CHAPTER XIVPARIS OF HENRY IV

Column at the Hôtel de Soissons.

More ambitious was a southwestern additionto the Louvre, a wing going to meet the river, and another at right angles following the stream westward. This extension parallel with the Seine was begun with the idea of continuing it to meet the palace of the Tuileries (see plan of Louvre, Chapter XXII) which the queen had begun on the site of some ancient tile-yards to the west of the Louvre. Only the central façade was finished in Catherine’s day, a pavilion containing a superb staircase and crowned by a dome, connected by two open galleries with what was planned to be the buildings surrounding the quadrangle. The workmanship was exquisitely delicate. Its beauty was enhanced by a lovely formal garden laid out by that Jack-of-all-Trades, Bernard Palissy, best known as “the Potter.”

Of private buildings two of the most beautiful still remain. Both are in the Marais, which had become fashionable at this time on account of its proximity both to the Tournelles and the Louvre. One of them is the Hôtel Carnavalet which now houses the Historical Museum of Paris, the most interesting special collection in the city to students of olden times. This building was begun in 1544 in Francis I’s reign, by the then president of the Parliament of Paris, who employed the best architects of the day, Lescot and Bullant, aided by Goujon, the sculptor, whose symbolic figures give its name to the “Court of the

HÔTEL CARNAVALET.

Seasons.” After changing hands more than once and being restored in the seventeenth century by another famous architect, Mansart, the house was occupied for eighteen years by Madame de Sévigné, the author of the famous “Letters.” When it was taken over by the city it was again thoroughly restored, and it now stands not only as a fine example of sixteenth and seventeenth century architecture but as a repository for bits and sections of old buildings from other parts of the city.

Not far away is the Hôtel Lamoignon, built toward the end of the sixteenth century for one of Henry II’s daughters. It is used for business purposes to-day, but its façade is still imposing with lofty Corinthian pilasters which rise from the ground to the roof. In the course of its vicissitudes it was the first home of the city’s historical library, and in the nineteenth century it was made into apartments, in one of which Alphonse Daudet, the novelist once lived.

Montaigne speaks with frankness of the evil smells of the streets of this time, and it is small wonder, since animals were slaughtered not far from the city hall, and the offscourings of the abattoirs drained into the Seine emitting foul odors as they went. Charles was moved to improve the condition of the Grève, which was a mud-hole and a dump-heap, not, apparently, because its state made it a disgraceful entrance to the city hall, but because it inconvenienced the crowds who assembled to witness tortures and executions on the square.

With Charles IX on the throne of France, Catherine de Medicis sought to provide for her youngest son by placing him on the vacant throne of Poland. A splendidfêteat the Tuileries celebrated his election, and he set forth joyfully for his new kingdom. He had lived in his adopted country only a few months when the news of his brother’s death reached him. The French crown, was, naturally, more attractive than the Polish, and Henry planned immediate departure for his fatherland. He had been long enough in Poland to know something of the temper of his subjects and he fled like a criminal before the pursuit of enraged peasants armed with scythes and flails. If they had known him better they might not have been so eager to keep him.

The Parisians were not fond of Henry. He made his formal entry into the city adorned with frills and ear-rings, and accompanied by sundry small pet animals. It was his habit to carry fastened about his neck a basket of little dogs and occasionally he dug down under them to find important papers. Silly as it sounds this habit at least had the merit of being more humanethan Charles IX’s custom of having fights between dogs and wild beasts.

Henry began at once to change for the worse his mother’s already vile court. Occasionally he was stricken with remorse and made such public exhibition of repentance as caused excessive mirth to all beholders of the processions wherein he and the dissolute young men, his “minions,” walked barefooted through the city. It is related that the court pages were once sharply switched in the Hall of the Cariatides in the Louvre for having indulged in a take-off of one of these penitential exercises of their king’s.

Except for the continuing of the work on the Louvre, decorating the old clock on the palace on the Cité (see Chapter VI) beginning the Pont Neuf across the western tip of the Cité, and establishing a few religious houses, Henry III was too busy contending with the Parisians to have time or inclination to beautify the city.

The Parisians not only objected to the continual financial drain made upon them by the king’s constant appeals for money for his minions, but they openly showed themselves favorable to the Duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic party.

For his own defense Henry brought into the city a band of Swiss soldiers. To the citizens it was the final outrage. Every section of the townhummed with preparations for revolt. A rumor of an attack upon the Temple made Henry send a body of troops there. For the first time in the history of Paris the people made use of a defense habitual with them two centuries later. They erected across the streets barricades made ofbarriques(hogsheads) filled with earth, took shelter behind them and attacked the mercenaries so vigorously that the Duke of Guise was forced to come to their rescue. The day after the Day of Barricades the troops sent to the defense of the Temple helped the populace seize it. When the governor of the Bastille went to the palace, and, entering the Great Hall, summoned the sixty members of the Parliament of Paris then in session, to follow him, and led them in their red and black robes through the streets to the prison where they were held for ransom, the citizens felt themselves to be in real possession of the town.

Henry had been warned of trouble on the Day of Barricades by a man who made his way to the royal apartments by the staircase existing even now in a corner of the Hall of the Cariatides. Reversing the direction taken by the Empress Eugénie when the news of the battle of Sedan reached Paris on the fourth of September some three hundred years later, the king fled through the Louvre westward, gained the stables of theTuileries, mounted a horse, and fled once more, though not pursued as he had been in Poland. The Parisians did not want to keep him.

In an effort to bring about better conditions Henry had made concessions to the Huguenots. Indignant at what they considered as treachery to his own religion the Catholics organized a League, of which the popular duke of Guise was the head. The duke’s power over the people, as he had shown it when he stopped the attack upon the king’s Swiss guard, and his connection with the League brought about Guise’s assassination by Henry’s order. The Parisians were enraged by the loss of their favorite, shut the gates against Henry, and prepared themselves to withstand a siege. Henry was forced to join the Protestant army of his cousin, Henry of Navarre, at Saint Cloud, on the Seine a few miles below Paris. There the king was assassinated by a young Jacobin novice sent out from the city.

Thus Paris was responsible for the crown’s passing at this juncture to the House of Bourbon whose representative, Henry of Navarre, who now became Henry IV, was one of the Protestants to whom the city was fiercely opposed.

HENRY IV (1589-1598), came to the throne after a career of strife which by no means ended at his accession. His family were ardent Protestants. Henry was born in the country and received an outdoor training which made him hardy and vigorous in wide contrast to the debauched youths who sat upon the throne in Paris. The religious wars were seething all through his boyhood. When he was but fifteen his mother, Jeanne d’Albret, a woman of exceptional courage and address, presented him to the Protestant army and he was made general-in-chief, with Admiral Coligny as his adviser. When he was nineteen he agreed to the marriage with Marguerite of Valois which was to reunite the contending parties—or to serve as a bait to entice the chief Protestants of the country to Paris, according as one interprets Catherine de Medicis.

Breaking harshly in upon the wedding festivities the bell of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois clanged its awful knell, and when the horror wasover Protestant Henry was lucky still to be alive. It behooved him to be prudent, and he accepted Charles IX’s commanding invitation to stay in Paris. Here he was under surveillance, and here he learned the ways of the most corrupt court that France had known up to that time, immoral, deceitful, treacherous, the women in every way as bad as the men.

During these years Henry diplomatically declared himself a convert to Catholicism, but it was a change for the moment; he had reverted long before the monk’s dagger made him King by slaying Henry III.

This murder meant an accession of hard work for Henry of Navarre for the League under the Duke of Mayenne and supported by Spain and Savoy was determined to accept no Protestant as ruler. Henry won a brilliant victory at Arques and another at Ivry.

Oh, how our hearts were beating, when at the dawn of day,We saw the army of the League drawn out in long array,With all its priest-led citizens and all its rebel peersAnd Appenzell’s stout infantry, and Egmont’s Flemish spears.There rode the brood of false Lorraine, the curses of our land;And dark Mayenne was in the midst, a truncheon in his hand;And as we looked on them, we thought of Seine’s empurpled flood,And good Coligny’s hoary hair all dabbled with his blood;And we cried unto the living God, who rules the fate of War,To fight for his own holy name and Henry of Navarre.

Then the “burghers of Saint Genevieve” were indeed forced to “Keep watch and ward” for Henry marched upon Paris without which he could not call his crown his own. At his approach the people from the suburbs crowded into the city till it held some 200,000. Henry had no trouble in taking the chief of the outer settlements and in controlling the town’s food supply. The resulting famine drove the Parisians to straits such as they had not known since the days of Sainte Geneviève and were not to know again until the Franco-Prussian War. The usual meat soon gave out and when all the horses and all the mules were eaten, any stray dog or cat was pursued by the populace and when caught, cooked and devoured in the open street. From dead men’s bones was made a sort of pasty bread, and mothers knew the taste of the flesh of their own children whose strength had not availed against the greater force of hunger.

Touched by the suffering of the city which he regarded as his own, Henry offered to let the besieged leave the town, but so earnest was theLeague, so inspiring the preaching of the priests that not more than 3000 took advantage of the opportunity.

The League was not at peace with itself, however. Mayenne disposed by death of the Leaguers whose importance threatened his power and there was stirring that feeling in favor of Henry which found voice a little later in the “Satire Ménippée,” the essays which rallied Catholics to the support of their monarch. The papers were written by a canon of the Sainte Chapelle and half a dozen friends in the form of a burlesque report of a meeting of the States General. The following selection gives an idea of the spirit of unrest that was troubling Paris and of the lack of approval of Henry III’s assassination felt by the moderate party.

“O Paris who are no longer Paris but a den of ferocious beasts, a citadel of Spaniards, Walloons and Neapolitans, an asylum and safe retreat for robbers, murderers and assassins, will you never be cognizant of your dignity and remember who you have been and what you are; will you never heal yourself of this frenzy which has engendered for you in place of one lawful and gracious King fifty saucy kinglets and fifty tyrants? You are in chains, under a Spanish Inquisition a thousand times more intolerable and harder to endure by spirits born free and unconstrained as the French are than the cruelest deaths which the Spaniards could devise. You did not tolerate a slight increase of taxes and of offices and a few new edicts which did not concern you at all, yet you endure that they pillage houses, that they ransom you with blood, that they imprison your senators, that they drive out and banish your good citizens and counselors: that they hang and massacre your principal magistrates; you see it and endure it but you approve it and praise it and you would not dare or know how to do otherwise. You have given little support to your King, good-tempered, easy, friendly, who behaved like a fellow-citizen of your town which he had enriched and embellished with handsome buildings, fortified with strong and haughty ramparts, honored with privileges and favorable exemptions. What say I? Given little support? Far worse: you have driven him from his city, his house, his very bed! Driven him? you have pursued him. Pursued him? You assassinated him, canonized the assassin and made joyful over his death. And now you see how much this death profited you.”

Henry of Navarre became king of Paris as well as of the rest of France though it required a considerable concession to achieve that position. Still it was not the first time that he had made a mental somersault, so when he found that Pariswas stubborn in spite of more than three years and a half of hunger, sickness and death, and that his enemies outside of the city were strong enough to inflict upon him a defeat of some moment, he yielded to the urging of his counselors, admitted with a shrug “So fair a city is well worth a mass” and declared his willingness to turn Catholic. After suitably prolonged disputations with theologians he declared himself convinced of the error of his belief, and on a Sunday in July, 1593, he appeared at Saint Denis where an imposing body of prelates was arrayed before the great door, and professed his new faith. Then he was allowed to enter the building and to repeat his profession before the altar.

Paris was not sorry to have an excuse for submitting and in the following March when Henry’s troops entered the city in the grayness of dawn one day toward the end of the month there was no opposition. On his way to Notre Dame to hear mass, Henry, resplendent in velvet, gold-embroidered, mounted on a handsome gray charger and constantly doffing his white-plumed helmet, was greeted with cries of “Long live the king” and “Hail to peace.” When the Provost of the Merchants and some of the principal citizens the day after his entry brought him a gift of sweetmeats, the king, though not fully dressed, for his subjects’ ardor had brought themat an unduly early hour, accepted the offering graciously, saying, “Yesterday I received your hearts; to-day I receive your comfits no less willingly.”

A Spanish troop had been called in by the League to assist them in holding the city against Henry. He allowed them to leave unmolested, contenting himself with watching them from a window as they passed through the Porte Saint Denis, and calling to them with cheerful insolence, “Gentlemen, my regards to your master—and never come back here!”

In the calm that succeeded the nation began a career of prosperity which it had not known for two generations. With cheerful severity Henry caused a gallows to be erected near the Porte Saint Antoine “Whereon to hang any person of either religion who should be found so bold as to attempt anything against the public peace.” He was determined that every peasant in the kingdom should have a chicken in the pot for his Sunday dinner, and he used intelligent methods of bringing about that result. Not only was he a man of practical good sense himself, but he was able to recognize that quality in others, and he chose men of prudence and intelligence as his advisers, chief of them the Duke of Sully. He encouraged agriculture, introduced new industries, permitted religious toleration throughthe Edict of Nantes, made himself the friend alike of peasant and of noble. France throve as she had not had a chance to do for many a decade—and the power of the crown became stronger than ever.

Henry’s early life had taught him to be active, and he lost no time in winning Paris to his friendship in various ways. He did not treat it like an enemy but as a returned prodigal, and the citizens lost none of their old privileges while they gained the civic improvements about which their new monarch busied himself promptly. He began the rebuilding of the city with the high roofed structures of brick and stone combined which showed that the classic outlines of the Renaissance were on the wane and which prefaced the Italian forms of the next reign.

In the place des Vosges of to-day may be seen the best extant examples of this style. Catherine de Medicis had made Henry II’s death at the Hôtel des Tournelles an excuse to leave a building damp and malodorous from the ill-drained marsh on which it was built. For a long time it housed only some of Charles IX’s pet animals, and then it was torn down except for a wing where Henry IV installed some of the silk workers whom he introduced into France that his people might learn a new industry. The palace park was used as a horse market, andfinally all memory of the past was cleared away and Henry IV caused to be laid out the Place Royale now called the Place des Vosges. “The spear-thrust of Montgomery,” said Victor Hugo, “was the origin of the Place Royale.”

The king built at his own expense several of the houses along the south side and gave the remainder of the land to people who would finish the remainder of the quadrangle in harmonious style. An arcade runs about the whole square whose north and south entrances are under pavilions which break the monotony of the architecture. The effect is wonderfully pleasing even to-day when most of the houses show signs of dilapidation and the park which they enclose is noisy with the overflow of children from the old and crowded streets round about. In the days of its prime it must have been extremely dignified and handsome.

Many great names are connected with this square. Richelieu lived here, Madame de Sévigné was born here, and here in the house where Victor Hugo had an apartment is the museum where Paris has collected mementoes of the man the people loved. Backing against the southern houses of the square still stands the house which Sully built for himself, its once imposing façade whose windows show signs of occupation bymany small businesses, looking down upon a disheveled courtyard.

Another step that tended to beautify Paris was the opening of the Place Dauphine from the western end of the palace of the Cité through the palace garden westward. It was surrounded by houses like those on the Place Royale. Madame Roland lived in one of them, situated where theplaceopens on the Pont Neuf which Henry finished. On it he planned to place his own equestrian statue, but that ornament underwent so many misfortunes, even to being shipwrecked on its way from Italy where it had been cast, that Henry was dead before it was set in place. It seems to have been fated to ill-luck, for during the Revolution it was melted down and made into cannon, although up to that time the people had laid their petitions at its foot. The existing statue replaced the old one in 1818.

On the northern part of the Pont Neuf Henry built the famous “Samaritaine,” a pump which forced water to the Louvre and the Tuileries, was crowned by a clock tower and a chime of bells, and was decorated with statues and carving. The name is perpetuated to-day in a department store on the right bank and in a public bath floating in the stream. On other bridges there were several of these pumps. One on thePont Notre Dame was destroyed within the remembrance of people now living.

Berthod, a seventeenth-century writer of doggerel, who describes “La Ville de Paris” in “burlesque verses,” draws a lively picture of the activities of Henry’s great esplanade in

THE RASCALITIES OF THE PONT-NEUF

May I be hung a hundred times—without a rope——If ever more I go to see you,Champion gathering of scamps,And if ever I take the troubleTo go and see the Samaritaine,The Pont-Neuf and that great horseOf bronze which never misbehaves,And is always clean though never curried(I’ll be blamed if he isn’t a merry companion)——Touch him as much as you like,For he’ll never bite you;Never has this parade horseEither bitten or kicked.O, you Pont-Neuf,rendezvousof charlatans,Of rascals, of confederates,Pont-Neuf, customary fieldFor sellers of paints, both face and wall,Resort of tooth-pullers,Of old clo’ men, booksellers, pedants,Of singers of new songs,Of lovers’ go-betweens,Of cut-purses, of slang users,Of masters of dirty trades,Of quacks and of nostrum makers,

O, you Pont-Neuf,rendezvousof charlatans,Of rascals, of confederates,Pont-Neuf, customary fieldFor sellers of paints, both face and wall,Resort of tooth-pullers,Of old clo’ men, booksellers, pedants,Of singers of new songs,Of lovers’ go-betweens,Of cut-purses, of slang users,Of masters of dirty trades,Of quacks and of nostrum makers,

THE SAMARITAINE.From an old print.

THE SAMARITAINE.

From an old print.

STATUE OF HENRY IV ON THE PONT NEUF.Madame Roland lived in the house on the right.

STATUE OF HENRY IV ON THE PONT NEUF.

Madame Roland lived in the house on the right.

And of spagiric physicians,Of clever jugglersAnd of chicken venders.“I’ve a splendid remedy, monsieur,”One of them says to you (Heaven never helps me!)“For what ails you.Believe me, sir, you canUse it without being housed.Look, it smells of sweetest scents,Is compounded of lively drugs,And never did Ambroise ParéMake up a like remedy.”“Here’s a pretty song,”Says another, “for a sou.”“Hi, there, my cloak, you rascal!Stop thief! Pickpocket!”“Ah, by George, there is the Samaritaine.See how it pours forth water,And how handsome the clock is!Hark, hark! How it strikes!Doesn’t it sound like chimes?Just cast your eye on that figure of a man striking the hour——Zounds, how he’s playing the hard worker!See, look, upon my word, won’t you remarkThat he’s as fresh as a Jew’s harp!Bless me! it’s astonishing!He’s striking the hour with his nose!”Let’s watch these shooters-at-a-mark,Who, to ornament their boothHave four or five great grotesque figuresStanding on turn-tables,Holding in their hands an ink-hornMade of wood or bone or ivory,A leaden comb, a mirrorDecorated with yellow and black paper,Shoe-horns, lacing tags,Flexible knives, spectacles,A comb-case, a sun-dial,All decked out with saffron yellow;Old books of Hours, for use of man or woman,Half French, half Latin;Old satin roses;A gun adorned with matches,Two or three old cakes of soap,A wooden tobacco-box,A nut-cracker,A little group of alabaster,Its figures whitened with plaster,A bad castor hatAdorned with an imitation gold cord,A flute, a Basque drum,An old sleeve, an ugly mask.“Here you are, gentlemen! Take a chance!Two shots for a farthing,”Says this rascal in his boothDressed in antique costume,And tormenting passers-byAbout his unmarketable wares.“Six balls for a sou,”Says this merchant of boxes of balls;“Here you are, sir! Who’ll take a shotBefore I shut up shop?Come on, customers, take a chance;Nobody fails in three shots!”

Two hospitals were built in Henry’s reign, one on the left bank, l’Hôpital de Charité, and the other outside of the city on the northeast, for contagious diseases.

Improvement of the quays was a manifold benefit to the city.

A satirical prescription warranted to cure the plague, was quoted then as it had been for the previous hundred years:

RECIPE FOR THE CURE OF THE EPIDEMIC

If you wish to be curedTake—if you can find them——Two conscientious Burgundians,Two clean Germans,Two meek inhabitants of Champagne,Two Englishmen who are not treacherous,Two men of Picardy who are not rashWith two bold Lombards,And, to end, two worthies from Limousin.Bray them in an oakum mortarAnd then put in your soup.If you have made a good hashYou’ll find you never had a betterRemedy to ward off the epidemic.But no one will ever believe it.

Queen Marguerite of Valois, the wife whose wedding festivities had precipitated the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, proved herself Catherine de Medicis’ own daughter in point of morals. Henry’s were none of the best and they were divorced, he to contemplate marriage with Gabrielle d’Estrées and after her death to clinch his Italian alliance by wedding Marie de Medicis,while Marguerite entertained herself with numerous lovers at the Hôtel de Sens and at a new house which she built on the left bank, finding it “piquant” to look across to the Louvre where her successor lived. In moments of emotion, conventionality or fright she founded several religious houses. Of the Monastery of the Petits-Augustins there is a remnant left, the chapel, which has been secularized and now houses the Renaissance museum of the School of Fine Arts. Its façade is, incongruously enough, the façade of Diane de Poitiers’ château d’Anet, mentioned above.

Henry’s devotion to Gabrielle d’Estrées, a rarely beautiful woman, made him have her initial carved in parts of the Louvre which he built. The letters are gone now except in one overlooked instance, and they were erased, it is said, by the order of Marie de Medicis. If this is true she seems to have had more feeling about this past love affair of the king’s than about his former wife, for she is said to have been friendly with Marguerite across the river even to the point of paying her debts.

In spite of Henry’s warlike career and his rough-and-ready manners he was not without the ability, which many early kings cultivated, to express his lighter emotions in verse. To-day this royal skill seems to have left the monarchs ofEurope with the exception of Carmen Sylva and of Nicholas of Montenegro who writes and fights with equal enthusiasm. Here is a poem addressed to

CHARMING GABRIELLE[4]

My charming Gabrielle!My heart is pierced with woe,When glory sounds her knell,And forth to war I go;Parting, perchance our last!Day, marked unblest to prove!O, that my life were past,Or else my hapless love!Bright star whose light I lose,——O, fatal memory!My grief each thought renews!——We meet again or die!Parting, perchance our last!Day, marked unblest to prove!O, that my life were past,Or else my hapless love!O, share and bless the crownBy valor given to me!War made the prize my own,My love awards it thee!Parting, perchance our last!Day, marked unblest to prove!O, that my life were past,Or else my hapless love!Let all my trumpets swell,And every echo roundThe words of my farewellRepeat with mournful sound!Parting, perchance our last!Day, marked unblest to prove!O, that my life were past,Or else my hapless love!

My charming Gabrielle!My heart is pierced with woe,When glory sounds her knell,And forth to war I go;

Parting, perchance our last!Day, marked unblest to prove!O, that my life were past,Or else my hapless love!

Bright star whose light I lose,——O, fatal memory!My grief each thought renews!——We meet again or die!

Parting, perchance our last!Day, marked unblest to prove!O, that my life were past,Or else my hapless love!

O, share and bless the crownBy valor given to me!War made the prize my own,My love awards it thee!

Parting, perchance our last!Day, marked unblest to prove!O, that my life were past,Or else my hapless love!

Let all my trumpets swell,And every echo roundThe words of my farewellRepeat with mournful sound!

Parting, perchance our last!Day, marked unblest to prove!O, that my life were past,Or else my hapless love!

The most ambitious architectural work of Henry’s reign was the addition which he made to the Louvre. Catherine de Medicis had begun a wing extending from the right angle of Francis I and Henry II toward the Seine, and then continued it in a gallery parallel with the river, and intended to meet the palace of the Tuileries. Henry IV finished both and added the story which was rebuilt in Louis XIV’s reign after a fire. It is now called the Gallery of Apollo and contains to-day a few of the crown jewels kept when the rest were sold twenty-five years ago. Out of this splendid hall opens the small square room in which hung Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” until its unexplained disappearance two years ago.

Popular as Henry was personally the politicalsituation was so embroiled that he had many enemies. Soon after his triumphal entry into Paris he was unsuccessfully attacked by a youth named Chastel, and it is a testimony to the king’s openness of mind and tact that after a few year’s he caused the demolition of the monument which enthusiasts raised to commemorate his escape. As a further expression of the people’s horror at Chastel’s act his house, opposite the Cour du Mai, was razed and on its site the public executioner branded his victims.

A half dozen other attempts upon Henry’s life followed, and at last one was successful. Driving in an open carriage through a narrow street (rue de la Ferronerie) near the markets, he was stabbed by one Ravaillac who leaped upon the wheel of the carriage as it halted in a press of traffic. A fortnight later the assassin was tortured to death on the Grève. The body of the most popular sovereign that France has ever known lay in state in the Hall of the Cariatides, that huge gallery of the Louvre which had served as a guardroom in the days of Henry II and Catherine de Medicis. There could be no better testimony to the regard in which the “roi galant” was held not only in his own time but later than the fact that during the Revolution his body and tomb at Saint Denis were not disturbed.

HENRY IV’S death left France with a nine-year-old king, Louis XIII, (1610-1643), whose Italian mother, acting as regent, had small sympathy with her adopted land. Sully she soon dismissed and the court witnessed a greedy scramble for money and preferment between imported favorites and French nobles. In the brief period of four years the financial state of the country was such that it became necessary to summon the States General to see if any way out of the trouble might be found. France’s regeneration under Henry of Navarre had been a growth too rapid to have roots firm enough to withstand rough handling.

The Assembly was to accomplish nothing for it. It was in the autumn of 1614 that the Estates met in a hall in the Hôtel de Bourbon just east of the Louvre. The body was a unit in demanding reform, but unity ceased with that demand. The nobles were indignant at certain encroachments on their aristocratic rights, the queen having given privileges to some middle-class professional people for a financial consideration. The clergy were shocked at the suggestion that they pay taxes—an idea not to be considered, they said, for it would be giving to man what was due to God. The Third Estate had a just grievance in the fact that upon them fell all the expenses of the government, and their representatives, speaking kneeling as was the dispiriting custom, succeeded nevertheless in giving some caustic warnings.

The only result of all this quarreling was that a petition was sent to the king asking him to give his attention to the questions under discussion. The only reply from the Louvre was the information that greeted the deputies when they gathered the next day that the queen wanted their hall of meeting for a ball and that the Assembly was therefore disbanded. It was a hundred and seventy-five years after this brusque treatment before it met again just before the outbreak of the Revolution.

Richelieu, Paris born, Sorbonne educated, and at that time a bishop, was a member of this Assembly of 1614. When he became Marie de Medicis’ adviser, and, diplomatic and inflexible, imposed his will upon the country, the situation cleared. There was need of high-handed action at first. The minister had the greedy Prince of Condé arrested within the palace of the Louvreand sent to the Bastille; a force was sent against other hungry and violent nobles; the king himself, though then but a lad of sixteen, felt the bracing atmosphere of this change and ordered the arrest—possibly the death—of the Italian Concini, who, with his wife, Leonora Galigaï had ruled the nation through the queen. Concini was shot as he was crossing the bridge across the eastern moat of the Louvre, and the king looked on from a window. Leonora was beheaded and burned as a witch on the Grève.

Richelieu, become a cardinal, ruled with wisdom and vigor. He treated high and low with equal impartiality, even causing the execution of some of the greatest nobles in the land for the breaking of the law which forbade dueling. The Place de Grève witnessed the punishment for the sport of the Place Royale. Legalized struggles by the Parliament in the palace on the Cité, underhand plots by men very near the throne—all were met and overthrown by the sagacious premier, and his every act tended to confirm the strength of the crown. He fought sturdily against the Huguenots and conquered them with the fall of La Rochelle, a conquest which the church of Notre Dame-des-Victoires was established to commemorate, the original building serving as the sacristy of the present edifice. He confirmed Henry of Navarre’s Edict of Nantes,however, giving to the Protestants religious liberty and civil rights. Abroad the cardinal’s policies brought territory and prestige to the crown.

Louis lived but a scant half year longer than Richelieu. The king’s whole life was passed under the domination of a determined mother, Marie de Medicis, and a masterful prime minister. It would have required a stronger personality than his to make itself felt, though Rubens has recorded in a series of pictures now in the Louvre the quarrels and reconciliations of the royal family. His only interests were hawking, drilling soldiers, and craftsmanship in leather. He was terribly bored most of the time, apparently without any initiative toward remedying the situation. His court reflected his own disposition and was incredibly dull, though ordered in etiquette and brilliant in garb.

It is to the regent and the cardinal and not to the king that Paris was indebted for the many embellishments of this reign and for any impetus that it gained toward the standards of art and literature which rose to their climax in the next reign.

Henry IV had made Paris so pleasant a place to live in that the city was constantly growing. Rivaling the Marais in popularity a new section became fashionable, the Quarter Saint Honoré onthe northwest of the town. By way of protecting this rapidly enlarging district Louis swung the city wall so far west as to include the Tuileries gardens. It was in this newly popular quarter that Richelieu built for himself the Palais Cardinal which he bequeathed to the king and which then took its present name, the Palais Royal. He encountered difficulties in the construction of his new home for his ideas of what he wanted did not harmonize with what he could have. Thehôtelsof other men were in the way and sometimes even the cardinal’s expressed desire was not enough to make them turn over their property to him. When they were citizens of small account he brought pressure, not always honest, to bear upon them; when they were people of importance he sometimes had to keep his wishes in abeyance. The result was an irregularity of outline that was not beautiful. To secure a symmetrical garden Richelieu did from within what few of the city’s enemies ever have succeeded in doing—he pierced the king’s new wall. After the cardinal’s death the queen-regent, Anne of Austria, moved into the palace, and in its garden Louis XIV grew up, a rather forlorn little figure so uncared for that once he was found after dark asleep under a bush.

Outside of the city wall running along the river bank was the Cours la Reine laid out by

THE ARCHBISHOP’S PALACE.Beyond the bridge, the old Hôtel Dieu.

THE ARCHBISHOP’S PALACE.

Beyond the bridge, the old Hôtel Dieu.

RICHELIEU’S PALAIS CARDINAL, LATER CALLED PALAIS ROYAL.

Marie de Medicis as a parade ground for the satins and velvets, the flowing cloaks and plumed hats of her courtiers. A similar sight was to be seen in the gardens of the left bank palace which Marie, disgusted with the gloom of the Louvre which she could not believe was really the palace when she first came to Paris, had rebuilt on the site of an old residence of the dukes of Luxembourg. To-day, with that combination of thrift and love of beauty which characterizes the Frenchman, the Senate occupies one part and the President of the Senate lives in another section. The national museum of contemporary art is housed in a modern building adjoining. The garden is still carefully ordered, the only renaissance garden in Paris, and is a fitting adjunct to the beautiful and varied Italian edifice which looks down upon it. The grounds are dotted with statues of eminent men and women, most of them portraits. To the east of the palace is an elaborate Florentine fountain and basin called the Fountain of the Medicis.

It was in Louis’ reign that Paris became the seat of an archbishop who used as his episcopal residence the bishop’s palace on the south side of Notre Dame. Of a half-dozen religious houses founded or enlarged at this time the best known is the Val-de-Grâce, made prominent by its gift from Louis’ wife, Anne of Austria, of ahandsome church, a thank-offering for the birth of a son after a childless wedded life of twenty-three years. This son ruled as Louis XIV, the “Grand Monarque.” The church of the Val-de-Grâce was dome-crowned in the fashion set by the left bank monastery of the Carmelites and followed in the construction of the near-by palace of the Luxembourg, of the chapel of the Sorbonne in which is Richelieu’s tomb, of the Church of Saint Paul-Saint Louis, in whose graveyard Rabelais was buried, and, in the next reign, of the College Mazarin (the Institute) and of the Dome of the Invalides beneath which Napoleon sleeps. The popularity of the dome continued far into the next century, for Sainte Geneviève’s church, now called the Pantheon, is topped in the same majestic style.

Now was the beginning, too, of the so-called “Jesuit” style, seen to-day in not undignified form in the façades of Saint Paul-Saint Louis near the Place de la Bastille, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the left bank church of fashionable weddings, Saint Roch on the rue Saint Honoré, from which the crowds watched the daily passing of the tumbrils during the Revolution, Saint Gervais, east of the Hôtel de Ville, which cherishes a crucifix from the ancient abbey of Sainte Geneviève, and the Oratory also on the rue Saint Honoré, now a Protestant church andserving as a background for a fine group of statuary representing Admiral Coligny between Fatherland and Religion.

The main feature of these façades is the superposition of columns. All three orders are used in Saint Gervais, the simplest, Doric, at the bottom, the Ionic above, and the most florid, the Corinthian at the top. The others employ but two orders, always with the more elaborate above.

Decoration was of the heavy style calledbaroquewhich developed later into the slightly more acceptablerococo, so called from its use of rocks, shells, and foliage combined with conventional scrolls. Louis’ addition to the Louvre, however, of a part of the eastern courtyard, reproduced therenaissancedecorations of the constructions of Francis I and Henry II to which they were attached.

Far to the east of the city Louis’ physician started a botanical garden which developed into the present huge Jardin des Plantes with its connecting collections of animals. One of the sights of the garden is a spreading cedar tree which the famous eighteenth century botanist, Jussieu, is said to have brought from the Andes, a tiny plant, slipped under the band of his hat.

An important addition to the Paris of Louis XIII’s time was the construction of what is now called the Île Saint Louis to the east of the Cité.This island was made by uniting two small islands, one of which had belonged to the bishop and the other to the canons of the cathedral. With bustling Paris only the cast of a stone away on each bank these two islets were devoted to such rural uses as the pasturage of cows and the whitening of linen. One of them, however, in Charles V’s time, had been the scene of a strange combat between a man and a dog, the property of his enemy whom he was accused of murdering from the fact that the dog attacked him whenever they met. Lists were enclosed on the then barren island and the king and a great crowd of men from court and town stood about to see the outcome of the “ordeal.” The man was allowed a stick; the dog had a barrel open at both ends into which he might retreat and from which he could plunge forth. When he was loosed he rushed about his enemy, evading his blows, threatening him now on one side and now on another until he was worn out, and then flew at his throat and threw him down so that he was forced to make confession of his crime thus proven by the “wager of battle.”

Henry IV built a chapel which became in the eighteenth century the present church of Saint Louis-in-the-Island, whose delicately pierced spire shows glints of sky through its openings. The first union with the main land was by a

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