formed by Francis I. and the Renaissance princes at the palace of Fontainebleau, where the canvases at the beginning of the seventeenth century had reached nearly 200. Colbert, during the reign of Louis XIV. by the purchase of the Mazarin and other collections, added 647 paintings and nearly 6000 drawings in ten years. In 1681 the Cabinet du Roi, for so the collection of royal pictures was called, was transferred to the Louvre. They soon, however, followed their owner to Versailles, but some hundred were subsequently returned to Paris, where they might be inspected at the Luxembourg Palace by the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays. In 1709 Bailly, the keeper of the king’s cabinet, took an inventory of the paintings and they were found to number 2376. In 1757 all were again returned to Versailles, and it was not until 1793, when the National Convention, on Barrère’s motion, took the matter in hand, that they were restored to the Parisians and, together with the works of art removed from the suppressed churches and monasteries, formed the famous picture gallery of the Louvre, which was formally opened to the public on the first anniversary of the memorable 10th of August. Napoleon’s spoils from Italian and other European galleries, which almost choked the Louvre during his reign, were reduced in 1815 by the return of 5233 works of art to their original owners, under English supervision. During the removal of the pictures British sentries were stationed along the galleries, and British soldiers stood under arms on the Quadrangle and the Place du Carrousel to protect the workmen. Subsequent gifts and private legacies have since added priceless collections, the latest, that of Thomy-Thierry, endowing the Museum with numerous examples of the Barbizon school.

Cardinal Virtues. Germain Pilon.

Diana and the Stag.

The ground floor, devoted to the plastic arts,{305} contains in its antique section many excellent Greco-Roman works, but relatively few of pure Greek workmanship. Among those few are the beautiful reliefs in the Salle Grecque and, in the Salle de la Vénus de Milo, the best-known and most-admired example of Greek statues in Europe, which gives its name to the hall. It was to this exquisite creation of idealised womanhood that the poet Heine dragged himself in May 1848 to take leave of the lovely idols of his youth, before he lay, never to raise himself again, on his mattress-grave in the Rue d’Amsterdam. “As I entered the noble hall,” he writes, “where the most blessed goddess of beauty, our dear Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal, I well-nigh broke down and lay at her feet sobbing so piteously that even a heart of stone must be moved to compassion. And the goddess gazed at me compassionately, yet withal so comfortless as who should say, ‘Dost thou not see that I have no arms and cannot help thee?’” It was a God with arms that poor Heine needed. An early work of a nobler and more virile type meets the visitor as he mounts the staircase to the Picture Gallery—the Victory of Samothrace, one of the grandest examples of pure Greek art in its finer period.

Magnificent as the collection of antique sculpture is, the little-visited Musée des Sculptures du Moyen âge, et de la Renaissance will be found of greater importance to the student of French art. Here are examples, few but admirable, of the growth of French sculpture from the tenth to the sixteenth century contrasted with some masterpieces of the Italian sculptors, including Michael Angelo’s so-called Slaves, being actually two of the Virtues wrought for the tomb of Pope Julius II. An interesting thirteenth-century coloured statue of Childebert from St. Germain des Prés, and a beautiful Death of the Virgin from the St. Jacques de la Boucherie, later in style, are especially interesting. Michel Colombe’s fine relief of St. George and the Dragon; Germain Pilon’s Theological Virtues from the church of the Célestins, and the Cardinal Virtues in{306} wood from St. Etienne du Mont; Jean Goujon’s Nymphs of the Seine, and Diana and the Stag, will illustrate the stubborn resistance made by the characteristic native school of sculpture against, and its gradual yielding to, the foreign influence of the Italian Renaissance. The gradual decline of French sculpture during the seventeenth century, its utter degradation in the reign of Louis XV., and signs of its recovery in the revolutionary epoch, may be traced in the Musée des Sculptures modernes.

The Burning Bush.

The last edition (1903) of the Summary Catalogue of the pictures in the Louvre contains the titles of 2984 works, apart from decorative ceiling and mural paintings. The visitor must therefore needs make choice of his own favourite schools or masters, for, if he were to devote but one minute to a cursory examination of each exhibit, twenty-five visits of two hours each would be needed to view the whole collection. The pictures bear evidence of the period during which they were amassed, for they are rich in examples of the later Italian and Netherland schools and relatively poor in those of the pre-Raphaelite masters. But among the latter is Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin, which Vasari declared must have been painted by the hand of one of the blessed spirits or angels represented in the picture, so unspeakably sweet and delightful were their forms, so gentle and delicate their mien, so glorious their colouration. “Even so,” he adds, “and not otherwise, must they be in heaven, and never do I gaze on this picture without discovering fresh beauties, and never do I withdraw my eyes from it sated with seeing.” Every phase in Raphael’s development, from the Peruginesque to the Roman periods, may be studied in the Louvre. No gallery in Europe—not excepting the Accademia of Venice—can approach the Louvre in the wealth of its Titians, and the same might almost be said of its Veroneses. It contains the most famous portrait in the world—Da Vinci’s Monna Lisa—and some exquisite examples of Luini’s fresco and easel works. Among the{307} rich collections of Tuscan and other Italian masters, we may mention two charming frescoes by Botticelli. In no gallery outside Spain are the Spanish artists, especially Murillo, so well represented, and magnificent examples of the later Flemings, Rubens and Van Dyck, adorn its walls. Among the latter master’s works is the Charles I. (No. 1967), bought for the boudoir of Madame Dubarry by Louis XV. on the fiction that it was a family picture, since the page holding the horse was named Barry. Michelet, in his History of the Revolution, says that he never visited the Louvre without staying to muse before this famous historic canvas.[169] Among the later Dutch masters, most of whom are adequately represented, are some masterpieces by Rembrandt; of the Germans, Holbein is seen at his best in some superb portraits.

But the student of French history and lover of French art will infallibly be drawn to the works of the native French schools, and especially to those of the earlier masters. For the extraordinary collection of French Primitifs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, exhibited at Paris in 1904, and the publication of Dimier’s[170] uncompromising and powerful defence of those critics, who, like himself, deny the existence of any indigenous French school of painting whatsoever, have concentrated the attention of the artistic world on this passionately debated controversy. The writer well remembers, some twenty years since, being impressed by certain characteristic traits in the few examples of early French painting hung in the Louvre, and desiring the opportunity of a wider field of observation. Such opportunity has at length been given. Now, while it is{308} quite true that most of the examples of the so-called Franco-Flemish school exhibited in the Pavilion de Marsan would pass, and have passed, unquestioned when seen among a collection of Flemish paintings, yet when massed together, they do display more or less well-defined extra-Flemish and extra-Italian characteristics—a modern feeling for nature and an intimate realism in the treatment of landscape, a freer, more supple and more vivacious drawing of the human figure—that produce a cumulative effect which is almost irresistible, and may be reasonably explained by the theory of a school of painters expressing independent local feeling and genius. We include, of course, the illuminated MSS. exhibited in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Books of Hours at Chantilly by Fouquet and by Pol de Limbourg and his brothers. The latter, by some authorities, are believed to have been the nephews of Malouel, and to have studied their art at Paris. The theory of the existence of a national French school, analogous to the post-revolutionary school of painting, is, of course, untenable, for France, as a nation, can scarcely be said to have existed, in the wider sense of the term, before the end of Louis XI.’s reign. When that monarch came to the throne Paris and North France had been sorely exhausted by the century of the English wars; Burgundy was an independent state; Provence, with its capital Aix, and Avignon were independent counties, ruled by the Counts of Provence and the Pope. A more rational classification into schools would perhaps, as Dimier has hinted, follow the lines of racial division—French and Teutonic. For many of the Flemish artists were French in race, as, for instance, Roger Van der Weyden, who was known to Italians as Rogerus Gallicus, and called himself Roger de la Pasture.

Triptych of Moulins.
Le Maitre de Moulins.

Juvenal des Ursins.
Fouquet.

The two great schools of Christian painting in Europe were born, grew and flourished in the free cities of Flanders in the north, and in the free cities of Italy in the south. French masters, working in the provincial centres of Tours,{309} Dijon, Moulins, Aix and Avignon, were inevitably subdued by the dominant and powerful masters of the north and south, and how far they succeeded in impressing a local and racial individuality on their works is, and long will be, a fruitful theme for constructive artistic criticism. The famous triptych of Moulins, now with many other works attributed to the painter of the Bourbons, known as the Maître de Moulins, who was working between 1480 and 1500, has long been accepted as a work by Ghirlandaio. The well-known painting at the Glasgow Museum, a Prince of Cleves, with his patron saint, St. Victor of Paris, now assigned to the Maître de Moulins, was recently exhibited among the Flemish paintings at Bruges, and has long been attributed to Hugo Van der Goes. The Burning Bush, given to Nicolas Fromont, has been with equal confidence classed as a Flemish work, and even ascribed to Van Eyck; and the Triumph of the Virgin, from Villeneuve-les-Avignon, now on irrefragable evidence assigned to Enguerrand Charonton, has been successively attributed to Van Eyck and Van der Meire. Even if all the paintings which the patriotic bias of enthusiastic critics has attributed to French masters, known or unknown, be accepted, the continuity is broken by many gaps, which can only be filled by assuming, after the fashion of biologists, the existence of “missing links.” Further researches will doubtless elucidate this fascinating controversy.

Among the French Primitifs[171] possessed by the Louvre may be mentioned the Martyrdom of St. Denis, and a Pietà, Nos. 995 and 996, attributed wholly or in part to Malouel, who was working about 1400 for Jean sans Peur at Dijon. A Pietà (No. 998), now attributed to the school of Paris of the late fifteenth century, contains an interesting representation of the Louvre, the abbey of St. Germain des Prés and of Montmartre, and has been ascribed{310} to a pupil of Van Eyck, and later to an Italian painter named Fabrino. By Fouquet (about 1415-1480), the best known of the early French masters, there are portraits of Juvenal des Ursins and Charles VII. Two works (Nos. 1004 and 1005), the portraits of Pierre II., Duke of Bourbon, and of Anne of Beaujean, catalogued under unknown masters, are now assigned by many critics to the Maître de Moulins.[172] Nicholas Froment, who was working about 1480-1500, is represented by admirable portraits (No. 304 a.), of Good King René and Jeanne de Laval, his second wife. Jean Perréal, believed by M. Hulin to be identical with the Maître de Moulins, is also represented by a Virgin and Child between two Donors (No. 1048).

The later master, of Flemish birth, known as Jean Clouet, a painter of great delicacy, simplicity and charm, who died between 1540 and 1541, having spent twenty-five years as court painter of France; his brother, Clouet of Navarre; and his son, François Clouet, who was his assistant during the ten later years of his life, are all more or less doubtfully represented. Nos. 126 and 127, portraits of Francis I., are attributed to Jean Clouet, or Jehannet as this elusive personality is sometimes known; Nos. 128 and 129, two admirable portraits of Charles IX. and his queen Elizabeth of Austria, to François Clouet; No. 134, a portrait of Louis de St. Gellais, is ascribed to Clouet of Navarre. Other portraits executed at this period will be found on the walls, and are of profound interest to the student of French history.

Shepherds of Arcady.
Poussin.

The two years’ sojourn in France of Solario, at the invitation of the Cardinal d’Amboise, of Da Vinci at the solicitation of Louis XII., and the foundation of the school of Fontainebleau by Rosso and Primaticcio, mark the eclipse of whatever schools of French painting were then existing, for the grand manner and dramatic power of the{311} Italians, fostered by royal patronage, carried all before them. Of Rosso, known to the French as Maître Roux, the Louvre has a Pietà and a classical subject—The Challenge of the Pierides (Nos. 1485 and 1486). Primaticcio is represented by some admirable drawings. But the sterility of the Fontainebleau school may be inferred from the fact that when Marie de’ Medici desired to have the Luxembourg decorated with the events in the life of Henry IV., her late husband, she was compelled to apply to a foreigner—Rubens.

Of Vouet (1590-1649), who is important as the leader of the new French school of the seventeenth century, the Louvre has some dozen examples, among them being his masterpiece (No. 971)—The Presentation at the Temple. Bestowing a passing attention on the lesser masters, and pausing to appreciate the works of the three brothers Le Nain, who stand pre-eminent for the healthy, sturdy simplicity of their peasant types and scenes of lowly life, we turn to Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), the greatest of the seventeenth-century masters, who spent the whole of his artistic career in Rome save two unhappy years (1640-1642) at the French court, which his simple habits and artistic conscience made intolerable to him. His exalted and lucid conceptions, admirable art and fertility of invention may be adequately appreciated at the Louvre alone, which holds nearly fifty examples of his work. The beautiful and pathetic Shepherds of Arcady (No. 734) is generally regarded as his masterpiece. A group of shepherds in the fulness of health and beauty are arrested in their enjoyment of life by the warning inscription on a tomb—“Et in arcadia ego” (“I, too, once lived in Arcady”). Equally rich is the Louvre in works of Vouet’s pupil, Lesueur (1617-1655), one of the twelve ancients of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. No greater contrast could be imagined to the frank paganism of Poussin than the works of this fervently religious and tender artist, whose famous series from the life of St. Bruno is now placed in {312}Room XII. His careful application to this monumental task may be estimated by the fact that 146 preliminary studies are preserved in the cabinet of drawings in the Louvre. The decorative skill, fertility and industry of his contemporary and fellow-pupil Lebrun (1617-1690), whom Louis XIV. loved to patronise, may perhaps be better appreciated at Versailles, but the Louvre displays the celebrated series of the Life of Alexander, executed for the Gobelins, and some score of his other works. His less talented rival, Mignard (1612-1695), also a pupil of Vouet, is seen at his best in the frescoes of the dome[173] of the Val de Grâce, but the oppressive influence of the Italian eclectics is all too evident in his style. He excelled in portraiture, and the visitor will not fail to remark the portraits of Madame de Maintenon, and of the Grand Dauphin with his wife and children. Louis XIV., who sat to him many times, one day, towards the end of his life, asked, “Do you find me changed?” “Sire,” answered the courtly painter, “I only perceive a few more victories on your brow.” We may now observe the more grave and virile style of Philippe de Champaigne of Brussels (1602-1674), who settled in Paris at nineteen years of age, and may fairly be classed among the French school. His intimate association with the austere and pious Jansenists of Port Royal is traceable in the Last Supper (No. 1928), and in his masterpiece, the portraits of Mother Catherine Agnes Arnauld and his own daughter, Sister Catherine (No. 1934), painted for the famous convent. He is perhaps better known for his portraits of Richelieu. Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), the best known and most appreciated of the seventeenth-century masters, and the greatest of the early landscape painters, is seen in sixteen examples.

A Seaport.
Claude Lorrain.

Landing of Cleopatra at Tarsus.
Claude Lorrain.

Rarely has the numbing and corrupting influence of royal patronage of art been more clearly demonstrated than in the group of painters who interpreted the hollow state, the sensuality and the more pleasant vices of the courts{313} of Louis XIV., of the Regency, and of Louis XV. But among them, yet not of them, Watteau (1641-1721) stands alone—Watteau the melancholy youth from French Flanders, who invented a new manner of painting, and became known as the Peintre des Scènes Galantes. These scenes of coquetry, frivolity and amorous dalliance, with their patched, powdered and scented ladies and gallants, toying with life in a land where, like that of the Lotus Eaters, it seems always afternoon, he clothes with a refined and delicate vesture of grace and fascination. He has a poetic touch for landscape and a tender, pathetic sense of the tears in mortal things which make him akin to Virgil in literature, for over the languorous and swooning air and sun-steeped glades the coming tempest lours. His success, as Walter Pater suggests, in painting these vain and perishable graces of the drawing-room and garden comedy of life with the delicate odour of decay which rises from the soil, was probably due to the fact that he despised them. The whole age of the Revolution lies between these irresponsible and gay courtiers in the scènes galantes of Watteau and the virile peasant scenes in the “epic of toil” painted by Millet. Among the dozen paintings by Watteau in the Louvre may be especially noted his Academy picture, the Embarkation for Cythera (No. 982). His pupils, Pater and Lancret, imitated his style, but were unable to soar to the higher plane of their master’s idealising spirit.

The eminent portrait painter, Rigaud (1659-1743), whose admirable Louis XIV. (No. 781) has been called “a page of history,” is represented by fifteen works, among them his masterpiece, the portrait of Bossuet (No. 783). A page of history too is the flaunting sensuality of Boucher (1703-1770) and of Fragonard (1732-1806), who lavished facile talents and ignoble industry in the service of the depraved boudoir tastes of the Pompadours and Du Barrys that ruled at Versailles. Productions of these artists in the Louvre are numerous and important. A somewhat feeble protest against the prevailing vulgarity and debasement of{314} contemporary art was made by Chardin (1699-1779) and by the super-sentimental Greuze (1725-1805) in their portrayal of scenes of simple domestic life, of which many examples may be noted in the Louvre.

But from the studio of Boucher there issued towards the end of the century the virile and revolutionary figure of David (1748-1825), who burst like a thunderstorm from the corrupt artistic atmosphere of the age, sweetening and bracing French art for half a century. The successive phases of this somewhat theatrical but potent genius may be followed in the Louvre from the Horatii (No. 189) and the Brutus (No. 191)—the revolutionary flavour of which saved the painter’s life during the Terror—to the later glorifications of Napoleonic splendours. The candelabrum in David’s best-known work, the portrait of Madame Récamier, is said to have been painted by his pupil Ingres (1780-1867), a commanding personality of the post-revolutionary epoch. To him and to his master is due the tradition of correct and honest drawing which ever since has characterised the modern French school of painting. Besides La Source, the most famous figure drawing of the school, the Louvre possesses many of his portraits and subject paintings. To appreciate duly the artist’s power, however, the drawings in the Salle des desseins d’Ingres should be studied. No master has evoked more reverence and admiration among students. More than once Professor Legros has told the writer of the thrill of emotion that passed through him and all his fellow-students when they saw the aged master enter the Ecole des Beaux Arts at Paris. Flandrin, the chief religious painter of the school, is poorly represented in the Louvre, and must be studied in the churches of St. Germain des Prés and St. Vincent de Paul.

The Embarkation for the Island of Cythera.
Watteau.

A two-fold study of absorbing interest to the artistic mind may be prosecuted in the Louvre—the development of the modern Romantic school of French painters from Gericault’s famous Raft of the Medusa, painted in 1819, through the works of Delacroix and Delaroche; and the{315} revival of landscape painting, under the stimulus of the English artists Bonnington and Constable, by Rousseau (1812-1867), the all-father of the modern French landscape school, and the little band of enthusiasts that grouped themselves around him at Barbizon. Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, Troyon and the grand and solemn Millet, once despised and rejected of men, have now won fame and appreciation. No princely patronage shone upon them nor smoothed their path; they wrought out the beauty of their souls under the hard discipline of poverty and in loving and awful communion with nature. They have revealed to the modern world new tones of colour in the air and the forest and the plain, and a new sense of the pathos and beauty in simple lives and common things.

The artistic treasures we have thus briefly and summarily reviewed form but a part of the inestimable possessions of the Louvre. Collections of drawings; ivories; reliquaries and sanctuary vessels; pottery; jewellery; furniture (among which is the famous bureau du roi, the most wonderful piece of cabinet work in Europe); bronzes; Greek, Egyptian, Assyrian, Chaldean and Persian antiquities (including the unique and magnificent frieze of the archers from the palace of Darius I.), all are crowded with objects of interest and beauty, even to the inexpert visitor.

Of the gorgeous palace of the Tuileries, with its inharmonious but picturesque façade, stretching across the western limit of the Louvre from the Pavilion de Flore to the Pavilion de Marsan, not one stone is left on another. We remember it after its fiery purgation by the Commune in 1871, a gaunt shell blackened and ruined, fitting emblem of the wreck which the enthroned wantonness and corruption of the Second Empire had made of France.

Grace before Meat.
Chardin.

Madame Recamier.
David.

North of the Louvre is the Palais Royal, once the gayest, now the dullest scene in Paris. This quarter of Richelieu and of Mazarin drew to itself the wealth and fashion of the city in its migration westward from the Marais{316} during the times of Louis XIII. and of the Regency of Anne of Austria. Nearly all the princely hotels that crowded the district have long since given place to commercial houses and shops. The mansions of the two great ministers remain as the Conseil d’Etat and the Bibliothèque Nationale, but all that is left of the immense Hôtel de Colbert in the Rue Vivienne is a name—the Passage Colbert. The same is true of the vast area of lands and buildings of the convent of the Filles de St. Thomas, of which the present Bourse and the Place before it only occupy a part. At the corner, however, of the Rue des Petits Champs and St. Anne the fine double façade of the Hôtel erected by Lulli with money borrowed from Molière may be seen, bearing the great musician’s coat-of-arms—a design of trumpets, lyres and cymbals. Further west, Napoleon’s Rues de Castiglione and de la Paix, the Regent Street of Paris, run south and north from the Place Vendôme, intended by its creator Louvois to be the most spacious in the city. A monumental parallelogram of public offices was to enclose the Place, but Versailles engulfed the king’s resources and the ambitious scheme was whittled down, the area much reduced, and the site and foundations of the new buildings were handed over to the Ville. What the Allies failed to do in 1814 the Commune succeeded in doing in 1871, and the boastful Column of Vendôme, a pitiful plagiarism of Trajan’s Column at Rome, was laid in the dust, only however to be raised again by the Third Republic in 1875. The Rue Castiglione leads down to the Terrace of the Feuillants overlooking the Tuileries gardens, all that is left of the famous monastery and grounds where Lafayette’s club of constitutional reformers met. The beautiful gardens remain much as Le Notre designed them for Louis XIV., and every spring the orange trees, some of them dating back it is said to the time of Francis I., are brought forth from the orangery to adorn the central avenue, and the gardens become vocal with many voices of children at their games—French children with their gentle humour and{317} sweet, refined play. Right and left of the central avenue, the two marble exhedræ may still be seen which were erected in 1793 for the elders who presided over the floral celebrations of the month of Germinal by the children of the Republic.

The Place Louis XV (now de la Concorde), with its setting of pavilions adorned with groups of statuary representing the chief cities of France, was created by Gabriel in 1763-1772 on the site of a dreary, marshy waste used as a depot for marble. The Place was adorned in 1763 with an equestrian statue of Louis XV., elevated on a pedestal which was decorated at the corners by statues of the cardinal virtues. Mordant couplets, two of which we transcribe, affixed on the base, soon expressed the judgment of the Parisians:—

After the fall of the monarchy the Place was known as the Place de la Revolution, and in 1792, Louis XV. with the other royal simulacra in bronze having been forged into the cannon that thundered against the allied kings of Europe, a plaster statue of Liberty was erected, at whose side the guillotine mowed down king and queen, revolutionist and aristocrat in one bloody harvest of death, ensanguining the very figure of the goddess herself, who looked on with cold and impassive mien. She too fell, and in her place stood a fascis of eighty-three spears, symbolising the unity of the eighty-three departments of France. In 1795 the Directory changed the{318} name to Place de la Concorde, and again in 1799 a seated statue of Liberty holding a globe was set up. In the hollow globe a pair of wild doves built their nest—a futile augury, for in 1801 Liberty II. was broken in pieces, and the model for a tall granite column erected in its place by Napoleon I. One year passed and this too disappeared. After the Restoration, among the other inanities came, in 1816, a second statue of Louis XV., and the Place resumed its original name. Ten years later an expiatory monument to Louis XVI. was begun, only to be swept away with other Bourbon lumber by the July Revolution of 1830. At length the famous obelisk from Luxor, after many vicissitudes, was elevated in 1836 where it now stands.

Landscape.
Corot.

The Place as we behold it dates from 1854, when the deep fosses which surrounded it in Louis XV.’s time, and which were responsible for the terrible disaster that attended the wedding festivities of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, were filled up, and other improvements and embellishments effected. The vast space and magnificent vistas enjoyed from this square are among the finest urban spectacles in Europe. To the north, on either side of the broad Rue Royale which opens to the Madeleine, stand Gabriel’s fine edifices (now the Ministry of Marine and the Cercle de la Rue Royale), designed to accommodate foreign ambassadors. To the south is the Palais Bourbon, now the Chamber of Deputies; to the east are the gardens of the Tuileries, and to the west is the stately Grande Avenue of the Champs Elysées rising to the colossal Arch of Triumph crowning the eminence of the Place de l’Etoile. As our eyes travel along the famous avenue, memories of the military glories and of the threefold humiliation of Imperial France crowd upon us. For down its ample way there marched in 1814 and 1815 two hostile and conquering armies to occupy Paris, and in 1871 the immense vault of the Arc de Triomphe, an arch of greater magnitude than any raised to Roman Cæsars, echoed to the shouts of another exultant foreign host, mocking as they strode beneath it at the names of German defeats{319} inscribed on its stones. And on the very Place de la Concorde, German hussars waltzed in pairs to the brazen music of a Uhlan band, while a line of French sentries across the entrance to the Tuileries gardens gazed sullenly on.

To the south of the Champs Elysées is the Cours de la Reine, planted by Catherine de’ Medici, for two years the most fashionable carriage drive in Paris. The charming Maison François I. brought from Moret, stone by stone, in 1826 stands re-erected at the further corner of the Cours. To the north, in the Cours de Gabriel, a fine gilded grille, surmounted with the arms of the Republic, gives access to the Elysée, the official residence of the President. It was once Madame Pompadour’s favourite house in Paris, and the piece of land she appropriated from the public to round off her gardens is still retained in its grounds. In the Avenue Montaigne (once the Allée des Veuves, a retired walk used by widows during their term of seclusion) Nos. 51 and 53 stand on the site of the notorious Bal Mabille,[176] the temple of the bacchanalia of the gay world of the Second Empire. In 1764 the Champs Elysées ended at Chaillot, an old feudal property which Louis XI. gave to Phillipe de Comines in 1450, and which in 1651 sheltered the unhappy widow of Charles I. Here Catherine de’ Medici built a château, but château and a nunnery of the Filles de Sainte Marie, founded by the English queen, disappeared in 1790. As we descend the Rue de Chaillot and pass the Trocadero we see across the Pont de Jéna the gilded dome of the Invalides and the vast field of Mars, the scene of the Feast of Pikes, and now encumbered by the relics of four World’s Fairs.

Lictors bringing to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons.
David.

The Paris we have rapidly surveyed is, mainly, enclosed by the inner boulevards, which correspond to the ramparts of Louis XIII. on the north demolished by his successor between 1676 and 1707, and the line of the Philip Augustus wall and the Boulevard St. Germain on the south. Beyond{320} this historic area are the outer boulevards which mark the octroi wall of Louis XVI.; further yet are the Thiers wall and fortifications of 1841. Within these wider boundaries is the greater Paris of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of profound concern to the economical and social student, but of minor interest to the ordinary traveller. The vogue of the brilliant and gay inner boulevards of the north bank so familiar to the foreigner in Paris is of comparatively recent growth. In the early nineteenth century the boulevard from the Place de la Madeleine to the Rue Cambon was almost deserted by day and dangerous by night—a vast waste, the proceeds of the confiscated lands of the Filles de la Conception. About the same time the fashionable cafés were migrating from the Palais Royal to the Boulevard des Italiens, south of which was built the Theatre of the Comédie Italienne, afterwards known as the Opéra Comique. Its façade was turned away from the boulevard lest the susceptible artists should be confounded with the ordinary “comediens of the boulevard.” From the Boulevard Montmartre to the Boulevard St. Martin followed lines of private hotels, villas, gardens and convent walls. A great mound which separated the Boulevard St. Martin from the Boulevard du Temple still existed, and was not cleared away until 1853. From 1760 to 1862 the Boulevard du Temple was a centre of pleasure and amusement, where charming suburban houses and pretty gardens alternated with cheap restaurants, hotels, theatres, cafés, marionette shows, circuses, tight-rope dancers, waxworks, and cafés-chantants. In 1835, so lurid were the dramas played there, that the boulevard was popularly known as the Boulevard du Crime. But the expression of the dramatic and musical genius and social life of the Parisians in their higher forms is of sufficient importance to merit a concluding chapter.{321}

CHAPTER XX

THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE—THE OPÉRA—SOME FAMOUS CAFÉS—CONCLUSION

AS early as 1341 the Rue des Jongleurs was inhabited by minstrels, mimes and players. They were men of tender heart, for in 1331 two jongleurs, Giacomo of Pistoia and Hugues of Lorraine, were touched by beholding a paralysed woman forsaken by the way, and determined to found a refuge for the sick poor: they hired a room and furnished it with some beds, but being unable to provide funds for maintenance, their warden collected alms from the charitable. In 1332, at a meeting of the Jongleurs of Paris, Giacomo and Hugues were present, and urged the claims of the poor upon their fellows. The players decided to found a guild with a hospital and church dedicated to St. Julian of the Minstrels,[177] but the Bishop of Paris, doubting their financial powers, required a certain sum to be paid within four years, in order to endow a chaplaincy and to compensate the curé of St. Merri. The players more than fulfilled their promise; their capitulary was confirmed by pope and king, and in 1343 they elected William the Flute Player and Henry of Mondidier as administrators; the servants of the Muses were therefore of no small importance in the fourteenth century. As early as 1398 the Confraternity of the Passion is known to have existed, and so charmed the people of Paris by its Passion Plays that the hour of vespers was{322} advanced to allow the faithful time to attend the representations, which lasted from 1.30 to 5 o’clock without any interval. In 1548 the Confraternity was performing at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the old mansion of Jean Sans Peur, for it was then forbidden to play the mystery of the Passion any more, and limited to profane, decent and lawful pieces, which were not to begin before 3 o’clock. From 1566 to 1676 the Comedians of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, as they were then called, continued their performances, and many ordinances were needed to purify the stage, to prevent licentious pieces and the use of words of double entente. Competitive companies performed at the Hôtel de Cluny, and in the Rue Michel le Comte, in those days a narrow street which became so blocked by carriages and horses during the performances that the inhabitants complained of being unable to reach their houses, and of suffering much from thieves and footpads. It was at the Hôtel de Bourgogne that the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine—Le Cid, Andromaque and Phèdre—were first performed.

The Pond.
Rousseau.

ARCHES IN THE COURTYARD OF THE HÔTEL CLUNY.

{323}

At No. 12 Rue Mazarine an inscription marks the site of the Tennis Court of the Métayers near the fosses of the old Porte de Nesle, where in 1643 a cultured young fellow, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, son of a prosperous tradesman of Paris, having associated himself with the Béjart family of comedians, opened the Illustre Théâtre. The venture met with small success, for soon Molière crossed the Seine and migrated to the Port St. Paul. Thence he returned to the Faubourg St. Germain and rented the Tennis Court of the Croix Blanche. Ill fortune still followed him, for in 1645, unable to pay his candlemaker, the illustrious player saw the inside of the debtors’ prison at the Petit Châtelet, and the company must needs borrow money to release their director. In 1646 the players left for the Provinces and were not seen again in Paris for twelve years.

The theatre of those days was innocent of stage upholstery, the exiguous decorations being confined to some hangings of faded tapestry on the stage and a few tallow candles with tin reflectors. A chandelier holding four candles hung from the roof and was periodically lowered and drawn up again during the performance; any spectator near by snuffed the candles with his fingers. The orchestra consisted of a flute and a drum, or two violins. The play began at two o’clock; the charges for entrance were twopence half-penny for a standing place in the pit, fivepence for a seat. On 24th October 1658 Molière, having won distinguished patronage, was honoured by a royal command to play Corneille’s Nicodème before the court at the Louvre. After the play was ended Molière prayed to be allowed to perform a little piece of his own—Le Docteur Amoureux—and so much amused Louis XIV. that the players were commanded to settle at Paris and permitted to use the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourbon three days a week in alternation with the comedians of the opera. Here it was that the first essentially French comedy, Les Précieuses Ridicules, was performed with such success that{324} after the second performance the prices were doubled. During the first performance an old playgoer is said to have risen and exclaimed, “Courage! Molière, voilà de la bonne comédie!”

After the demolition of the Hôtel de Bourbon, the players were settled in Richelieu’s theatre at the Palais Royal, where they performed for the first time on 20th January 1661. During this period of transition Molière was again invited to play before the king in the Salle des Gardes (Caryatides) at the Louvre, and so keen was the interest in the new bonne comédie that the almost dying Mazarin had his chair dragged into the hall that he might be present.

In 1665 the king appointed Molière valet du roi at a salary of a thousand livres, subsidised the company to the amount of seven thousand livres a year, and they were thenceforth known as the “Troupe du Roi.” Free from pecuniary anxiety, the great dramatist wrote his masterpieces, Le Misanthrope, Tartuffe, L’Avare, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and Les Femmes Savantes.

Millet.
The Binders.

In 1673, after Molière’s death, the Troupe du Roi joined the players of the Marais and rented the famous Théâtre Guénégaud in the old Tennis Court of La Bouteille which had been fitted up for the first performances of French opera in 1671-1672. The united companies played there until 1680, when the long-standing jealousy which had existed between the Troupe du Roi and the players of the Hôtel de Bourgogne was finally dissipated by the fusion of the two companies to form the Comédie Française. For nine years the famous Comédie used the Théâtre Guénégaud, whose site may be seen marked with an inscription at 42 Rue Mazarine. In 1689 the players were evicted from the Théâtre Guénégaud, owing to the machinations of the Jansenists at the Collége Mazarin, and rented the Tennis Court de l’Etoile near the Boulevard St. Germain, now No. 14 Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, which they opened on{325} 18th April 1689 by a performance of Phèdre and Le Médecin malgré lui. Here the Comédie Française remained until 1770. In 1781 they were playing at the Théâtre de la Nation (now Odéon.)[178] In 1787 a theatre was built in the Rue Richelieu for the Variétés Amusantes, or the Palais Variétés, where the new Théâtre Français[179] now stands, a little to the west of Richelieu’s theatre of the Palais Cardinal, whose site is indicated by an inscription at the corner of the Rues de Valois and St. Honoré.

Soon the passions evoked by the Revolutionary movement were felt on the boards, and the staid old Comédie Française was rent by rival factions. The performance of Chenier’s patriotic tragedy, Charles IX., on 4th November 1789, was made a political demonstration, and the pit acclaimed Talma with frantic applause as he created the rôle of Charles IX., and the days of St. Bartholomew were acted on the stage. The bishops tried to stop the performances, and priests refused absolution to those of their penitents who went to see them. The Royalists among the Comedians replied by playing a loyalist repertory, Cinna and Athalie, amid shouts from the pit for William Tell and the Death of Cæsar, and Molière’s famous house became an arena where political factions strove for mastery. Men went to the theatre armed as to a battle. Every couplet fired the passions of the audience, the boxes crying, “Vive le roi!” to be answered by the hoarse voices of the pit, “Vive la nation!” Shouts were raised for the busts of Voltaire and of Brutus: they were brought from the foyer and placed on the stage. The very kings of shreds and patches on the boards came to blows and the Roman toga concealed a poignard. For a time “idolatry” triumphed at the Nation, but Talma and the patriots at length won. A reconciliation was effected, and at a performance of the{326} Taking of the Bastille, on 8th January 1791, Talma addressed the audience saying that they had composed their differences. Naudet, the Royalist champion, was recalcitrant, and amid furious shouts from the pit, “On your knees, citizen!” at length gave way, embraced Talma with ill-grace, and on the ensuing nights the Revolutionary repertory, The Conquest of Liberty, Rome Saved, and Brutus held the boards. The court took their revenge at the opera where the boxes called for the airs, “O Richard, O mon roi,” and “Règne sur un peuple fidèle,” while the king, queen and dauphin appeared in the box amid shouts of “Vive le roi!” On 13th January of the same year the restrictions on the opening of playhouses were revoked, and by November no less than seventy-eight theatres were registered on the books of the Hôtel de Ville. The Théâtre Français became the Théâtre de la Republique, and during the early months of ’93, when the fate of the monarchy hung in the balance, the most popular piece was Catherine, or The Farmer’s Fair Wife (La belle Fermière). Fénelon, a new tragedy, was often played, and on 6th February citizen Talma acted Othello for his benefit performance.

In the stormy year of 1830, when the July Revolution made an end for ever of the Bourbon cause in France, the Comédie Française was again a scene of fierce and bitter strife. Hernani, a drama in verse, had been accepted from the pen of Victor Hugo, the brilliant and exuberant master of a new Romantic school of poets, who had determined to emancipate themselves from the traditions, which had long since hardened into literary dogmas, of the Classical school of the siècle de Louis Quatorze. On the night of the first performance each side, Romanticists and Classicists, had packed the theatre with their partisans, and the air was charged with feeling. The curtain rose, but less than two lines were uttered before the pent-up passions of the audience burst forth:—

The Trocadero.

{327}

The last word had not passed the actress’s lips when a howl of execration rose from the devotees of Racine, outraged by the author’s heresy in permitting an adjective to stray into the second line of the verse. The Romanticists, led by Théophile Gautier, answered in withering blasphemies, and soon the pit became a pandemonium of warring factions. Night after night the literary sects renewed their contests, and the representations, as Victor Hugo said, became battles rather than performances. The year 1830 was the ’93 of the Romantic school, but the passions it evoked have long since been calmed, and Hernani and Le Roi s’Amuse, which latter was suppressed by the Government of Louis Philippe after the first performance, have taken their place in the classic repertory of the Théâtre Français beside the tragedies of Racine and Corneille.

A curious development of dramatic art runs parallel to the movement we have traced. One of the earliest Corporations of Paris was that of the famous Basoche,[180] or law-clerks and practitioners, at the Palais de Justice, who were organised in a little realm of their own, subject to the superior power of the Parlement. The Basoche had its own king (roi de la Basoche), chancellor, masters, almoners, secretaries, treasurers and a number of minor officials, made its own laws and punished offenders. It had its own money, seal, and arms composed of an escritoire on a field fleur-de-lisé, surmounted by a casque and morion. It had, moreover, jurisdiction over the farces, sottises and moralités played by its members before the public. The clerks of the Basoche organised processions and plays for public festivals, and were compensated for out-of-pocket expenses if for any reason the celebrations were cancelled by the Parlement. If the date, 6th January 1482, of one of these performances in the Grande Salle of the Palais de Justice, so vividly described by Victor Hugo in Notre Dame, be correct, the prohibition by the Parlement in 1477, renewed in 1478, of any performances of farce, sottise, or moralité by the king of the Basoche in the{328} Palais or the Châtelet, or elsewhere in public, under pain of a whipping with withies and banishment, must have been soon withdrawn. In 1538 the Basoche was ordered to deliver to the Parlement any plays they proposed to perform, that they might be examined and emended (visités et reformés) and to act in public, only such plays as had been approved by the court.

The clerks of the Basoche were clothed in yellow and blue taffety, and, on extraordinary occasions, in gorgeous costumes varying according to the company to which they belonged. Each captain had the form and style of his company’s dress painted on vellum, and whoso desired to join signed his name beneath, and agreed to be subject to a fine of ten crowns if he made default. In 1528 a famous trial took place before the Parlement on the occasion of an appeal by one of the clerks against the chancellor of the Basoche, who had seized his cloak in payment of a fine and costs. After many pleadings by celebrated lawyers, the case was referred back to the king of the Basoche, with instructions that he was to treat his subjects amiably.

The treasurers of the Basoche were charged with the cost of the annual planting of the May tree in the Cour du Mai of the Palais. Towards the end of May the procession of the Basoche wended its way to the Forest of Bondy, where halt was made under the Orme aux harangues (elm of the speeches). Here their procureur made an oration, and demanded from the officer of woods and forests two trees of his own choice in the king’s name, which were carried to Paris amid much playing of drums and fifes and trumpets. On the last Saturday in May the ceremony of the planting took place in the court of the palace, the preceding year’s tree, standing to the right of the entrance, was felled and removed, and the more flourishing of the two brought from the forest was planted in its stead.

Anne of Austria, to whom Molière dedicated one of his plays, was so devoted an admirer of the theatre that even during the period of court mourning for her royal husband{329} she was unable to renounce her favourite pleasure and witnessed the plays at the Palais Royal concealed behind her ladies. Mazarin, courtier that he was, flattered her passion for the drama by introducing a company of Italian opera-singers, who in 1647 performed La Finta Pazza at the Hôtel de Bourbon.

The new entertainment met with instant success, and the French were spurred to emulation by the music and voices of the foreign performers. Anne’s music masters, Lambert and Cambert, set to music a piece written by the Abbé Perrin, who was attached to the court of the Duke of Orleans, and this musical comedy was performed with brilliant success before the young king at Vincennes. Encouraged by Mazarin, Perrin and Cambert joined the Marquis of Sourdeac, a clever mechanician, and obtained permission in 1669 to open an Academy of Music, for so the new venture was called, and works were performed which vied in attraction with those of the Italians. Perrin now obtained the sole privilege of producing operas in Paris and other French towns, and in 1671-1672 we find the entrepreneurs giving performances of Pomone among other “Comédies Françaises en Musique” in the theatre of the Hôtel de Guénégaud. Perrin having disagreed with his partners, the privilege of performing opera was next transferred to a young Italian musician named Lulli, who had entered the service of Mademoiselle (daughter of the Duke of Orleans) as a kitchen boy, but having developed an extraordinary aptitude for the violin was put under a master, and became one of the greatest performers of the day. He entered the king’s service, won the protection of Madame de Montespan, and so charmed Louis by his talents that his fortune was assured. Lulli’s works were first given at the Tennis Court of Bel-air, in the Rue Vaugirard, and a clause having been inserted in the charter permitting the nobles of the court to take part in the representations without derogation, a performance of Love and Bacchus was given before the{330} king in which the Duke of Monmouth was associated with seven French nobles.

When Molière’s company of comedians left the theatre of the Palais Royal in 1673, Lulli’s “Academy” was established in their place, and the Palais Royal Theatre became the Royal Opera House until 1787, with an interval caused by the rebuilding after the fire of 1763. In 1697 the Italians were forbidden to perform any more in Paris, and French opera enjoyed a monopoly of royal favour, until the Regent recalled the Italians in 1716.

The Académie de Musique, or French Opera, subsequently migrated to the Salle d’Opéra, at the Hôtel Louvois, on the site of the present Square Louvois. It was in this house that the Duke of Berri was assassinated in 1820. The Government decreed the demolition of the building, and an opera house was hurriedly erected in the Rue Lepelletier. This inconvenient, stuffy Hall of the Muses, so familiar to the older generation of opera-goers, was at length superseded by the present luxurious temple in 1874.

Arc de Triomphe.

The early French operas were of the nature of elaborate ballets, based invariably on mythological subjects, and, indeed, the ballet up to recent times, when the reforming influence of Wagner’s music-dramas made itself felt, has always formed the more important part of every operatic performance. Only when the curtain rose on the scènes de ballet did chatter cease, for as Taine remarked, “Le public ne se trouve émoustillé que par le ballet” (“The public only brightens up at the ballet”), and the traditional habit of Society was expressed in the formula, “On n’écoute que le ballet” (“One only listens to the ballet”). Molière wrote a tragédie-ballet, a pastorale heroique, a pastorale comique, and eight comédies-ballets, in one of which, Le Sicilian, the king himself, the Marquis of Villeroi and other courtiers performed with Molière and his daughter. In 1681 the permission already given to the princes and other nobles to take part in the ballets without derogation was extended to{331} the ladies of the court, who in that year performed the Triomphe de l’Amour. The innovation proved most successful, and soon affected the public stage, where, as at the court, up to that period male performers alone were tolerated. Mdlle. de la Fontaine was the first of the famous danseuses of the Paris opera, and her portrait, with those of some score of her successors, still adorn the foyer de la danse. The opera was a social rather than a musical function, and the old foyer, until the fall of the Second Empire, was the favourite meeting-place during the season of royal and distinguished personages, courtiers, ministers, ambassadors, and, indeed, of all French society of the male persuasion. Such was the passion for the opera during the reign of Louis XVI. that fashionable devotees would journey from Brussels to Paris in time to see the curtain rise and return to Brussels when the performance was over, travelling all night.

“In fair weather or foul,” says Diderot in the opening lines of the Neveu de Rameau “it is my custom, towards five in the evening, to stroll about the Palais Royal, where I muse silently on politics, love, taste or philosophy. If the weather be too cold or wet, I take refuge in the Café de la Régence, and there I amuse myself by watching the chess players; for Paris is the one place in the world, and the Café de la Régence the one place in Paris, where chess is played perfectly.” The Café Procope and the Régence have been termed the Adam and Eve of the cafés of Paris. The former was the first coffee-house seen there, and was opened by one Gregory of Aleppo and a Sicilian, Procopio by name, shortly before the Comédie Française was transferred in 1689 to its new house in the present Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. The famous café, where, too, ices were first sold, was situated opposite the theatre, and at once became a kind of ante-chamber to the Comédie, crowded with actors and dramatic authors, among whom were seen Voltaire, Crébillon and Piron.

The Café de la Place du Palais Royal, the original apellation{332} of the Régence, was founded shortly after the Procope, and became the favourite haunt of literary men, and especially of chess-players. Here the author of Gil Blas beheld, in a vast salon brilliant with lustres and mirrors, a score of silent and grave personages, pousseurs de bois (wood-shovers), playing at chess on marble tables, surrounded by others watching the games, amid a silence so profound that the movement of the pieces could alone be heard. If, however, we may credit a description of the famous hall of the chequer-board published in Fraser’s Magazine, December 1840, the tempers of the players must have suffered a distressing deterioration since the times of Le Sage, for when the author of the article entered the café, in the winter of 1839, his ears were assailed by a “roar like that of the Regent’s Park beast show at feeding-time.” So great was the renown of the Parisian players that strangers from the four corners of the earth—Poles, Turks, Moors and Hindoos—made journeys to the Café de la Régence as to an arena where victory was esteemed final and complete. Not even on the Rialto of Venice, says the writer in Fraser’s, in its most famous time, could so great a mixture of garbs and tongues be met. Here, among other literary monarchs who visited the café, came Voltaire and D’Alembert. Jean Jacques Rousseau, dressed as an Armenian, drew such crowds that the proprietor was forced to appeal for police protection, and the eccentric philosopher, while absorbed in play, was furtively sketched by St. Aubin. Here came, incogniti, the Emperor Joseph of Austria, brother of Marie Antoinette, and Emperor Paul of Russia, the latter betraying his imperial quality by tossing to the waiter a golden louis he had won by betting on a game. The café was the favourite resort of Robespierre, a devoted chess-player, who lived close by in the Rue St. Honoré (No. 398), and of the young Napoleon Bonaparte when waiting on fortune in Paris. The latter is said to have been a rough, impatient player, and a bad loser. Hats were kept on to economise space, and on a winter Sunday afternoon a chair was worth{333} a monarch’s ransom: when a champion player entered, hats were raised, and fifty challengers leapt from their seats to offer a game. So proud was the proprietor of the distinction conferred on his café, that long after Rousseau’s and Voltaire’s deaths he would call to the waiter, “Serve Jean Jacques!” “Look to Voltaire!” if any customers sat down at the tables where the famous philosophers had been wont to sit. While the big game of political chess was being enacted in the streets of Paris during the three days of July 1830, the players of the café are said to have calmly pushed their wooden pieces undisturbed by the fighting outside, during which the front of the building was injured. The original café no longer exists, for in 1852 the Régence was removed from the Place du Palais Royal to the Rue St. Honoré. Last year the writer was startled by an amazing exuviation of the somewhat faded café, which had assumed a new decoration of most brilliant and approved modernity; it now vies in splendour with the cafes of the Boulevards. A few chess-players still linger on and are relegated to a recessed room.

Shortly after the foundation of the Régence another café was opened by Widow Marion on the old Carrefour de l’Opéra, where the Academicians gathered and discussed of matters affecting the French language. At Guadot’s, on the Place de l’Ecole, was heard the clank of spur and sabre. Soon every phase of Parisian social life found its appropriate coffee-house, and by the end of the eighteenth century some nine hundred cafés were established in the city.

But this new development was regarded with small favour by the Government, always suspicious of any form of social and intellectual activity. Politics were forbidden, and spies haunted the precincts of the chief cafés. Ill fared the man, however distinguished, whose political feelings overmastered his prudence, for an invidious phrase was not infrequently the password to the Bastille. It was difficult even to discuss philosophy, and the lovers of wisdom who met at Procope’s were reduced to inventing a jargon for its principal terms—Monsieur l’Etre for God, Javotte for{334} Religion and Margot for the Soul—to put spies off the scent, not always with success. No newspapers were provided until the Revolutionary time, when the Gazette or the Journal became more important than the coffee: the cafés of the Palais Royal were then transformed into so many political clubs, where every table served as a rostrum of fiery declamation, for the agitated and eventful summer of 1789 was a rainy one, to the good fortune of the Palais Royal houses. No. 46 Rue Richelieu stands on the site of the Café de Foy, the senior and most famous of them, founded in 1700. It extended through to the gardens of the Palais Royal, and in early times its proprietor was the only one permitted to place chairs and tables on the terrace. There, in the afternoon, would sit the finely-apparelled sons of Mars, and other gay dogs of the period, with their scented perukes, amber vinaigrettes, silver-hilted swords and gold-headed canes, quizzing the passers-by. In summer evenings, after the conclusion of the opera at 8.30., the bonne compagnie in full dress would stroll under the great overarching trees of the grand allée, or sit at the cafés listening to open-air performers, sometimes remaining on moonlight nights as late as 2 a.m. Between 1770 and 1780 the favourite promenade was the scene of violent conflicts between the partisans of Gluck and Piccini, and many a duel was recorded between the champions of the rival musical factions.

In the Garden of the Tuileries.

It was from one of the tables of the Café Foy that Camille Desmoulins sounded the war-cry of the Revolution. Every day a special courier from Versailles brought the bulletins of the National Assembly, which were read publicly amid clamorous interjections. Spies found their office a perilous one, for, if discovered, they were ducked in the basins of the fountains, and, when feeling grew more bitter, risked meeting a violent death. Later the Café Foy made a complete volte-face, raised its ices to twenty sous and grew Royalist in tone. Its frequenters came armed with sword-sticks and loaded canes, raised their hats when the king’s name was uttered, and one evil day planted a gallows{335} outside the café, painted with the national colours. The excited patriots stormed the house, expelled the Royalists and disinfected the salon with gin. During the occupation of Paris by the allies many a fatal duel between the foreign officers and the Imperialists was initiated there. Later, Horace Vernet painted a swallow on the ceiling, which attracted many visitors; the dramatists and artists of the Théâtre Français freely patronised the house, and among them might be often seen the huge figure of the most prodigious master of modern romantic fiction, Alexandre Dumas.

The extremer section of the Revolutionists frequented the Café Corazza, still extant, which soon became a minor Jacobins, where, after the club was closed, the excited orators continued their discussions: Chabot, Collot d’Herbois and other terrorists met there. The Café Valois was patronised by the Feuillants, and so excited the ire of the Fédérés, who met at the Caveau, that one day they issued forth, assailed their opponents’ stronghold and burned the copies of the Journal de Paris found there. The old Café Procope in the south of Paris became the Café Zoppi, where the “zealous children of triumphant Liberty” assembled, and where the “Friends of the Revolution and of Humanity,” on the news of Franklin’s death, covered the lustres with crape and affixed his bust, crowned with oak leaves, outside the door. A legend told of the great American’s death, and the words “vir Deus” were inscribed beneath the bust. Every day at five o’clock the habitués formed themselves into a club in the salon decorated with statues of Mucius Scevola and Mirabeau, passed resolutions, sent protesting deputations to Royalist editors, and every evening made autos da fé of their publications outside the café. When war was declared they subscribed to purchase a case of muskets as an offering to the Fatherland. Self-regarding citizens, the Société des Amis de la Loi, who desired to eat and drink in peace far from political storms, met in the Café de Flore, near the Porte St. Denis, until the Jacobins applied the scriptural{336} maxim—He who is not for us is against us—and they were forced to take sides. Every partizan had his café; Hebertists, Fayettists, Maratists, Dantonists and Robespierrists, all gathered where their friends were known to meet.

In the early nineteenth century on the displacement of the favourite promenade of Parisian flaneurs from the Palais Royal to the Boulevard des Italiens, the proprietors of cafés and restaurants followed. A group of young fellows entered one evening a small cabaret near the Comédie Italienne (now Opéra Comique), found the wine to their taste and the cuisine excellent. They praised host and fare to their friends, and the modest cabaret developed into the Café Anglais, most famous of epicurean temples, frequented during the Second Empire by kings and princes, to whom alone the haughty proprietor would devote personal care.

The sumptuous cafés Tortoni founded in 1798 and de Paris opened 1822 have long since passed away. So has the Café Hardy, whose proprietor invented dejeûners à la fourchette, although its rival and neighbour, the Café Riche, still exists. “One must be very Hardy to dine at Riche’s, and very Riche to dine at Hardy’s,” was the celebrated mot of an old gourmand of the First Empire. During the early times of the Third Republic the Café Fronton was crowded almost daily by prominent politicians, Gambetta, Spuller, Naquet and others, while the Imperialists, under Cassagnac, met at the Café de la Paix in the Place de l’Opéra, which was dubbed the Boulevard de l’Isle d’Elbe. Many others of the celebrated cafés of the boulevards have disappeared or suffered a transformation into the more popular Brasseries or Tavernes of which so many, alternating with the theatres, restaurants and dazzling shops that line the most-frequented evening promenade of Paris, invite the thirsty or leisurely pleasure-seeker of to-day.

Nowhere may the traveller gain a better impression of the essential gaiety and sociability of the Parisian temperament{337} than by sitting outside a café on the boulevards on a public festival and observing his neighbours and the passers-by—their imperturbable good humour; their easy manners; their simple enjoyments; their quick intelligence, alert gait and expressive gestures; the wonderful skill of the women in dress. The glittering halls of pleasure that appeal to so many travellers, the Bohemian cafés of the outer boulevards, the Folies Bergères, the Moulins Rouges, the Bals Bullier, with their meretricious and vulgar attractions, frequented by the more facile daughters of Lutetia, “whose havoc of virtue is measured by the length of their laundresses’ bills,” as a genial satirist of their sex has phrased it—all these manifestations of la vie, so unutterably dull and sordid, are of small concern to the cultured traveller. The intimate charm and spirit of Paris will be heard and felt by him not amid the whirlwind of these saturnalia largely maintained by the patronage of foreign visitors, but rather in the smaller voices that speak from the inmost Paris which we have essayed to describe. Nor can we bid more fitting adieu to our readers than by translating Goethe’s words to Eckermann: “Think of the city of Paris where all the best of the realms of nature and art in the whole earth are open to daily contemplation, a world-city where the crossing of every bridge or every square recalls a great past, and where at every street corner a piece of history has been unfolded.{338}”

INDEX

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W.

A
Abbey Lands, their extent, 34
Abbeys, their need of reform, 56
Abbo, his story of the siege of Paris, 38-43
Abbots, their varied powers, 34
Abelard, comes to Paris, 87;
his school at St. Denis, 88;
death of, 89
Abelard and Heloise, their house, 282
Académie Française, origin of, 200
Adam du Petit Pont, 90
Aignan’s, St., remains of, 283
Amboise, Cardinal d’, employs Solario, 149
Amphitheatre, Roman, 288
Anagni, humiliation of Boniface VIII. at, 107
Angelico, Fra, painting by, at Louvre, 306
Angelo’s, Michael, slaves, 305
Année terrible, the, 261
Anselm, St., his moral force, 54
Antheric, Bishop, his courage, 42
Antoinette, Marie, her courage, 249;
her sinister influence, 253, 254
Arches, triumphal, 224, 277, 278
Aristotle, his works at Paris, 99
Armagnac and Burgundian factions, their origin, 127
Armagnacs, massacre of, 129
Assembly, National, the, its patriotism, 248, 256
Attila, 13, 15
Austrasia, kingdom of, 21
Austria, Anne of, her regency, 202
Averroists at Paris, 100

B
Ballet, importance of the, 330
Bal Mabille, site of, 319
Baptistry, the, 281
Barbarian invasions, 12
Barrère, 270
Barry, Mme. du, 232, 248, 302
Bartholomew, St., massacre of, 168-172
Basine and Childeric, story of, 19
Basoche, Corporation of, 327;
players of, 327
Bastille, foundation of, 123;
banquet at, 158;
captured by the Parlement, 204;
story of, 250-252
Bazoches, Guy of, his impression of Paris, 66
Bedford, Duke of, Regent at Paris, 130
Bernard, St., his commanding genius, 55;
denounces Abelard, 89;
draws up Rule of Knights-Templars, 108
Bernini, his design for the Louvre, 221
Billettes, monastery of, 299
Bishops and abbots, their administrative powers, 23, 24, 46
Boniface VIII., his contest with Philip the Fair, 106, 107;
his grandeur of soul, 107, 109
Booksellers at Paris, 190
Bordone, Paris, 152
Botticelli, frescoes at Louvre, 307
Boucher, 313
Boulevards, the, 320
Bourbon, Hôtel de, 186, 192;
plays at, 323{340}
Bourg-la-Reine, 60;
English at, 119
Bourgogne, Hôtel de, comedians of, 322
Bouvines, victory of, its consequences, 62
Bridges, approaches to, fortified, 36
British sentries at Louvre, 304
Brosse, Pierre de la, his death, 103
Broussel, arrested and set free, 203, 204
Brunehaut, her career and death, 21, 23, 24
Brunswick, Duke of, his proclamation, 257
Bullant, Jean, builds Tuileries, 186
Burgundians, the, 12
Burgundy, Dukes of, 125
Burke, his political nescience, 262
Bury, Richard de, at Paris, 101
Bussy, the island of, 6

C
Cafés at Paris, their introduction and growth, 331-333;
their importance in revolutionary times, 334-336
Calvin, 94;
at Collége de France, 156
Campan, Mme., her memoirs, 233, 245
Capet, Hugh, his coronation, 45;
founds Capetian dynasty, 45
Capets, growth of Paris under, 47
Carlyle, his history of the Revolution, 246, 247
Carmelites, their establishment at Paris, 72
Carnarvalet, Hôtel de, 297
Carnot, 261
Carrousel, the, 211;
arch of, 277
Carthusians, their establishment at Paris, 72
Caryatides, Salle des, 164
Castiglione, Rue de, 316
Castile, Blanche of, 67
Catacombs, the, 302
Catholic hierarchy re-established in Paris, 273
Cellini, Benvenuto, at Paris and Fontainebleau, 152-154
Cerceau, Baptiste du, continues Lescot’s Louvre, 186
Champaigne, Phil. de, 312
Champeaux, William of, 87
Champs Elysées, 319
Chardin, 314
Charlemagne at Paris, 33;
the Northmen, 35;
his patronage of learning, 35
Charles of Burgundy, his defeat by Swiss, 142
Charles I., effect of his trial on the revolutionists, 257-259
Charles V., builds the Hôtel St. Paul, 121;
his library, 121;
his love of gardens, 121;
his wise statesmanship, 121;
wall of, 122
Charles VI., his minority, 123;
his madness, 124;
saved from fire, 125;
his death and burial, 130
Charles VII., his acclamation as king at Melun, 131;
his death, 138
Charles VIII., his Italian campaign, 148
Charles IX., 166, 167;
his vacillation, 169;
doubtful story of his firing on Huguenots, 173;
his death, 174
Charonton, attribution of paintings to, 309
Chateauroux, Mme. de, her appeal to Louis XV., 230
Châtelet, the Grand, 147, 300
Châtelet, the Petit, 146, 300
Chavannes, Puvis de, 246, 288
Chénier, M. J., the revolutionary dramatist, 270
Chess players at Paris, 331-333
Chilperic, marriage with Galowinthe, 21;
his murder, 22;
his reformed alphabet, 25
Chramm, his defeat and death, 20
Christian hierarchy, its efforts to purify the Church, 54{341}
Church, the, its civilising genius, 24;
its growing civil power, 34
Church building, expansion of, 47
Cinq-Mars, his execution, 195
Cité, the island of, 2;
two islets joined to, 187;
its associations, 281
Clement, Jacques, assassinates Henry III., 177
Clement V., Pope, and the Templars, 110
Clergy, attempted taxation of, 231;
non-jurors, their expulsion, 272
Clisson, Hôtel de, 297
Clock tower, the, 283
Clodomir, murder of his sons by Childebert and Clothaire, 19, 20
Clothaire, his escape from assassination, 20;
his death, 21
Cloud, St., foundation of monastery of, 20
Clouet, François, 310
Clouet, Jean, 310
Clouet de Navarre, 310
Clovis, 13, 15;
conversion of, 17;
baptism of, 18;
his cruelty, 18;
makes Paris his capital, 19;
tower of, 288
Cluny, college of, 94
Cluny, Hôtel de, 151, 287, 322
Code civil, the, 264, 269
Colbert, his administrative genius, 209
Colbert, Hôtel, 316
Coligny, Admiral, his attempted assassination, 168;
his murder, 170;
site of his house, 303
Colleges, decadence of, 101
Collége de France, foundation of, 155
Colombe, Michel, 305
Comèdie Française, the old, 324;
its origin, 324;
political factions at, 325;
literary factions at, 326
Commune, the, 293
Conciergerie, the, 106, 283
Concini, 192; his death, 193
Concorde, place de la, 317, 318
Condé the Great, his insolence, 205, 206
Condé, Prince of, his plot to destroy the Guises, 165;
his death, 166
Condorcet, 269
Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, 52, 299
Contrat Social, the, its influence, 268
Convention, the, abolishes slavery, 264;
its constructive measures, 263, 264
Cordeliers, refectory of, 288
Corot, 315
Coryat, his impressions of Paris, 189
Cosme, St., 290
Cosme, St., curé of, his revolutionary zeal, 180, 181
Crown, the, its absolutism, 206
Cruce slays 400 Huguenots, 172

D
Dagobert the Great, 27, 28, 29
Damiens, his attack on Louis XV., 232;
his horrible torture, 232
Danes, invasions of, 35
Danseuses, their introduction into opera, 331
Dante, his use of artista, 86;
at Paris, 100
Danton, 261;
his trial, 241
D’Artagnan, his dwelling, 303
Daubigny, 315
Dauphin, origin of title, 117, note
David, his genius, 314
Delacroix, paintings of, at St. Sulpice, 291;
and Louvre, 314
Delaroche, 314
Denis, St., abbey of, 28
Denis, St., church of, 15;
building of new church of, 79
Denis, St., de la Chartre, 31
Denis, St., du Pas, 281
Denis, St., story of, 7;
body of exposed, 51{342}
Denis, St., Rue, 293
Deputies, Chamber of, 318
Desmoulins, Camille, his revolutionary oration, 249
Diaz, 315
Diderot at Café de la Régence, 331
Dimier, his views on French School of Paintings, 307
Dionysius and his companions, their mission to Paris, 5
Discipline, collegiate, 93, 94
Dix-huit, College of, 92
Dolet, Etienne, his statue, 286
Domenico da Cortona, 148;
designs Hôtel de Ville, 151
Dominicans, their establishment at Paris, 73
Dragon, Cour du, 291
Dubois, Abbé, his wealth and depravity, 227
Duke of Orleans, his murder, 126

E
Ebles, Abbot, his courage, 38, 41
Ecclesiastical architecture, development of, 47
Ecole des Beaux Arts, 291
Edict of Nantes, 182;
revocation of, 214;
approved by eminent Churchmen, 215;
effect in Europe, 215
Education, state of, before Revolution, 264
Egalité, Philip, 199;
his vote, 259
Eloy, St., abbey of, 31, 56, 57
Eloy, St., bishop and goldsmith, 28
Elysée, the, 319
Émigrés, the, 254, 256
Empire, the Second, streets of, 278
Encyclopedists, their aims, 267
English, the, at Paris, 120, 135, 136;
evacuate Paris, 137;
expelled from Calais, 162
Estampes, Madame d’, 153, 154
Estiennes, the, 143, 144
Estrées, Gabrielle d’, 181
Etienne du Mont, St., 17, 151, 288
Etoile, arch of, 277, 278
Eudes, Count, 38, 41, 42
Eugene III., Pope, at Paris, 57
Eustache, St., church of, 151, 303
Evelyn, witnesses torture of accused prisoners, 262

F
Ferronnerie, Rue de la, 185
Feudalism, origin of, 44
Flamboyant, not a debasement of Gothic, 145, note
Flandrin, frescoes by, at St. Germain des Prés, 291
Fleury, Cardinal, his honest administration, 229
Flore, Pavilion de, 186
Fontainebleau, school of, 152
Fontaine des Innocents, 164
Fouarre, Rue du, 100
Fouquet, 310
Foy, Café, 249
Fragonnard, 313
France, her greatness under Richelieu, 195
Francis I., his entry into Paris, 150;
the Renaissance, 150;
his magnificent hospitality, 157;
life at Paris under, 157;
his access of piety, 158, 159;
his death, 160
Francis II. at Amboise, 165
Francis, St., his love of the French tongue, 99
Franciscans, their establishment at Paris, 73
Franklin, Benjamin, at Versailles, 254
Franks, the, 13
Fredegonde, her cruelty and death, 21-23
French language, its universality, 99
French people, their desire for peace, 274{343}
Fromont, Nicholas, 309
Fronde, the, 204
Fronde, the second, 205;
defeat of, 206
Fulbert, Canon, his house, 282
Fulrad, Abbot, completes Church of St. Denis, 33

G
Galilée, the island of, 6
Genevieve, St., her story, 14, 15;
monastery of, 17;
shrine of, 17;
abbey of, 30;
Templars at, 111
Geneviève, Ste., la Petite, 60
Gericault, his Raft of the Medusa, 314
Germain, St., of Auxerre, 14, 27
Germain, St., l’Auxerrois, 31, 303
Germain, St., of Autun, 24, 25
Germain, St., des Prés, 23;
captured by Henry IV., 178;
church of, 291
Germain, St., Faubourg, 293
Gervais, St., church of, 31, 295
Gibbon at Paris, 242
Giocondo, Fra, rebuilds Petit Pont and Pont Notre Dame, 148
Girondins, their condemnation, 241
Goethe, his speech at Valmy, 246;
his description of the revolutionary army, 262
Goldoni assisted by the Convention, 264
Gothic art of the thirteenth century, 84
Goths, the, 12, 13
Goujon, Jean, his work at the Louvre, 164, 306;
decorates the Fontaine des Innocents, 164;
reliefs by, at the Carnavalet, 297
Gozlin, his patriotism and courage, 37, 38, 40, 41
Grande Galerie, the, 186, 191
Gregory, St., of Tours, 13, 22
Greuze, 314
Grève, Place de, 293
Guénégaud, Théâtre, 324
Guise, Duke Francis of, shot by a Huguenot, 165
Guise, Duke Henry of, his popularity at Paris, 176;
his assassination, 177
Guises, rise of the, 161

H
Halles, les, 59, 148, 302
Halle aux Vins, 60, note
Hawkers, 259, 270
Heine and the Venus de Milo, 305
Héloïse and Abelard, loves of, 88;
their grave at Paris, 89
Henry I., son of Robert the Pious, his accession, 51
Henry II., his death, 162
Henry III., his coronation, 175;
his assassination, 177
Henry IV., his conversion, 181;
his patriotism, 181, 184;
his divorce, 182;
his assassination, 185;
his architectural achievements, 187;
his statue, 197
Henry V. of England, 128;
death and burial of, 130
Henry V. and Charles VI., entry into Paris, 131
Heretics, first execution of, 49
Hervé and his eleven companions, their heroism, 40, 41
Hierarchy, the, its unpopularity, 272
Holbein, 307
Homme Armé, Rue de l’, 135, 297
Horloge, Pavilion de l’, 198
Host, miracle of sacred, 299
Hôtel Dieu, foundation of, 31;
rules of, 76;
site of, 281
Hôtel St Paul, 121
Hôtel des Tournelles, 140, 146
Hôtel de Ville, 279, 293, 295
Hugh (Eudes), Count, his heroism, 38, 41, 42
Hugo, Victor, his exile and return, 274;
his house, 297
Huguenots, hostility of Parisians to, 167{344}

I
Infanta, Garden of, 229;
betrothed to Louis XV., 229
Ingres, 314
Innocent II., Pope, at Paris, 59
Innocents, Cemetery of, 148
Innocents, Square des, 301
Institut, the, 207
Invalides, Hôpital des, 223
Irish College, 286
Italian College, 286
Ivry, battle of, 179

J
Jacobins, 197;
their aims, 267;
their supreme service to France, 268
Jacquerie, the, 118
Jacques de la Boucherie, St., 60, 300
Jacques, St., Rue, 5, 284
Jansenists and Jesuits, 218, 230
Jardin des Plantes, 200
Jean, St., Feu de, 295
Jean sans Peur, 125;
tower of, 127;
his assassination, 130;
inscription, 297
Jeanne d’Arc, saviour of France, 131, 132;
wounded at siege of Paris, 132;
her capture, trial and execution, 132, 133;
her rehabilitation at Notre Dame, 134
Jefferson and Marie Antoinette, 253
Jesuits, their suppression, 232
Jews at Paris, their treatment, 34, 49, 59
John the Good, 104, 117;
at Paris, 119
Jongleurs, their charity, 321
Judicial penalties at Paris, 159
Juifs, les, the Island of, 6
Julian, the Emperor, his love of Paris, 10
Julian, St., of the minstrels, 321
Julien le Pauvre, St., 27;
rebuilding of, 81;
church of, 284
Jupiter, altar to, 9, 287;
temple of, 7

K
Knights-Templars, their foundation, 108;
their heroism, 109;
their arrest and torture, 110, 111;
their destruction, 112, 116;
site of their fortress, 299

L
Lafayette, his loyalty, 256
Landry, St., fair of, 98;
gifts by scholars, 98;
port of, 282, 283
Latini Brunetto, 99
Laurens, J. P., paintings at Luxembourg and Panthéon, 48, note, 240
Law, John, his financial scheme, 227, 228
League, the, 175;
its ecclesiastical army, 179
Leaguers, their triumph, 176;
their violence, 181
Lebrun, 312
Leczynski, Marie, her marriage to Louis XV., 229;
her death, 233
Legros, 290
Lemercier continues the Louvre, 198;
designs Palais Cardinal, 199
Lemoine, Cardinal, college of, 93
Lescot, Pierre, designs new Louvre, 157;
designs Fontaine des Innocents, 164
Lesueur, 311
Levau, his suspension, 221
Lorrain, Claude, 312
Lorraine, Cardinal of, 177
Louis VI. chastises rebellious vassals, 54;
pioneer of the monarchy, 58
Louis VII., 60;
birth of an heir, 61
Louis VIII. invades England, 62{345}
Louis XI., his shabby dress, 138;
his policy, 139;
at Paris, 139, 140;
meets Edward IV. of England, 140;
institutes the Angelus, 140;
his death, 142
Louis XII. invites Leonardo da Vinci to France, 149;
his wise rule, 149, 150
Louis XIII., his accession, 192;
his coup d’état, 193
Louis XIV., his accession, 209;
his small attainments, 211;
his hatred of Paris, 212;
court of, 210, 211, 219;
secret marriage with Mme. Scarron, 213;
death of his heirs, 219;
his death, 220;
state of France and Paris at end of his reign, 226;
his vandalism, 236
Louis XV., his majority, 228;
his sickness and recovery, 231;
his vicious life, 231;
his disastrous reign, 233, 234;
his death, 233
Louis XVI., his accession, 243;
state of Paris under, 243;
his vacillation, 253;
intrigues with foreign courts, 254;
his trial and sentence, 259, 260;
execution of, 261
Louis Philippe, 273
Louis, St., his early youth, 67;
his love of justice, 67, 77;
redeems the crown of thorns, 68;
his views on the treatment of Jews and infidels, 69;
builds the Sainte Chapelle, 69;
his hatred of blasphemy, 71;
his death, 77
Louviers, the island of, 6
Louvois and Vauban, inventors of bayonet, 210
Louvre, building of, 62;
its position, 65;
demolition of keep, 156;
west wing completed, 164;
continued by Lemercier, 198;
continued by Levau, 220;
Perrault, base of, 222;
neglect of, by Louis XIV., 223;
and by Louis XV., 234;
repair of, 235;
during the Revolution, 275;
under Napoleon I., 276;
under Napoleon III., 276;
paintings in, 304;
sculpture in, 305, 306
Loyola, Ignatius, founds Society of Jesus at Paris, 156
Luini, 307
Lulli, his musical genius, 329
Lulli, Hôtel, 316
Lutetia, its origin, 3
Lutetius, hill of, 4
Lutherans, their violence and iconomachy, 158;
persecution of, 159, 160
Luxembourg, palace and gardens of, 197, 290;
museum of, 290
Luxor, Column of, 278
Luynes, his rise and fall, 193, 194

M
Madeleine, the, 277
Maillotins, the, 123
Maintenon, Mme. de, her ascendency over Louis XIV., 213, 214, 216, 217;
the Protestants and, 214
Malouel, 309
Manége, Salle du, 259
Mansard, François, extends Palais Royal, 199
Marais, the, 7, 65, 295
Marat, his body at the Cordeliers, 288;
site of his house, 289
Marcel, Etienne, buys the Maison aux Piliers, 117;
his power at Paris, 118;
accused of treachery, 119;
his statue, 117;
his death, 118, 119
Marcel, Etienne, Rue, 127
Marlborough, Duke of, his victories, 216
Marly, hermitage of, 213
Marmoutier, monastery of, 9
Mars, Champ de, 252
Martel, Charles, birth of, 29{346}
Martin, St., des Champs, rebuilding of, 52
Martin, St., story of, 8
Martin, St., Rue, 293
Mary Stuart, at Amboise, 165
Massacres of September, 258
Maur, St., des Fossés, 34
May Tree, planting of, in Cour du Mai, 328
Mayenne, Hôtel de, 295
Mazarin, Cardinal, his cautious policy, 202;
his unpopularity, 205;
his triumph, 206;
his death, 207
Mazzini, his teaching, 268
Medici, Catherine de’, her rise to importance, 165;
her plot against the Huguenots, 168, 169;
her death and unpopularity, 178;
remains of her hôtel, 302
Medici, Marie de’, marriage with Henry IV., 182;
her coronation, 184;
her disgrace and death, 195
Médicine, Ecole de, 288
Merri, St., church of, 151
Meuniers, Pont des, collapse of, 188
Michel le Comte, Rue, plays in, 322
Mignard, 312
Millet, 313, 315
Miracles, Cour des, 302
Molay, Jacques de, 109-111
Molé, President, his courage, 204
Molière, imprisoned for debt, 323;
opens l’Illustre Théâtre, 323;
his success at court, 323
Monasteries, their increase, 24;
suppression of, at Paris, 272
Monastic settlements, 34
Monks and nuns, their declining morals, 55, 56
Monks, their science and learning, 24
Montaigne, College of, 94
Montfaucon, 103;
its “fair gallows,” 189
Montgomery, Duke of, kills Henry II., 162
Montmartre, 7;
nunnery of, 60
Montmorency, his execution, 195
Morris, Governor, his estimate of Louis XVI., 253
Moulins, Maître de, 309, 310

N
Nain, Le, the brothers, 311
Napoleon I., his policy, 265;
his raids on Italy, 266;
crowns himself at Notre Dame, 266;
his genius, 267;
secret of his power, 268;
his plans for the Louvre, 276;
his new streets, 277;
his tomb, 293
Napoleon III., his coup d’état, 274
Nautæ, guild of the, 9
Navarre, college of, 93
Navarre, Henry of, affianced to Princess Marguerite, 167;
his marriage festivities, 167
Navarre, Jeanne de, 166;
her death at Court, 167
Necker, Mme., her salon, 269
Nemours, Duke of, executed at Paris, 141
Neustria, kingdom of, 21
Nicholas, St., chapel of, 31, 33;
scholars of, 92
Nobles, the, their rapacity, 192
Noces Vermeilles, the, 168
Nogaret, Guillaume de, 107
Normans, the, settle in France, 43
Notre Dame, church of, 9, 26, 281;
rebuilding of, 81;
English envoys at, 157;
clerical iconoclasts of, 236;
worship of Nature at, 272
Notre Dame, the island of, 6

O
Odéon, Théâtre de l’, 325
Œil de Bœuf, the, 248
Oiseaux, Pont aux, consumed by fire, 189{347}
Opera, French, rise of, 329
Opera house, the, 279, 330
Opera, Italian, introduced to Paris, 329
Orders, the reformed, 55
Oriflamme, the, its first use as royal standard, 58;
its disappearance, 128
Orleans, Philip of, his regency, 227
Orme, Philibert de l’, 186

P
Paine, Thomas, his votes for mercy, 259, 260
Paix, Rue de la, 316
Palais Cardinal, Théâtre du, its site, 325
Palais of the Cité rebuilt, 104;
surrendered to Parlement, 121
Palais de Justice injured by fire, 240;
booksellers at, 240, 241;
Revolutionary tribunal at, 241
Palais Royal, 199, 200, 315;
revolutionists at, 249;
theatre of, 324
Palissy, Bernard, his grotto, 186
Panthéon, its vicissitudes, 238-240
Paraclete, the, 89
Paris, its geographical situation, 1, 2;
its capture by the Romans, 4;
the White City, 4;
arms of, 9;
Julian proclaimed emperor at, 10;
siege of, by Childeric, 15;
the market of the peoples, 34;
siege of, by Normans, 37;
a city of refuge, 46;
under interdict, 57;
growth of, under Louis VI., 59;
under English rule, 135;
in the fifteenth century, 145;
crafts of, 146, 147;
siege of, by Henry III. and Henry of Navarre, 177;
siege of, by Henry IV., 179;
under Richelieu, 196, 197;
made an archbishopric, 202;
Turenne and Condé fight for, 206;
misery at, 217;
under Louis XIV., 220;
Louis XVI. and court returns to, 249;
an armourer’s shop, 261;
life at, during the Revolution, 269;
school of, at Louvre, 309
Parisian women at Versailles, 249
Parisians, their chastisement by Charles VI., 123, 124;
their fidelity to the revolutionary ideals, 273
Parisii, the, 3
Parlement, the, 104, 106;
councillors of, hanged by the sections, 180;
councillors arrested, 203;
its public spirit, 203;
its humiliation by Louis XIV., 206;
suppression of, 233
Pascal, his statue, 300
Passion, confraternity of, 321
Passion plays, their success, 322
Paul III., Pope, his humane protest against persecution of Lutherans, 160
Pavia, defeat of, 154
Pepin of Heristal, 29;
of Landen, 29;
the Short, becomes king of France, 30
Père la Chaise, 206
Peronne, peace of, 141
Perrault, Claude, his design for the Louvre accepted, 221;
his east façade, 222, 276
Perréal, 310
Petite Galerie, the, 173, 187
Petit Pont, the, 6;
Place du, 284
Philip Augustus, his birth and accession, 61;
his conquests, 62;
pavement of, 63;
wall of, 63-65;
his wisdom, 65
Philip I., his depravity and adultery, 52, 53;
his excommunication and death, 53, 54
Philip III., 103
Philip VI., 117
Philip le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, sides with the English, 130
Philip the Fair, 104;
conflict with Boniface VIII., 106-108;
destroys Templars, 110-115;
his death, 115
Picpus, village of, 189
Pierre aux Bœufs, St., 60, 281
Pierre, St., des Fossés, 34
Pilon, Germain, 305{348}
Place Royale, 187, 296, 297
Playing cards, revolutionary, 271
Poitiers, Diane de, 144, 162
Pol, St., Count of, executed at Paris, 141
Pompadour, Mme. de, her power, 231, 232
Pont au Change rebuilt, 189
Pont Marie, 201
Pont Neuf, 197, 284
Pont Notre Dame, 7
Pont Royal, 224
Portes Cochères, corps of, 204
Port Royal, destruction of, 218
Poussin, 311
Prés aux Clercs, the, 97
Primaticcio, 152, 153, 311
Primitifs, at Louvre, 308
Printing, introduction of, at Paris, 143;
at the Louvre, 200
Provost of Merchants, 9;
last of, 293
Provost of Paris, his hotel, 295
Public good, league of, 139

Q
Quatre Nations, the, 95
Quinze-vingts, establishment of, at Paris, 74

R
Radegonde, St., her piety, 25;
nuns of, at Cambridge, 25
Raphael, 306
Ravaillac, assassin of Henry IV., his cruel torture, 185
Rectors, their power, 95, 98
Reformation, the, 164
Rembrandt, 307
Rémi, St., 13
Republic, the second, 274
Republic, the third, its patriotism, 274;
architecture of, 278
Restoration, the, architecture of, 277
Retz, Cardinal de, 203;
joins the insurrection, 204, 205
Revolutionary, Committee of the League, 180
Revolution, the, its triumph, 262;
its results, 275;
Place de la, 317
Revolutionists, their attitude towards England, 265
Richelieu, his rise to fame, 193, 194;
his firmness, 194;
his death, 195;
second founder of Sorbonne, 200;
his tomb at the Sorbonne, 200
Rigaud, 313
Robert the Pious, his excommunication, 48;
his charity, 48;
repudiates his queen, 47, 48;
marries Constance of Aquitaine, 48
Robert the Strong, 37
Robespierre and the Terror, 246, 247;
his feast of the Etre Suprème, 273;
at chess, 333
Rochelle, la, capture of, 194
Roland, 270
Roland, Mme., 283
Rollo, 37, 43
Roman amphitheatre, the, 5
Roman aqueduct, the, 5
Roman Empire, exhaustion of, 12
Rosso, 152, 311
Rousseau, his impressions of Paris, 226;
his journey from Paris to Lyons, 244
Rousseau, Théodore, 315
Royalty, abolition of, 258
Royale, place, 187, 296, 297
Rubens, 307
Ryswick, peace of, 215

S
Sacre Cœur, church of, 240, 279
Sainte Chapelle, the, 69, 82, 83
Samaritaine, la, 198
Sarto, Andrea del, 152
Saxe, Marshall, his victories, 231{349}
Scholars, their lack of discipline, 90;
their festive meetings, 91;
their depravity, 92;
poor, at Paris, 92;
defence of, by king, 97
Schoolman, the, 100
Sculpture, Greek, at Louvre, 305;
mediæval and renaissance, at Louvre, 305
Sections, the, 176, 180;
their defeat, 180
Sens, Archbishop of, and Templars, 112;
his palace, 295
Serfdom, 49
Serfs, their condition, 49, 50
Séverin, St., church of, 284, 286
Sévigné, Mme. de, 297
Siegbert, marriage with Brunehaut, 21
Siéyès, Abbé, 269
Siger, at Paris, 100
Signs, old, at Paris, 303
Simon, St., Duke of, his memoirs, 210
Soissons, the vase of, 13
Sorbon, Robert of, founds the Sorbonne, 92
Sorbonne, introduction of painting at, 143;
Greek lectureship at, 145;
the new, 288
Soubise, Hôtel de, 297
Soufflot builds Panthéon, 238;
mutilates west front of Notre Dame, 238
Staël, Mme. de, 270
States-General, establishment of, 104;
convoked by Dauphin, 117;
meet at the Louvre, 180;
at the Hôtel de Bourbon, 192;
at Versailles, 247
Stephen, St., church of, 31
Stephen III., Pope, at Paris, 30
Street names, revolutionary, 271
Streets, old, at Paris, 286, 299
Suger, Abbot, 58;
builds new St. Denis, 79
Sully, Duke of, 182, 184;
his enforced retirement, 192;
Hôtel de, 295
Sully, Maurice de, builds cathedral of Notre Dame, 81
Sulpice, St., church of, 241, 242, 291
Surgery, school of, 290
Swiss Guards, their devotion and courage, 257

T
Talleyrand, Bishop, 270
Talma, Julie, 270
Talma, 326
Tax farmers, their brutality, 245
Tennis-court oath, 248
Terror, the white, 247, note
Terror, the, at Paris, 262
Theatre, the early, 323
Thermæ, the, 9, 10
Tiberius Cæsar, discovery of altar to, 9
Tiers Etat, at Notre Dame, 106;
its humiliation, 192
Titian, 306
Trône, place du, 189
Troyes, treaty of, 130
Troyon, 315
Truce of God, 98
Tuileries, the, 186;
secret flight of royal family from, 255;
attack on, 257;
palace and gardens of, 315, 316
Turenne, his defeat at Paris, 205, 206

U
University, first use of term, 95
Ursins, Mme. des, her power in Spain, 216
Utrecht, peace of, 219

V
Vaches, isle des, 6
Val de Grâce, church of, 223
Vallière, Mme. de la, 212
Van Dyck, 307{350}
Vasari, his appreciation of Fra Angelico, 306
Vauban, his military science, 210;
his estimate of the national resources, 215
Vendôme, Duke of, his depravity, 216
Vendôme, place and column of, 316
Venetian merchants at Paris, 34;
their sympathy with Jeanne d’Arc, 133
Venise, Rue de, 299
Vergniaud, 260, 270
Veronese, 306
Versailles, château of, 212;
cost of, 213, note;
opera house, scene at, 248;
the revolution at, 247
Victoires, Notre Dame des, 194, note
Victor, St., prior of, stabbed, 57;
abbey of, 60
Ville, the, 146, 147
Vinci, da, his Monna Lisa at Louvre, 306
Viollet le Duc, his love of Gothic, 278
Voltaire, his solvent wit, 269, 270
Volterra, Daniele da, his statue of Louis XIII., 187
Vosges, Place des, 187
Vouet, 311

W
Wall, the Roman, 6
Watteau, his manner of painting, 313;
works by, at Louvre, 313
Whistler, 290

THE END

Colston & Coy., Limited, Printers, Edinburgh.{351}