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. 43-73.
PARIS : ITS SITES, MONUMENTS AND HISTORY
321PARIS in the generation immediately succeeding Henry IV. saw the beginning of the change that entirely transformed her outward aspect. The period of the great cardinals, the few years that saw in England the victory of the upper class over the Crown, saw in France the victory of the Crown over the whole State. It is to that common origin that you may trace the English polity of to-day, aristocratic and jealous of local liberties, and the French polity, centralized and egalitarian.
The prodigious work, however, with which stand associated the names of Mazarin and Richelieu, does not affect Paris as we might imagine it would. You do not get a town or a palace which are by their mere outward aspect the centre of a great state. Versailles was such a palace, modern Paris is such a town. The Louvre and the Tuileries and the city of the great cardinals feels the period indirectly only, but the effect is very marked. It does not become grandiose, but it knows every part of itself. This change in Paris of the fifteenth century may be compared to the new fashion in clothing, or to the new style in literature that will come in with some new 322 era of civilization — a fashion and a style often inferior to the spirit which is moving an epoch — and which will only have its final effect at a much later time.
In a word, Paris is changed from the half-Gothic, half-renaissance place that it was, into a uniform city of high houses, steeply pitched roofs — all that we see in the old quarters to-day. A new style has appeared which remains untouched until the eighteenth century, and of which even our modern architecture is but a development.
There is one quarter of Paris left in which the traveller may realize for himself what this period did. It is the Ile St. Louis behind Notre Dame. Here there is practically no change, and in the great height of the old houses in the narrow but straight streets, the monotonous windows, the paved quays, you have remaining a pure portion of the time. There it had a fresh field to work upon, and there it has left an example of its effect which, from the size and locality of the Island, will probably be for many years a well-preserved relic of the days that saw the consolidation of the monarchy.
Turning to the Hôtel de Ville, we find it still unfinished at the time of Henry IV.’s death. In 1613 the belfry was completed and the great bell — pitched on a lower key to distinguish it from the one at the Palais — hung. From thenceforth on the birth of a Dauphin this bell was rung for three consecutive days and nights. Finally, with the completion in 323 1628 of the Pavillon de St. Esprit, the work may be said to have come to an end.
Under Louis XIII. The history of the Place de Grève may be briefly summed up in the words: Fêtes and Executions, the former usually planned by the King and the latter by Richelieu. The Cardinal, however, was not responsible for the first and most terrible of these, the execution, that is, of Ravaillac, mutilated, tortured, and torn apart on the 27th of May, 1610, just thirteen days after the assassination of Henry.
The only act of Louis XIII.’s reign which in any way affected the architecture of the Place de Grève was the laying of the corner-stone of a fountain which stood for fifty years or so near its centre, and was supplied from the new aqueduct of Arcueil, finished about 1624.
The Hôtel de Ville narrowly escaped destruction in the riots of July 4, 1652, when the mob set fire to the doors during a sitting of the Council. The fire burned from six o’clock in the evening until nine o’clock the next morning. The Grand Salle of Henry II., the windows and doors on the Place de Grève, and the mounted figure of Henry IV. over the principal entrance, were seriously injured, while the attempt made by the sculptor’s son, Biard fils, to restore the bas-relief of the King only completed its ruin.
The building made a still narrower escape four 324 years earlier, on the 27th of August, la journée des Barricades, when the Governor of the Bastille, Leclerc du Tremblay, trained his cannon on it, and stood by with his men holding lighted wicks, only awaiting a word from the Court to bombard it. Throughout the Fronde the Bastille continued to play an important part, and it was by the Porte St. Antoine, opened to them through the influence of Mademoiselle Montpensier, daughter of the duke of Orleans, that Condé’s men entered like victors, headed by Condé himself, while the guns of the Bastille, directed, it is said, by Mademoiselle again, held the royal army in check.
The gateway of St. Antoine was restored and ornamented with statues for the entrance of Louis XIV. The triumphal arch, which had been erected a little beyond the gate for the entrance of Henry III., was reconstructed by Blondel with great tact and success. In speaking of this work he says; “As they wished to preserve the old archway on account of Jean Goujon’s bas-reliefs, I could think of no better way than to make two new archways, one on either side.” These bas-reliefs were removed later to the gateway of the Jardin de Beaumarchais, and then, after sundry wanderings, to the Hôtel de Cluny, where they may still be seen in the garden.
The great gate, ornamented with elaborate sculptures by François d’Anguier and Van Opstal, was only finished in 1672, in Latin inscriptions recalling 325 that it was erected by the Prévôt des Marchands and sheriffs in memory of the entry of Louis XIV. and Maria Theresa, and of the “fortunate peace which their marriage had just given to France under the auspices of Cardinal Mazarin.”
The Bastille hard by was approached by two drawbridges, then came a great oak door faced with iron, and a heavy wooden grating, kept barred and bolted until all new-comers had been thoroughly scanned by the captain of the guard in charge of the gate. Between the two inner courts, the Cour d’Honneur and the Cour des Cuisines, Louis XIV. erected a three-storied building for the Governor of the Prison and various other officials. So bad was the ventilation, however, between those towering walls of masonry, so stifling the heat in summer, and so penetrating the cold and damp in winter, that before very long the Governor remonstrated, and a hôtel was built for him outside the enclosure; the apartments thus left vacant were used for a certain class of distinguished prisoners, placed by their families under the care of the King — either for safety or by way of punishment — and for sick prisoners who had obtained permission to be attended at their own expense and out of their cells.
The Court of Honor communicated directly by means of six stairways with the towers called respectively la Liberté, la Bertaudière, la Bazènière, la Comté, du Trésor, and la Chapelle. The two others, 326 the Tour du Puits and the Tour du Coin, opened on to the Cour des Cuisines, where the air was always heavy with smoke and infected with the smell of dirty water and offal. In this horrible Tour du Puits were lodged the turnkeys and lower grades of servants. With the exception of a small chapel on the first floor of the Tour de la Liberté and a torture-chamber stripped of its appliances, when torture was abolished in the reign of Louis XVI., there were now nothing but prisons in the Bastille; beneath all but two of the eight towers were horrible underground dungeons, damp, fetid, and overrun with rats and vermin; these were abandoned, except in some extraordinary cases, by the middle of the eighteenth century. The towers had one large, semicircular prison on each floor, capable of accommodating a number of inmates at once, and although bitterly cold at one time and suffocatingly hot at another, they were at least habitable. Pierre de la Porte, Anne of Austria’s cloak-bearer, has left a description in his memoirs of the dungeon where he was confined in the Bastille by Richelieu, whose suspicions he had in some manner aroused; he says that the furniture consisted only of a straw mattress for the soldier who was shut up with him, and a folding bed for himself. From the Bastille Register we learn some meagre details of the arrival there of the mysterious “Man with the Iron Mask,” and of his death five years later. Under date of Thursday, September 18, 1698, 327 we are told that M. de Saint Mars, the new Governor of the Bastille, had arrived, bringing with him a prisoner from Pignerol, who was masked. Immediately on alighting, the prisoner was taken to a room on the ground floor of the Tour Bazènière, and kept there until 9 o’clock at night, when he was conducted to a room in the Tour Bertaudière, which had been made ready for him.
The register of November 19, 1703, states that the “unknown prisoner, who still wears a velvet mask, as he did when M. de Saint Mars brought him from the Isles Ste. Marguerite, having felt unwell since yesterday, died as he was coming from the mass. * * * He was buried, under the name of M. de Marchiali, in the Cemetery of St. Paul.”
A protegé of the Queen-Mother, Gaspard Fieubet, who became Councillor under Louis XIV., built the Hôtel on the corner of the Quai des Celestins and the Rue du Petit-Muse, which, though altered by the addition of a quantity of sculptures, is still standing. Fieubet, who was a friend of la Fontaine, and something of a poet himself, opened his house to the literary men of the day, his receptions rivalling even the Saturdays of Mlle. De Scudéry.
Shortly after the death of Henry IV. Sully, utterly out of sympathy with the policy of the regent, retired from office; but the Arsenal, though shorn of most of its privileges, continued to be the residence of the Grand Master of Artillery. Louis XIII., in spite of 328 vigorous protests from the Parliament, established an independent tribunal there, dealing particularly with the trial and punishment of counterfeiters. Here took place the trial of Nicolas Fouquet, Superintendent of Finances under Louis XIV. The ladies of the Court, with whom he was a great favorite, used to stand at the windows of a house overlooking the Arsenal to watch the prisoner on his way to and from the Bastille, where he was confined. “When I saw him,” writes Mme. De Sévigné to M. de Pomponne, “my knees shook and my heart beat so that I could scarcely stand. * * * * M. d’Arganon touched him and pointed us out, and he bowed to us with that same smiling air you know so well.”
Claude de Boisleve, Commissioner of the Treasury, was involved in Fouquet’s downfall, and his Hôtel on the Rue de la Culture Ste. Catherine, being sold to a Counsellor of Parliament, one Gaspard de Gillier. Mme. De Sévigné took it and lived there from 1677 to her death in 1696; the street is now Rue de Sévigné. This Hôtel had been begun by Pierre Lescot for President Ligneris. Jean Goujon executed the sculptures on the porte cochère as well as those on the entablature of the main wing, and the eight figures in high relief in the courtyard, representing the signs of the zodiac. The death of Lescot interrupted the work, but it was finished later by Bullant and du Cerceau on the original plans; it took the name it still bears — Carnavalet — when Françoise de la Baume, 329 dame de Carnavalet, bought it in 1578. François Mansard, to whom was given the task of restoring and enlarging it by the Boisleve family in 1662, insisted upon preserving, as far as possible, the style of its architecture, declaring that this Palace was, in his opinion, the chef-d’œuvre of Lescot and Bullant. This did not prevent its being used under the Restoration for the school of bridges and highways, and, worse still, at a later period as a boys’ boarding-school. Under M. Haussmann the building was bought by the city, restored and fitted up for its present purpose — a Musée de la Ville.
When the duke de la Meilleraie was Grand Master of Artillery, his wife, Marie de Cossé-Brissac, had the “Cabinet,” built by Sully for Henry IV., decorated with paintings either by Simon Vouet or Claude Vignon, to which the Duchess of Maine added, about fifty years later, a portrait of herself in the guise of a Nymph, painted over the chimney-place by Vanloo. These paintings, covered by book-shelves when the Marquis de Paulmy, more interested in books than in guns, turned the Arsenal into a library, remained hidden and forgotten for more than a hundred years, to issue forth fresh as when they were painted, in our own century. They may be seen to-day in the Bibliothéque de l’Arsenal, the Cabinet de Henri IV. having been preserved almost intact in the reconstruction of the building.
The Place Royale (now Place des Vosges), begun 330 by Henry IV. in 1615, was only finished in time for the festivities given to celebrate the marriages of his son and daughter. These made it a fashionable neighborhood, and we find some of the most prominent nobles occupying Hôtels there. Marion de Lorme spent the last years of her life in the pavilion of Marshal de Lavardin, bought for her by the Duke de la Meilleraie. Sauval tells how her body, placed on a magnificent bier, lay in state for twenty-four hours in the Place Royale, “as though she had been renowned for her virtues.” It was also a favorite spot for duels; they are described as taking place at all hours of the day and night. Louis XIII., determined to break up, if possible, a custom that was gaining ground with alarming rapidity, made duelling a capital offence; notwithstanding which, on the 12th of May, 1627; six gentlemen of the Court met, three against three, at two o’clock in the afternoon, while the windows and balconies of the surrounding houses were thronged with spectators, as though it had been a theatrical entertainment. Two of the combatants overtaken on their subsequent flight to England were, in fact, put to death. The last duel, as well as the most celebrated that took place here, was fought by the Duke of Guise and the Count de Coligny in 1643; it resulted in the exile of the first and the death of the second from his wounds.
Richelieu placed a bronze equestrian statue of the King in the centre of the Place Royale, ostensibly as 331 a memorial of his efforts to break up duelling. The statue was executed by Biard the younger, while the horse was one that had been made in the reign of Henry II. by the Italian, Daniel Ricciarelli, and never used; the pompous Latin inscription on the base was composed principally of allusions to the Cardinal himself. This monument was among the first to be overthrown in the Revolution, and like its fellows was melted down for guns.
We must not leave the Place Royale and the Marais without reminding the reader that this neighborhood was for many years the headquarters of the new Précieuses, who had followed Mlle. de Scudéry and a few other of the choice spirits who had been wont to cluster around the Hôtel de Rambouillet in the Rue St. Thomas du Louvre. Some of these settled in the Place Royale, others in the fine Hôtels of the Quartier du Marais, and for thirty years Mlle. de Scudéry, from her little house in the Rue de Meauce, presided over a society, which, if bourgeois, was none the less composed of some of the most brilliant intellects of the Capital. Molière moved his Illustre Théatre to the Arsenal Quartier in 1645, and was thus enabled to make that careful study of the Précieuses of the Marais which resulted in Les Précieuses Ridicules. With Ninon de l’Enclos, who died in her house in the Rue des Tournelles in 1706, the last Précieuse passed away.
The fine wrought-iron grating, paid for by the 332 property owners, which once surrounded the garden of the Place Royale was removed in 1841 on the pretence that it was too high and heavy. Victor Hugo, then living there, tried hard to save a thing that even the Revolution had spared, but without success; it was replaced by one of modern style and workmanship.
The Temple meanwhile had undergone a complete metamorphosis in both habit and appearance. The towers, walls and some of the old buildings were still standing, but from the time of Henry IV., when the ancient constructions began to fall into ruins, instead of repairing them they pulled them down and built in their stead the Palace of the Grand Prior and a number of other handsome Hôtels, which were frequently occupied by persons having no connection with the Order of Malta. Moreover, the place lost more and more its warlike traditions, and developed into a calm and peaceful retreat whose favored occupants enjoyed the advantages offered by a life at once of retirement and dissipation. Notwithstanding its ancient towers and battlemented walls, there was no spot in Paris where one could live in such absolute freedom, paying no taxes and subject to no interference from either Crown or municipality. Three classes were to be found at this time living within the Temple enclosure besides the legitimate members of the order; first, wealthy families seeking either to economize or to enjoy its free manner of 333 life; second, debtors to whom it offered a safe asylum; and, third, all manner of tradespeople and artisans who went there to escape from the tyrannies of the trade corporations and the heavy taxes imposed in the city. Certain manufactures (such as false jewelry) which were forbidden in Paris were conducted feely in the Temple, and a thriving trade sprang up in what was called bijoux du Temple, while the Faculty of Medicine was powerless to arrest any one of the numerous quacks who openly sold their drugs and panaceas in the Temple enclosure.
When Jacques de Souvré was Grand Prior in 1630 he began the great Palace of the Priors, with Delisle for architect. It consisted of a somewhat bare façade preceded by a grand court surrounded by a peristyle of coupled columns of such enormous proportions as to completely dwarf the palace itself and lend it a poor, mean look.
It was just about this time that Richelieu, lately advanced to the post of chief minister, began to think about enlarging his hôtel in the Rue St. Honoré. This hôtel, whose history has been briefly traced in a previous chapter,* had passed from the hands of the Marquis de Rambouillet into those of the Secretary of State, Pierre Forget de Fresne, from whom Richelieu bought it. In 1629 the work of reconstruction was begun.
The first thing to be done was to convert the small 334 garden belonging to the old palace into a “Park.” To an ordinary individual the fact that this garden was limited by the walls of the city itself might have presented an obstacle. Not so with Richelieu. The walls came down, the moats were filled in, and a veritable park extending to the north was laid out in the rear of his dwelling. Nor did the extension of this last prove any more difficult. One after another the proprietors of the neighboring houses found themselves obliged to part with them, and in seven years the new palace had swallowed up the Hôtel d’Estrées, the Hôtel de Mercœur, the Maison de Benjamin, the great Maison de l’Ours, that of the Chapeau Rouge, of the Cynge-Blanc, and many others. In one case at least, that of a house on the Rue St. Honoré, the Cardinal had recourse to very doubtful means. “At first,” says one account, “the Cardinal was mild and tried persuasion, but the bourgeois who owned the house said stupidly that it was the heritage of his forefathers. So at last the Minister, becoming angry, applied the newly-created ‘tax for the wealthy’ to him, and after that he got the house as he wanted to.”
Two contractors named Frogee and Barbier had bought up all that part of the Petits Champs lying just beyond the lately effaced walls and moats, that the Cardinal had not taken for his park. Here a new quarter rapidly grew up, but the purchasers were obliged to sign agreements that the houses should have neither door nor window overlooking 335 his Eminence’s park and enclosure. More than that, when the Prévôt des Marchands, who had bought a piece of land from Barbier on the Rue Bons Enfants, built three pavilions between the park and the rear of the Hôtel du Vrillière, we find Richelieu writing to him to say that as still another pavilion is needed to “entirely prevent any one from looking into my park, this line is to ask you to have this fourth one built, as well as the others.”
In spite of all his efforts, however, there were a few of the adjacent buildings that the Cardinal could not get control of. Sauval states that the architect, Mercier, was much hampered by the pavilions and wings of certain buildings which the owners declined to part with, and which he was consequently obliged to build around; he adds that to this circumstance was due the great irregularity of the plan. The Cour Orry, for instance, and the Hôtels de Châtillon and Francière interfered seriously with the theatre upon which Richelieu had lavished so much care and money. A plan of 1679 gives it a width of only thirty-six feet.
After Richelieu’s death, when opinions could be expressed more frankly, this irregular mass of buildings, with its courts and passageways, arcades, stairways, and gardens, was severely criticised. The first courtyard was too small, and its buildings too low; the second court was too large, and the entrance, at the end of a long vaulted passageway connecting 336 with the first court, was placed on one side instead of in the middle. The heavy sculptured anchors and prows — in reference to the supervision exercised by Richelieu over the commerce and navigation of Paris — which adorned the rez-de-chaussée were poorly executed and clumsy, as any one can still see for himself, from a few survivors which, placed in the little gallery on the right of the second court, give it its name of Galérie des Proues. The great stairway was pronounced defective in construction and wretchedly placed off in a corner instead of in the centre of the wing, where it would have had a fine effect; and finally, the buildings themselves, with their low arcades overweighted by the sculptured prows and entresol, and the story above with its Doric pilasters, failed to please any one. For all of this the architect, however, was not held accountable. Richelieu himself distinctly stated that nothing was done except by his express orders. One part alone was generally admired; that was the open arcade, one story high and surmounted by a balcony which connected the east and west wings on the garden side. When the Queen-Mother and her sons took up their residence in the Palais Royal the former had a balcony constructed in front of her apartment, from which she could see into the garden. Mercier prepared the designs for the ”Queen’s balcony,” which was executed by Etienne Doyart (de Nevers) with as much “delicacy, tenderness, and patience as 337 though instead of iron it had been silver, wrought by the most skillful goldsmiths.” Of all the rooms and galleries selected by the Queen for her own use, only the large cabinet was actually finished when she arrived; but upon that the Cardinal had expended so much care and taste that it was long the wonder and admiration of Paris. The Queen, however, failed to appreciate it, and even had masterpieces by Caracci, Guido, Andrea del Sarto and others replaced by copies, while the originals were sent to Fontainebleau. She employed the painter Vouet to carry out her designs for completing the other apartments, an oratory, a bath-room, three great galleries, the King’s suite in the left wing, originally intended by Richelieu for himself, and so on. The large gallery of the left wing made up for certain defects of construction by its magnificent marbles, brought from the store-house at Fontainebleau or else selected in Italy by the Marquis of Frangipani or the Abbé Mazarin, and its collection of portraits, each from the hand of a master, which gave it its name of Galerie des Hommes Illustres.
When Richelieu died in 1642 his will confirmed the gift he had made four years earlier of his palace to the King; it also rehearsed the conditions: The “Hôtel” was never, for any cause whatsoever, to be alienated from the crown, and the “Capitainerie et Conciergerie” was to belong to his successors, the Dukes of Richelieu. The will goes on to give the 338 most minute directions for building the “Hôtel de Richelieu,” which his nephew and heir was to occupy, in the adjoining street (which after going for a time by the name of Rue Royal took that of the Cardinal), and for the installation and care of his library in one of the additions to be built there. He arranges for everything — the furniture that is to go into the new hôtel, the salary to be paid the librarian, the sums to be expended on the building, which is to follow certain plans and occupy a clearly indicated site; finally he names the palace which he presents to the King, the “Palais Cardinal.” None of these directions were carried out; the house on the corner of the Rue St. Honoré and the Rue Royal, belonging to the Quinze Vingts, was never bought, as was intended, in order to connect the new hôtel with the “Palais Cardinal,” and a part of the land already acquired for the purpose was sold by the Duke some years later to an “association” of three persons, who built upon part and resold the rest. René Baudilet, “Tailor to the Queen,” built the house opposite the Rue Villedot in 1658, in which Molière died fifteen years later. As to the library, Richelieu’s niece, the Duchesse of Aiguillon, who occupied the hôtel as soon as enough of it was finished for any one to live in, cared so little either for it or her uncle’s wishes that she appropriated the salary to have been paid to a librarian, and allowed many of the books to be carried off. She showed herself much more zealous in 339 the matter of the inscription placed over the main entrance by Richelieu’s orders. This inscription, which announced to all the world that the building was the “Palais Cardinal,” was an offence to the enemies of the dead Minister. When the court was established there, one of these, the Marquis de Fouville, represented to Anne of Austria how unseemly it was for a King to inhabit a palace bearing the name of one of his own subjects. The Duchesse d’Aiguillon, on the other hand, insisted so vehemently that some recognition of so magnificent a gift was due to the donor’s memory, that the inscription remained; but the people paid no attention to it, for from the moment the Queen-Mother and her sons came there to live it was the Palais Royal, and so it has continued to be ever since. Mazarin, following in the wake of the court, employed Mansard to build him a palace on the site of the Hôtel Tubœuf, at the corner of the Rue (Neuve) des Petits Champs and the Rue Vivienne. Here he collected that famous library which, scattered during the Fronde and recovered on the Cardinal’s return to power in 1653, became on his death the property of the college (des Quatre Nations) founded by him on the left bank. Its sojourn on the Rue des Petits Champs is commemorated by the present Bibliothèque Nationale which occupies the same building, or as much of it as modern restorations have left standing.
In the opposite wall a gate was cut, so that in 340 order to reach the Palais Royal the Cardinal had only to pass through the garden; but soon even this was too far to go, and an apartment was prepared for him between those of the Queen and the young princes. Here Louis XIV. and Philip d’Orléans passed their neglected and unhappy childhood. La Porte says in his memoirs that the Cardinal let it be seen that any zeal displayed in the interest of the young princes would not be taken in good part. “The King,” says Saint Simon, “has been heard to refer bitterly to this period of his life; he has even told of how he was found one evening half drowned, having fallen into the large basin in the garden.” This basin (supplied with water from “La Samaritaine” of the Pont Neuf), in which the great reign just about to open was so nearly effaced, stood near the end of the garden, in front of where the Café de la Rotonde is now.
During the day the garden was thrown open to the public; but at night, after the gates were shut, the Queen, accompanied only by a few of her favorites, used to love to pace up and down the walks and alleys, sometimes nearly until daybreak. Gay times for the Palais Royal, a period of royal marriages and baptisms, of fêtes and princely visitors. Then came the Fronde, and everything was changed. The Queen adopted the dangerous course of arresting the ringleaders. After a Te Deum of gratitude at Notre Dame for Condé’s victory over the Imperialists (August 20, 1648) she sent Comminges to seize Broussel. 341 “Go,” she says piously, “and God be with you!” Broussel, surrounded by his five children, had just finished dinner in his house close by in the Port St. Landry; he was hurried off just as he was, “in his slippers,” while the one man-servant of the establishment ran after the carriage, screaming: “To arms! To arms! They are carrying off M. Broussel!” On the 27th the people rose, and in twelve hours as many hundred barricades had been thrown up in the streets of Paris. The Parliament presented itself in a body at the Palais Royal to implore the regent to liberate the captive members, but Anne flew into a temper, and, entering “her little gray room,” slammed the door in their faces. The discomfited members, in order to get back to the Palais de la Cité, had to again climb over the barricades, as had been their undignified manner of coming. But now the people had grown threatening; they got over the first and second by lying: “The Queen was considering; she gave hopes.” But at the third they were stopped. “Broussel free, or Mazarin and the Chancellor as hostages” — only on those terms could they get by. Back to the Palais Royal then to plead, to show the Queen how the safety of the court was in danger, that the people threatened to carry the young King off to the Hôtel de Ville and set the Palais Royal on fire. The princesses and Mazarin add their entreaties, as well as Henrietta-Maria of England, who had some experience in affairs of this kind, and who observed 342 dryly that Mazarin might have a fate similar to Strafford’s. This settled it; Broussel was liberated, and the people, overjoyed at their victory, quieted down as suddenly as they had risen. “In less than two hours,” says Cardinal de Retz, “Paris looked quieter than I have ever seen it, even on a Good Friday.”
But Anne of Austria never again felt quite safe in the Palais Royal; at the least sign of trouble she was ready to fly, and on three different occasions she slipped out of Paris with her sons before the people could stop her. In 1651 Mazarin had fled, and it was rumored that the Queen was preparing to follow him; instantly there was a great uprising. A threatening mob surrounded the Palais Royal and insisted upon seeing the King. The Queen, who had gone to bed, was aroused by a messenger from Prince Gaston d’Orleans, who asked her to take some means of quelling the tumult. She thereupon declared that she had not the remotest idea of carrying off the King, that he was sound asleep at the moment, and his brother as well, as M. de Sourches could see for himself if he chose to. Finally, as the people were still dissatisfied, she had the palace doors thrown open, and sent word to them to come in if they wanted to and look at the King. Enchanted at this confidence they did so, and could not express their delight at the sight of the young King lying in bed, with the curtains drawn back so as to let everyone see. The crowd 343 went quietly off showering benedictions on him, and seven months later the Regent, who had quite enough of such excitements, made an excuse to get herself and her sons out of Paris. When they returned in the following year it was not to the Palais Royal, but to the Louvre. Mme. De Motteville remarks that they had experienced the “inconvenience” of private houses unprovided with moats. Henrietta-Maria, with her English suite, left the Louvre to the royal family and went to the Palais Royal, most unfortunately for the latter, for the place was so pillaged by the English as to be completely ruined. The theatre was also in ruins — that famous theatre where Richelieu had produced his play of Mirame to an icy audience of courtiers already vieing with one another for the Queen’s favor. An attempt to build another story had resulted in crushing in the roof, and a number of the magnificent oak beams, upon which the Cardinal had expended such enormous sums of money, were broken in two. Deplorable as its condition was, it was the only theatre in Paris available when Molière; was turned out of the Louvre in 1660. He and his troupe has just been engaged by Monsieur (the King’s brother) as “comedians in ordinary;” the Prince accordingly exerted his influence to get it for them, and when three months had been spent in making such repairs as were absolutely necessary, the curtain rose for the first time on Le Dépit Amoureux and Le Cocu Imaginaire, two 344 of his most popular plays. Here the next twelve years saw his masterpieces produced one after another, and it was on this stage that he was seized with convulsions while acting La Malade Imaginaire in 1673, his death occurring a few hours later.
Let us now see what has been done since the death of Henry IV. towards finishing the Louvre. Complete as far as the two galleries were concerned, it was now a question of carrying on the work on the main building, and to do this no less a person than the great Cardinal was needed. Richelieu was made Minister on the 26th of April, 1624, and two months later we find the King — acting on his advice — laying the corner-stone of the new constructions which were to result in such a whole as had hitherto existed only in the dreams of Henry IV. It was on the 28th of June that the King came from Compiègne to Paris to take part in this ceremony; the Prévôt des Marchands and the Sheriffs drove over from the Hôtel de Ville, the King returning with them to lay the corner-stone of the fountain on the Place de Grève.
The architect chosen by Richelieu was Le Mercier, engaged at the same time on the Palais Cardinal and the reconstruction of the Sorbonne. He had lately returned from Italy, but was so little influenced by what he had seen there that the only trace of his foreign studies to be found at the Louvre is a certain resemblance between the vestibule and the entrance to the Palazzo Farnese.
345Intelligent and judicious, “he was capable,” as Vitet says, “of admiring something beside his own work,” and more than that, we may add, of admiring the work of his own countrymen; he believed that the art of carrying on intelligently what another had begun was of quite as much value as that of creating unintelligently. And so with the utmost cheerfulness, and with no air at all of “resigning” himself to circumstances, he set to work to finish the Louvre, building on another’s foundations, and would probably not even have allowed himself the liberty of enlarging Pierre Lescot’s plans had he not been obliged to. Richelieu, in fact, intended Louis XIII. to be the greatest King, and his palace of the Louvre the greatest palace, on earth. Had the plans been carried out it would have been nearly four times as large as it now is, extending on the north, for example, as far as the Rue St. Honoré. When the work was begun the Péres de la Congrégation were notified that as the Oratoire would be swallowed up in the new construction, the King proposed to replace it by a church on the Rue St. Honoré, which would be included in the Louvre. They thanked the King, and their chapel has been called ever since L’Oratoire Royal.
All that Le Mercier was able to carry out of these gigantic plans was the northern half of the west wing, of which Lescot had finished the southern half, and the western end of the north wing. The most difficult 346 part of his task was the great central pavilion, which, for a time at least, was to be the main entrance to the palace. In order to bring this into accord as far as possible with Lescot’s style he imitated the latter’s Pavillon du Roi on the south side, only altering the style of the ornamentation so as to agree better with the rest of the west façade. For the piers of the top story he had the happy idea of copying the caryatides of Goujon in the Salle des Gardes. These, eight in number, constitute the chef-d’œuvre of Jacques Sarrazin, then at the height of his reputation. At the same time Nicolas Pouissin, brought back, not too willing, from Rome by the King’s invitation, was put to work on the Grande Gallerie, where he accomplished very little, and that little was nearly all destroyed by fire in 1661.
Richelieu’s death brought the works at the Louvre to a sudden stop, and when Louis XIII. followed him five months later, and the Regent with her young sons went to the Palais Cardinal to live, even the royal mint and printing-office, which the Minster had established in the ground floor of the Grande Gallerie, were abandoned, and the whole building fell into a state of neglect, which the occupation of Henrietta-Maria and her English suite did little to improve. Ten years later, when these were sent to the Palais Cardinal, and the court returned to the Louvre, the work was again taken up, and soon, as the young King’s interest became aroused, pushed 347 with great activity. The apartments of the Queen and her son were restored, and the tremendous task of rebuilding the eastern wing and finishing those on the north and south undertaken. This was the condition of the Louvre: The west façade was finished, its central pavilion and northern half but lately, as we have just seen, by Le Mercier; the southern half, the corner Pavillon du Roi, and the western half of the south façade, by Pierre Lescot; the north-west pavilion and the north façade were only begun, the walls not being higher than the ground floor; the east façade was, except for some unimportant details, just as it had been under Charles V., and its doorway, the main entrance to the Louvre, was the same gloomy, forbidding object that had for so long suggested a prison rather than a royal residence; this was to be entirely rebuilt, and on the south not only the half still needed to complete Lescot’s work, but an entire new façade was planned. The Petite and Grande Galleries were finished.
By 1660 the work was in full train. M. de Ratabon, the superintendent, showed a wonderful activity, above all, in pulling down; he was in such a hurry to demolish the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, so as to clear the way for the erection of the east façade, that he did not even take time to notify Molière, who for two years past had been giving performances there three times a week in the Grande Salle. “On Monday, October 11th,” writes one of his comedians, “the 348 troupe was much surprised to find itself without a theatre.” Ratabon was made to repair the theatre of the Palais Cardinal for their use, to make up for having turned them out so roughly.
Mazarin, ill, nearly dying, established himself in the attic story of the Pavillon du Roi in the winter of 1661, so as to be on the spot, and, by appearing in person at the carnival festivities, show his enemies that he was still a factor to be considered. On the morning of February 6th the decorations of the Gallerie des Rois, the “Galerie Peinte” as it was called, where the ballet was to be danced, took fire, and very soon, the magnificent new hangings of gold brocade having caught, the whole place was in flames. It was put out before reaching the rest of the building, but all the portraits of the Kings and Queens, Marie de Médicis alone excepted, were destroyed, as well as the paintings of the ceiling, among them those executed shortly before by Poussin.
The Cardinal was in great danger. Brienne met him, being half carried out of his apartments by his captain of the guard, “trembling, exhausted, with death written in his eyes; whether from fear at having been so nearly suffocated in his bed, or that the catastrophe was a warning of his own approaching end, I have never seen any one so pallid, so unstrung. I advanced towards him with the rest, but when I found that he made no response to any one I kept quiet, merely letting him see that I was there.” The 349 shock was too much for his ailing condition, and a month later he died at Vincennes.
But little was done during the reign of Louis XIII. and the minority of his son toward finishing the Tuileries. In 1634 the Parliament ordered the demolition of what remained of the wall of Charles V. between the Porte Neuve and the Porte St. Honoré, and of the moat. Shops and markets were built on a part of the site thus left vacant, the Porte St. Honoré being converted into a meat-market, and the materials from the old fortifications were used to carry on the new bastioned wall begun in 1566. Meanwhile the ground lying between this and the wall of the Tuileries garden had been given by the King to one Regnard, a former valet-de-chambre of De Souvré, on condition that he would turn it into a garden or public park. This soon became a favorite resort of the fashionable society of Paris. From its elevated terraces, extending the entire length of the walls, Sauval says a view could be had not only of the greater part of Paris and the windings of the Seine, but of all that went on in the Cours de la Reine. When Richelieu, in order to break off the intercourse between Mlle. de Montpensier and the Dauphin, had her sent to Paris, she was lodged in the Tuileries, probably in the apartments occupied later on by Louis XIV., which overlooked the “Petit Jardin.” At all events, this was called the Parterre de Mademoiselle until the year of the great tourney, 350 1662, in which the King and royal princes took part; ever since then the spot has been called “Place des Carrousel.” Mademoiselle describes how, as she was getting ready for bed on the night of February 7, 1651, word was brought that something was taking place in Paris. She went out on a terrace, and by the light of the moon saw a barricade stretched across the end of the street, and a number of horsemen guarding it so as to cover the escape of Mazarin from the Porte de la Conférence; a number of boatmen were trying to drive the guard away. The princess apparently lost no time in sending some of her people to take a hand in the fray, for with their aid the cavaliers were driven off.
One spring night thirty-three years earlier the sentinel at the Louvre had seen what looked like a circle of fire above the roof of the Palais de la Cité. He gave the alarm, but it was too late to save the Grand’ Salle; the wind was high, the woodwork very old and dry, and in less than half an hour the roof and wooden arches were completely destroyed, the pillars and great marble table were in pieces, the statues of the Kings hopelessly defaced, and the chapel, treasury office and first Chamber of Inquiry destroyed. The Tour de l’Horloge caught fire from a brand, but was saved without incurring much damage. The most serious loss of all was that of the registers; one of the clerks who succeeded in reaching his office through the garden was able to save a few, but the 351 rest were totally destroyed. This fact gave rise to a report that the fire had been started purposely, in order that the papers relating to Ravaillac’s trial might be either consumed or stolen, as they were thought to implicate certain high personages. The truth is that the cause of the fire was never known; it may have been the result of the carelessness of a portier’s daughter, or of a merchant of the Grand’ Salle, as is sometimes stated. If it was the latter he was one of the losers, for all the merchandise except some at the “Fourth Pillar” was burned. Salomon de Brosse was given the task of rebuilding the Grand’ Salle, and such other parts of the Palais as had suffered. He finished it in four years. The dimensions and general arrangement of the old Grand’ Salle were preserved; the new one had two naves separated by Ionic columns supporting stone arches, and flanked by arcades with massive pilasters; the light came from two great bays placed at either end. Severe and cold, but at the same time dignified and entirely in keeping with the use to which it was devoted, this hall of de Brosse remained until, under the name of the “Salle des Pas perdus,” it was in turn destroyed by fire in our own day, its only modification of any account being the two rows of bull’s-eyes which were cut in the roof in 1683, so as to give the body of the hall more light.
It was at this date that a richly-carved wooden chapel was built on the site of the old one, its grating 353 of gilded metal adorned with the arms of M. de Novion, then First President. The merchants had re-established themselves, each with his stall at the base of a pillar. Gloves, fans, slippers, all the fripperies of fashionable society, must be bought at the Palais, to be in correct style. The scene of Corneille’s comedy, written in 1636, is laid there. As before, each gallery had its book-stalls — in the Galerie Mercière, that of Abraham Bosse, à la Palme, and another, à l’Ecu de France; Pierre Rocolet, printer in ordinary, both to the King and the Maison de Ville, took for his sign the Armes of Paris. Bilaine’s well-known book-shop was at the second pillar of the Grand’ Salle, while that of René Gaignard, le Sacrifice d’Abel, was at the foot of the first. It was here that, at a certain hour of the day, the wits used to congregate and delight the bystanders with their clever repartee.
The Sainte Chapelle, but slightly hurt in the fire of 1618, was seriously damaged in 1630 through the carelessness of some workmen, who, while repairing the leaden covering of the roof, left some lighted charcoal beneath their stove. The spire with which Charles VI. had replaced the original one of Saint Louis was destroyed, as well as the roof and stone ornaments of the eaves. The new spire, far less beautiful than its predecessors, was much higher, one of the highest indeed, in Paris; it was always a little out of plumb, and leaned so much by 1791 that it had to be taken down.
353This fire emphasized the importance of having some sort of direct communication between the river and the court of the Sainte Chapelle, and it was in consequence that the little street, named after the patroness of the Queen, Rue Ste. Anne, was opened, connecting the court and the Rue Neuve St. Louis; the latter was lined with new buildings of brick and stone, those on the south overhanging the river somewhat, in almost every one of which was a goldsmith’s shop. These, spreading to the quay, which was a continuation of the Rue St. Louis, gave it the name that it still bears. The Rue Ste. Anne is now called Rue Boileau, after the poet who has given such a vivid picture of the life of the Palais in Lutrin, and whose childhood was spent in one of the tall houses bordering on the court. The scene of l’Intrigue des filoux, written in 1647 by l’Estoile, is laid among the goldsmiths’ shops of the Rue de Harlay.
Either on the Pont Neuf or at the Palais were waged the principal battles of the Fronde. “The pamphlets,” writes Constant Moreau, “were conceived, thought out, written at the Palais. They were sold on the Pont Neuf. When the populace had yelled, denounced and threatened sufficiently at the Palais, they fought on the Pont Neuf. What was merely a row at the Palais became a riot on the Pont Neuf.”
Still another disastrous fire was that which started in a shop on the Pont aux Meuniers — or Pont Marchand — 354 1621: it caused the total destruction of the two bridges (the Pont au Change was so near the Pont aux Meuniers as almost to touch it at the south end) and some damage in the Cité and to the Tour de l’Horloge as well. For eighteen years a simple foot-bridge alone replaced the two that had been burned, but between 1639 and 1647 the Pont au Change was rebuilt in stone, and lined with tall houses as before. Some ten or twelve years later the Pont Notre Dame had to be rebuilt as well, having been declared unsafe.
Before leaving the Isle de la Cité we must mention the dedication of himself and his kingdom to the Virgin, made by Louis XIII. in Notre Dame in 1638. The reconstruction of the high altar ordered in commemoration of this vow, and only completed in the lifetime of his son, was the beginning of that series of unfortunate “restorations” by which so much that was beautiful and valuable in the old church was hopelessly lost. For the new altar Nicolas Coustou executed the “Descent from the Cross;” the “Entombment” on the plinth, by Van Clève, was brought from the Church of the Capucins; on the right the statue of Louis XIII. is by Guillaume Coustou, and the kneeling figure of Louis XIV. on the left by Antoine Coysevox.
In front of a fountain — removed in 1748 — in the Parvis Notre Dame was the statue called by the people the Grand Jeusneur. It was made of plaster covered with lead, and represented a man holding a book in 355 one hand and with the other leaning on a staff, around which snakes were coiled. Nothing is known of the origin of this figure, nor for whom it was intended, but for several generations it acted the part of Pasquin for the Parisians, sometimes exchanging remarks with “la Samaritaine” on the Pont Neuf, sometimes signing its name to satires or political pamphlets of the day.
The island on the east, still called l’Ile Notre Dame, now beginning for the first time to be inhabited, a bridge was needed to connect it with the Cité. For ten or fifteen years, however, the canons of the Cathedral successfully opposed the work by refusing to let it abut upon their gardens. It had finally to be carried around to a spot in the Port St. Landry, near the western extremity of the present Quai aux Fleurs, was finished by 1634, and called the Pont Rouge.
We will now briefly notice four establishments on the left bank closely associated with this period. First, the Jardin des Plantes, founded in the reign of Louis XIII., under the direction of De la Brosse, on the waste land lying off to the east of the University Hill. Next, the Sorbonne, entirely rebuilt by Richelieu when he was made grand master of the order in 1622; Jean Le Mercier was the architect. The college occupied three sides of an open court, while the theological department had a separate building of its own on the other side of the Rue Sorbonne. Richelieu himself laid the corner-stone of the church 356 in 1635 — on the site of the old Collège de Calvi. It was still unfinished at his death, and his body was taken to the old college chapel, hung with black velvet for the occasion, where it lay in state until, owing to the increasing unpopularity of the dead Cardinal, the authorities were obliged to “cause the coffin to disappear” for a time, for fear some indignity should be offered it. When the tomb executed by Girardon in the adjoining church was at last ready, however, the body was laid there, and remained without molestation until the Revolution; the head was then stolen and eleven years passed before it could be recovered and restored to its proper place.
At a very short distance from the Sorbonne stands the Palais de Luxembourg, which with its great gardens was the residence of Marie de Médicis after the death of Henry IV. She bought it from the Duke de Piney-Luxembourg, whose name it has always borne, although nothing remains of the original building, and the property has passed through the hands of a succession of owners. The Queen wanted an Italian palace, and employed Jacques Debrosses to build her a modified Pitti. The same architect laid out the gardens, designed the Fontaine de Médicis; and constructed the aqueduct at Arcueil which supplied the palace with water. From Marie de Médicis it passed into the hands of Gaston of Orléans; after him it belonged successively to Mlle. de Montpensier, Elizabeth de Guise, and the two daughters 357 of the last, the second of whom gave it to Louis XIV., ever since whose time it has remained in the hands of the government.
When Margaret of Valois died she left her great hôtel, not yet entirely finished, to the young King, Louis XIII., but within a few years it had to be sold for the benefit of her creditors. With it went the park and all the dependencies, and soon we find new streets opened, the Rues de Lille, de Verneuil, de l’Université, du Bac,† and others, while the ground bordering on the Seine is divided into lots on which a number of fine hôtels are built.
The alienation of this “grand parc non clos,” as it is called in the procès-verbal, was not accomplished without vigorous protests from the dwellers in the quartier, who had so long enjoyed its shady walks and pleasant alleys — that “public qui est privé du contentement de la pourmenade des hallées que la deffuncte reyne Marguerite avoit fait faire avec tant de soing et d’affection.” The poor clerical students, the pastry-cooks, the tavern-keepers, and may other honest folk sent in their protests; that of the bakers was especially plaintive.
“You know only too well, Messieurs,” it ran, “how on holidays and Sundays the populace of Paris assemble in parties in various parts and divisions of this regretted park, some to discuss affairs of weight and 358 others their honest affections. Then they enliven themselves each according to his mood and fancy, without any quarrelling or disputing at all. . . . . Thus the bakers, for whom I am charged to represent to you in all humility the great sorrow and loss that the degradation of this park would cause us.”
The monks of the abbey of St. Germain des Prés were no more successful in preserving their grounds. In 1636 the ancient fortifications, consisting of a double line of high walls flanked by towers, and concealing a deep moat which ran between them, were pulled down, new streets followed the line of the moats, and the road leading to the Pré aux Clercs was lined with houses; this is the street which on the modern map bears the name of St. Benoît. More humiliating than all, the abbey, except within the now curtailed limits of the establishment, lost its right of “haute justice.”
In 1644, in the course of some necessary work of repair, they discovered under the pavement of the church the coffins of Childebert and of Ultrogothe. Twelve years later, when the choir stalls were being changed, they came across the tombs of Childeric, his wife, and their son Dagobert, but on investigating further it was discovered that these had without doubt been opened and rifled by the workmen in 1644; these coffins, with those of Chilperic and Clotaire II. and their wives, were all reinterred in the church, while the “bones and ashes” of Childebert and his wife 359 were wrapped separately in white satin, placed in a leaden coffin divided in two parts, and buried in the middle of the choir, where a monument was raised over them.
With St. Germain des Prés our circuit of Paris during this period ends. To the latter part of the seventeenth century and the opening of the eighteenth (the fifty-four years, that is, that elapsed between the death of Mazarin and that of Louis XIV.) we shall devote a fresh chapter.
*Footnotes
† Following the old road from the ford that gave it its name. See page 278.