“Revenge and hate bring forth their kind,Like the foul cubs their parents are.”
“Revenge and hate bring forth their kind,Like the foul cubs their parents are.”
“Revenge and hate bring forth their kind,Like the foul cubs their parents are.”
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,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.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,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.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 atSt. Denis. The sections demanded Brizard’s instant execution, and on his discharge by the Parlement thecuréof 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 apapier rougeor 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 thecuréof 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 thecuréof 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;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. Violentcurésagain donned their armour, children were baptised and mass was sung by cuirassed priests. Thecuréof St. Cosme seized a partisan, and with other fanatics of the League hastened to the Latin Quarter to raise theuniversity. 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.HÔTEL DE SULLY.
Henry, like one of his predecessors, had ofbastards 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 hima 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 whenthe 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 ofvalets de piedfollowed 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.
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 ordedalusand 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 wasimposed 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’sPrécieuseslived.
PLACE DES VOSGES.PLACE DES VOSGES.
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, occupiesits 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.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 ofLes Misérableswill 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.OLD HOUSES NEAR PONT ST. MICHEL, SHOWING SPIRE OF THE STE. CHAPELLE.
Pont St. Michel.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 ofCoryat’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 wordlutum, 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 inParis 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,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.”
LOUISXIII. 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 thepauvre 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 thepauvre 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; eachorder 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.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.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.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 thecuréof 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.
THE MEDICI FOUNTAIN, LUXEMBOURG GARDENS.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’striumphs 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 acafé. 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, isa 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 anindustrieuse horloge, which told the hours, days, and months.
PONT NEUF.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.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 ascafésand 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 ofimprisonment, 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,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 theprécieusesof 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 peacefulquarters 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 indifferenceto 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, butwas 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 thePortes Cochères, formed by a conscription of one horseman for everyhouse 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 hisentourageof young nobles, dubbedpetits 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.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 ofCharonne 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 deathin 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. Louisbooted[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 andbelles-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.
THE INSTITUT DE FRANCE.THE INSTITUT DE FRANCE.
THEcentury 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 theSpanish 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.Place du Carrousel.
External grandeur and regal presence,[135]a profound belief in his divinely-appointed despotism, and in earlier years acapacity 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 ofFrance, 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 ofthe 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. Theplaisir du roimust 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.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.” Anaide-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.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 hadlong 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 solemnrenunciation 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, thecamerera majorof 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.”