From Paris: Its Sites, Monuments and History, compiled from the principal secondary authorities by Maria Hornor Lansdale, With an Introduction by Hilaire Belloc, Illustrated; Philadelphia: The International Press, The John C. Winston Co., 1898; pp. 296-320.
PARIS : ITS SITES, MONUMENTS AND HISTORY
296THE period which we are about to treat in this chapter covers but twenty years, and deals with but one reign; nevertheless this short space of time merits a separate place on account of its importance in the history of the city. It would not be possible to include it in the long and complicated history through which we have just passed, for it was a period of peace and of reorganization; on the other hand, it would be unwise to merge it in the story of the seventeenth century — in the account of the transformation of Paris — first, because it is politically distinct from the era of the great Cardinals; secondly, because the personality of Henry IV. is so separate from that of his successors; and thirdly, because, though his work was the beginning of the rebuilding, yet it was an attempt peculiar to the reign, and one which would be ill-understood in connection with the efforts of Richelieu or of Mazarin. English and American readers will understand this attitude if we put it thus: “That the time of Shakespeare should not be confounded with the time of Cromwell.” In order to effect this differentiation it is necessary to deal in a short chapter with the architectural movement of 297 less than a generation, but the above paragraph will (we hope) furnish an excuse.
In the first place, of what character was the period? With the religious wars we have already dealt, we have seen their complexity and have noted the tangle of dynastic, of national, of religious, and of personal interests which no one can quite succeed in unravelling. When Henry enters Paris the various elements seem — mainly through lapse of time — to be resolving themselves; we have with this first of the Bourbons the characters which are to follow the house for exactly two hundred years (I mean from 1589 to 1789), and which are to be the fruitful cause of its grandeur and of its decay. These may be enumerated as follows: (1) the governing, and ultimately the absolute power of the crown, due to (2) the demand for national unity, which is the dumb yet controlling force of the two centuries, which in its turn is led by (3) Paris, which has been growing more and more conscious of its hegemony and of its separate life; these strong national currents, destined to survive and to be (all unseen) the basis of the Revolution, are combated by (4) the remaining pretensions of the nobles, and their insistence (as their political power declines) upon oppressive and useless privilege, and (5) the body of the French Protestants, now grown to a body definitely religious in character, and separatist now from their ideas rather than from their former ground of material interest.
298All these five points (as we shall see) show especially strong contrasts when in the seventeenth century the generation of the Medicean time was dead; but even with 1589 they are strongly accentuated, and we feel that we have entered into the new world.
Following this movement comes, as we shall see in this chapter, the first hearty attempt to transform Paris, to replace the Gothic by the Renaissance. It was late in the day for this to come, but Paris is northern, the influence of Italy was bound to touch her almost as tardily as it touched England. We saw in the last chapter how the spirit of the classical revival shot fitfully through the Gothic city over which Catherine had ruled. Yet that force, though strong and vivid, struck but here and there — there was no complete evidence of it outside of the Tuileries, and the town into which Henry rode was still a place of pointed roofs, of spires, and of timbered houses, though the western wing of the Louvre (which Henry II. had built), the Tuileries, and here and here a church or private houses, lifted a high new roof and showed a dome or a colonnade. An odd feature of it all was the ring of fortifications, modern and bastioned, contrasting violently with the mediæval towers of the Palais and of the Louvre.
Well in the time of Henry the change becomes general from having been spasmodic. As the description of his work will make clear, the spots he had time to change were few, but they were scattered, 299 they were representative, and they sufficed to profoundly change the aspect of the city. In architecture, as in every other thing, France and Paris find the idea before they execute the thing. The nation and its capital are a standing menace to the “historic method,” and (like human beings) they think before they realize their thought in action. Upon that basis we may say, with a little stretching of the metaphor, that Henry of Navarre began to make the city which the Italian woman and her contemporaries had imagined. Thus France to-day is profoundly building up (and how few can see it!) the solid building whose architects died all in germinal of the year II.
The events of the reign (though there is space here but for the briefest mention of the most important) should be grasped before we speak of its monuments. For, especially towards its close, they will explain much of Henry’s efforts, and still more of their partial nature.
When Henry III. had ended his peripatetics in death, and when the knife of Clément had completed the failure which the King’s own character had prepared, then Henry of Navarre was left the only conceivable heir to the throne. It was not that Henry III. had so named him before he died, nor even the legitimacy of his claim, so much as the attitude of the opposing party, which made this certain. Paris, his principal opponent, was in a kind of angry “impasse,” 300 the city was all for unity, for centralized government, for the nation — as opposed to faction. It was this which had made it support Guise, and when the last of the Valois made his volte-face it was left in a confusion of principles. Once all the forces to which the city had been devoted were in the same person or cause, now they were disunited. If they looked to the King, to the central government, the Huguenot appeared; if they turned to attack feudalism, why legitimacy itself was leading the nobles. Paris might talk and argue about a King-Cardinal, or the claims of the Infanta, but she knew in her heart that she could not desert the male line and the eldest representative. Neither could she accept the Huguenot supremacy, which was simply another name for the victory of the provinces and of aristocracy.
As might be expected in such a dilemma, actual circumstances rather than theories carried the day. Paris was under siege when Henry III. died, and she decided to continue the war. It was more than three and a half years, from August, 1589, to March, 1594, that the struggle went on. On Henry’s side were the growing adhesion of the provinces, the conquest of Normandy, the great battle of Ivry. On the side of Paris was (at first) the genius of the Duke of Parma, the national desire to see the capital at its head, and, most important of all, the desperate valor of the citizens.
Paris at that moment was like a man who knows 301 that his quarrel has been just, knows that he should make terms, but, led on by the momentum of his anger, is but the more determined to fight to the end. Ivry, great and decisive victory though it was, failed to accomplish Henry’s purpose.
The story of Henry’s abjuration is well known. In the summer of 1593 he accepted the Roman faith, and with that act the end was in sight, though the Duke of Mayenne fought hard at the head of his garrison, and for personal reasons Paris itself was veering around. It had stipulated for the wars, and Henry had paid the price. De Mayenne was away at Soissons when, at four in the morning of March 22, 1594, Henry entered by the Porte Neuve, and the next day the people acclaimed him. The Spanish left the city, and Henry was definitely established in the Louvre. From that date begins a united and happy reign, memorable in the affections of the French people.
Once firmly established in his palace, Henry begins that policy towards the continent which has become the foundation of modern international relations. He feels that what was esteemed a crime in Louis XI. will be mere patriotism in the future. The Middle Ages are not only over, they are even forgotten, and the same spirit which made Henry IV. destroy the Gothic leads him also to replace the relics of feudalism in foreign politics by the doctrine of the balance of power. The nations of Europe were formed 302 before 1500, spent the sixteenth century in turmoil, each to assert its independence, and now with the seventeenth century they are beginning to appear in a group with definite federal rules. Thus Henry fights the preponderance of Spain and retakes the French town of Amiens. The signal result of that act was the treaty of Vervins.
But to hold France thus as a watch-dog in Europe was but one side of Henry’s policy. If he desired her independence and her power it was, in his practical mind, but one aspect of a general well-being which was his chief object, the careful attention to the economic condition of the people, the wise dependence upon Sully’s judgment and the chivalrous attempt of the Edict of Nantes. He thought it possible for the two religious bodies to live side by side, and saw the supreme importance of recognizing the unity of the country by the equality of its citizens. The policy was doomed to fail, and that unity was not achieved by a compromise but by a fierce ideal nearly two hundred years after Henry’s time. It was this common sense and practical but patriotic policy which endeared Henry to the hearts of the people. The peasants understood him and he them; so that in the Revolution his name survived and his grave was spared.
For the last twelve years of his life Sully is at his side, and as the reign progresses things go from better to better. The death of Gabrielle d’Estrées removed 303 the danger of a quixotic alliance, and in the autumn of the next year (1600) Henry met Marie de Médicis, the queen, at Lyons. In September, 1601, Louis XIII. was born, and in July, 1602, Henry cowed the faction of the nobles (for the moment at least) in the execution of de Biron.
The next few years were a preparation for what seemed the inevitable struggle between this new, strong, centralized kingship of France and the house of Austria; but just as the armies were collected, and even a regent (the Queen) appointed for the King’s absence, fell the blow of Ravaillac. Henry was to have joined the army on the 19th of May; it was on the 14th that he was on his way to visit Sully at the Arsenal; he was ill-attended by but a few gentlemen, when during a block in the traffic in the Rue Ferronnerie the carriage stopped, and the assassin thrust in his arm and stabbed the King. Ravaillac was executed with tortures horrible but not undeserved; for if Henry had lived we might have had to chronicle a peaceful and contented development in the early seventeenth century, the Fronde and the reaction which produced the despotism of Louis XIV. might surely have been avoided. As it is, this little space stands out quite distinct, and, in the history of Paris, is the preparation of the great reconstruction under Richelieu.
Since the Louvre contains the most important relics of Henry’s influence, we will in this chapter depart 304 somewhat from our usual order and begin with the changes that occurred in that palace.
When Marie de Médicis arrived in Paris in January, 1601, she could not recover from her surprise and disappointment at the appearance of the Louvre. She came from a full renaissance to find something more than half mediæval. After the luxury and magnificence of the Pitti, it seemed to her inexpressibly cold and dreary, not to say shabby, and Cheverney says that he had to tell her several times that it really was the Louvre, as she persisted in thinking they had taken her somewhere else, and that a trick was being played on her. It must be remembered, though, that since the death of Henry III. the Queen’s apartment had been uninhabited. Such as it was, Marie continued to live there during the nine years that elapsed before her husband’s death.
Henry apparently intended to make Gabrielle d’Estrées his queen, and of this historical surmise a certain amount of proof is afforded by the presence of the interlaced letters H. and G. in the ornamentations of the new work on the Louvre. But one of these monograms was found by M. Duban in the course of his careful restorations. It is on the fifth arch of the north façade of the Grande Galerie, where it had been apparently overlooked — all the others had disappeared. Who destroyed them? The stereotyped answer to that is “The Revolutionists, who in July, 1793, effaced everything in the Louvre that suggested 305 royalty.” It is perfectly true that a great many emblems were destroyed then, but these particular ones had been out of existence long before. It was the woman who became Queen instead of Gabrielle, Marie de Médicis, who had them erased. Sauval, in “Les Galanteries des Rois de France,” states this positively. Speaking of Gabrielle, then become the Duchess of Beaufort, and of the King, he says: “He had his initial, interlaced with that of the Duchess, carved in the palace he was building at that time; but they are no longer to be found, because Marie de Médicis had them erased.”
In addition to the interest attaching to this record of Henry IV.’s affection for Gabrielle, it gives us a valuable date. Since it must have been cut during the lifetime of the favorite, that is before April 10, 1599, it proves that from the early part of his reign Henry had interested himself in the works at the Louvre, especially in the Grande Galerie, which he completed, carrying it on from the point where Catherine de Médicis abandoned it to the line of the present Rue des Tuileries. The other gallery that connected it with the pavilion of the King, called the Petite Galerie (the present museum of ancient sculptures), was much farther advanced, practically finished, in fact, being the most complete work left at the Louvre by Catherine de Médicis. This gallery, with its Italian terrace (which was left intact until Henry IV. replaced it with the Galerie des Rois), 306 with its wide and lofty arcades, its pilasters, its incrustations of black and white marble, all so thoroughly Tuscan in style, must have afforded the old Florentine Queen the liveliest satisfaction.
Near the Petite Galerie on the southwest, and at the eastern end of the present Grande Galerie, stood a house called de l’Engin. Catherine had it pulled down and built on the site a single large hall, lighted by five windows similar in style to those of the new Louvre of Lescot. This she was not able to finish, and the whole credit has been given to Henry IV. in consequence, though he only completed it.
Henry overlaid the walls and paved the floor of this hall with different colored marbles, filled it with the most beautiful statues he could collect from his different palaces — the most wonderful was the Diana huntress, which he brought from Fontainebleau — and when by these means he had produced one of the most magnificent rooms in the whole Louvre, he would give audiences to foreign ambassadors and persons of distinction no where else. It pleased the King, in fact, to have it called the “Ambassadors’ Chamber,” but its other name, “Salle des Antiques,” was the one by which it was known longest, and which, indeed, it might well have continued to bear, as some of the finest statues (the Augustus, for instance, which earned it this title) are still there. Finally, the famous “Salon Carré” of to-day is made by throwing 307 into one the two stories which Henry IV. had built above this hall.
As to all Catherine de Médicis’ scheme for a separate Tuileries, Henry only adopted what had already been begun; for the Tuileries itself he contented himself with the part that was finished, only carrying it on down to the quay in order to connect it with the Grande Galerie, which was the favorite one among all his projects. As to the famous quadrangle, planned by Catherine, he made no attempt whatever to carry it out. Was his idea to connect the two palaces in any other way than by the gallery? So it would seem; at any rate Malherbe points to it in a letter of January 20, 1608, where, after saying that the rest of the Hôtel de Bourbon was to be pulled down, he adds, “Saint Nicolas and Saint Thomas du Louvre will be transported there so as to clear that space between the Louvre and the Tuileries.” There can be but little doubt that the plan was to convert this “space” into a great garden, whose avenues and shrubbery should form a continuation (the city moat being previously filled in) to the great parterre which was shortly to be planted before the eastern façade of the Tuileries, and which is not to be confounded with the park on the other side. If this were indeed Henry IV.’s project, he was never able to realize it; Ravaillac’s dagger cut him off too soon. Thus the “Great Gallery” is the main thing that he left us at the Louvre.
308In the Temple quarter we have nothing to remark, save that another of Henry’s great enterprises was likewise checked by his sudden death. This was the magnificent Place du France, which he proposed laying out in the still uninhabited part of the Culture du Temple.
As for the Hôtel des Tournelles, it was more or less neglected, being only used by Henry as a lodging for a colony of two hundred workmen, whom he had brought from Italy to start the manufacture of silk stuffs, shot with silver and gold threads. The quarter in which it stood, however, received his especial attention.
Towards the close of the year 1604 letters-patent were issued to the effect that the Treasurers of France were to assemble at “a place called the parc des Tournelles,” to give their advice on the subject of a concession the King wished to make, with a view to establishing a manufactory of “silk worked with silver, as it is in Milan.” In addition to the building — the main wing of the Hôtel des Tournelles — the King granted the owners of the proposed manufactory a considerable piece of ground at the junction of the Rue St. Antoine, on which the first pavilion of the Place Royale was to be erected. The King meantime had removed the horse-market to the extremity of the Faubourg St. Honoré, where the quartier Gaillon grew up later, and had planned the entire transformation of this neighborhood, through 309 which he was obliged to pass constantly on his way to and from the Hôtel of Sebastien Zamet and the Arsenal, where Sully was established.
His intention was to make it one of the handsomest quartiers of Paris, and though the architect who had charge of the work is not positively known, there seems little doubt that it was Androuet du Cerceau, who, moreover, had furnished the plans for Sully’s Hôtel, then building on the ground close by, given him by the King ten years before.
Although du Cerceau, stern and inflexible Huguenot that he was, quitted France and died abroad rather than make an abjuration as his august master had done, this last thought none the less of him nor of his talent, and the plans for the Place Royale were exactly carried out; the King, that is, erecting at his own cost the side backing on the Hôtel Sully, while the ground on the remaining three sides was given to various persons of the court free of charge, on condition that they should erect there, with as little delay as possible, buildings corresponding in style and design to the first. The central space was to be left open for a public garden. Letters-patent of August 2, 1605, order that the place formerly called parc des Tournelles, and then Marché aux Chevaux, shall in future be named Place Royale. Four streets were opened at the same time, the Grande Rue Royale, now Rue de Birague, on the south, the Rue du Parc Royal, now Rue de Béarn, on the north, the 310 Petite Rue Royal, and Rue de la Coulture Ste. Catherine on the east and west, which are now merged into one street, called des Francs Bourgeois and des Vosges.
The first parts finished were the two great pavilions in the centre of the northern and southern façades, called respectively Pavillon du Roi and de la Reine. On the ground floor of each of these was an arcade having a high central arch flanked by two lower ones decorated with Doric pilasters. These two main pavilions, as well as the thirty-six smaller ones, which, precisely alike, and placed at intervals all around the place so as to form an arcade, were constructed of brick with facings and trimmings of white stone, their three stories surmounted by a lofty slate roof with dormer windows.
Although the King came every day, when he was in Paris, to stimulate the workmen by his presence, and when he was away wrote constantly to Sully urging him to push the work as rapidly as possible, the Place Royale was not finished at the time of his death in 1610. (It is, of course, the square now called “Place des Vosges.”)
Ever since Henry II.’s time the seat of the Grand Master of the Artillery of France had been at the Arsenal, though he only occasionally occupied the hôtel erected by Charles IX. When Sully held this office, while Henry IV. interested himself in enlarging the hôtel, laying out gardens, and even building 311 a theatre where the minister could amuse himself, the latter was bent solely on finishing the magazines and foundries, and on arranging for the manufacture of saltpetre — they had ceased to make powder here, it being considered too dangerous. Before long it was thought wise to transfer the saltpetre factory as well to an outlying point; it was accordingly established on the opposite bank of the river, the place taking the name of the Salpêtriére.
The Municipal Council of Paris watched with growing uneasiness the unusual activity in and about the Arsenal under Sully’s direction. At last, when a report was circulated that work had been begun on a fortress which was to stand between the Arsenal and the Seine, and not only cut off the promenade du Mail, where the Parisians were fond of resorting in fine weather, but enclose the casemates, where the city kept the great iron chains for shutting off the river, they became thoroughly alarmed and sent the Provost to St. Germain to remonstrate with the King. Henry met them the next day with the smiling assurance that they were needlessly alarmed, as the only building he proposed to erect at that spot was a pavilion where he could rest after coming out of his bath and before taking a boat for the Louvre. This pavilion was not built till nearly nine years later; it was of wood, and surmounted a part of the wall of Charles V., just opposite the Ile Louviers; it consisted of a large room opening out of a small cabinet, and 312 had stairs leading down to the water’s edge. Here the King proposed coming occasionally incognito, to enjoy at once the society of the Grand Master and freedom from court etiquette; and although his death occurred before he had ever been able to carry out his intention, it always went by the name of the Cabinet de Henry IV.
On the day following Henry’s entry into Paris the command of the Bastille had been given to Dominique de Vie; he was succeeded in 1601 by Sully, who, while continuing to live at the Arsenal, had the King’s treasure, a vast sum due mainly to his careful management, transferred to the Bastille as being a safer place of deposit.
Another event of the 23d of March, 1594, was the reception by Henry at the Louvre of a delegation headed by the Prévôt des Marchands, who came to present an offering of sugar-plums and comfits in sign of welcome, and incidentally to secure the good graces of the King. The latter was only half-dressed — the zeal of “Messieurs de l’Hôtel de Ville” had brought them out early — but he received them as he was, with a short and characteristic speech. “Hier, je reçus vos cœurs, aujourdhui je ne reçois pas mons volontiers vos confitures,” and, what was more to the point, he shortly reinstated the city in all its “rights and privileges” lost in the course of the preceding three years. A year later the Hôtel de Ville was put in possession of one-half the confiscations and fines due the 313 King since the death of his predecessor, on the sole condition that the money should be used for the benefit of the city alone, its festivities, and, above all, its buildings and improvements.
Of these last the most pressing was the completion of the Hôtel de Ville, where work had been abandoned for ten or twelve years. Dominico Cortona’s plans were carried out, but the building was not finished until 1628. Above the central door, replacing the inscription of 1533, was an equestrian statue of the King in bas-relief, executed by Pierre Biard.
We now come to the most conspicuous work of Henry IV.’s reign — the completion of the Pont Neuf — one of the main causes of his popularity at the time of his death. So soon as the treaty with Spain was concluded, in 1598 that is, the King turned his attention to this business, and by the following year Guillaume Marchand and François Petit, who were building it under the direction of the architect Claude de Chastillon, had completed the part over the southern arm of the river leading from the Quai des Augustins to the Island; but the most important part still remained to be done. As we mentioned in the last chapter, the main arm of the river could show nothing as yet but some rows of piles sticking out of the water. Petit and Marchand said they must have for this work sixty thousand écus and three years’ time.
At first the King tried to raise the money by using the proceeds from a tax on wine, usually applied to 314 keeping the public fountains in repair, but that proving insufficient, he made up the amount himself, and by the end of the allotted time it was possible (to be sure with some risk) to cross the entire length of the bridge. The King, always adventurous, promptly tried it, and L’Estoile writes in his journal, under date of Friday, June 20, 1603, “The King crossed from the Quai des Augustins to the Louvre on the Pont Neuf, which is not too secure as yet, and which very few persons dare to try. Some of those who made the attempt got their necks broken and fell into the river; when this was told his Majesty, he answered (so they say) that ‘there was not one among them who was a King,’ as he was.” The reign of Henry IV. saw the completion of the Pont Neuf and the beginning of the Place Dauphine. The King considered the bridge unfinished so long as it lacked a wide open space at the point of its junction with the Ile de la Cité; he also wished to have a pump constructed that should be at once an ornament and serve to increase the water-supply of the Louvre and the Tuileries. Messieurs de la Ville objected to this that it would interfere with the course of the river; but, the King paying not the slightest attention to their remonstrances, the pump was begun first, the Fleming Lintlaër having charge of the work.
Between 1605 and 1608 the mill connected with its machinery was set up in the second arch on the Louvre side. Great interest and excitement on the 315 part of the public. “The water from the pump on the Pont Neuf is at the Tuileries!” writes Malherbe triumphantly, on October 3, 1608. But the great ornament of the Bridge and Place Dauphine was to be the equestrian statue of Henry IV. In 1604, Franqueville, “premier sculpteur du roi,” was ordered to make a small model, which was then sent to Florence, where it was to be executed in full size by John of Bologna and — an operation that at that date could only be carried out by Italian artists — cast in bronze. John of Bologna died in 1608, leaving it unfinished — he had started with the horse, begun for another statue — and Pietro Tacca, his best scholar, carried on the work; but when Henry was killed it was still far from completed.
Although the Grand Duke, cousin of the Queen, urged Tacca to get it done, and the Queen supplied him liberally with money, “thirty thousand écus out of her own pocket,” says Bassompierre, it was not ready to ship until 1613.
The Colosse du Grand Roy Henry, as it was called, weighing about 12,400 pounds, was transported in the end of April to Leghorn, where the Chevalier Pescolini, and the engineer Antonio Guido, embarked with it for France. The plan was to go by way of Gibraltar to Havre, where the statue was to be put on a flat-bottomed boat and towed up to Paris. Unfortunately the vessel foundered off the coast of Sardinia, the “Colosse” capsized in the mud, and was 316 with the greatest difficulty raised and placed on board another ship. This accident, and a number of others which cannot be enumerated here, caused so much delay that it was more than a year after they left Leghorn, in the early part of May, that is, that Pescolini and Guido at last reached Havre with their charge.
Pescolini hurried at once to Paris with the news, and a temporary pedestal was forthwith raised on the Place Dauphine to support the King and his charger; but it was still some months before the statue could be set up, and the Queen with the young King had meanwhile been called away from the Capital. Orders were given, however, not to delay the ceremony already so long expected; it was hoped, too, that the sight might revive a little of the popularity of the father in favor of the son, who just then stood somewhat in need of it. On the twenty-third of August accordingly it took place in the presence of the two Provosts, the Sheriffs, the First President and the Treasurers-General of France. A full account of the proceedings was found beneath one of the feet of the horse when the statue was overturned in 1792.
Malherbe, writing in 1607 of Paris, says: “The greatest changes are in l’Ile du Palais, where they are making two new quays, one connecting the Pont Neuf with the Pont aux Meuniers, and the other connecting it with the Pont St. Michel; and on this same Island they are opening a Place to be called, it 317 is said, the Place Dauphine, which is to be very beautiful and much more frequented than the Place Royale.”
The King had, in fact, relinquished a considerable part of the Palais garden for this purpose. The plans were prepared by the Grand Master Sully: there were to be three rows of three-story brick houses all alike, in the form of a trapeze, the point opening on the bridge, and the base through the centre on a street which was to run between the Palais and the Place, and be called, after the first President, the Rue de Harlay.
François Petit, who was charged with the execution of these plans, had only to copy the style of the buildings on the Place Royale going up at the same time, which those of the Place Dauphine were to resemble.
What was left of the King’s garden after the Rue de Harlay was opened was reserved henceforth to the First President — it comprehended only that part hitherto called “Jardin du Bailliage” from the old “Hôtel of the Bailiffs,” which it adjoined.
On the other side of the Palais, at the corner of the rues de la Barillerie and de la Vielle-Draperie — that is, opposite the present entrance to the Cour du Mai — stood a monument called La Pyramide, erected by the city and Parliament to commemorate the attempt on Henry IV.’s life by Jean Chastel. It stood on the site of the house formerly occupied by 318 the young man’s father, who, implicated in the crime, forfeited all his possessions. The name of Pyramid was entirely inappropriate; the monument consisted of a sort of four-sided portico, with emblematic statues at the corners, surmounted by a cross. The base was covered with inscriptions in Latin and French, and the sentence, which included the Jesuits as having been instigators and parties to the crime, was set forth at length. The King had the whole thing demolished in 1605, eight years after the attempted assassination.
The Pont aux Meuniers, which started from a point a little west of the Pont au Change, had long been in a somewhat unsafe condition; it was carried away in an inundation in 1596, with great loss of life. Rebuilt in 1608 in wood, it was sometimes called Pont Marchand, from the name of the architect, who also paid the cost of construction, and sometimes Pont aux Oiseaux, from the bird painted as a sign above the door of each house, It was burned in 1621 and never rebuilt.
The great work planned by Henry IV. on the left bank of the river was unfortunately interrupted by his death. Francis I. had been the first to endow a college intended purely for the advancement of knowledge; the other colleges, strewn so thickly up the slopes of the Montagne Ste. Geneviève, taught science as it was already known, exact, bearing the stamp and seal of the great scholars. The Collège 319 du France had for its main object the study of open questions and the making of new discoveries. Until Henry II.’s time there were no special buildings set apart for its use, the teachers holding their classes about, now in one place and now in another. Then the adjoining Collèges of Tréguier and Cambrai were assigned to them, and under Henry IV. arrangements were made for the erection of a really splendid building. The plans were made and the work just about beginning when the King was killed. As, however, Marie de Médicis and her successors continued it on the same general plan, it may be considered as one of the results of that short and brilliant reign.
In connection with the University it is interesting to note that in the sixteenth century three scholars attended the same classes in the Hôtel de Navarre (the site of the present Ecole Polytechnique), the young Duke of Anjou, later Henry III., the Prince de Béarn — Henry IV. — and their common enemy, Henry of Guise. All three of them received the visit made there by Charles IX. in 1568.
Henry IV. made an attempt to enter Paris by the Porte St. Germain in 1589; he got possession of the Faubourg, but the gate, although barricaded in great haste, held out. L’Estoile tells how the King went up to the top of the tower of St. Germain des Prés to get a view of Paris, accompanied only by a monk, and how when he came down he said to the Maréchal de Biron that a sudden dread had seized him on finding 320 himself up there all alone with that monk, thinking of brother Clement’s knife.
In 1606 Marguerite of Valois, Henry’s first wife, decided to have a palace of her own directly opposite the Louvre. She accordingly bought some land belonging to the Grand and Petit Prés aux Clercs, and built a great hôtel, opening on the Rue de Seine and reaching to the Quai Malaquais, called then Quai de la Reine Marguerite. The gardens and great unenclosed park of this hôtel reached beyond the line of the present Rue du Bac, the wide avenues being traced to-day by the rues de Lille and de Verneuil and the Quays Malaquais and Voltaire. This park, thrown open to the public as was so frequently done by large households of that day, soon became the favorite resort of the inhabitants of the Faubourg St. Germain, and suggested the idea of the Cours de la Reine, opened later on the opposite bank of the river, the origin of the Champs Elysées.
With this we have touched on nearly all that was actually accomplished in Henry’s reign, but we shall see in the next chapter that very many of the great things done under Louis XIII. drew their inspiration, and sometimes their plans and origin, from the time of his father.