TWENTY CENTURIES — OF PARJS ' ya^m^ ^CS^Mh » toSS^ ^^^^3&S t^t»!ft ^^Pc ^m rf ' ^^\Vb '^trAyfcf<( -^^ ' ' ^^p ' ' ^^ik ^V-^' ?^L i-^fcCKHL^ ^B <'~'''''^^B ■i-" ""^^ V^E^&r^ S B''~'^^9 ^^'j- ' ifl M^^iMj ^V ''"^^^l^l JH'^I B|H^^^~-Jhh^^| r^^B V. ' ^^^^^1 Pi r\Y^^M^^^ SqS Ky »»» S2S) ooo Y >V-S StWITH TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS BY MABELL S. C. SMITH ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY PUBLISHERS Arms of the City of Paris. Copyright, 1913, Bt THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY. Published October, 1913. TO M. P. G. Un rayon de soleil a ses entrees partout. Sardou 2007911 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGB I. Earliest Paris 1 II. Merovingian Paris 16 III. Carlovingian Paris 32 IV. Paris of the Early Capetians ... 44 V. Paris of Philip Augustus 69 VI. Paris of Saint Louis 90 VII. Paris of Philip the Fair 105 VIII. Paris of the Early Valois .... 129 IX. Paris of Charles V 153 X. Paris of the Hundred Years' W^ar . . 165 XL Paris of the Later Fifteenth Cen- tury 189 XII. Paris of the Renaissance 199 XIII. Paris of the Reformation .... 214 XIV. Paris of Henry IV 230 XV. Paris of Richelieu 248 XVI. Paris of the " Grand Monarque " . . 260 XVII. Paris of Louis the " Well-Beloved " 274 XVIII. Paris of the Revolution 287 XIX. Paris of Napoleon 310 XX. Paris of the Lesser Revolutions . . 338 XXI. Paris of Louis Napoleon 355 XXII. Paris of To-day 369 Appendix 385 Index 395 V MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS Panorama of Paris Frontispiece Arms of the City of Paris To-day . Copyright page OPPOSITE PAGE Map of Paris 1 Lutetia under the Romans (Map) . . . page 7 Interior of the Roman Palais des Thermes ... 10 Amphitheater of Lutetia at Present Time ... 10 Saint Germain des Pres 30 France at Time of Hugh Capet (Map) . page 45 The Louvre in Time of Philip Augustus ... 78 Fragment of Wall of Philip Augustus .... 78 Tour de Nesle in 1661 82 Choir and Nave of Notre Dame, looking West . 86 Nave of Saint Germain des Pres 86 Cathedral of Notre Dame 88 The Sainte Chapelle, erected by Louis IX . . 100 Interior of the Sainte Chapelle 100 Hotel de Cluny 116 Hotel de Sens 116 The Old Louvre page 161 Arms of City of Paris under Charles V . . " 164 Oldest Known Map of Paris . between 182 and 183 Churches of Saint Etienne-du-Mont and Sainte Genevieve in 17th Century 190 Jube in Church of Saint Etienne-du-Mont . . 190 Church of Saint Severin 194 Church of Saint Germain I'Auxerrois in 1835 . 198 vii viii MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OPPOSITE PAGE Tour de Saint Jacques de la Boucherie .... 198 The College of France 206 House of Francis I on the Cours-la-Reine . . . 206 Cellier's Drawing of Hotel de Ville . . . page 208 Column at the Hotel de Soissons ... " 223 Hotel Carnavalet 224 The Samaritaine 240 Statue of Henry IV on the Pont Neuf .... 240 The Archbishop's Palace 252 Richelieu's Palais Cardinal, later called Palais Royal 252 Palace of the Luxembourg 256 Court of Honor of National Library .... 256 Hotel des Invalides 272 Saint Sulpice 272 Elysee Palace, Residence of President of France . 280 Chamber of Deputies (Palais Bourbon) . . . 280 Church of Sainte Genevieve, now the Pantheon . 284 The Odeon 290 The Comedie Francaise about 1785 290 "The Convention," by Sicard 308 Rue de Rivoli 326 Triumphal Arch of the Carrousel 330 Triumphal Arch of the Star 330 Napoleon's Tomb 336 The Bourse 346 Church of the Madeleine 346 The Successive Walls of Paris . between 366 and 367 The Strasbourg Statue 360 The EifFel Tower 360 The New Louvre . 370 MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS ix OPPOSITE PAQH Hotel de Ville 374 Mairie of the Arrondissement of the Temple . . 376 Salle des Fetes, Hotel de Ville 376 Portions of the Louvre built by Francis I, Henry II, and Louis XIII 378 Colonnade, East End of Louvre, built by Louis XIV 378 Section of Louvre begun by Henry IV . . . . 380 Northwest Wing of Louvre, built by Napoleon I, Louis XVIII, and Napoleon III 380 Plan of the Louvre pag^ 382 Twenty Centuries of Paris CHAPTER I EARLIEST PARIS FRANCE has been inhabited since the days when prehistoric man unconsciously told the story of his life through the medium of the household utensils and the implements of war which he left behind him in the caves in which he dwelt, or which his considerate relatives buried with him to make his sojourn easy in the land be- yond the grave. From bits of bone, of flint, and of polished stone archaeologists have recon- structed the man himself and his activities through the early ages. Of contemporary in- formation, however, there is none until the ad- venturous peoples of the Mediterranean pushed their way as traders and explorers into the heart of Gaul, and then wrote about their discoveries. The Gauls, they said, were largely Celtic in origin and had displaced an earlier race, the Ibe- rians, whom they had crowded to the southwest. They were brave, loyal, superstitious, and sub- ject to their priests, the Druids. Their dress 2 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS showed that they had made great advance in knowledge over the cave men, for they wore col- ored tmiics — which meant that they knew how to spin and weave and dye — and brazen helmets and shields and gold and silver girdles — which meant that they could work in metal. Such industries prove that the nomadic life was over, and, in truth, there were many towns throughout Gaul, some of them of no mean size, furnished with public utilities such as wells and bridges, and surrounded by fields made fertile by irrigation. An independent spirit had devel- oped, too, for in about the year 500 B.C. the chiefs and nobles rebelled against the lay author- ity of the Druids. Then these chiefs and nobles seem to have ruled " without the consent of the governed," for Caesar relates that before he went to Gaul in 58 B.C. the lower classes had rebelled against the upper, and, with the aid of the Druids, had beaten them. It is from Ceesar, too, that we first learn some- thing about Paris. " Lutetia," he calls it, " a stronghold of the Parisii," who were one of the three or four hundred tribes who dwelt in Gaul. Lutetia — " JNIudtown " Carlyle translates the name — was not much of a stronghold, for its fortifications could have been nothing more than a stockade encircling the round huts which made up the village occupying an island in the Seine, EARLIEST PARIS 3 the present " Cite " (from the Latin civitas) , and connected with both banks by bridges. It was only about half a mile long and an eighth of a mile wide. It was large enough and strong enough, however, to serve as a refuge for the tribesmen in time of war. Probably such a haven was not an unusual arrangement. Not far from Paris is another instance in Melun which has grown around the village which the Romans called JNIelodunum, built in the same way on an island in the river. In the spring of 53 B.C. Ctesar smnmoned dele- gates from all the tribes of Gaul to meet at Lu- tetia, but the rebellion of the year 52 in which the Parisii joined determined the Roman general to destroy the town and crush the tribe. He sent Labienus with four legions to carry out his plans. The Gaids chose as their leader Camulogenus of the tribe of the Aulerci, an old man, but skilled in warfare. He took advantage of the marsh on the right bank of the river and so stationed his troops as to prevent the approach of the Romans to the little town. Labienus first tried to make a road across the bog by laying do\vn hurdles plastered with clay. This proved too much of an undertaking, so he slipped away " at the third watch " and retraced his steps to Melodunum. There he seized fifty ships which he filled with Roman soldiers and with them threatened the 4 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS town so effectually that it yielded to him. Then he repaired the bridge, crossed to the left bank, and once more began his march toward Lutetia. When the Lutetians heard of this move from refugees, they burned their town and destroyed its bridges. Labienus put a Roman knight in command of each of the fifty ships which he had captured and ordered them to slip silently down the river for about four miles under cover of darkness. Five steady cohorts he left to guard the camp, and another five he despatched up the river after midnight with instructions to carry their baggage with no attempt at quiet. In the same direction he sent certain small boats whose oars were to meet the water right noisily. He himself led a body of soldiers in the direction which the ships had taken. When the Gauls were informed by their scouts of the seeming division into three bands of the Roman army they, natm-ally but unwisely, made a like divi- sion of their o^vn men. In the battle that en- sued — probably near the Ivry of to-day — the Gauls resisted with such courage that very few took refuge in flight, preferring to fall with the valiant Camulogenus. The Gauls left to watch Labienus's camp tried to aid their fel- lows when they heard of the battle in progress, but they could not withstand the attack of the victorious Romans, whose cavalry cut down all EARLIEST PARIS 5 but the few who managed to escape to the wooded hills. So it happens, rather humorously, that the earliest written account of Paris is that telling of the destruction which left its site a clean slate upon which the Romans might begin to write its story. For five hundred years they wrote, imtil the Frankish invasion swept its destructive might across Romanized Gaul. In five himdred years much may be brought to pass, and the Paris that Sainte Genevieve saved from Attila the Hun (451 a.d.) and in which Clovis established himself (481) was a town vastly different from the stockade-de- fended hamlet which Labienus set out to destroy. While its position was selected by the Gauls be- cause it could be easily defended, it was evident in later and more peaceful times that the city could be developed into a valuable commercial station. The Seine and its tributaries, the Marne and the Oise, proved highways on which the products of a large district could be carried to the distributing center, Lutetia, whence they could be packed north or south or to the coast provinces over the masterly roads which always made an important feature of the Roman colonizing policy. There are Paris streets to- day which follow these same roads into the country. 6 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Roman civilization made its last stand in Gaul, and Paris became one of the flourishing places which the Romans knew how to encour- age. As soon as the strength of the builders permitted, the town ceased to be confined to the island and spread on both sides of the river. A bridge, fortified at the mainland end, connected the island with the right bank and with the road threading its way northward to avoid the marsh whose name (Marais) is still given to a district of the city. Where now on the north shore is the square in front of the Hotel de Ville there has always been an open place, originally kept free for the landing of merchandise from the river boats. This open place was called the Greve or Strand, and the busy scenes enacted upon it sometimes included quarrels between the masters and the longshoremen. Such a dispute came to be called a greve, the French word to- day for a strike. Where now the Palais Royal rises on the right bank, a reservoir held water to supply the pub- lic baths. Tombs clustered along the roads lead- ing north and east, for cemeteries were not al- lowed within Roman cities. Otherwise the north side of the river with its unwholesome marsh was but scantily populated. Far different was the southern or left bank, sloping pleasantly to the Seine from Mons Lu- EARLIEST PARIS LUTETIA UNDER THE ROMANS. 8 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS cotetius. This hill is now known as Mont Sainte Genevieve and is crowned by the church, Saint Etienne-du-Mont, that holds her tomb, and by the Pantheon, long dedicated to her, but now a secular building. This southern district was drained by the little stream, Bievre, whose waters in later times were believed to hold some chemical properties which accounted for the brillianc}^ of the tapestries made in the Gobelins factory situated on its banks. Fields, fruitful in vines and olive trees, clustered around villas which the Romans knew well how to build for comfort and beauty, and which the conquered Gauls were not slow to adopt, modifying the form to their needs as they modified the Roman dress, covering with the graceful toga the busi- ness-like garments of older Gaul. The later emperors came often to Lutetia. They, too, saw the beauty of the river's left bank connected with the Cite by a fortified bridge. Some one of them, probably Constantius Chlorus, built a palace of majestic size with gar- dens sweeping to the river bank, and here in Lu- cotecia, Lutetia's suburb, Constantine the Great and his two sons lived when they visited this part of Gaul. Constantine's nephew, Julian, called the Apostate because of his adherence to the old philosophies, spent parts of three years here. " I was in winter quarters," he wrote, " in my EARLIEST PARIS 9 dear Lutetia, which is situated in the middle of a river on an island of moderate size joined to the mainland by two bridges. The winter is less severe here than elsewhere, perhaps because of the gentle sea breezes which reach Lutetia, the distance of this city from the sea being only nine hundred stadia. This part of the country has excellent vineyards, and the people cultivate fig-trees which they protect against the winter's cold by coverings of straw." In the huge palace where Julian found him- self so happy his physician, Oribasius, prepared an edition of the works of Galen, the first book published in Paris; and here it was — or per- haps in the palace on the Cite — that in 361 the rebellious Roman soldiers proclaimed Julian as their emperor. Of the palace there is left to- day what was probably but a small part of the original building, but which is, in reality, a sec- tion of no small size. It was that portion of the structure which contained the baths, and it gave its name to the building — Palais des Thermes (Palace of the Baths). One room, preserved in fair condition and showing the enduring Roman brick and stone-work, is sixty-five feet long and thirty-seven feet wide and springs to a vaulted height of fifty-nine feet. It is used as a mu- seum of Gallo-Roman remains. The baths were supphed with water by an aqueduct some eleven 10 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS miles in length, fragments of which have been found at various parts of its course. At Ar- cueil, a town three miles from Paris, named from the Latin word arculus, a little arch, there still remain parts of two arches whose small stones are held by the extraordinarily tenacious Roman cement and are varied by occasional thin, horizontal layers of red tiles. At present they are built into the walls of a chateau which has recently been bequeathed to the town for an old men's home. Somewhere south of the palace and not far from it was a garrison to protect the suburb and the Cite from southern invasion. That it was not greatly needed during this peaceful and prosperous period seems proved by the fact that Lutetia's amusement ground was not within its easy reach, but on the eastern slope of Mons Lucotetius. Here at some time ditring the Roman occupation, perhaps during the second or third century, an amphitheater was built, and here emperors and generals and merchants, Romans and Gauls, gazed upon the pageants and contests of the arena. Christianity wrought a milder mood in her believers and even before the invasion of the Franks the stone seats of the ellipse had been converted to other uses. Enough was discovered, however, some thirty INTERIOR OF THE ROMAN PALAIS DES THERMES. AMPHITHEATER OF LUTETIA AT PRESENT TIME. EARLIEST PARIS 11 years ago to permit an adequate idea of the original appearance. To Julian has been attributed the rebuilding of the Cite, and excavations at different points have unearthed remains unmistakably of Roman workmanship, which show that the island was completely surroimded by a wall. Probably some of the stones of the amphitheater went into it. This fortification has been related to the fourth century, and it is known that on the spot in the Cite where the Palais de Justice now houses the law com-ts, an administrative build- ing of some kind has stood since this same early date. One of Julian's successors, Maximus, erected a triumphal arch near the cathedral in 383, and it is probable that other pretentious structures justified the erection of the protect- ing wall. The cathedral was a church dedicated to Saint Etienne, modest as compared with its medieval successor, Notre Dame, whose sacristy is placed on the same spot, yet showing that concentra- tion of the arts in their expression of religious spirit which has made the churches of Europe at once the treasure-house of the student and the devotee, the inspiration of the poet, and the joy of the lover of color and of line. Both of these Christian churches have stood on ground already dedicated to religion, for under the choir of Notre 12 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Dame there was discovered in 1711 a pagan altar, now the chief relic of the museum in the Thermes. The inscription on the stone places it in the reign of the emperor Tiberius (14-37 a. d.), the successor of the great Augustus. Its inscrip- tion reads: "When Tiberius was emperor the Parisian Watermen publicly raised this altar to Jupiter, best and greatest." The Naut^ Stone. These Watermen (Nautae) seem from early- days to have been an important guild, first as carriers of merchandise and later as an adminis- trative body. In the twelfth century the band was called the Brotherhood of Water Mer- chants, and its head the Provost of the Water Merchants, a name given in shortened form — Provost of the Merchants — to the first magistrate of the city up to the time of the Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Even to-day such of the duties of the Prefect of the Seine as apply EARLIEST PARIS 13 not to the Department of the Seine but to the city of Paris alone are comparable to those of the Provost of the Merchants. From the seal of the Nautae, a boat, has developed the present coat of arms of the City of Paris. It was about the middle of the third century that the altar to greatest Jupiter began to be deserted by its worshipers, for it was then that Saint Denis came to Paris to preach the new religion, and with his coming and the Emperor Constantine's conversion Clmstian churches be- gan to be built. Even the martyrdom of Saint Denis, who, according to Gregory of Tours, " ended his earthly life by the sword," was no check to believers. Legend has it that his head was stricken off on Montmartre, the hill tower- ing above Paris on the north, and to-day crowned by the pearl-white dome of the basilica of the Sacre Coeui* gleaming, mysterious, through the city's eternal haze. The hill's name has been said to mean " Mount of Mars," be- cause of a pagan altar raised upon its summit, or " Mount of the ^Martyr," referring to the death of Saint Denis. Either derivation may be defended, and neither contradicts the story that the holy Bishop of Paris, decapitated, picked up his head and carried it for several miles before a kindly-disposed woman offered him burial. Over his remains a chapel was 14. TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS raised, restored about two centuries later by Sainte Genevieve, and replaced in 630 by the basilica which Dagobert I (602-638) erected to house fittingly that most holy relic, the head of the saint. The existing church was begun about five hundred years later by Suger, the minister of Louis VI who adopted the oriflamme of Saint Denis as the royal standard of France. The flag hung above the altar and was used only when the king went into battle himself. Since the English victory on the field of Agincourt (1415) it has not left the church. The banner (in replica) stands to-day in the choir behind and to the left of the high altar. Throughout the church are the tombs of the Kings of France from Dagobert to Louis XVIII — twelve cen- turies of royal bones. The canonization of Martin, bishop of Tours, the soldier saint who did not hesitate to di\dde his cloak with the shivering poor, received early recognition in Paris, where, indeed, he has al- ways been popular. In what was in Roman days the country but is now well within the city limits a chapel was reared in his honor on the spot where he stopped to cure a leper when he was on his way to Paris. In the eleventh cen- tury it was replaced by the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, which developed into one of the huge monastic establishments which were EARLIEST PARIS 15 each a little world in itself during the middle ages. Another chapel to Saint Martin rose at the main- land end of the bridge leading from the island to the right bank. It was a fair and prosperous city that the world conquerors had nursed beside the Seine; it remained for time to prove whether its five centuries of growth had made it strong and sound or whether its heart was rotten and its roots uncertain of their hold. CHAPTER II MEROVINGIAN PARIS THE reading of Csesar's " Commentaries " makes us know that the Gauls with whom he contended were worthy oppo- nents, ingenious in planning warfare and en- thusiastic in fighting. Even the trained Roman legions had to work for their victories. Grant- ing possible exaggeration, which is a sore temp- tation to a conqueror, eager to magnify the diffi- culties of his conquest, it is nevertheless clear that a radical change had transformed these fierce Gauls and irresistible Romans of a half century before Christ when, five hundred years later, a band of less than 10,000 " barbarians ", led by Clovis, swept across a comparatively unresist- ing Gaul. What had happened in Gaul was what had happened in other parts of the Roman Empire. Money had concentrated in the hands of an in- satiable few. To supply them and the govern- ment every stratum of society was squeezed of its smallest coin, until good men of middle-class position were wilUng to sell themselves into slav- ery to avoid the insistent demands of self-seek- 16 MEROVINGIAN PARIS 17 ing tax collectors, and the government was meanly willing to accept the sacrifice because the supply of slaves was not being kept up since the victorious eagles had ceased to perch upon Rome's banner. In Paris conditions were not different from those in other parts of the province. The town was good to look upon with handsome Roman buildings, and it was ordered with due respect to the laws for whose making Rome had un- doubted genius; but beneath this fair outside there shivered the soul of the dependent grown cowardly from abuse, lacking loyalty for what was unworthy of loyalty. The Gauls, who had adopted the language and manners of their con- querors, had become weak from overmuch re- liance on the stronger power; the Romans had softened during years of peace. So it happened that when the barbarians from the north and east threatened Gaul they were bought off with gifts of land, and when, in 451, Attila, the Scourge of God, led into the north his fierce and hideous Huns whose only joy was bloodshed, the people of Paris prepared themselves for flight when he was still a long way off. For every vital crisis in the life of the indi- vidual there is given a counterbalancing power of endurance; to groups this power is taught by the man or woman whom the circumstances 18 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS develop as a leader. In this emergency, when the dreaded shadow of the hawklike Hun flut- tered the citizens, and they were making prep- arations for deserting the town and taking into hiding such of their goods and chattels as they could, the leader developed in the unexpected form of a woman — Sainte Genevieve. Some say that Genevieve was, like Jeanne Dare a thou- sand years later, a peasant girl. Saint Germain of Auxerre, the story goes, on his way to *' quenche an heresy e " across the Channel, chanced to visit Nanterre where his prophetic eye espied the divine spirit in the little maid and his holy hand sealed her unto God. An- other version insists that Genevieve belonged to a prominent family in Paris and that her fam- ily's influence accounted for her sway over the people. For sway them she did. At her bidding the women of the city fasted and fell on their knees and assailed God with prayer. Nearer and nearer came the foe, and the unbelieving reviled the maiden; but Saint Germain reproached them for their lack of faith and the miracle came to pass — the " tyrantes approachyd not parys." All quarrels were lost in the apprehension of this attack of a common enemy, and by the united effort of Gauls and Romans, of Burgun- dians, Visigoths and Franks, the dreaded Attila MEROVINGIAN PARIS 19 was defeated near Chalons in a battle so deter- mined that the very ghosts of the slain, it was declared, continued the fight. Freed of this menace to the whole country the victorious tribes again fell to quarreling among themselves. The Franks proved sturdiest and most persistent. Descended from Pharamond, who, perhaps, was legendary, their king, Me- rovee, had led them against Attila. Now his son, Childeric, attacked Paris. Again Gene- vieve rescued her townsmen from famine, herself embarking upon the Seine, which probably was beset by the enemy along the banks, and return- ing with a boatload of provisions which, by miraculous multiplication, revictualed the whole hungry and despairing garrison. Childeric's son, Clovis, leading about 8000 men, in 481 made himself king of northern France with Paris as his capital, thus establish- ing the line of monarchs who called themselves Merovingians. " Paris," he wrote in 500 a.d., "is a brilliant queen over other cities; a royal city, the seat and head of the empire of the Gauls. With Paris safe the realm has nothing to fear." Clovis had married an orthodox Catholic wife, Clotilde, who was eager for his conversion. Her argmnents are said to have been far from gen- tle, but they seem to have been suited to her 20 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS husband's nature, for he was almost persuaded to make the great change at the time of the birth of his eldest child. The baby died within the week, however, and the king looked upon his loss as an act of vengeance on the part of his deserted gods. When the second child recovered from a serious illness he was convinced that Clo- tilde's intercessions had saved its life, and again he inclined toward Christianity. An incident determined his acceptance of his wife's faith. In the battle of Tolbiac against the Germans Clovis begged the aid of " the. God of the Chris- tians " to determine in his favor a wavering vic- tory. He won the fight, and it is easy to believe the joy of Sainte Genevieve, when the mon- arch was baptized in the cathedral at Rheims. He seems to have been of simple mind. The fittings and the ceremonies of the vast church touched his spirit to submission. " Is not this the kingdom of heaven you promised me?" he asked of the bishop. Again, when he listened to the story of the crucifixion, he is said to have cried with an elemental desire for vengeance, " Oh, had I been there with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ! " Sainte Genevieve died in 509 and the citizens of grateful Paris over which she had watched in wise tenderness for fourscore years, made her their patron saint. The hill that had been known MEROVINGIAN PARIS 21 as Mons Lucotetius they called Mont Sainte Genevieve, and on it they built a chapel to honor and protect her grave. Clovis replaced the little oratory by a church as long as the mighty swing of his battle-axe, dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul and serving as the abbey church of a religious establishment which bore Sainte Gene- vieve's name. Except for a dormitory and re- fectory this monastery was torn down in the mid- dle of the eighteenth century to give place to a new church of Sainte Genevieve, secularized to- day and known as the Pantheon. The abbey church, built and rebuilt, was destroyed during the Revolution, the tower (called the Tower of Clovis, but really belonging to a later period) being all that is left of these historic structures. The reaction against religion in those turbulent revolutionary years made it no sacrilege to burn the good saint's bones on the Greve, but some of the devoted preserved the ashes which rest now in a stone sarcophagus, elaborately canopied, in the neighboring church of Saint Etienne-du-Mont built in the twelfth century as a church for the dependents of the Abbey. The comparatively peaceful and prosperous Roman period of five hundred years was followed by five centuries of strife and disaster at the hands of the northern tribes. The Roman Em- pire had found in Gaul the last stronghold of its 22 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS civilization. There were large cities, fine build- ings, public utilities, institutions of learning. To the barbarians, a youthful race at the destruc- tive stage, these represented but so many things to be destroyed. Terrible and repeated on- slaughts ousted the Romans, and then the victors became embroiled with new tribes who sought to drive them out. Palaces and houses were de- stroyed, fields and vineyards were laid waste. Paris, the stronghold of the early Merovingians, suffered less than the other important towns of Gaul, but the Franks had no standards of fair living, and they did not build up where time or their own ferocity had cast down. Tottering walls were bolstered with rough buttresses, new dwellings were square hovels of the same heavy stonework, farming languished, commerce died. The successors of Clovis for one hundred and fifty years tricked their wives, murdered their rivals, and assassinated their nearest of kin if they stood in their way. Clovis divided his king- dom among his four sons. One of them was killed in battle soon after and left his three chil- dren to the care of their grandmother, Clotilde, with whom they lived in the great palace on the left bank. Just like the wicked uncles in many a fairy tale two of Clovis's surviving sons ob- tained possession of the little boys by stratagem and took them away to the palace on the Cite. MEROVINGIAN PARIS 23 Then they sent to Clotilde a messenger who bade her choose between the shears and the sword — the shears which should chp the children's locks and thereby sever their claims to the throne and send them into the Church, and the sword of death. In a passion of indignation Clotilde ex- claimed that she would rather see them dead than shorn. Claiming this cry as their authori- zation the two men set about the murder of their nephews. Childebert, king of Paris, proved somewhat less brutal than his brother (he loved flowers enough to plant a garden at the Roman palace) and would have saved the children — they were hardly more than babies — but Clotaire stabbed two of them with his own hand. Then lie married their mother. The third boy escaped, came imder the tutelage of Saint Severin and en- tered a Benedictine monastery. When he was a man grown he established a religious house at a spot a few miles from Paris called Saint Cloud from his name, Clodoald. Here, on a height above the river, stood the chateau where Napoleon effected the coup d' etat that made him First Consul, and whence Charles X issued the decrees that brought about the Revolution of 1830. The building was burned during the troubles of 1870, but the park with its fine alUes of trees and its fountains is one of the play- grounds of modern Paris. 24 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Clotaire had done away with the possible rivahy of his nephews but he had a bitter enemy in his brother Thierry. This amiable relative plotted his assassination. He invited him to a feast and stationed his desperadoes behind a cur- tain whence they should spring out upon their victim. Some friend of Clotaire's, chancing to pass by, noticed below this apparently innocent screen a row of feet unaccounted for, and guessed the project of their owners. Warned of his danger Clotaire came amply guarded and caused his brother extreme annoyance by his evident knowledge of his plan and its consequent frustra- tion. Thierry gave him a silver dish by way of souvenir of this pleasant occasion, but he re- pented him of this generosity as soon as Clotaire was out of sight and sent his son to replevin the gift. One of Clotaire's sons, Chilperic I (who died in 584) gave his daughter in marriage to the son of the king of the Visigoths in Spain. A great train came to Paris to fetch the bride, and the ap- pearance of these rough Goths and the thought of her approaching separation from her parents and friends so afflicted the young girl that her father determined to secure companionship for her. He commanded some chosen young peo- ple — girls and youths of her own age — and also some entire families to go with her into Spain. MEROVINGIAN PARIS 25 So great was the opposition to this high-handed proceeding that it became necessary forcibly to seize the iinwiUing recipients of the honor in order to be sure of their presence when the ex- pedition started. Some of those who were to be separated from their kindred committed sui- cide in despair over their banishment. " In Paris there reigned a desolation like Egj^pt," says sympathetic Gregory of Tours. Robbed of their children the rich Parisians found the coimtry also robbed of gold and silver vessels and of handsome raiment, for the queen heaped into her daughter's bridal coffers the treasures that she had obtained from the nobles in the course of years under the guise of revenue. So loath were the princess's attendants to follow her fortunes and so lacking were they in loyalty that her retinue on arriving in Spain was lessened not only by the daily desertions of all who could manage to escape, but by the defection in a body of no less than fifty men. Fredegonde, the bride's mother, was a woman of forceful will and of unbridled passions. The list of deaths for which she was responsible reads like a roster of the royal family. Although of low birth she attracted the attention of the king, Chilperic, and induced him to put aside his wife, Audovere. Chilperic then married Galsuinthe, sister of Brunehaut, wife of his brother Sigebert. 26 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Fredegonde soon compassed Galsuinthe's death and then achieved her ambition and became queen herself. Brunehaut naturally was indignant as well as sorrowful at her sister's death, clearly the work of an assassin. She urged her husband to vengeance and he declared war against Chil- peric. His activity was not of long duration, however, for he, too, fell a victim to Fredegonde' s ferocity. Brunehaut saved her life only by claiming the asylum of the cathedral of Paris. Not long after she married Merovee, a son of Chilperic and Audovere. Then Fredegonde disposed of her by inducing Sigebert's subjects to claim their queen and by insisting that Chil- peric should deliver her over to them. Merovee, at her command, was shorn and imprisoned and hounded until he sought death at the hands of a servant. His brother was stabbed. Their mother, Audovere, was not safe even in the cloister, for she was murdered in her retreat. Chilperic himself was the next victim, killed by a knife-thrust as he returned from the chase. He was succeeded by an infant son, Clotaire II (613-628), and Fredegonde spent the rest of her life in alternations of affectionately fierce de- votion to his interests and in scheming against the authority of his guardians. Brunehaut outlived her enemy, Fredegonde, by many years and finally met her death at the MEROVINGIAN PARIS 27 order of Fredegonde's son. After a stormy career during which she compassed much good for the subjects of her son and grandsons and earned her share of hatred from the nobles whom she opposed, she was captured by Clotaire. Her extreme age — she was eighty — did not save her from a brutal end. She was stripped and dis- played to his army, then bound by a foot, an arm and her hair to a wild horse which kicked her to death. This hideous deed was done in Paris where now the rue Saint Honore crosses the rue de I'Arbre Sec, and not far from the site of the house wherein Admiral Coligny was slain, the first victim of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Of all the Merovingian kings only Dagobert I (628-638), son of Clotaire II, proved himself a man of strength, incongruously fighting and praying, massacring captives and building churches, living a vicious life in private and gov- erning with justice and intelligence. " Great king Dagobert " he was called, and he was re- garded impartially as a " jolly good fellow " and as a saint. He lived in the palace on the Cite, and he rebuilt the abbey of Saint Denis, invited distant merchants to visit Gaul, dealt out justice to poor and rich alike in unconventional and hearty fashion, and hammered his enemies with the same vigor and enthusiasm. 28 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS In the century following his the Merovingian line degenerated into a race of " Rois Faineants " ("Do-nothing Kings")* dissolute, lazy, leaving the task of government to their Mayors of the Palace while they rolled slothfully in ox-carts from the debaucheries of one country house to the coarse pleasures of another. The only upbuilding accomplished during the Merovingian two centuries and a half was the es- tablishment of churches and religious houses. The Frank was not aggressive in the less active relations of his duties as a victor. He was con- tent to learn the language of the conquered race and the mysticism of religion spoke to him win- ningly. Throughout the years when nothing that fell was restored and the hand was busy striking, at least one kind of constructive impulse was manifest when Clovis built the church in which he was buried on Mons Lucotetius, when his son, Childebert, reared an abbey on the south bank to protect the tunic of Saint Vincent, when on the north bank a chui'ch was dedicated to the same saint and another to Saint Laurent, while the south side was further enriched by edifices sacred to Saint Julien and to Saint Severin, the tutor of Clodoald. It is not the original build- ings that we see on these sites to-day, but it is a not uninteresting phase of the French spirit that has reared one structure after another upon MEROVINGIAN PARIS 29 ground once consecrated, so that a church stands to-day where a church stood fifteen hundred years ago. The story of the foundation of the church of Saint Vincent is interesting from several points of view. Clovis divided his possessions among his four sons, giving Paris to Childebert. Chil- debert had no notion of staying cooped up in this northern town, and he went as far afield as Sara- gossa in search of war. During the course of his siege of that city he beheld its citizens march- ing about bearing what seemed to be a relic of especial sanctity. It proved to be the cloak of Saint Vincent in which they were trusting to save them from their assailants. It did not be- tray their trust, for Childebert became filled with eagerness to possess a relic which could inspire such confidence, and offered to raise the siege if they would give him the tunic. When he re- turned to Paris Saint Germain of Autun per- suaded him to build a church for its protection and to establish an abbey whose members should make it their first duty to pay honor to the relic. This abbey was called later Saint Germain-des- Pres, the name which the abbey church bears to- day. It stands no longer in the meadows, but raises its square Merovingian tower above one of the busiest parts of Paris. Except for this tower the church was burned in the ninth cen- 30 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS tury, but it was rebuilt in the eleventh and twelfth centm-ies and the nave with its seini-circular arches is one of the few remaining examples in the city of the Romanesque architecture of which this was a characteristic. The choir shows in its arches and windows the hand of a later builder who was inclining toward the pointed Gothic. The Merovingian kings were buried here. After the founding of Saint Denis the royal re- mains were removed to that abbey church. The north bank church of Saint Vincent also received the name of Saint Germain, but this was to honor Saint Germain I'Auxerrois, the friend of Sainte Genevieve. This early edifice also was destroyed, but was rebuilt by Robert the Pious, and the later building held the bell which rang for the massacre of Saint Bartholo- mew a thousand years later. These churches and monasteries were the means of preserving whatever of learning per- sisted thi'ough this period of return to primitive living. Every one of them was a center of infor- mation, and every one of them taught freely what it knew of agriculture and of the homely arts. Further the Church was thoroughly demo- cratic. A bishop's miter lay in every student's portfolio, as a marshal's baton hid in the knap- sack of each one of Napoleon's soldiers. SAINT GERMAIN DES PRES. MEROVINGIAN PARIS 31 Of larger government, however, the bishops had small knowledge, and Paris, left to their guidance while the kings roamed abroad, lost her high prestige. She did not regain it under the next dynasty. CHAPTER III CARLOVINGIAN PARIS WHILE the nominal kings were losing their powers thi'ough inaction, activity was developing a race of strong rulers in the Mayors of the Palace — originally the royal stewards. Pepin d'Heristal (who died in 714) is accounted the founder of the family which was to oust the Sluggard Kings from the throne that they disgraced. Pepin's son, Charles Martel — the Hammer — (715-741) stayed the advance of the Saracens in the fiercely fought battle at Tours where he earned not only his nickname but the gratitude of the Christian world, threat- ened by the Mohammedan invasion. Charles's son, Pepin le Bref (752-768), thought that the time had come when the achievements of the Mayors of the Palace should receive recogni- tion — when the king in fact should be the king in name. He appealed to Pope Zachary to sanction his taking the title. The pope was glad of the support of the Franks, and approved. Childeric III became the last of the Meroving- ian line when he was shorn of the long locks which symbolized his regal strength, and Pepin, 32 CARLOVINGIAN PARIS 33 anointed king in his stead, became the first of those monarchs who have been called Carol- ingians or Carlovingians from the name of his son, Charlemagne ( Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great. ) Pepin was anointed first at Soissons by the Bishop of Mayence who used in the ceremony the flask from which Saint Remi had anointed Clovis. Later the new king was anointed again, this time at Saint Denis, by Zachary's successor, Stephen III, who was the first pope to visit Paris. The Frankish nobles paid for the honor to their city by being forced by the Holy Father to swear allegiance to Pepin and his sons. There was much in Paris to interest the pope. The Cite was rich in churches and religious es- tablishments. The cathedral now was a church dedicated to Notre Dame, built by Childe- bert in gratitude for a recovery from illness. It stood beside the one-time cathedral dedicated to Saint Etienne; smaller churches honored Saint Gervais, Saint Nicholas and Saint Michel. Eloy, the jovial goldsmith saint, was the pro- tector of a convent raised to his name. Saint Landry, a bishop of Paris in the seventh century, had founded a hospital on the very spot where Saint Louis and his mother, Blanche of Castile, were to build the Hotel Dieu in the thirteenth century, and but the width of the present 84 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS square from the new Hotel Dieu, built since the Third Republic came into being. Together with religion and good works justice held sway on the island. In the Roman palace judges interpreted the laws gathered and summarized by Dagobert. In a building near by whose site is covered by the enlarged palace was housed the first organ known in Europe, a gift to Pepin. So mysteri- ous seemed its working that a woman is said to have fallen dead when she heard it. On the Cite dwelt the merchants, too, for the right bank of the river had not yet become the business section of Paris, although the Greve al- ways was busy with the loading and unloading of boats. The shops in the Cite held stocks of rich stuffs and of gold and silver vessels and or- naments, chiefly of home manufacture, for the trade that had grown up in Gallo-Roman days was rapidly dying out in the unsympathetic at- mosphere of constant strife. Back from the river on the right bank were monasteries in whose great size the papal visitor must have delighted as he did in the establishment dedicated to the patron saint of Paris on the hill now called by her name, the Mont Sainte Gene- vieve, and in the abbey of Saint Germain-des- Pres, rich in lands and serfs and so gorgeous with Spanish booty that its church was called Saint Germain-le-Dore — The Gilded. CARLOVINGIAN PARIS 35 Charleiuagne (768-814), son of Pepin le Brcf, saw a splendid vision of a united Gaul, but his plan was not suited to a period when the German belief in the might of the strong-armed individ- ual was laying the foundations of the feudal sys- tem. He himself was German and established his capital not at Paris, but nearer the German boundary, where he felt more at home. He visited Paris, however, lending the splendor of his presence to the services of dedication which marked the completion of the church of Saint Denis. Under the emperor's direction his ad- viser, Alcuin of York, established in Paris the first of those schools which have made the city through the centuries one of the chief educa- tional centers of the world. Charlemagne him- self never learned to write, it is said, but his in- telligence appreciated the value of learning and he first offered to the students of Europe the hospitality which Paris has given them with the utmost generosity ever since. To-day foreign students are admitted to the University of France on exactly the same terms as native students. An equestrian statue of the Emperor, his horse led by Roland and Oliver, stands before the cathedral of Notre Dame. Not only was Charlemagne's kingdom divided after his death, but his strength as well seemed 36 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS to have shared the shattering. His descendants were men of small force. Louis le Debonnaire, (814-840) succeeded the great king. Louis' three sons, Lothaire, Louis, and Charles the Bald divided the vast possessions into three parts. The oath by which Louis pledged himself to support Charles against Lothair has an especial interest for scholars because it is the oldest known example of the Romance tongue which succeeded the Low Latin of the Gallo-Romans. The oath was given at Strasburg, the armies of Louis and Charles witnessing, in March, 842. The weakness of Charlemagne's successors helped the growth in power of the individual nobles. The feudal system developed without check. Families made themselves great by their fighting strength. Dukes and counts held sway without hindrance in their own dominions. Much as this added to their importance it was a dis- advantage to them when there was need for con- certed action against an enemy. Once Charle- magne saw the piratical crafts of the Northmen enter one of his harbors and he prophesied that they would bring misfortune to his people when he was no longer living to guard them. His prophecy came true, and when the sea robbers penetrated into the country by way of the big northern rivers and attacked the cities on the Seine and the Loire, sacking the churches and CARLOVINGIAN PARIS 37 carrying away the riches of the monasteries, there was no concerted action among the nobles, and destruction and loss went on little hindered by the inadequate efforts of this or that feudal lord. Paris itself was pillaged more than once, and the abbeys of Saint Denis and Saint Germain-des- Pres paid imwilling tribute to the boldness of the invaders. Charlemagne's grandsons were not of the met- tle to deal sharply with the Northmen. Charles the Bald preferred diplomacy to fighting. His nephew, Charles the Fat, once more united the great king's possessions, but he was no warrior and when the terrible foes appeared in the Seine he was not ashamed to buy them off. Again and again they came, each time ravaging more fiercely, each time approaching nearer and nearer to Paris which they now threatened to destroy. It was in 885 that Rollo or Rolf, called the Gang- er or Walker, because he was so huge that no horse could carry him, led a persistent band be- fore whom the Parisians abandoned their suburbs and withdrew behind the walls of the Cite. They fortified the bridges leading to the northern and southern banks, and under their protection sus- tained a siege of a year and a half. Abbo, one of the monks of the monastery of Saint Germain- des-Pres, has told us about it in a narrative poem of some 1,200 lines. It all sounds as if the 38 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS days of Caesar had come again. The Northmen used machines for hurling weapons and fireballs into the city, and floated fireboats down the river to destroy the bridges. The Parisians retahated from the wall and the towers. The leaders were Eudes, count of Paris and of the district around the city, and Gozlin, bishop of Paris, both of whom fought manfully, and also took intelligent care to foster the courage of their people. Not a day passed without fighting, and although suc- cess usually rested with the practised Northmen the Parisians did not become discouraged or de- moralized. The most dramatic episode of the siege came at a time when the swollen Seine swept away the Petit Pont leading to the south- ern bank, and cut off fram their friends the de- fenders of the Petit Chatelet on the mainland. The garrison numbered but a dozen men and they fought with superb courage mitil every one of them was killed. Abbo's story tells of sorties to secure food, of negotiations that fell through, of a journey made by Eudes to seek help from the Emperor and of the suspicion of treachery that his long absence cast upon him until he banished it by cutting his way through his foes into the town again. His return heartened the besieged, but the besiegers were not disheartened. Hot weather lowered the Seine and an attacking party found footing CARLOVINGIAN PARIS 39 outside the walls of the island and built a fire against one of the gates. Then in truth the very saints were called on to give aid. Holy Sainte Genevieve's body had been in some way brought into the Cite from its resting place on the south- ern hill, and now it was carried about the town that she had succored three centuries before. The trusting declared that they saw Saint Ger- main in spirit-guise upon the wall encouraging the defenders. At last Charles appeared upon the hill of JNIontmartre, but wliile the plucky fighters in the beleaguered city were preparing to go forth to meet him they learned that once again he had bought off the invading army. The fat king was deposed and died soon after and again the regal possessions were divided. Paris and its surroundings, the lie de France, fell (887) to Eudes, the candidate of a party of independent nobles who admired his fine work in the defense of the city. The end of the siege did not mean the end of the new king's troubles with Rollo. That sturdy opponent never ceased his fighting though his invasions became in time not ravages but reason- ably ordered campaigns, since he did not destroy what he gained, and sometimes even repaired the damage he had done. Fortune was impartial. Now Rollo defeated Eudes, now Eudes defeated 40 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Rollo. The king's most famous success was at Montfaucon, then northeast of Paris, but now within the fortifications. For five hundred years before the Revolution there stood on this spot a gibbet three stories high on which one hundred and twenty criminals could be hung at once. The man who built it was one of its victims. Loyalty to the royal family led to the restora- tion of the Carlovingian line after the death of Eudes. Charles, called the Simple, a youth of nineteen, was set upon the throne and found him- self faced at once by the problem of crushing or checking the perpetual invasion. When no solu- tion had been found after thirteen years the king attempted conciliation. He offered Rollo his daughter in marriage and a considerable piece of territory provided that the rover should acknowl- edge himself Charles's vassal and should become a Christian. Rollo considered this proposition for a period of three months and then consented to parley with the king over details. They went with their followers to a town not far from Paris where they ranged themselves on opposite sides of a stream and communicated by messenger. Rollo seems to have made no difficulty on the subject of his bride or of his religion, but he was fastidious as to the land he should receive. No one knew better than he the character and condi- tion of northern France, and he rejected one pro- CARLOVINGIAN PARIS 41 posed section after another on the plea of its be- ing too swampy or too close to the sea or — brazenly enough — too seriously hurt by the harrying of the Northmen! When at last he deigned to accept what came to be called Nor- mandy a further difficulty arose because he re- fused to acknowledge liis vassalship by kneeling before the king and kissing his foot. He had never bent the knee to any one, he said, and he never would. He was willing to do it vicari- ously, however, and he directed one of his fol- lowers to offer the feudal salute. But his proxy had been trained in the same school. Stooping suddenly he seized Charles's foot and raised it to his lips, oversetting the king and provoking bursts of laughter from the Northmen and of indignation from the Franks. Charles found it prudent to swallow his rage and he was rewarded by gaining an admirable colony. The Northmen or Normans became ex- cellent settlers and their coming invigorated a people whose feeble monarchs had represented only too well their own characteristics. It was largely through this vigorous northern influence that, when a break occurred in the Carlovingian line, Hugh Capet, duke of France and count of Paris, a descendant of Eudes' brother Robert, was elevated (987) by the barons to the throne which his descendants in the direct line occupied 42 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS for some three hundred years. The family never has died out. Louis XVI in prison was called " Citizen Capet; " the duke of Orleans, pre- tender to the non-existent French throne, is a twentieth century representative. The tenth century found Paris reduced to practically its size when Caesar sent Labienus to attack it. The Northmen had destroyed the fau- bourgs on the once flourishing left bank, and it was only by degrees that the abbeys of Sainte Genevieve and of Saint Germain-des-Pres re- placed their buildings to meet the needs of the population slowly growing around them once more. The northern bank was even more forlorn, with but a chapel or two to lighten its waste places, and an insignificant blockhouse, perhaps built by the Nortliinen, where to-day the Louvre stands magnificent. Packed into the Cite were the houses and the public buildings of such population as the wars had left. A street led across the island from north to south, connecting the two bridges; an- other from east to west between the cathedral and the palace. Around the open square made by their crossing clustered the shops and mar- kets. Wooden dwellings filled every alley and even crouched against the huge encircling wall. Nobles in armor, their servitors in leather, ec- CARLOVINGIAN PARIS 43 clesiastics with mail beneath their robes, mer- chants in more peaceful guise, peasants in walk- ing trim — all these carried on the e very-day life of this city which is seemingly immortal since fire and sword and flood have laid it low re- peatedly but only for such brief time as it takes for it to grow again. CHAPTER IV PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS NEVER in all its many troubled days has France been more in need of a wise head and a steady hand than it was when in 987 the lords gave to Hugh Capet the name of King of France. He was already Count of Paris and Duke of France, that is, of the lie de France, the district around Paris. When he was chosen king the title meant only that a few powerful nobles promised him their fidelity. Back of this insignificant fact, however, loomed the idea of kingship remembered from the Roman days of centralized power. Combined with this idea was the governing principle of the new feudalism which emphasized the duty of every man to be loyal to his superior with obe- dience and support, to his inferior with protec- tion. Thus the title of king meant much or little in proportion as the holders of great pos- sessions lived up to their oaths of allegiance. The weakness of the royal person was the foundation weakness of the feudal system which 44 PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 45 France at Time of Hugh Capet. (At the dates indicated the provinces came under the French crown) 46 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS nominally linked the whole of society in an in- ter-dependent chain, but really fostered the strength of the individual. Under such conditions it was only the man of unusual force who could maintain himself at a pitch of power greater than that of subordinates who were his equals in all but name. Hugh Capet proved himself such a man, fighting, ca- joling, buying his way through a reign of con- stant disturbance, but strong enough at its end to leave his crown to his son without opposition from the nobles. A medieval tradition had it that Hugh was the son of a butcher of Paris. A fourteenth century chanson called " Hugh the Butcher " encouraged the bourgeois to believe in the pos- sibility of a like elevation. Dante refers to the story in the " Divine Comedy." He hears a shade on the Fifth Ledge of Purgatory say: " I was the root of the evil plant which so over- shadows all the Christian land that good fruit is rarely plucked therefrom. . . . Yonder I was called Hugh Capet: of me are born the Philips and the Lewises by whom of late times France is ruled. I was the son of a butcher of Paris. Wlien the ancient kings had all died out, save one who had assumed the gray garb, I found me with the bridle of the government of the realm fast in my hands," PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 47 Here follows a recital of wicked deeds done by Hugh's descendants by reason of avarice, in the midst of which is the apostrophe, " O Ava- rice, what more canst thou do with us since thou hast so drawn thy race unto thyself that it cares not for its own flesh? " There is no reason to suppose that the tradi- tion concerning Hugh's birth rested on fact. His descent from Robert the Strong was di- rect and he himself was the worthy head of a family that had given to the throne of France one titled and two untitled kings. The son who followed Hugh was Robert the Pious (996-1031) and he and his successors for a hundred and fifty years labored perseveringly toward that centralization of power in the mon- arch which came to definite realization in the reign of Phihp Augustus (1180-1223), and to establishment under the single-hearted rule of Louis IX, the Saint (1226-1270). Within three centuries after the accession of the new dynasty Paris attained to the position which she has held ever since — as the head of the nation, leading by virtue of her thought and will, and as the heart of the people, beating with impulses of generosity and love and passion. With Hugh Capet himself her stability began, for he was the first king to make the city his per- manent home. The palace at the western end of 48 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS the Cite had been strengthened by Eudes who made of it a square fortress with towers. Here Hugh Hved when he was not in the field sup- pressing the uprisings of the nobles who had elected him. That they were of a spirit so inde- pendent as to need a constant curb is to be guessed from a conversation reported to have occurred between Hugh and Adelbert, one of the great lords. " Have a care," warned Hugh. " Who made you count? " " Wlio made you king? " instantly retorted the lord. Perhaps it was a wish not to seem to glory over his subjects that impelled Hugh never to wear his crown after the occasion of his coronation. By having his son Robert crowned at the same time he helped secure the stability of his line. To the west of the palace Hugh planted a garden, and he also added stables, whose care was entrusted to a comte de Vetahle, or consta- ble, the title given later and until 1627 to the commander-in-chief of the French army. On the river side of the palace the king rebuilt the Gallo-Roman prison on the spot where now stands the Conciergerie. The keeper of this prison was a noble to whom was given the title of count of the candles, comte des cierges or con- cierge, the name bestowed to-day on a janitor. His pay in the olden days consisted of two fowls a day and the ashes from the king's fireplace. PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 49 To the east of the palace on the spot where the Tribunal of Commerce now rises, there stood in Hugh's day a Merovingian chapel dedicated to Saint Bartholomew. Legend has it that it was of ancient origin and had been sacred to pagan gods. To secure their overthrow. Saint Denis, it is said, went there to preach, and there it was that he was seized by his enemies. King Hugh enlarged the church and dedicated it not only to Saint Bartholomew but to Saint Mag- loire as well. It was during the time of Robert the Pious that society, grown degenerate under the gen- erally base or incompetent kings of the Mero- vingian and Carlovingian dynasties, reached its lowest ebb of hopelessness and inaction. Mod- ern historians deny that fear of the end of the world when the year 1000 should open had any- thing to do with the lethargy of this period. Whether they are right or wrong, it cannot be disputed that after the year had begim there was a stirring such as had not been known for two or three generations. Only the church seems to have emerged triumphant in material things, for it now held rich possessions whose deeds of gift, beginning " Because of the approaching end of the world," seem to hint at an attempt of former owners to be on the safe side in the event of the possible coming of the Day of 50 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Judgment. Whatever the cause, the givers, stripped stark, had to busy themselves to restore their affairs, and some new constructive impulse built noble buildings and inspired a brutalized society with ideals which devoted force to uplift- ing ends — the protection of the weak and the defense of the church. Robert did not inherit his father's energy or administrative ability. He was a handsome man, fond of appearing in public wearing his crown and flowing robes. He was something of a scholar, and so good a musician that he led the choir at Saint Denis and composed hymns which were accepted by the Church. The poor were his especial care and so traded on his good nature that they even snipped the gold tassels and fringe from his garments when he went abroad. At an open table many hundred dined daily at his expense. He was truly pious as his name declared, and, in the manner of the age, he sought to express his religious interest by the building of churches and monasteries. Paris in especial profited by his desire to win eternal favor, for he built or restored churches to the mystic number of seven and twice that number of religious establishments. King Robert's domestic life verged on trag- edy. He married a distant cousin whom he loved devotedly, but the marriage was not ap- PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 51 proved by the pope, and when the king and queen refused to separate he excommunicated them. To be excommunicated meant not only that the offender was cut off from the sacra- ments of the Church, but that he was forbidden all intercourse with his fellow men. Every one fled at sight of the accursed and the few ser- vants left to the royal pair cleansed with fire every plate and cup that they used. Robert and Bertha finally bowed to the papal decree. Robert then married Constance, daugh- ter of the Count of Toulouse, who proved a suf- ficient punishment for any and all his sins of omission and commission. In her train came troubadours and southern knights who brought to Robert's rebuilt and enlarged Paris palace fashions of dress that were regarded as un- seemly, manners that were all too frivolous, and characters unworthy of dependence. The nov- elty caught the fancy of the Parisians, who, according to an old chronicler, " before long re- flected only too faithfully the depravity and in- famy of their models." Constance kept a sharp eye on her husband's charitable disbursements, and she brought up her sons so badly that Robert's last years were embittered by their brawlings and rebellions. The king died bitterly lamented by his subjects, who knew enough of the character of his sue- 52 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS cesser to feel strong apprehension concerning their fate at his hands. The eleventh century, filled by the reigns of Robert, his son, Henry I (1031-1060) and his grandson Philip I (1060-1108), was made ter- rible by famines and wonderful by the opening of the great adventure of the Crusades. The famine brought to thousands a lingering death beside which the sudden departure attending the end of the world would have been peaceful translation. The Crusades, begun (1096) in exaltation but in a pitiful ignorance of ways and means, ended a hundred and seventy-five years later in selfishness and an accession of knowledge. The ignorance cost a waste of human life hor- rible to think of; the knowledge moved western Europe to expression in all forms of art, and brought about a feeling of unity which, in France, produced a nation bound by common in- terests. Beyond any calculation was the im- petus given to commerce and to the intellectual life. The ordering of society, the institution of chivalry, the awakening to the vividness of men- tal activity and of beauty — these three influ- ences touched life imder the early Capetians un- til it grew and ripened into the simple, beauty- loving. God-fearing temper of the thirteenth century, the soul of the Middle Ages. Henry I (1031-1060), no weakling but not PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 53 a man of administrative ability, followed his father's example as a builder. One of his bene- factions was the Priory of Saint Martin-des- Champs which was begun in the last year of his reign on the site of a former establishment which had been destroyed by the Normans. It lay well out of the city on the old Roman road lead- ing to the north and was a huge place, a fortified village in itself and quite independent of Paris. A wall of considerable size furnished with round towers surrounded an enclosure in which were a church, a refectory, a cloister, a chapter-house, an archive tower, a field for the pasturing of cattle, gardens for the raising of vegetables, and a cemetery for the burial of the dead. The wall has gone to-day except for one of the round towers which was preserved and rebuilt through the intercession of Victor Hugo when the straightening of a street called for its destruc- tion. The field and gardens and the cemetery are now hidden beneath houses and pavements, but the church, whose erection lasted from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and the re- fectory, finished in the thirteenth century, have been preserved as parts of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, established by the Convention in 1794 as a technical school and museum of machines and scientific instruments. The church, secularized, serves as an exhibition hall 54 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS for macliiner}% an incongruous and somewhat shocking combination. The refectory is put to the more suitable use of housing the technical library. Both are exquisite examples, and the church is the oldest existing instance in the city, of that Gothic architecture which sprang into being in the twelfth century as if to sjonbolize with its stretching height and its soaring spires, its delicate workmanship and its brilliancy of light and coloring, the aspiration toward the high and the beautiful which filled men's desires after they came in contact with the appealing mysticism and the dazzling loveliness of the East. Like his father Henry had trouble with his wives — there were three of them — and the mari- tal affairs of his son, Philip I (1060-1108), were even more involved. Becoming violently infat- uated with Bertrade, the fourth wife of the Count of Anjou, Philip sent away his wife, Bertha, and arranged with Bertrade during a church service that she should submit to being kidnapped. No bishop would marry them and it was only after long search that a priest was found sufficiently timid or sufficiently avaricious to yield his conscience to the royal demand. Excommunication followed promptly, and for twelve years the coming of Philip and Bertrade to a city silenced the church bells, which rang PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 55 out joyfully again as they left. So bad was the effect upon his people of their king's obstinate wrong-doing that the pope at last consented to an examination of the royal offender. All the bishops of France met in Paris on the first day of December, 1104. The Bishop of Orleans and the Bishop of Paris waited upon Phihp and asked whether he were prepared to change his manner of life. He said that he was and ac- cordingly appeared before the ecclesiastical body barefooted and seemingly penitent. Kneehng he promised atonement and swore to put aside Bertrade. Bertrade took a similar oath. Neither of them kept it, but so wilhng was everybody to feign blindness after this form of expiation that two years later the monks of Saint Nicholas at Angers received them both cordially, and Bertrade's discarded husband dined at the same table with his successor and slept in the same room with him. Philip never was a friend of the church though he did not in later life carry into effect depredations such as he planned when young, a real theft, in fact, which, through a miraculous intervention, never came to pass. Feeling a twinge of royal poverty — which does not mean that he was really very poor — he went with one of his officers to Saint Germain-des-Pres to take possession of some part of its riches. As they 56 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS approached the treasury the king's companion was stricken bhnd, a circumstance that put the thieving monarch to flight in terror. Yet the check was not lasting for he and his courtiers so corrupted some of the nunneries and monas- teries of Paris that the Bishop of Paris was obhged to disperse the estabhshments. One of the largest, a convent, was on the Cite on the site of the present Prefecture of Police. Having all this trouble with the pope and the church on his hands it is not to be wondered at that Philip was not stirred by Peter the Her- mit's preaching of the First Crusade. Indeed, no great ruler went on this first expedition, though the enlistment of many strong lords and their feudal following, and the unwise rush of whole families — women and children as well as men and youths — lost many lives to France in this most French of all the crusades. Though not of a temper to sympathize per- sonally with a love of learning Philip had intel- ligence enough and kingly pride enough to see the advantage to Paris of a concentration of schools in his capital. He never interfered with the teaching of the religious houses, and during his reign and immediately after at least four schools had obtained a more than local reputa- tion. As the church of Saint Denis sheltered the tombs of the kings it was fitting that the PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 57 abbey should instruct the sons of the nobles ; the cathedral of Notre Dame stood in the heart of the Cite, and there the sons of the merchants were trained, one of their teachers being William of Champeaux whose eloquence knew no equal until it was matched and surpassed by one of his pupils, a young man from Brittany, Abelard. Abelard learned what many others have learned before and since, that it is both tactless and un- profitable to outshine your so-called " betters." He was sent away from Paris. It was not long before he was summoned back by general ac- claim, and joined the lecturers of the third great school of the time, the favorite of the foreign stu- dents, that of the abbey of Sainte Genevieve. His popularity there so displeased WiUiam of Champeaux that he severed his connection with the school of Notre Dame and founded the school and abbey of Saint Victor, on the south bank, east of the island. This abbey was sup- pressed during the Revolution and Napoleon built on its site the Halle aux Vins where the city's supply of wine is stored in bond. Of these four schools the one to which Abelard attached himself acquired a drawing reputation thi'oughout all Europe, and scholars from Eng- land and Germany and Italy sought him ea- gerly, often enjoying the privilege of sitting under him at the expense of a long journey on 58 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS foot and of a life of privation when Paris was reached. Abelard's thesis was " Do not beheve what you cannot understand " — the time-hon- ored cry of the independent thinker. The con- servatives bided their time; there was no use contending with a man in whom youth, beauty, learning and eloquence flowered in a magical persuasiveness. Unfortunately for Abelard's career he was in- vited by Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral, to enter his household as tutor of his niece, Heloise. It was a rash experiment. In a narrow street of the Cite, twisting about in the space north of the cathedral, the section where the canons and canonesses used to live, there is still shown the site of the garden where tutor and pupil, soon grown lovers, met in secret and plighted a troth that was to bring upon them both suffering and shame — for Abelard the end of his rise in the church, for Heloise, the cloister. They were married and lived for a time where now stands nmnber nine on the Quai aux Fleurs, looking across the Seine to the right bank. Fulbert sep- arated them, but even the conservatives were shocked at the hideous revenge which sent Abe- lard away from Paris only to be reunited with Heloise after her death in a convent twenty years after the death of her lover. To-day their tomb in Pere Lachaise is the most visited of all PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 59 the resting places of the illustrious in this fa- mous cemetery. Louis VI (1108-1137), called "the Wide- awake " and " the Fat," was a monarch who did much and planned more. Tall, handsome, energetic, serious, he was the author of policies which in later days developed important results. His accession found his kingdom surrounded by nobles who were nominally his subjects but really enemies of uncommon vigor awaiting the first chance to take their liege lord by surprise. He needed something more than his present re- sources to cope with the situation, and he met it by making for his son an advantageous mar- riage which won him the adherence of Poitou and Guienne, and by permitting in his adver- saries' domains, but not in his own, the establish- ment of communes — self-governing towns which paid for their privileges by Supporting him against the nobles who ordinarily would have received their feudal obedience. Both these steps proved of substantial value to the crown, the first adding a large piece of territory to the royal possessions in the next reign, and the other developing a new social class, the bourgeoisie or town dwelling class, whose democratic spirit grew so rapidly that Louis IX in the next cen- tury had to check its advance if he would have his own unchecked. It has never been long sub- 60 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS dued, however; it smoldered until it burst into the flame of the Revolution; it persists to-day as the genius of the Third Republic. Paris never was a commune, but, in compen- sation for remaining under the rulersliip of the king and his provost (who lived in the Grand Chatelet built to defend the northern end of the bridge from the Cite as the Petit Chatelet held the southern bank) it received certain unusual privileges. Among them was the mo- nopoly of water transportation between Paris and Mantes granted by Louis VI to the Corpora- tion of Water Merchants. This corporation was the most powerful of the merchants' guilds in whose hands rested the municipal administra- tion. Louis' methods, and those of his schoolmate and adviser, Suger, abbot of Saint Denis, en- com'aged the growth of the city, for in tliis reign it began once more to increase briskly on both banks of the river. As in the earlier centuries, the pleasant country on the left bank proved more attractive than did the rough land on the right. The south side permitted streets to wan- der as widely as they willed, but on the north the newcomers were pushed into a crowded section along the river. Marsh and forest behind sep- arated this compact district from Saint Martin- des-Champs. Even at this early stage the PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 61 northern settlement, grouped around the Greve where the shipping was concentrated, was becoming the business part of Paris. At a dis- creet distance outside were the markets on exactly the spot where the Halles Centrales stand to-day, and just within the settlement Louis built for the benefit of the market men and women the church of Saint Jacques-la- Boucherie, now entirely destroyed except for a sixteenth century tower which stands in ornate dignity in a leafy square around which nineteenth century steam trams and twentieth century automobiles hoot and whirl. To Louis VI is attributed the building of the second city wall, piecing out its predecessor so as to protect the suburbs on the right bank. He was interested, too, in religious establislmients. He added to the nmnber of the clergy of the chapel of Saint Nicholas near the palace, mak- ing part of their emolmnent six hogsheads of wine apiece from his own vineyards. He re- paired Notre Dame, already five centm-ies old. He was a patron of Saint Denis, where he had been educated and where he adopted as the royal banner the oriflamme of the saint. He dedi- cated a church of the Cite to Sainte Genevieve in gratitude for her staying an epidemic of fever. He had the heads of cattle carved over the door of the church with which he honored Saint Peter — 62 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Saint Pierre-aux-Boeufs — for the especial bene- fit of the butchers of the city. On top of Montmartre, standing demurely to-day beside the glittering basilica of the Sa- cred Heart, is the little church of Saint Pierre- de-Montmartre built by Louis as the chapel of a Benedictine abbey. Its restoration has been completed within the last decade, and its cold, undecorated severity compels a realization of monastic cheerlessness and of how acceptable must have been the reaction to the colorful warmth and grace of the Gothic. Though their chm'ch was not beautiful the Benedictines had no reason to be uncomfortable^ for Louis granted to them a whole village and sundry estates, and in addition such eminently secular property as a monopoly of the baking privileges of certain ovens, a slaughter-house, the confiscated house of an Italian money-changer, and the exclusive right to fish in certain parts of the Seine. Up to this point the buildings mentioned have but little to show to modern eyes beyond their ancient character and perhaps their form. A Roman bath, a IMerovingian tower on the Church of Saint Germain-des-Pres, a rebuilt tower of Saint Martin's Priory, two aged col- umns in Saint Pierre-de-Montmartre — these are but fragments of the old constructions. From this period on, however, it will become PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 63 more and more usual to find large portions of early buildings. One such is the church of Saint Julien-le-Pauvi'e. Its date is a little later than that of the abbey church of Saint Pierre-de- Montmartre. It is Gothic at its simplest, yet its pointed windows and arches are prophetic of the beauty to come. The story of Saint Julien, to whom the church is dedicated, is one of tragic interest. A youth of noble family, he gave himself earnestly to all the piu'suits of his time and of his class, his one fault being his love of the cruelties of the chase. One day a dying stag whose doe and fawn he had killed prophesied that he would slay his own father and mother. The prophecy came to pass and Julien, in horror at the misfor- tune that had befallen him, left home and wife and wealth and wandered in poverty through the world seeking whom he might help. At last he established himself on a river bank in a hut where he sheltered travelers through the night, and in the morning ferried them across the stream. There he lived a life of expiation till death took him. It was in the sixth century that a pil- grim's hostel was built in Saint Julien's honor on the south side of the Seine. There Saint Gregory of Tom*s lodged in 580, and there the Normans came in 886 and destroyed it. In the 64 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS twelfth century it was rebuilt as a part of the Abbey of Longpont. Since then the unpreten- tious building has had a varied history. At one time it served as the general assembly hall of the University; again it became the chapel of the hospital, the Hotel Dieu. During the Revolu- tion it served as a storehouse for fodder. At some time the nave was destroyed, leaving in the present courtyard a well which once was beneath the roof of the church. The existing edifice, which is merely the choir of the twelfth century building, is used for the Greek service. Thanks to his father's prudent arrangements Louis VII, called "the Young" and "the Pious " (1137-1180), inherited a far larger and stronger territory than had Louis VI. He was by no means his father's equal in intelligence or energy and his reign was unmarked by events notable either for Paris or for France. His hap- piest days were those that he spent in the clois- ters of Notre Dame, he said. His father was happiest in the field. A few years after Louis' accession he became involved in a quarrel with the pope over a can- didate for a bishopric. When the Count of Champagne sided with the Holy Father Louis invaded his domains. During the siege of the town of Vitry no fewer than thirteen hundred people who had taken refuge in a church were PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 65 burned to death with the destruction of the building. Remorse for this disaster for which he was responsible made him lend a willing ear to the exhortations of Saint Bernard, an oppo- nent of Abelard's heresies who was now preach- ing the Second Crusade, and when Pope Eugen- ius came in person to France he gave the French king the pilgrim's equipment and the oriflamme of Saint Denis in the Saint's own church. The crusade ended in bitter disaster, and Louis died before the Third Crusade was under way, but his interest in the Holy Wars led to his patronage of the order of Knights Templar, which had been founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher. At the time when Pope Eugenius went to Paris there was a mighty gathering there of Templars, and probably it was then that King Louis granted them the land not far from the Priory of Saint Martin on which they built a huge establishment, part fortification, part religious house, whose surroundings they made fair by draining the marshes and convert- ing waste land into fruitful fields. The king does not seem to have been the cause of much civic improvement of Paris in spite of his long reign. He built an oratory to Notre Dame-de-l'Etoile near the palace. If we may judge by his usual oath — " By the Holy Inno- cents of Bethlehem " — it must have been he who 66 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS gave the name to the cemetery of the Holy In- nocents and its chapel, though probably they were established before his da}^ The burying ground was near the Halles, and it was laid out when that section was far beyond the crowded part of the town. By the time of the acces- sion of Philip Augustus (1180), however, the population had pushed northwards from the busy river bank, the marsh had been made habitable, and the quickly increasing cemetery stood on the outskirts of the town, not in the countr}^ and needed the wall which Philip gave it. The Pont au Change, the bridge leading from the right bank to the island near the palace — perhaps the very line which the Grand Pont drew across the river at the time of the siege by the Normans — received its name at this time. There were houses built upon it from end to end, and Louis allowed the money-changers to do business upon it along one side and permitted the goldsmiths to establish themselves on the other. For four centuries this was the fashion- able promenade of Paris until Henry IV fin- ished the Pont Neuf whose open expanse across the western tip of the Cite gave more space for display. When a new king made liis formal entry into Paris it was customary for a huge flock of birds to be let loose from the Pont au PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 67 Change that they might carry the glad news abroad. Eleanor of Aquitaine who had brought Louis and France so handsome a dowry proved a wife whose conduct her husband could not counte- nance, though he loved her with a stern fond- ness. Their marriage was annulled. Within a few months Eleanor married Henry Plantag- enet who became Henry II of England and she gave her new husband possessions in France which, added to those which he already had as lord of Normandy, Brittany, Anjou and JMaine, made him richer in French lands than the king to whom he owed allegiance. Then be- gan the friction between the two countries which it has required centuries to still. Louis was twice married after his separation from Eleanor. His last wife was Alix or Adelaide of Chamj^agne, whose marriage, consecration and coronation on a November day in 1160 were the ceremonies of the last brilliant scene enacted within the walls of the ancient JNIerovingian church of Notre Dame, soon to be replaced by the building which ennobles the Cite to-day. After Louis' death there came to the throne a king for whom the bird-sellers of the Pont au Change might properly have sent forth double the usual number of feathered messengers of 68 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS gladness, for Philip the Great was to make France understand for the first time the spirit of nationality, and under him Paris was to develop into the brain that ordered the members. CHAPTER V PARIS OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS IN Philip Augustus (1180-1223) was reincar- nated Charlemagne's wide-seeing spirit, and now it appeared at a time when it was possible to turn vision into fact. Charlemagne saw the value of a united nation under a central- ized power but conditions were not ripe for the fulfillment of his vision. Philip Augustus was alert in taking advantage of the beginning made by Louis VI toward establishing the supremacy of the king and in availing himself of certain feudal rights which previous monarchs had not been strong enough to enforce. He insisted that his vassals, great lords all of them, should sub- mit themselves to his court ; that they should take him as arbiter of their disputes ; that they should ask his confirmation, as suzerain, of any privi- leges that they granted to their vassals ; and that they should make no changes in their fiefs which should lessen their value to him. As suzerain the king was heir to fiefs which fell vacant for any reason, and he acted as guardian for the many minor children orphaned in the constant quarrels in which the nobles engaged. 69 70 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS A strong grasp of all these hitherto unurged rights gave Philip a power that enabled him to repress the disorders of the country, and sounded the note for the downfall of feudal home rule which could not live harmoniously with power centralized in the monarch. Phihp's procedm-e divided his kingdom into bailiwicks, each containing several provostships. Four times a year each hcdlli appeared before the assizes in Paris and reported on the condition of the land under his care. Thrice a year he came to town bringing the revenues of his baili- wick, and the king saw to it that the money was not turned over to any body of lords, always hun- gry for more without Oliver's excuse, and ac- customed to pocket any sums that strayed in their way. By the king's decree the financial report was made to a board consisting of a clerk and of six burgesses. The burgesses were always Philip's good friends. He made it for their in- terest to be faithful to him, and with their aid he played the barons against the church, the church against the barons, and both against the bands of robbers that infested the kingdom. He banished the Jews and confiscated their property, this for the same spiritual benefit which he thought would profit the country by his burning of heretics. Incidentally, the contents of the Hebrews' cof- fers hidden in the ghetto on the Cite did not come PARIS OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS 71 amiss for the filling of the king's own strong boxes in the palace not far away. In the palace Philip's father and grandfather had died, there he himself was born, and there he married his second wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, to whom he took so violent a dislike that he sep- arated from her the next day. The imlucky young woman appealed to the pope and the con- sequent embroilment of Philip with the church on account of his subsequent marriage with Agnes of Meran laid the whole kingdom under interdict. No services were held in the churches even for marriages or burials and the unhappi- ness caused the people was so great that at last Philip put away Agnes and recalled Ingeborg, Because he loved Agnes tenderly he hated Inge- borg all the more and her life of seeming favor was in reality one of wretchedness. When Philip came to the throne all the western part of what is now France belonged to the king of England, Henry II. The lie de France was cut off from the sea, and the frequent hostile ac- tions of a vassal whose possessions were greater than his own kept the young monarch constantly involved in petty wars with a man so much older than he and so much more skillful a tactician that he gained nothing and even came near losing a part of what he had. Into the mind of the lad of fifteen these troubles instilled a hatred of Eng- 72 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS land and a determination to be free of this per- petual annoyance and to obtain a hold upon land that seemed unnaturally owned by a lord who was his vassal and yet lived over seas. The years intervening between the growth of Philip's determination and his chance to put it into effect were filled with work which developed the young king's naturally strong character and intelligence. After Henry's death one of his troublesome sons succeeded him — Richard, who has come doAvn in history as " the Lion-hearted." Richard was handsome and brave, a man to stir the imagination and admiration of a fighting age, but he was too impetuous and too active to ap- ply himself to the study of government. When the call came for the Third Crusade Richard found in it an outlet for his energy for which he would not have to make excuse to his deserted kingdom. He and Philip and Frederick of Ger- many all went to the East, and there the French and English kings came to know each other, Philip envying Richard's dash and audacity and envied in turn for the statesmanlike qualities which he was developing. When it became evident that his presence would be of no help to a crusade doomed to fail- ure Philip insisted on withdrawing to France where he knew that his coming would be of ad- vantage ; Richard stayed on with no thought for PARIS OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS 73 his kingdom, hoping for further adventure. Phihp put himself in touch with conditions in and around the lie de France, took advantage of all disturbances in his vassal's provinces which would give him even a slender foothold, and was ready to meet any act of Richard's successor, John, whatever it might be. The opportunity came soon after John's ac- cession, for he could be depended upon to open some loophole through his disposition toward devious ways rather than straightforward. As lord of the western provinces of France he was Philip's vassal; as Duke of Brittany his boy nephew, Arthur, was his vassal. When war broke out between France and England and John went across the Channel to pursue it, he found that his nephew, incited by Philip, without doubt, was laying claim to other provinces than Brittany. The easiest way out of the difficulty was to murder Arthur, which Jolin is said to have done either with his own hand or by the dirks of ruffians in his presence. After Philip had stormed a fortress that had been looked upon as the chief defender of Rouen the frightened Englishman fled home, and then Philip devised a plan of making Arthui^'s death work to his ad- vantage. As John's suzerain he summoned him to Paris to answer for his nephew's death before the king's court. John refused to appear unless 74 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS he were promised a safe-conduct not only to the city but home again. PhiHp refused to promise protection for the return trip unless the court should declare John not guilty of the charge against him. Phihp hardly could have expected that John would thrust his head into the noose, but it suited his purpose quite as well that he should not. What he wanted was his land and that he could take now with perfect justice when the court declared John guilty of murder and of treason in disobeying the orders of his overlord. The estates in France which John had inherited from his father, those in the north, were confis- cated to the French crown. It was all much easier than fighting. While diplomacy gained for Philip these northern possessions and the power that went with them, he gained a like addition in the south by a system of letting alone. Simon de Mont- fort, a noble of Normandy, entered upon a cru- sade against the people of Albi, in Toulouse, a town and district heretical enough to attract the attention of the persecutor and rich enough to draw the gaze of the avaricious soldier of fortune. The destruction that ensued laid waste a fair country and wiped out the greater part of its population. A few years later the province fell in to the crown in default of direct heirs to the ruling family of Toulouse, and thus the south PARIS OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS 75 of France was added to the northern and west- ern possessions which were accumulating under Philip's control. Poor-spirited as was Jolin, now called " Lack- land," he could not see himself deprived of his own land and his rival growing rich in other provinces without making some opposition. He entered into a coalition with the German emperor and with the Count of Flanders, who was one of Philip's important vassals. Philip defeated the combined armies in the battle of Bouvines (1214) and thereby made himself the most powerful monarch in Europe. The success of the citizen soldiery established the reputation of the bur- gesses as strong and intelligent fighters and thereby struck terror to the hearts of nobles who were nursing plans of rebellion Hke those of the captured Count of Flanders. Yet nobles were one with burgesses in rejoicing over John's final dismissal from any governing part in northern France and over the defeat of the intruding Ger- mans. Never before in all her history had there been so universal a feeling of what it meant to be a Frenchman and to serve a country whose unity was symbolized by a king personally strong, strongly supported, in very truth the head con- trolling the members. It is an interesting fact that the same period that established the supremacy of the king of 76 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS France was marked in England by the check to the royal domination administered to John Lack- land when the barons wrested from him the Magna Charta. Historians of other countries are apt to speak of the French as volatile, ca- pricious, delighting in revolutions, of which the troubled fourscore years from 1789 to 1871 are examples. It might be well to remember that the English, who pride themselves on being neither volatile nor capricious, were less patient than the men across the Channel. They, too, made their stand against aristocratic privilege, and they did it five hundred years before the long-suffering French; they, too, cut off their monarch's head, and Charles went to the block a hundred and fifty years before Louis mounted the guillotine. Action and reaction are equal, prolonged repression must result in correspond- ing expression. The evils of five centuries are quickly cured if less than one century is devoted to the healing. After the battle of Bouvines the victorious army marched to Paris in a trimnph which was participated in by every village along the way. Every parish church held a service of thanks- giving, every crossroads was packed with shout- ing peasants doing homage to the king, admiring the nobles, and, above all, wonderstruck at the new military force whose possible value they PARIS OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS 77 could see, even if it was not yet entirely clear how great would be the weight of the " mailed fist " of the bourgeois. At the very time when the power of the king was becoming dominant, however, democracy showed itself even with impudence in the fab- liaucc, the popular tales which betrayed the jeal- ous spirit of the populace toward the nobles and the clergy. These verses, marked by the esprit gaulois were characteristic of the period of the early middle ages as were also the chansons de geste which stirred the crusaders by their recital of the valorous deeds of accredited heroes. *' Renard the Fox," a long epic of three centuries' growth, burlesques every aspect of the social life of the middle ages, and its delicious fooling paints a more vivid and more intimate picture than does the pen of any chronicler. These lighter forms were not representative of all the thought of the period, for Abelard's thesis, ancient and ever new, that we should not believe what we do not understand, and Saint Bernard's refutation of such a lack of faith were the most prominent instances of a mental activity that fomid lodg- ment in schools and expression in pulpit con- troversy and rostrum argument. Now, too, the professions and the arts no longer were confined to the monasteries, but laymen became teachers and writers and artists and craftsmen. 78 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS The opportunities of meeting in Paris like- minded people from all over Europe for a long time had drawn students to Paris, and schools were endowed for men of different nationalities. Philip united them under the jm'isdiction of the University. From very early days the region on the south bank, just across from the eastern end of the Cite and extending up Mont Sainte Genevieve has been given over to students. In the church of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre they met with their instructors. Across the alley on which the church faces still stands the house of the gov- ernor of the Petit Chatelet before whom the young men appeared to adjust their differences. Behind the church runs the rue du Fouarre on which many colleges were situated, among them the Schools of France, Normandy, Germany and Picardy. In 1202 this thoroughfare was called rue des Escohers, but when, by way of re- sponding to Pope Urban Vs appeal for self- denial, the students in the classes sat on bundles of straw bought in the near-by hay market, the street changed its name to " Straw Street," to commemorate their good intentions. Near by, to-day, is a modern street called " Dante," after the Italian poet, who was not behind his contemporaries in studying in Paris. Emile Loubet, the former president of the French Rei^ublic, lives at number 5 on this street. _''.• -_■%'•////.- I/// ^^tfMI i/r ,Jf'//4/i/'' ^ / f^'/f MLk^ HOUSE OF FRANCIS I ON THE COURS-LA-REINE. PARIS OF THE RENAISSANCE 207 neath it. Farther on the procession stopped for the imperial guest to witness an allegorical play depicting the friendship of France and Ger- many. Over the Notre Dame Bridge, covered with ivy, Charles went to the cathedral and then to the palace of the Cite, where he supped. Dur- ing his visit of a week he stayed at the Louvre, and was so brilliantly entertained that upon his departure he exclaimed, " Other cities are merely cities ; Paris is a world in itself." The chief churches built in Francis's reign were Saint Etienne-du-Mont (on the site of an earlier edifice) in which Sainte Genevieve's ashes now rest, Saint Eustache, the church of the mar- ket people at the Halles, and the flamboyant tower of Saint Jacques-de-la-Boucher ie. This tower is the last expression of the Gothic, while Saint fitienne and Saint Eustache show the Transition combination of Gothic and Renais- sance. Etienne Marcel's Maison aux Piliers had been but a second-hand affair. By 1530 a new City Hall was imperative. Its corner stone was laid amid feasting on the open square with bread and wine for all comers and cries of " Long live the king and the city fathers ! " This enthusiastic be- ginning did not foretell quick work, however, for eighty years elapsed before the building was 208 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS done. Its style was the same that it is to-day ex- cept in the development of details. It was the old Maison aux Piliers that had seen the dinner given to Queen Claude by the city fathers on the occasion of her entrance into Paris after Francis's accession. Louis XII's third Cellier's Drawing op the H^tel de Ville in 1583. queen, Mary, an English princess, was the first royal lady whom the city fathers had ventured to invite to partake of their hospitality. The occa- sion had not been entirely successful, for so great a throng pressed in to the city hall to observe the unusual guests that the waiters " hardly had room to bring the food upon the tables." The arrangements for Queen Claude's entertainment PARIS OF THE RENAISSANCE 209 included precautions against such an invasion. When the great day came the provost of the Merchants and the lesser officials, clothed flam- ingly in red velvet and scarlet satin and followed by representatives of the guilds of drapers, grocers, goldsmiths, dyers, and so on, went to a suburb to meet their lady and act as her escort, and her majesty was graciously appreciative of all their attentions. While the Renaissance, humanism and the dis- covery of the New World were exciting men to new interests they also did their part in promot- ing independence of thought. With ability to read the Bible in the original came questioning of previous interpretations. There grew up both within and without the Church a desire to reform it, and with Calvin and Luther there came into expression not only a protest against the present state of affairs but a formulation of a new be- lief. Rabelais and Montaigne in their vastly dif- ferent ways worked toward the same end. The movement proved to be one of those appeals which spread like a flame when the air touches it. Rich and poor, noble and simple responded to the plea, and Francis found himself the ruler of people ready to fly at each other's throats and clamoring for him to let loose the dogs of persecution. Francis was a Catholic and condemned Prot- 210 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS estantism in Francis, but in Germany he allied himself to the Protestant party against the em- peror. Henry II (1547-1559), Francis's son, did the same — and won some territory by the manoeuver — although he had strengthened his Catholic interests by marrying Catherine de JMedicis, a niece of the Pope, and showed himself by no means friendly to the democratic ideas which the new religion fostered. His strength constantlj^ was spent against the movement even to the end of his reign when he made an alliance for purposes of persecution with Philip II of Spain, husband of " Bloody Mary " of England. One of the first fruits of this union with the land of the Inquisition was the trial of a distinguished member of the Parliament, Anne du Bourg. Henry's death merely interrupted the examina- tion and du Bourg was burned on the Greve be- fore the City Hall. The Paris Protestants or Huguenots lived chiefly in the Faubourg Saint Germain on the left bank. Henry's chief exploit was the capture of Calais which had been in the hands of the English ever since the Hundred Years' War, and whose loss meant so much to Queen Mary of England that she is said to have declared that when she died " Calais " would be found written on her heart. The celebration in Paris of the capture of the PARIS OF THE RENAISSANCE 211 long-lost city was one of the greatest possible failures. The main festivity was to be in the evening at the Maison aux Pihers. It poured in torrents sufficient to put a literal as well as a figurative damper on any pleasure-making. When Henry arrived at the Place de Greve the salutes of artillery frightened his horses and he was almost thrown down as he alighted from his carriage. At supper the crowd was so great that it was almost impossible to get anything to eat. The main part of the program within the hall was a play by the poet Jodelle who has left an amus- ing account of the evening of " My Disaster." There were twelve actors in his musical sketch, he says. Of these six were so hoarse that they could not be heard, and the remaining six did not know their parts. One of the characters, Or- pheus, was to sing a song in the king's praise so literally moving that the very stones followed the singer about the stage. But, alas, the property man had misunderstood his orders and instead of preparing two rocks (rochers) he had arranged two steeples (clochers) . When the unfortunate author, who had a part himself, saw these unex- pected constructions coming across the stage he forgot his own lines, so utter was his amazement and misery. Henry's restless reign left him little time to spend in Paris or to devote to its beautifying. 212 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Whenever he came to the city festivities of all sorts ran high and the citizens paid for it all, though their temper grew sullen as the demands and the power of the crown increased. Henry ex- pected the city fathers to meet expenses which they, quite reasonably, classed as personal mat- ters ; for instance, a charge for the food and shel- ter and care of a lion, a dromedary and a j aguar, which had been sent to the king from Africa. Beyond the strengthening of the right bank fortifications, some addition to the palace of the Cite, and the continuation of the new Hotel de Ville and of Francis I's Louvre Henry did prac- tically no building. His " H," sometimes inter- laced with his wife's " C " and sometimes with Diane de Poitiers' initial topped by her crescent, is by no means so frequent in Paris as, for exam- ple, in Fontainebleau, and other suburbs. In the courtyard of the Palais des Beaux- Arts is the fa9ade of the chateau d'Anet which shows the monogram, and is a beautiful example of re- naissance architecture. A needed charity was instituted by the estab- lishment of a Foundling Hospital. So usual was it to dispose of unwelcome infants that cradles for their reception were placed in the porch of Notre Dame itself. The hospital proved not an entire success, for about a century later Saint Vincent de Paul found that sorcerers, beggars PARIS OF THE RENAISSANCE 213 and gymnasts were buying babies from the hos- pital at a franc apiece. His own foundation of a children's home came from a chance meeting with a beggar who was breaking his purchase's legs so that its wails might excite pity from passers-by. Henry's death was brought about by one of those tragic happenings that mar times of at- tempted gayety. Henry was marrying off his daughter and his sister for political reasons and he arranged a double wedding. The festivities included an elaborate supper in the Great Hall of the palace of the City and a tournament in the rue Saint Antoine. The king himself took part in the joust, by accident was mortally wounded by Montgomery, the captain of the Scottish guards, and died in the near-by Hotel des Tournelles a few days after. CHAPTER XIII PARIS OF THE REFORMATION WHILE Henry II lived Catherine de Medicis was not conspicuous, Henry yielding rather to Diane de Poitiers than to his wife, but the queen-mother wielded a ruthless power over her three young sons who succeeded their father in turn. Through her, also, Italian pictures and books were brought in by their painters and authors, Italian architects transformed French buildings, Italian favorites filled the court, where they introduced the ruffs and padded trunks and soft crowned toques of Italian fashions. Paris streets, narrow as in the days when their Gothic houses were first built, widened into occasional squares meant to remind the queen of her southern home. Francis II (1559-1560) was Heniy's oldest son, kno^vn to-day only as the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom he married in Notre Dame when he was fourteen and she was sixteen. He came to the throne a twelvemonth later and during the one short year of his reign he was a tool in the hands of the ex-Italian family of the 214 PARIS OF THE REFORMATION 215 Guises of which Mary's mother was a member. Throughout France quarrels and conspiracies were rife, all having for their basic reason dif- ferences in religion and the lack of tolerance which could not allow freedom of belief. Of Francis's reign as it concerns Paris there is nothing of interest except the fact that his wed- ding supper, like that of his sister a year later, was given in the Great Hall of the palace of the Cite. Francis's death gave the crown to his next younger brother, Charles IX (1560-1574), who was but eleven years old. During the fourteen years of his reign Catherine de Medicis ruled, first as regent and later in fact though not in name. Her methods were tell-tale of her nature. She favored Protestants or Catholics as the mo- ment demanded, she promised and did not fulfil, she deceived, she ordered assassination, she de- praved the morals of her own children. All the time civil war went on, pausing now and again but never entirely ceasing. The most horrible event of the whole hideous contest was the massacre of the Protestants which took place on Saint Bartholomew's Day, August 24, 1572. Catherine had arranged that her daughter. Marguerite of Valois, should marry Henry, King of Navarre, the leader of the Protestants. Whether this was done in the 216 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS hope of bringing the opposing parties together, or whether the queen-mother's intention was to decoy as many prominent Huguenots as possible to Paris it is impossible to say. The fact that Henry's mother, Jeanne d'Albret, died in Paris a few weeks before the wedding, probably from 2)oison-saturated gloves, would seem to lend color to the latter theory. So suspicious of evil were the Huguenots that it is said that one-half of Henry of Navarre's moustache turned white from fear when he saw two prominent Catholics talking together a little while before the wedding. Events proved that such suspicions were not groundless. The wedding was set for the seventeenth of August. On account of the dif- ference between the religious belief of Henry and his bride, it took place in front of the cathe- dral in the Parvis or Paradise of Notre Dame. This Avas an open place raised above the level of the adjoining streets and railed from it. Mar- guerite was so unwilling to marry Henry that she refused her consent even up to the moment when the archbishop demanded it. Her brother, the king, met the emergency by seizing her head and bobbing it and the service went on as if she had answered a legitimate " I will." After the marriage the bride heard mass in the cathedral while the bridegroom admired the bishop's gar- den. Dinner followed at the bishop's palace, PARIS OF THE REFORMATION 217 and supper at the Louvre. On succeeding days there were balls, jousts, and masquerades. Four days later Admiral Coligny, the head of the Protestants, was attacked by a paid assassin but not killed. This piece of news was brought to Charles IX while he was playing tennis on one of the courts at the eastern end of the Louvre. On the night before St. Bartholomew's Day the Provost of the Merchants was smnmoned to the Louvre and received instructions to close the city gates, to fasten the chains across the streets, and to arm the militia. At the appointed hour, or rather, owing to Catherine's eagerness, at two in the morning, an hour before the appointed time, the signal was given on the right bank by the bell of the church of Saint Germain I'Aux- errois, facing the eastern end of the Louvre, and on the Cite by that in the clock tower on the palace. Admiral Coligny, who lived just north of the Louvre, was killed in his bed and his body thrown from the window to the pavement where the Duke of Guise kicked it. " They told us nothing of all this," says the bride, Marguerite of Navarre, who has left an account of her experiences. " I saw everybody in action, the Huguenots desperate over this at- tack; M. de Guise fearful lest they take ven- geance on him, whispering to everybody. The 218 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Huguenots suspected me because I was a Catho- lic, and the Catholics because I had married the king of Navarre who was a Huguenot. On this account no one said anything to me about it until evening, when being in the bedroom of the queen, my mother, seated on a chest beside my sister of Lorraine whom I saw to be very sad, as the queen my mother was speaking to some of them she noticed me and told me to go to bed. As I was courtesying to her my sister, weeping bit- terly, seized my arm and stopped me, saying * Sister, don't go.' I was greatly frightened. The queen my mother saw it and called my sis- ter and scolded her severely, forbidding her to say anything to me. My sister told her that there was no reason to sacrifice me like that, and that if they discovered anything they undoubt- edly would avenge themselves on me. The queen my mother replied that if God so willed I should come to no harm, but, whatever happened, I must go, for fear of their suspecting something which would impede the outcome. " I saw quite well that they were disputing though I did not hear their words. Again she roughly ordered me to go to bed. My sister burst into tears as she bade me good-night, dar- ing to say nothing more to me, and I went away thoroughly stunned and overcome, without un- derstanding at all what I had to fear. Suddenly PARIS OF THE REFORMATION 219 when I was in my dressing room I began to pray God to take me under his protection and preserve me, without knowing from what or whom. Upon that, the King my husband, who had retired, sum- moned me to his room, and I found his bed sur- rounded by thirty or forty Huguenots whom I did not then know, for I had only been married a few days. They talked all night about the acci- dent that had befallen the Admiral, resolving that as soon as morning came they would ask the king for revenge on M. de Guise and that if he would not give it to them they would take it for themselves. I still had my sister's tears upon my mind and I could not sleep because of the fear she had inspired in me, though I knew not of what. Thus the night passed without my closing my eyes. At daybreak, the King my hus- band, suddenly making up his mind to ask jus- tice from King Charles, said that he was going to play tennis until the King should awake. He left my room and all the gentlemen also. I, see- ing that it was daylight, thinking that the danger of which my sister had spoken to me was passed by, overcome with sleep, told my nurse to shut the door that I might sleep comfortably. " An hour after as I was still sleeping there came a man who beat on the door with hands and feet crying, ' Navarre, Navarre ! ' My nurse, thinking that it was the King my husband, ran 220 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS at once to the door and opened it. It was a gen- tleman named Leran who had received a sword thrust in the elbow and a blow on the arm from a halberd, and who was still pm'sued by four archers who all rushed after him into my room. He, wishing to save himself, flung himself on to my bed. When I felt the man grasp me I flung myself out of bed, and he rolled after me still clinging to me. I did not recognize the man and I did not know whether he was there to attack me, or whether the archers were after him or me. We both screamed and we were equally fright- ened. At last, by God's will, M. de Nan9ay, captain of the guards came. When he saw in what a state I was, though he was sorry he could not help laughing. He reprimanded the guards severely for their indiscretion, sent them away and granted to my request the life of the man who was still holding on to me. I made him lie down and have his wounds dressed in my dress- ing room until he was quite recovered. I had to change my clothes for the wounded man had covered me with blood. M. de Nan9ay told me what had happened and assured me that the King my husband was in the King's room and that there would be no more disturbance. I threw a mantle over me and he escorted me to my sister, Madame de Lorraine's, room, where I arrived more dead than alive. Just as I entered the ante- PARIS OF THE REFORMATION 221 chamber, where the doors were all open, a gen- tleman named Bom-se, escaping from the pur- suit of the archers was pierced by a halberd-thrust only three paces away. I fell in the opposite direction into JNI. de Nan9ay's arms thinking that the thrust had stabbed us both. When I had re- covered somewhat I went into the small room wliere my sister was sleeping. While I was there M. de Mixossans, the King my husband's first gentleman-in-waiting, and Armagnac, his first valet-de-chambre, sought me out to beg me to save their lives. I knelt before the King and the queen my mother to beg the favor from them and and at last they granted it to me." There is a story, probably untrue, that Charles, almost crazy with excitement took his stand at a window of the Louvre and shot down all the Huguenots he saw, shrieking "Kill! Kill!" For twenty-four hours the slaughter continued in Paris, ruffians and unprincipled men seizing the opportunity to kill for plunder and to rid themselves of their enemies. Paris streets literally ran blood and Paris buildings so echoed the cries of the dying that the king heard them in his own delirium of death. When Queen Wilhelmina visited Paris in June, 1912, she placed a wreath at the foot of the statue of her ancestor, Admiral Coligny, which stands at the outside end of the church 222 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS called the Oratory, now Protestant, not far from the spot of his assassination. Charles IX's name is not connected with build- ings or improvements in Paris, so overshadowed was he by his mother. He rebuilt the Arsenal at the eastern end of the city, and he furthered the sale and demolition of the great establishment of the Hotel Saint Paul, whose breaking up had been begun by Francis I. Catherine had left the Hotel des Tournelles after the death there of her husband, Henry II. At the Louvre she found herself sadly crowded, for she had been obliged to give up her royal apartments to the young queen when Charles married, and, counting her daughters and daugh- ter-in-law there were four queens with their ret- inues to be housed in the old palace. Near the church of Saint Eustache the dowager-queen selected a location to her fancy for the building of a new palace, but the ground was occupied by a refuge of Filles Penitentes. With the entire lack of consideration for others peculiar to the powerful, Catherine had this establishment razed and its inmates removed to an abbey on the rue Saint Denis. The religious of the abbey, in their turn, were sent to the top of the Mont Sainte Genevieve, where they took possession of the old hospital of Saint Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, whose name still clings to the parish and the church. PARIS OF THE REFORMATION 223 The construction for which all this moving gave place was a charming palace known as the Hotel de Soissons of which nothing is left but a graceful pillar from whose top it is said that Catherine Column at the H6tel de Soissons, indulged in the harmless amusement of star-gaz- ing. The palace was pulled down in 1749 to give place to the Corn Exchange, and that, in 1887, to allow the erection of the Bourse de Com- merce. More ambitious was a southwestern addition 224. TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS to the Louvre, a wing going to meet the river, and another at right angles following the stream west- ward. This extension parallel with the Seine was begun v ith the idea of continuing it to meet the palace ol the Tuileries (see plan of Louvre, Chapter XXII) which the queen had begun on the site of s jme ancient tile-yards to the west of the Louvre. Only the central f a9ade 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 Hotel 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 PARIS OF THE REFORMATION 225 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 Sevigne, 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 cit}^ Not far away is the Hotel 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 fa9ade 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 im- prove the condition of the Greve, which was a mud-hole and a dump-heap, not, apparently, be- 226 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS cause 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 splendid fete at 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 humane PARIS OF THE REFORMATION 227 than Charles IX's custom of having fights be- tween 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 Cite (see Chapter VI) beginning the Pont Neuf across the western tip of the Cite, 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 con- tinual 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 town 228 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS hummed 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 of barriqucs (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 citi- zens 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 ro3^al apartments by the staircase existing even now in a corner of the Hall of the Cariatides. Reversing the direction taken by the Empress Eugenie 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 the PARIS OF THE REFORMATION 229 Tuileries, 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 rehgion 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 assas- sination 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. Hemy was forced to join the Protestant army of his cousin, Henry of Na- varre, 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 Bour- bon whose representative, Henry of Navarre, who now became Henry IV, was one of the Prot- estants to whom the city was fiercely opposed. CHAPTER XIV PAEIS OF HENRY IV 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 comitry 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 reUgious 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 ^vith 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 inter- prets Catherine de Medicis. Breaking harshly in upon the wedding festivi- ties the bell of Saint Germain I'Auxerrois clanged its awful knell, and when the horror was 230 PARIS OF HENRY IV 231 over 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 de- clared 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 peers And 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 ; 232 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS 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 ap- proach the peojDle from the suburbs crowded into the city till it held some 200,000. Henry had no trouble in taking the chief of the outer settle- ments and in controlling the to^vn's food supply. The resulting famine drove the Parisians to straits such as they had not known since the days of Sainte Genevieve 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 pur- sued 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 be- sieged leave the town, but so earnest was the PARIS OF HENRY IV 233 League, 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 Menippee," 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 Ill's as- sassination felt by the moderate party. " O Paris who are no longer Paris but a den of ferocious beasts, a citadel of Spaniards, Wal- loons and Neapolitans, an asylum and safe re- treat for robbers, murderers and assassins, will you never be cognizant of your dignity and re- member 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 In- quisition a thousand times more intolerable and harder to endure by spirits born free and uncon- 234 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS strained 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 con- cern 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 mag- istrates ; 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 sup- port to your King, good-tempered, easy, friendly, who behaved like a fellow-citizen of your town which he had enriched and embellished with hand- some 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 Paris PARIS OF HENRY IV 235 was 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 Cath- olic. 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 sub- mitting 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 vel- vet, 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 prin- cipal citizens the day after his entry brought him a gift of sweetmeats, the king, though not fully dressed, for his subjects' ardor had brought them 236 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS at an unduly early hour, accepted the offering graciously, saying, " Yesterday I received your hearts ; to-day I receive your comfits no less will- ingly." 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 inso- lence, " Gentlemen, my regards to your mas- ter — and never come back here! " In the calm that succeeded the nation be- gan 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 per- son 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 in- dustries, permitted religious toleration through PARIS OF HENRY IV 237 the Edict of Nantes, made himself the friend ahke 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 Re- naissance 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 Hotel des Tournelles an excuse to leave a build- ing 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, and 238 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS finally 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 re- mainder 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 pa- vilions which break the monotony of the archi- tecture. The effect is wonderfully pleasing even to-day when most of the houses show signs of di- lapidation 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 dig- nified and handsome. Many great names are connected with this square. Richelieu lived here, Madame de Sevigne was born here, and here in the house where Vic- tor Hugo had an apartment is the museimi 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 fa9ade whose windows show signs of occupation by PARIS OF HENRY IV 239 many 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 Cite through the palace garden westward. It was surrounded by houses like those on the Place Royale. Ma- dame Roland lived in one of them, situated where the place opens on the Pont Neuf which Henry finished. On it he planned to place his own equestrian statue, but that ornament under- went so many misfortunes, even to being ship- wrecked 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 carv- ing. The name is perpetuated to-day in a de- partment store on the right bank and in a pub- lic bath floating in the stream. On other bridges there were several of these pumps. One on the 240 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Pont Notre Dame was destroyed within the re- membrance of people now living. Berthod, a seventeenth-century writer of dog- gerel, 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 trouble To go and see the Samaritaine, The Pont-Neuf and that great horse Of 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 horse Either bitten or kicked. O, you Pont-Neuf, rendezvous of charlatans, Of rascals, of confederates, Pont-Neuf, customary field For 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, ium\-r ^y '^ iftU^-i*'' THE SAMARITAINE. From an old print. STATUE OF HENRY IV ON THE PONT NEUF. Madame Roland lived in the house on the right. PARIS OF HENRY IV 241 And of spagiric physicians^ Of clever jugglers And 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 can Use it without being housed. Look, it smells of sweetest scents, Is compounded of lively drugs, And never did Ambroise Pare Make 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 I 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 remark That 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 booth Have four or five great grotesque figures Standing on turn-tables. Holding in their hands an ink-horn Made of wood or bone or ivory, A leaden comb, a mirror Decorated with yellow and black paper, 242 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS 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 hat Adorned 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 booth Dressed in antique costume. And tormenting passers-by About his unmarketable wares. " Six balls for a sou," Says this merchant of boxes of balls ; " Here you are, sir ! Who'll take a shot Before 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, I'Hopital de Charite, and the other outside of the city on the northeast, for con- tagious diseases. PARIS OF HENRY IV 243 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 EPTDEMIC If you wish to be cured Take — 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 rash With two bold Lombards, And, to end, two worthies from Limousin. Bray them in an oakum mortar And then put in your soup. If you have made a good hash You'll find you never had a better Remedy to ward off the epidemic. But no one will ever believe it. Queen Marguerite of Valois, the wife whose wedding festivities had precipitated the massa- cre of Saint Bartholomew, proved herself Cath- erine 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'Estrees and after her death to clinch his Italian alliance by wedding Marie de Medicis, 244 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS while Marguerite entertained herself with nu- merous lovers at the Hotel 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, con- ventionality or fright she founded several re- ligious 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 f a9ade is, incongruously enough, the f a9ade of Diane de Poitiers' chateau d'Anet, mentioned above. Henry's devotion to Gabrielle d'Estrees, a rarely beautifid woman, made him have her ini- tial carved in parts of the Louvre which he built. The letters are gone now except in one over- looked 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 ex- press his lighter emotions in verse. To-day this royal skill seems to have left the monarchs of PARIS OF HENRY IV 245 Europe with the exception of Carmen Sylva and of Nichohis of Montenegro who writes and fights with equal enthusiasm. Here is a poem ad- dressed to CHARMING GABRIELLE ^ 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 crown By valor given to me I War made the prize my own, My love awards it thee! 1 Translated by Louisa Stuart Costello. 246 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS 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 round The words of my farewell Repeat 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 be 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 con- tinued 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 political PARIS OF HENRY IV 247 situation was so embroiled that he had many ene- mies. 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 open- ness of mind and tact that after a few years 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 execu- tioner 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 Greve. 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 distm'bed. CHAPTER XV PAEIS OF RICHELIEU 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 wit- nessed a greedy scramble for money and prefer- ment 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 Hotel de Bourbon just east of the Louvre. The body was a unit in demand- ing reform, but unity ceased with that demand. The nobles were indignant at certain encroach- ments on their aristocratic rights, the queen hav- ing given privileges to some middle-class profes- 248 PARIS OF RICHELIEU 249 sional 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 griev- ance in the fact that upon them fell all the ex- penses of the government, and their representa- tives, 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 infor- mation that greeted the deputies when they gath- ered 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 Conde arrested witliin the palace of the Louvre 250 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS and 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 Galigai had ruled the nation through the queen. Concini was shot as he was crossing the bridge across the east- ern moat of the Louvre, and the king looked on from a window. Leonora was beheaded and burned as a witch on the Greve. Richelieu, become a cardinal, ruled with wis- dom 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 Greve witnessed the punishment for the sport of the Place Royale. Legalized strug- gles by the Parliament in the palace on the Cite, 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 estab- lished to commemorate, the original building serving as the sacristy of the present edifice. He confirmed Henry of Navarre's Edict of Nantes, PARIS OF RICHELIEU 251 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 hfe was passed under the domination of a determined mother, Marie de Medicis, and a masterful prime min- ister. It would have required a stronger per- sonality 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 hawk- ing, drilling soldiers, and craftsmanship in leather. He was terribly bored most of the time, ap- parently without any initiative toward remedying the situation. His court reflected his own disposi- tion arid 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 Honore on 252 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS the 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 con- struction of his new home for his ideas of what he wanted did not harmonize with what he could have. The hotels of other men were in the way and sometimes even the cardinal's expressed de- sire 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 irregular- ity of outline that was not beautiful. To secure a symmetrical garden Richelieu did from within what few of the city's enemies ever have suc- ceeded 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 waU running along the river bank was the Cours la Reine laid out by THE ARCHBISHOPS PALACE. Beyond tlie liridsii', llie old Hotel Dieii. RICHELIEUS PALAIS CARDINAL, LATER CALLED PALAIS ROYAL. PARIS OF RICHELIEU 253 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 Luxem- bourg. 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 sec- tion. 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-Grace, made prominent by its gift from Louis' wife, Anne of Austria, of a 254 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS handsome 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- Grace 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 Chm-ch 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 centmy, for Sainte Genevieve'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 fa9ades of Saint Paul- Saint Louis near the Place da la Bastille, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the left bank church of fashionable weddings. Saint Roch on the rue Saint Honore, from which the crowds watched the daily passing of the tumbrils during the Revolution, Saint Gervais, east of the Hotel de Ville, which cherishes a crucifix from the ancient abbey of Sainte Genevieve, and the Oratory also on the rue Saint Honore, now a Protestant church and PARIS OF RICHELIEU 255 serving as a background for a fine group of statuary representing Admiral Coligny between Fatherland and Religion. The main feature of these fa9ades 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 called baroque which developed later into the slightly more acceptable rococo, 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 court- yard, reproduced the renaissance decorations 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 con- necting 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 X Ill's time was the construction of what is now called the lie Saint Louis to the east of the Cite. 256 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS 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 out- come 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 PALACE OF THE LUXEMBOURG. COURT OF HONOR OF NATIONAL LIBRARY. See page 272. PARIS OF RICHELIEU 257 bridge to the right bank. An engineer named Marie conceived the idea of joining the two islets, and now the island is a unit and only the name of a street indicates where the Seine once flowed between. Once begun, this new residence section rapidly became popular among people who wanted to live somewhat remote from the turmoil of many streets. To-day the. island is covered from tip to tip with dwellings and such few shops as are needed to supply the daily needs of the people, but there is still the atmosphere of remoteness that made its charm for Gautier and Baudelaire and Voltaire, and which induced Lambert de Thorigny, president of the Parliament, to build the superb mansion, still standing and restored to its original beauty, on whose decorations all the best French artists of the day lavished their skill. To cross one of the bridges on to the island is to find one's self transported to one of the provinces. It is as true to-day as when it was written a hundred and thirty years ago that " the dweller in the Marais is a stranger in the Isle." Louis XIII cared little for letters. Richelieu, on the other hand, made some pretensions to being a literary man himself, recognized ability in others, and was able to understand the useful- ness and the power of the pen. It was, in part, his encouragement that made the success of the 258 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS literary meetings at the Hotel de Rambouillet near the Louvre where the " precious " ladies and gentlemen conversed and wrote in a language whose high-flown eloquence was a reaction against the rough language of the military court of Henry IV. Corneille came to the fore in Louis' reign, and, for his own political purposes, Richelieu organized a group of writers who had met for their own pleasure into the French Academy whose members, the forty " Im- mortals," assume to-day to be the court of last resort on the literature and language of France. The two succeeding sovereigns, Louis XIV and XV added other academies — of Inscrip- tions, Sciences and so on — which, after the Revolution, were combined as the Institute and established in the College Mazarin near whose dome a tablet now marks the former site of the Tour de Nesle. It is quite probable that when the great cardinal died Paris, not being gifted with prophetic vision, drew a sigh of relief. His was indeed a master spirit. Beneath the rush of the city's life there was no one of whatever class who did not know that he was neither too high nor too low to receive the premier's attention if he drew it upon himself. Richelieu's word meant his making or his breaking. If Richelieu stretched forth his hand he might be raised to PARIS OF RICHELIEU 259 prominence: if Richelieu frowned he might be sent to a j^rison from which only Death would release him. Cardinal de Retz, who analyzed Richelieu's qualities with impartiality and intelligence said of him " all his vices were those which can only be brought into use by means of great virtues." Claude le Petit (1638-1662), author of "La Chronique Scandaleuse ou Paris Ridicule/* in describing the Palais Royal, wrote: Here dwelt old Claws and nothing lacked, John Richelieu by name, A dcmi-God in local fame, Half-Prince, half-Pope in fact. CHAPTER XVI PAKIS OF THE " GRAND MONAEQUE " HISTORY repeated itself when Louis XIII died, leaving as his heir a child of five, Louis XIV (1643-1715), whose kingdom was ruled by a regent, the queen mother, Anne of Austria, who took as her adviser another cardinal, the Italian, Mazarin. This newcomer to power was a different sort of man from his predecessor, Richelieu. " He pos- sessed wit, insinuation, gayety and good man- ners," says de Retz, but " he carried the tricks of the sharper into the ministry." War with Spain brought success at the begin- ning, but the Parisians were all too soon quarrel- ing over the finances, and in the thick of a civil war. The people resented the arrest of a mem- ber of Parliament, Broussel, which had been accomplished while the general attention was engaged by the celebration at Notre Dame and in the streets over the victory at Lens. De Retz, who was at that time archbishop suffragan of Paris, went to Anne to ask for Broussel's re- lease. The queen laughed at him and so roused his wrath that he joined the insurgents. He did 260 PARIS OF THE " GRAND MONARQUE " 261 it whole-heartedly, for for some time to come he fought in the streets — alternately with trying to calm the people — and once was seen at a sitting of the Parliament of Paris with a dagger care- lessly protruding from his pocket — " the arch- bishop's breviary," some wit called it. After de Retz's failure the Parliament sent a delegation to the regent at the Palais Royal to demand the release of Broussel. Anne refused and the burghers tucked up their gowns and clambered over the street barricades to report their failure to the people. Half way across town they were met by a mob who declined to accept any such decision as final, and once more the envoys turned about and made their laborious way back to the regent. Anne finally yielded her prisoner, but her action did not end the struggle, which was carried on for some years and was called the Fronde (sling) because the members of Parlia- ment behaved like the stone-slinging youngsters of the faubourg Saint Honore who gave way before the king's archers, but renewed their sport as soon as their backs were turned. The contest seems to have been rather absurd, for while the personal courage of the Parisians was unques- tioned there was no organization, and the troop that rode gaily out to meet the royal regulars was pretty sure to ride back sad and bedraggled. 262 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS The little king was taken to Saint Germain for protection during this year-long commotion, and it was not until peace between the warring parties had been formally proclaimed that he returned to Paris. This peace did not last long, for the bourgeoisie, some members of the nobility and even a few princes of the blood royal were among the disaffected Parisians. Anne and Mazarin adopted high-handed measures, but they soon found that imprisoning men like the Prince de Conde of the Bourbon family did not ingratiate the com't with the people or advance its cause. Two years later on a summer's day Mazarin took the child king to the top of the hill on which is now the cemetery of Pere Lachaise that he might watch a battle between his own troops under Turenne and those under Conde just outside the city walls on the east. Conde's force was out-numbered and it looked as if he were going to be crushed between Turenne's army and the wall when the Porte Saint Antoine was suddenly opened and the guns of the Bastille were used against Turenne while Conde's army gained this unexpected refuge. It turned out that the king's cousin, the Duchesse de Montpensier, known as " La Grande Mademoiselle," had taken upon herself to give the orders which defeated the royal troops. This PARIS OF THE " GRAND MONARQUE " 203 strong-minded young woman was the bachelor girl of her time, and a " character." What she would do next was the constant guess and the constant diversion of the court. Although she was eleven years older than Louis he was so captivated by her vivacity that the cardinal thought it judicious to keep the cousins apart, and gave her apartments at the Louvre. At one time during the siege of Orleans she made her way across the moat in a small boat and squeezed her way into the town through a postern gate. At love she scoffed and she refused every offer of marriage that was made to her until she was of an age ostensibly of discretion when she fell madly in love with an adventurer. Her marital experiences imdoubtedly made her return to her earlier beliefs in the foolishness of love and mar- riage. The court retreated to Saint Denis. The city was given over to internal dissension for some of the city officials were accused of sympathizing with the hated foreign cardinal and his party, and the Hotel de Ville became the center of violent scenes, its besiegers men who wore in their hats a tuft of straw, the badge of the Frondeurs. It was only when Anne consented to send Mazarin away that the Fronde came to an end and once again Louis could return to Paris. With such youthful experiences of his chief city it is small wonder that Louis XIV had no 264 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS great love for it as a place of residence and that he spent most of his life at Versailles. The hunt- ing lodge which Louis XIII had built was the nucleus of the huge palace which his son made large enough not only for his family and retinue but for a large number of the nobles whom it was his policy to gather about him so that he could keep his eye on them. By this means the power of the nobles was decreased on their own estates while their respect for the king, on whose words and smiles they hung, was enormously increased. A lord was grateful for a room at Versailles even though it were so far from private as to be used as a passage-way. Many of the nobility paid handsomely for positions in the royal kitchens. Later in the reign these offices were held by bourgeois, for the finances of this class improved as those of the upper class lessened on account of decreased revenues from their neglected estates. The burghers aped the nobles in man- ners and in dress, and by favoring them, from whom he had nothing to fear, Louis gained the friendship of an important body. He raised no objection when the citizens took nobles into busi- ness partnership, for that serv^ed him both by lowering ancient pride and by providing money upon which he could make some demand. In manners, dress and literature this reign was increasingly formal following upon the example of Louis who was formal because he honestly be- PARIS OF THE " GRAND MONARQUE " 265 lieved himself godlike and insisted on formality as appropriate. His was a grand manner and his an incomparable selfishness. His belief in the divine right of kings stretched until " right " meant the right to do whatever he chose however unkind or immoral. Beneath the gorgeousness of the court was a life of hypocrisy, self-seeking, and crime almost beyond belief. The godlike sovereign certainly had a more than human appetite. It is related that at one dinner he ate: Four plates of different kinds of soup A whole pheasant A partridge A large plate of salad Two large slices of ham A bowl of mutton with gravy and garlic A plate of pastry Fruit Several hard-boiled eggs. In theatrical parlance, he was " playing to capacity." Upon Mazarin's death the king, then twenty- three years old and ignorant of independent action, had made known his intention of conduct- ing affairs himself. For the rest of his life he worked hard every day at the affairs of the state, comforted when things went wrong with the refreshing thought that the fault was not his be- cause he had acted with God-given intelligence. 266 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS The early part of his career was marked by such advance in the condition of the finances, the laws, education, the army, and industrial achievement that, provided he blinded himself to the fact that in Colbert, Vauban and Louvois he had excep- tionally efficient administrators, he might well think himself a paragon of intelligence. Great generals won his battles; great writers praised his power; great artists and architects built grandly in his honor. It is not strange that he thought himself what others called him, the " Grand Monarque " and the " Roi Soleil." Centralization was the basic policy of Louis's career. In Paris it took the form of substituting a law court under royal control for the local courts in different parts of the city, and in making the municipal offices purchasable from the king. Municipal improvements made the city pleasanter to live in. An effort was made — not very successfully from the modern point of view — to keep the streets clean,^ and at night a lantern was hung midway between cross streets and burned until midnight. As the number of lights installed was but 6,500 and Paris at that time covered some four square miles of territory it may be seen that the illumination was not daz- zling. It was enough, however, to be of assistance to Louis' new police force, and to make visible in the evening as well as the morning the two gates — of Saint Denis and Saint Martin — PARIS OF THE " GRAND MONARQUE " 267 erected by the admiring Parisians to do honor to his early victories. The fire department be- came a lay institution at this time for, rather cm-iously, fire fighting had previously been the work of a religious house. The population is estimated at between eight and nine hundred thousand. Two new squares of this century were the Place des Victoires, in front of Notre Dame des Victoires, and the Place Vendome, north of the rue Saint Honore. By a city regulation no change is permitted to-day of the fa9ades of the buildings on these two open places. At the extreme eastern end of modern Paris the Place de la Nation is the former Place du Trone, which received its name when in 1660 Louis sat upon a temporary throne beyond the city wall to receive congratulations upon having secured the Peace of the Pyrenees. The poet Scarron, husband of rran9oise d'Aubigne who, after his death, became the governess of the king's children by Madame de Montespan, and who later was married secretly to Louis, has left a description of Paris in the " Great Century." The translation is by Walter Besant. Houses in labyrinthine maze ; The streets with mud bespattered all; Palace and prison, churches, quays. Here stately shop, there shabby stall. 268 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Passengers black, red, gray and white, The pursed-up prude, the light coquette; Murder and Treason dark as night; With clerks, their hands with ink-stains wet; A gold-laced coat without a sou, And trembling at a bailiff's sight ; A braggart shivering with fear ; Pages and lackeys, thieves of night ! And 'mid the tumult, noise and stink of it, There's Paris — pray, what do you think of it? An epitome of society this. Paris was indeed full of adventurers, of criminals even among the high-born, of gamblers so mad over games of chance that special laws had to be passed driving them out of the city. There is still standing near the Hotel de Ville the Hotel d'Aubray where lived the famous poisoner, the Marquise de Brinvilliers. A glance at the career of this woman shows a social condition amazing in its calm iniquity. The marquise herself, of seemingly guileless charm, acquired from a lover the destructive skill which she utilized in removing from her path her relatives and any other people who interfered with her in any way. Her trial is a " celebrated case " not only because of her own rank but be- cause other people of note were suspected of be- ing in collusion with her. Torture was abolished under Louis XIV but not until after Madame de Brinvilliers had been made to drink many buckets PARIS OF THE " GRAND MONARQUE " 269 of water and to be sadly bent across wooden horses. She was beheaded on the Greve, her body burned and the ashes thrown to the winds. At about the same time accident disclosed an astounding number of cases of poisoning or at- tempted poisoning. Mme. de Montespan un- doubtedly tried to make way with the father of her children, the king, and rumors were constant of many other instances. " So far," said Mme. de Sevigne's son, " I have not been accused of attempting to poison little mamma, and that is a distinction in these days." Paris was lively enough during this reign, for Versailles was not so far away but that its people could go to town for city diversions, and as Louis grew more serious with age and court etiquette more rigorous and burdensome, the town made its call more and more insistently. Louis himself, hugely bewigged and elaborately elegant, how- ever, does not often appear in the picture. Once he took part in a gorgeous carrousel — a carnival chiefly of equestrian sports — which took place in the large square — now called the Place du Carrousel — lying between the Louvre and the Tuileries. Once, twenty-five years later, he was entertained at the Hotel de Ville at a dinner at which the city officials waited upon him in person. Yet neither of these pictures lingers in the memory like that of the bewigged monarch 270 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS usually most punctilious in his dress for occasions, appearing in the palace of the Cite before the Parliament, booted for the chase, arrogantly care- less of any courtesy toward the body he addressed and haughtily insisting with the full force of his sincere belief that he and the State were one, — " Umat c'est moi." Power was dear to the king's heart and he so impressed his magnificence on his people that they thought it only fitting that he should have a rising sun carved on the buildings which he erected, such as that part of the Louvre which he built to complete the eastern quadrangle. (See plan, Chapter XXII). The eastern exterior of this section, facing the church of Saint Germain I'Auxerrois, shows the superb colonnade designed by Perrault, a sort of universal genius, who was both a physician and an architect. Another piece of his work was the Observatory, still in active use on the left bank near the University. The king's appreciation of splendor demanded com- pleteness, and so his handsome buildings were placed in the setting of stately gardens, his chief designer being Le Notre whose work is still to be seen encircling the palaces in the environs of Paris. In the city he laid out the gardens of the Tuileries, and that superb avenue, the Champs Elysees, which leads from the broad Place de la Concorde to Napoleon's Arch of Triumph. The four hundredth anniversary of Le Notre's birth PARIS OF THE " GRAND MONARQUE " 271 was celebrated on March 12, 1913, when Paris- ians recalled his work with almost unanimous ap- proval because of its harmony with the impressive buildings which it supplemented. Other important buildings of Louis' reign were the Invalides or Soldiers' Home with its church and its later addition, the work of Mansard who gave his name to the curb-roof which we know. Beneath Mansard's beautiful dome the body of Napoleon now lies " among the people whom I loved." Louis' contest with the pope over the king's position as head of the French church tended to lessen his interest in the establishment of religious institutions, but the famous church of Saint Sulpice, whose twin towers are landmarks on the left bank, was begun by him, together with the seminary whose square ugliness is soon to house the overflow from the near-by Luxembourg museum. Since the quarrel between church and state in 1902-03, the building has stood bleakly empty except when it was used to shelter some of the refugees made homeless by the Seine floods a few years ago. The Abbey-in-the-Woods, removed by Louis from Picardy to Paris and made famous by the residence there in the middle of the last century of the witty Madame Recamier, has been until very recently one of the chief historic " sights " 272 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS near the celebrated left bank department store, the Bon Marche. The Church of Saint Nicholas-du-Chardonnet is interesting chiefly because of the tomb which LeBrun, the painter, designed in honor of his mother, a sepulcher opening at the smnmons of a hovering angel. Among Louis' good works must be counted the union of several hospitals into one known as the Salpetriere from its occupying the site of a saltpeter manufactory, and devoted to-day to the care of nervous diseases and insanity. The tapestry manufactory of the Gobelins family was received into royal favor by Louis and then as now did its work only for the govern- ment. Its products to-day, painstakingly made by skillful workmen who have given their lives to this task as did their fathers before them, are never sold, but are used for the decoration of public buildings and as gifts for people whom the state wishes to honor. Of comparatively small houses belonging to this century the best remaining instances are the Pavilion of Hanover, in which is the Paris office of the New York Times; the Hotel Mazarin which now contains the fine collection of books known as the National Library; the Hotel de la Vrilliere, now the Bank of France, with an echauguette (observation turret) by Mansard; the Hotel de Soubise, used with the Hotel de ^I^Sr^"^ ^ijLJx HOTEL DES INVALIDES. SAINT SULPICE. From a print of about 1820. PARIS OF THE " GRAND MONARQUE '' 273 Clisson to house the national archives; the near-by Hotel de Hollande, once the Dutch embassy; and the Hotel Beauvais from whose balcony the queen-mother, the Queen of Eng- land, Cardinal Mazarin and Turenne watched the entrance of Louis XIV and his bride, Maria Theresa of Spain. The latter part of Louis' reign showed a con- stant decline in power resulting from a decline in common sense no less than from the loss of able advisers. Taxes brought the peasants to poverty, famine killed them when disease did not. Territory was lost. As a last burst of stupidity the revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove out of the country the best class of artisans who took their intelligence and skill to the enrichment of other countries. The beginning of the eigh- teenth century found France with a selfish nobil- ity, and a disordered bourgeoisie and a peasantry in whose hearts was smoldering the fire of bitter hatred that was to burst forth into flame at the Revolution. During the winter of 1709, six years before Louis' death, the cold was so severe that five thousand people died of their sufferings in Paris alone, and the scarcity of food was so pronounced that the purveyors of the court had difficulty in securing enough for the king himself to eat. So ended in suffering and sullenness the reign of the Grand Monarque. CHAPTER XVII PARIS OF LOUIS THE " WELL-BELOVED " IT was a pitiful country to which Louis XV fell heir (in 1715) when his great-grand- father died. The peasants had been taxed to the last sou, the nobles, untaxed and selfish, scrambled greedily for court preferment and left their estates uncared for, many of the bourgeois tried to emulate the nobles in ex- tavagance, and all of them seemed to view with apathy a government in which the most intel- ligent part of the community had an extremely small share. The nouveau riche has his place in the picture. It is related of a rich salt manufacturer, for in- stance, that he was asked by a friend to whom he was showing a fine villa that he had just built, why a certain niche was left vacant. Proud of his occupation the owner replied that he intended to fill the space with a statue symbolic of his business. To which the friend retorted with a prompt suggestion, " Lot's wife." At the time of his accession Louis was but five years old, and the regency was given into the hands of the unscrupulous Duke of Orleans. 274 PARIS OF LOUIS " WELL-BELOVED " 275 Both courtiers and Parisians were delighted at the removal of the court from Versailles to the city, but the good people of the town soon realized that the added liveliness was a doubtful advantage, for the gayeties of the Palais Royal in which the regent lived were gross debaucheries. Even holy days were not held sacred, and Orleans is said to have expressed extravagant admiration for a certain church dignitary who was reputed not to have gone to bed sober for forty years. To such a pass did the extravagances fostered by the regent grow that even Louis the Well-Beloved, himself the Prince of Extravagance, was com- pelled later to pass sumptuary laws regulating dress and the expense of entertaimnents. There is in the French character to-day a cer- tain crdulity as concerns " get-rich-quick " schemes which renders the people astonishingly responsive to the efforts of swindlers like Ma- dame Humbert, notorious a few years ago. It is a quality in curious contrast to the shrewdness which makes them the readiest financiers of mod- ern Europe, yet in a way it supplements the thrift which some students look upon as a result of the bitter days of the "Old Regime," the pinch- ing period that resulted in the Revolution. It would seem that this characteristic is not a mod- ern phenomenon, for at the beginning of Louis XV's reign a Scotsman named Law proposed a 276 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS paper money scheme that was seized upon with eagerness by all classes of an impoverished society. Nor was it a phenomenon peculiar to France, for at about the same time the South Sea Bubble was exciting England to a frenzy of acquisitiveness. Whatever the psychology, all France and especially all Paris went wild over Law's propositions. He issued small notes which he redeemed in specie until he won the confidence of the public and the government endorsed his bank and permitted the use of his paper in pay- ment of taxes. The Mississippi valley was sup- posed at that time to abound in gold and silver and Law's office in the rue Quincampoix, near the Halles and the church of Saint Leu, was fairly besieged by courtiers and clergy, by tradesmen and ladies of the nobility eager to buy stock in a mining company which Law organized. West of the Halles, near the Hotel de Soissons, was a Bourse des Valeurs established entirely for the conduct of business connected with Law's schemes. It is probable that Law was self-deceived. At any rate, when the bubble burst he was as hard hit financially as any of his victims, and, in addi- tion, barely escaped with his life from their wrath, when they besieged his bank in the Place Vendome and rushed, howling with rage, to the Palais Royal where they thought he had taken PARIS OF LOUIS "WELL-BELOVED" 277 refuge. The government repudiated its debts, but private individuals could not do that and the ruin was general. A rhyme of the day says : On Monday I bought share on share; On Tuesday I was a millionaire ; On Wednesday I took a grand abode ; On Thursday in my carriage rode ; On Friday drove to the Opera-ball ; On Saturday came to the paupers' hall. Louis ruled — or misruled — for sixty years. In the space of six decades much may happen for good or ill, but this long reign was marked by no rises and by few falls, merely by a gradual, con- sistent decadence. The country engaged in the War of the Polish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years' War, and in all lost territory, men and prestige, while the effects of the hated tax collector added to the ever-growing misery. The people were too crushed to do more than look on dully while their sovereign secured in infamous ways the where- withal for his infamous pleasures. He sold the liberty of his subjects, for any one who could pay for a warrant (lettre de cachet) could put a private enemy into prison where he might lie forgotten for years. He sold the lives of his people, for he starved them to death by scores through the negotiation of a successful corner in food stuffs. Even when he disbanded the parlia- 278 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS ments (courts) the only bodies that were trying to do anything, there was small stir made about it. Louis encouraged a persecution of the Huguenots, yet. Catholic though he was, he fa- vored the expulsion of the Jesuits against whom the Jansenists, also Catholics, were contending. Friend was pitted against friend, neighbor against neighbor in these fierce quarrels based on religious differences, always the fiercest quarrels that man can know. The persecution was often petty, always bitter, yet it had its serious side when Pascal and the writers who gathered at Port Royal entered into philosophic discussion. This serious addiction of the people was a curious aspect of the men- tal and moral state of the period. While some people were entering heart and soul into these argmnents there was at the same time an ample number of readers who devoured with gusto poems, plays and novels so coarse that to- day they never would reach print. That the same people might be interested in both sorts of literature is attested by the temper of some of the highest ecclesiastics who not only connived at the king's immoral life, but furthered it. In some temperaments the extremes of the age produced an unbalanced state. This showed it- self at one time throughout Paris in the behavior PARIS OF LOUIS " WELL-BELOVED " 279 of the " Convulsionaries of Saint Medard," who hysterically proclaimed the miracles performed at the tombs of two priests buried in the ancient churchyard of Saint Medard, near the Gobelins factory. So wide-spread and so distracting was this belief that the graveyard was closed to the public. This step caused a wit to fasten upon the wall an inscription. "By order of the king, God is forbidden to perform miracles in this place." Contemporary accounts of the execution of a man who had made an attempt upon the life of the king shows a callousness to suffering that would seem impossible if one had not read re- cently of the brutalities of the Balkan war, nearly three hundred years later. The execu- tion took place as usual in the Place de Greve, and every window and balcony was filled with eager spectators, many of them elegantly dressed ladies of the court who played cards to while away the moments of waiting. The poor wretch who was to furnish amusement for this gay throng was placed on an elevated table where all might see him, and he was gashed and torn and twisted and burned and broken for an hour be- fore the breath mercifully left his mangled body. Like his great-grandfather, Louis preferred Versailles to Paris, but not for the Sun King's reason. He had no especial desire to keep his 280 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS eye on his courtiers, but kindred spirits he gathered about him and the favorites of Madame de Pompadour ruled and of Madame du Barry vulgarized the once decorous though far from im- peccable salons of Versailles. With lowered taste arcliitecture Ijecame rococo and decoration a mass of wreaths and shells and leaves and scrolls. In Paris, meanwhile, the Louvre fell into such disrepair that it was habitable only by people willing to live in haphazard fashion for the sake of a free lodging, while private stables occupied much of the ground floor and the government post horses stamped and kicked beneath Per- rault's unfinished colonnade. Disgusted at this eyesore in their once beautiful city the Parisians authorized the Provost of the Merchants to offer to repair the building at the expense of the town. Louis, however, seems to have thought that if the citizens had so much money to spend it had better be on him, and he refused the offer and set about devising new ways of capturing the hidden coin. Of building there could not be much at a time when the monarch took no pride in his own chief city and suffered no expenditures except those that he saw no way of diverting to his own yawn- ing purse. One of the few constructions of Louis' date is the Mint, built on one of the left bank quays on a part of the site once occupied ELYSEE PALACE, RESIDENCE OF PRESIDENT OF FRANCE. Iteci 'S-fLr •■*Op^- •, .. . AL J CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES (PALAIS BOURBON). PARIS OF LOUIS " WELL-BELOVED " 281 by the ancient Hotel de Nesle. It contains a museum of coins and medals as well as the work- shops for the making of coins. Another of the king's languid interests was the Military School which looms imposingly across the southeastern end of the Champ de Mars as the modern tourist sits at luncheon on the first ' stage ' of the Eiffel Tower. The Field of JNIars itself, now green with lawns and bright with flowers, was laid out as a drill ground on the very spot where a battle with the Normans took place during the siege of 885 a.d. Its great size has frequently made it useful for large gatherings of people, and no fewer than four World Exhibitions have erected their plaster cities upon its ample space. Another open place of impressive size was the present Place de la Concorde, first called the Place Louis XV. This vast square, now the center of Paris, was framed on the side of the Tuileries gardens by balustrades designed by Gabriel, the architect of the Military School, and was planned as a setting for that colossal statue of the King on which a wag pinned a placard saying : " He is here as at Versailles, Without heart and without entrails." The square stood on the western edge of the 282 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS settled part of the city, but not too far away for the appropriate erection of the handsome build- ings still standing on the north side restored to their early dignity. One of these, built as a storehouse for state effects, is now used by the Ministry of Marine. The other was a private hotel. Between the two the rue Royale runs a little way northward to the classic church of the Madeleine, whose corner- stone Louis laid on the site of a former chapel, but whose construction was long delayed. Stand- ing on its broad steps to-day the eye follows the vista of the rue Royale across the square and over the river to the Palace of Deputies, begun as the Palais Bourbon in the early part of Louis XV's reign. It was in the rue Royale that most of the deaths occurred during Louis XVI's wedding festivities, and it was through this street that the tumbrils laden with victims for the guillotine came from the rue Saint Honore. A little way from the place on the west is the Palace of the Elysee, which the government furnishes as a mansion for the President of the Republic. It has been rebuilt and restored since its first condition as a private house which Louis XV bought and gave to Madame de Pompadour. Not being of a markedly religious turn except when he was ill, it is not surprising that Louis PARIS OF LOUIS " WELL-BELOVED " 283 promoted the construction of very few churches. One of them, Saint Philippe-du-Roule, replaced a leper hospital. A few years before the Madeleine was begun, a new church of Sainte Genevieve was planned as a crown for the Mont Sainte Genevieve. Great difficulties had to be overcome in providing a firm foundation, for the elevation was found to be honeycombed with the quarries of Gallo-Roman days. It was fifty years after its beginning before the adjoining abbey chapel of Sainte Genevieve, which the new build- ing was to replace, was torn down, leaving the fine dome-crowned church — now the Pantheon — to stand uncrowded. Opposite the Pantheon to the west is the Law School, designed by the same architect, Soufflot. In public utilities Paris found herself some- what richer than before Louis' reign. The postal service attained such effective organization that it made three deliveries a day and was housed in a large and adequately equipped build- ino". It became usual to number all the houses as had been done for some two hundred years on the house-laden bridges. The names of streets were cut on stone blocks and affixed to a corner build- ing. In spite of the discomfort of getting about the large city through dirty streets carriages had been introduced but slowly into the city. As late as 284 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS the sixteenth century only the king and ladies of the court used the heavy coaches which were called " chariots." In the next century chairs car- ried by porters became fashionable among the ex- travagantly dressed and bewigged. A cab ser- vice, established midway through the hundred years won instant favor, and was greatly im- proved in Louis XV's time, though Parisians were condemned for many decades longer to traverse the town through streets unprovided with sidewalks and defiantly dirty. It is hard for the admirers of twentieth cen- tury Paris cleanliness to realize that an English traveler, writing just before the French Revolu- tion, complains bitterly of the dirt and disorder and danger of the streets and compares them most unfavoraby with London thoroughfares. Another undertaking, this time of scientific interest, was the tracing of the meridian of Paris from the Observatory of the left bank across the river to Montmartre on the right of the Seine. In the left transept of the church of Saint Sulpice is a section of the line, and a small obelisk on which a ray of sunlight falls from the south at exactly noon. At the same moment the sun's rays set off a cannon, placed where the meridian crosses the garden of the Palais Royal. That the fire service was not astonishingly competent seems to be indicated by the disasters CHURCH OF SAINTE GENEVIEVE, NOW THE PANTHEON. PARIS OF LOUIS " WELL-BELOVED " 285 of this century. Twice serious fires destroyed large parts of the Hotel Dieii, the old general hospital. It had become so crowded in the Sun King's time that six and eight patients were put into one bed. Nothing was done to relieve the situation, however, until it reached such a pass that even the careless Regent was aroused and provided money for the building of a new wing by taxing public amusements. The second con- flagration (in 1772) was not extinguished for eleven days. Many sufferers were burned in their beds, and hundeds of others, turned out into the December cold, took refuge in near-by Notre Dame. In the same year with the earlier fire at the hospital (1737) a two-day conflagration started by prisoners worked havoc with the palace of the Cite. In 1777 another destroyed the front of the palace. Another fire earlier in the century had its origin in the efforts of a poor woman to recover the body of her drowned son through the media- tion of Saint Nicholas. To that end she set afloat in the Seine a wooden bowl containing a loaf of bread and a lighted candle. The candle set fire to a barge of hay. Some one cut the boat loose and it was swept by the current under the Petit Pont which was consumed with all its burden of houses. The bridge was quickly replaced, but without any buildings on it, a fashion followed 286 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS toward the end of Louis XVI's reign when the Pont Neuf and the Pont Notre Dame were cleared. The Pont Neuf s broad expanse became at once the field for hucksters and mountebanks of all sorts; here strikers assembled near the statue of Henry IV; here, according to an old verse- maker, there was much love-making near the " Bronze Horse; " and here the enlisting officers plied their activities even up to a quarter of a century ago when army service became com- pulsory. CHAPTER XVIII PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION LOUIS XV was succeeded in 1774 by his twenty year old grandson, Louis XVI, at whose birth the Paris that later was to kill him expressed extravagant delight in countless feasts, balls and displays of fireworks. Young as he was at his accession, Louis had been married for several years. His wife, Marie Antoinette, was but fourteen when she came to Paris as a bride, and an accident which occurred during the wedding festivities seemed a mournful prophecy of the troubled days to come. At the close of a fete in the Place Louis XV a panic seized the crowd. It rushed headlong into the rue Royale in such a passion of terror that the narrow street was swiftly filled with a mass of people fighting their way over the bleeding, dying bodies of those who had reached the exit first and by chance had fallen. Again the royal family preferred Versailles to Paris. In the country the well-meaning young king tinkered with locks and was generally dull and uninteresting, while the queen made a charm- ingly elaborate pretence at living the simple life, 287 288 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS a la Watteaii. Louis did his ineffective best to straighten out the affairs of his kingdom but the deluge which Louis XV had predicted was com- ing and rapidly. The court often came to town both to give and receive entertainment, and public festivities were not infrequent, for the people had a sort of tolerant affection for the king and queen whose gentleness and helplessness were not without their appeal. When the dauphin was born, eight years after the accession, the City of Paris gave a dinner at the Hotel de Ville in honor of the event. The royal table was laid with seventy- eight covers and at it the king and his two brothers were the only men, the remaining seventy-five being the queen, the princesses and the ladies of the court. As seems frequently to have happened at these large dinners at the City Hall not everything went smoothly. This time the trouble arose from the com- mands of etiquette. The hosts bent their whole energies upon serving the king promptlj^ When he had finished his dinner the guests at the other tables had had nothing but butter and radishes, yet in spite of their hunger they were forced to rise and leave when the king rose. As the preparations for the feast are reported to have been lavishly extravagant it is to be hoped that " the left-overs " were given to the poor who PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 289 were pitiably hungry most of the time in those days. The public works of Louis' reign were not many. The unrest of the people was too evident, the supply of money too small for much to be accomplished. To the clearing of the bridges which has been mentioned above was added an effort to bring light and air into at least one crowded spot on the left bank by tearing down the ancient Petit Chatelet. A new wall pro- tected several of the outlying suburbs, and was not pulled down until 1860. At each of its gates was a pavilion, several of which are still standing, which served as an office for the collectors of the octroi, a tax levied even now upon all food brought into the city. As anything to do with taxes was obnoxious to the people this construc- tion has been described as " Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmur ant.''* which may be inadequately translated, " The wall walling Paris makes Paris wail." The over-florid architecture of Louis XVs reign showed signs of betterment under the younger Louis through the influence of the Greek. The best and, indeed almost the only re- maining examples are the church of Saint Louis d'Antin which Louis built as a chapel for a Capuchin convent, and the Odeon, a theater. 290 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS This building has a dignified f a9ade, but around the remaining three sides runs an arcade filled with open-air book shops whose widely varied stock is more picturesque than appropriately placed. Its actors are the students graduated in the second rank from the government school of acting. Those of the first grade make up the company of the Comedie Fran9aise whose play- house stands in columned ugliness to-day at- tached to the corner of the Palais Royal. The drama always has been fostered in Paris, but up to Moliere's time no especial provision was made for the presentation of the play from which the people derived so much pleasure. In early times the performance took place in the street. In the fifteenth century the clerks attached to the court held in the palace of the Cite performed farces in the great hall of the palace, using Louis IX's huge marble table as a stage. In the six- teenth century a troupe remodeled for its use a part of the Hotel of Burgundy of which a fragment is left in the Tower of John the Fear- less. In the seventeenth century a disused tennis court in the Marais housed a company of players. Moliere and his actors occupied the hall of a half- ruined residence opposite the eastern end of the Louvre until it was torn down, when they moved to the Palais Royal. Street fairs were enormously popular. They THE ODEON. iiiiinru'NffTfif THE COMEDIE FRANCAISE ABOUT 1785. PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 291 were often conducted by hospitals or religious houses. The best known are the Fair of Saint Germain and the Fair of Saint Laurent, both the left and the right banks being served by these two entertainments. There were side shows and mountebanks of all kinds, and some old verses say that " as one approaches his ears are as full as bottles with noise.'* In summing up the causes of the Revolution soon to let loose the pent-up fury of generations of repression, the economic and social reasons are easily seen. To English minds the only wonder is that the people endured so long the steady curtail- ment of opportunity and that they were so long deluded by the magnificence of royalty. The lower classes were taxed inordinately, even on necessities. The nobility (of whom there were some two hundred thousand as against England's five hundred) and the clergy were not taxed at all, and when the Minister of Finance suggested to the assembled Notables, whom Louis was forced to summon, that they should bear their share of the government support, they resented the idea as insulting. Not only were the taxes heavy, their collection was farmed out to tax- gatherers who were permitted to take in lieu of salary as much more than the original tax as they could squeeze out of their victims. And, as if this drain, long continued and ever increasing, 292 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS were not enough, Louis XV had collected ad- vance taxes. Politically, the power of the French monarch was practically absolute. The nobility and clergy almost invariably supported him, voting two to one against the Third Estate in the States General, and, as this body had not convened for nearly two hundred years before Louis XVI summoned it, it hardly could be regarded as a check to absolutism. Trial by jury had fallen into complete disuse and no man was sure of his personal liberty or of undisturbed ownership of his property, and, at the same time, he was denied freedom of belief and of speech. But indejjendence of belief and of speech was fast increasing, and its growth is an evidence of the intellectual change which is one of the causes of the Revolution, less evident but not less power- ful than those which affected the economic, social and political status of Frenchmen. Paris was the center of this intellectual and literary activ- ity. In Paris lived or sojourned the men whose advanced thinking was percolating through all classes of society — Voltaire and Montesquieu, who pleaded for liberty and a constitutional government, and Rousseau whose appeals for individual freedom of politics, religion and speech subordinated to the good of the whole, crystal- lized in the war cry " Liberty, Equality and PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 293 Fraternity " which has become the watchword of modern France. In Paris, too, were published the famous philosophical and economic articles of the Encyclopedia, often with difficulty in evad- ing the police, and often interrupted by the prison visits of its contributors, Diderot being sent to the Bastille immediately upon the appear- ance of the first volume. Skepticism permeated the upper classes, ir- religion the lower. Paris, indeed, was the very crater of the Revolution. In the scholars' attics on the left bank argument was growing loud where only whispers had been heard before; in the crowded tenements of the eastern quarter aroimd the Saint Antoine Gate, and especially amid the fallen grandeurs of the once fashionable Marais people were talking now where once they had hardly dared to think. The mob that was soon to take unspeakable license in the name of Lib- erty was watching for an opportunity to test its strength. It made its first trial amid the excitements of the election to the States General which Louis was forced to summon when the Notables failed to suggest any solution of the country's problems. It met in the spring of 1789, the first time in one hundred and seven-five years. Riots were frequent, prophetic of the struggle with the 294 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS king which began as soon as the sitting opened at Versailles. Louis closed the hall to the as- semblage and they met in the tennis court and took the famous oath by which they bound them- selves not to disband until they had prepared a written constitution. They called themselves the National Constituent Assembly, the nobility and clergy joined them at the king's request, and they voted thereafter not by classes but as individuals. Some of the Third Estate knew definitely what they wanted. A peasant declared that he was going to work for the abolition of three things — pigeons, because they ate the grain; rabbits, because they ate the sprouting corn ; and monks, because they ate the sheaves. Three weeks after the Oath of the Tennis Court, Desmoulins, a young journalist, made an inflammatory speech in the garden of the Palais Royal, declaring that the fact of the king's sur- rounding his family with Swiss soldiers was an introduction of force that made the wise regard the Bastille as a menace to the city. The facts seem to be that most of the prisoners were well cared for, so well fed that Bastille diet was a town joke, and, as a picture by Fragonard shows, might even entertain their friends. On July 14, 1789, two days after Desmoulins' speech, the Parisians poured against the fortress PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 295 a horde of citizens armed with weapons taken from the Hotel des Invahdes. They forced the first drawbridge, burned the governor's house and easily compelled his surrender, since the garrison of which the people declared themselves in terror consisted only of about eighty men who were but scantily provided with ammunition. The crowd set free the prisoners, who numbered but a half dozen or so under Louis' mild rule, seized the captain and hurried him to the Greve where the}^ struck off his head and carried it about the city on a pike — the first of such hideous sights of which the Revolution was to know an appalling mmiber. The destruction of the huge mass of masonry was begun the next day and lasted through five years. Lafayette sent one of the keys to General Washington. So thoroughly did the Bastille symbolize op- pression in the public mind of France that the anniversary of the day of its fall has been made the national holiday. One of the schemes proposed for the decora- tion of the vacant square was the erection of an enormous elephant to be made from guns taken in battle by Napoleon. A plaster model stood in the place for several years, the same animal which served as a refuge for the street urchin, Gavroche, in Victor Hugo's " Les Miserables." After 1830 the present "July Column" was 296 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS erected to the memory of the victims of the " Three Glorious Days " of the Revolution of that year. Upon hearing of the Fall of the Bastille the king made concessions to the Assembly and then went to Paris accompanied by a huge and motley crowd armed with guns and scythes. The mayor went through the ceremony of presenting him with the keys of the city in token of its loyalty, while at almost the same time La- fayette was organizing the citizens into the National Guard, who wore a cockade made up not only of red and blue, the colors of Paris, but of white, the royal hue. The nobles, awakened to the danger of a gen- eral insurrection, tried to put a stop to the riot- ing and incendiarism that was spreading over the country by offering to yield their privileges. This concession proved but a sop, for the people's hunger was now unappeasable. Louis continued to spend most of his time at Versailles to the dis- satisfaction of the Parisians. When they heard of the expressions of loyalty uttered by the king's body-guard at a banquet they voted that the court had no right to feast while Paris was suffering for bread, marched to Versailles and forced the king, the queen, and the little dauphin — the baker and his wife and the baker's boy, they called them — to go back with them to town. Marie Antoinette PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 297 had succeeded in making herself extremely un- popular, both with the nobility who objected to her independence of the laws of etiquette to which they were accustomed, and with the people, who called her the " Austrian Wolf," and who really believed her to be sinister and wicked instead of a gay and affectionate young woman, whose worst fault was thoughtlessness. If she had had before but small knowledge of the opinion in which she was held by her subjects she discovered it dur- ing this ten-mile drive when her carriage was sur- rounded by east-end roughs and disheveled wo- men from the Halles who had only been deterred from killing her as she stood beside her husband at Versailles by her display of dauntless courage, and who crowded upon her now, yelling in- decencies and shaking their fists at the king and the uncomprehending little prince and his sister. This return to Paris was called the " Joyous Entry." Arrived at Paris they went to the Tuileries and passed a sleepless night in the long-deserted palace which seems to have been despoiled even of its beds. There they lived for many months, willingly served only by a few faithful guards and daily insulted by people who came to see the tyrants and to watch the " Wolf's Cub " dig in the little fenced enclosure which he called his garden. The king's brother and his closest 298 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS friends fled from the country, leaving him to face his troubles alone. The first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was celebrated upon the Field of Mars by a great festival. Undeterred by a violent rainstorm a hundred thousand people passed before an Altar of the Fatherland erected in the middle, and after taking part in a religious service, listened to Lafayette, who was the first to swear to up- hold the Constitution, and to Louis, who de- clared : " 1, King of the French, swear to use the power which the constitutional act of the State has delegated to me, for the maintenance of the Constitution decreed hy the National As- sembly and accepted hy me." The Assembly confiscated church property and gave to the state the control of the clergy. Then it ordered the clergy to take an oath to sup- port the Constitution. Because this implied an acknowledgment that the action of the Assembly was justifiable the pope forbade the clergy to take the oath. At first the king vetoed this bill, called the " Civil Constitution of the Clergy," and then he sanctioned it. It was this vacillation that caused the distribution in Paris of the cartoon of " King Janus." The Assembly worked hard in the old riding school near the Tuileries, and formulated many political changes which did not live and many PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 299 civil improvements which were more enduring. Mirabeau used his strength for order ; but popular clubs, the Jacobins and Cordeliers, which took their names from the old religious buildings in which they met, were constantly stirring the fiercest passions of the people, and principles closely akin to anarchy were taught in the press of Danton and Desmoulins, sincere believers in revolution. Despairing of achieving peace from within the king entered into a secret arrangement with several other European rulers, by which they were to invade France and subdue his subjects for him, and in June, 1791, he tried to escape from the country with his family and to join his allies. They stole forth at night from the Tuileries and managed to leave the city, but they were recognized and sent back, making their way once more to the palace through a huge and sul- len crowd. The clubs clamored for the king's de- position and the people rioted in the Field of Mars against Lafayette and the mayor of Paris, who dispersed them at the command of the As- sembly. In the autimin the Assembly finished the preparation of the constitution and disbanded, to be succeeded at once by the Legislative Assem- bly, whose leaders, the Girondins, were anti- royalists, but not active republicans. War was 300 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS declared against Austria, but distrust and dis- content led the French army to reverses of which the revolutionary press made the most. It happened to be on the anniversary of the flight of the royal family that the Marais and the Faubourg Saint Antoine again gave up their hordes, who lashed themselves into fury as they pushed their way through the chamber where the Assembly was sitting, and then surged on to the Tuileries. Without doubt their intention was murder, but once more, as when Marie Antoinette fronted them at Versailles, they stopped abashed before a calm which they could not understand. Louis donned the scarlet lib- erty cap which they handed him, the queen allowed a similar " Phrygian bonnet " to be put upon the dauphin, and the mob stood appeased and even admiring. Yet only a few days later Lafayette, the defender of the Assembly, was forced to flee from the country. The Reign of Terror had begun. The threatened approach of the foreign enemy was the signal for a final attack upon the royal family. Early on one August morning the Nat- ional Guard and the Swiss Guards massed them- selves about the palace to withstand the assault of the crowd whose ominous roar was heard growing momentarily louder as it poured west- ward under the leadership of a brewer of the PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 301 Faubourg St. Antoine. The guards gave their life valiantly, but they were hacked to pieces in the struggle which Thorwaldsen's famous Lion commemorates at Lucerne. The victorious rab- ble set fire to the palace, which was partly de- stroyed, and then rushed before the Assembly, demanding that it dissolve in favor of a National Convention. In the old riding school the king and queen, their children and the king's sister, Madame Elizabeth, took refuge, staying crowded into a small room while the Assembly discussed the question of what should be done with them. After three days and nights of extreme discom- fort they were removed to the tower of the an- cient Temple.^ Paris was the very heart of the Terror. The rabble had learned its power and unscrupulous leaders permitted brutality and urged violence. A casual word was enough to cause anybody, man, woman or child, to be arrested as a suspect and thrown into prison. If he did not die there, forgotten, he came out only to be taken before a so-called tribunal which listened to false charges, practically allowed no denial or protest, declared its victims, in detachments, guilty of " conspiring against the Republic " and sent them straightway to the guillotine. » See Chapter VII. 302 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS This instrument was invented by a physician, Dr. Guillotin, to provide a humane method of capital punishment. Its victims would feel no pain he said ; only a refreshing coolness ! It was set up in various parts of the city. In the Place Louis XV, then called the Place de la Revolu- tion, the scaffold was erected near the statue of Liberty to which Mme. Roland addressed her famous exclamation: " O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name! " Around it gath- ered a daily crowd, some, the industriously knit- ting women described in " A Tale of Two Cit- ies," who came as to a vaudeville performance; some, fanatics, equally joyous over the downfall of hated aristocrats or of plebeian " enemies of the Republic," others, monsters who rejoiced in blood, no matter whose. Pitiful, indeed, were those who came day after day to watch the tum- brils approaching from the east through the rue Royale from the rue Saint Honore for some friend whose appearance here might solve the mystery of an unexplained disappearance. In a little over two years two thousand and eight hun- dred people lost their heads in this place; one thousand three hundred were slain in six weeks in the Square of the Throne; scores more suffered in the small square where the Sun King had held his Carrousel, and yet others in the Greve be- fore the City Hall. PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 303 Even such slight semblance of the forms of justice as preceded the ride to the guillotine was denied to hundreds of people, many of them in- nocent of any fault. Almost a thousand of such victims were massacred in the early days of September following the incarceration of the royal family. Bands of authorized assassins held pretended court in the prisons and butchered the helpless prisoners. At the Abbaye, the old prison of the monastery of Saint Germain-des- Pres, the unfortunates were killed in the square before the church. It was in this prison that Mme. Roland wrote the " Memoirs " that give us one of the most vivid contemporary pictm-es that we have of these awful days. Here, too, Charlotte Corday spent the days between her murder of Marat and her passage to the guil- lotine. If there is one more moving spot than another in the Paris of to-day it is the Carmelite Convent near the Palace of the Luxembourg. Behind the old monastic buildings, almost deserted now, lies one of those unexpected gardens which make Paris wonderful in surprises. Surrounding houses shut out the roar from the stone-paved street. In a central pool a lone duckling, surviv- ing from Easter Day, swims briskly as playful goldfish nip the webs of his busy feet. It is all as peaceful and as remote from scenes of either 304s TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS pain or joy as a chateau garden in the provinces. Yet here at the garden entrance of the building one hundred and twenty parish priests were hacked down in cold blood at the command of a coward who urged on his ruffians through a grated window. The stains are still red in a tiny room above where the swords of some of the assassins dripped blood againt the plastered wall, and down in the crypt are piled the skulls of the slaughtered, here crushed by a heavy blow, there pierced by a bayonet thrust or a pistol bullet. During this time when the mutual suspicion of the moderate Girondists on the one hand and of the radical group, Robespierre, Marat and Danton and their friends, on the other, brought about the arrest of no fewer than three hundred thousand suspects, all sorts of places were pressed into service as prisons, even buildings so unsuit- able as the College of the Four Nations (the Institute) and the Palace of the Luxembourg. In the latter was detained Josephine, who was afterwards to marry Napoleon. Five months after his capture the king was tried by the Convention, which had succeeded the Legislature and had formally declared the Re- public, and twenty-four hours after his convic- tion " Citizen Capet " was beheaded on the same charge that had brought thousands of his subjects to the scaffold, that of having " conspired against PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 305 the Republic." He died bravely, his last words silenced by an intentional ruffle of drums. The queen was removed from the Temple to the Conciergerie where she was kept in close con- finement, never without guards in her room, until she went through a form of trial which sent her to execution in the October after Louis' death. Her courage, so often tested, was superb, and her composure failed her only when a woman stand- ing on the steps of Saint Roch to watch the tumbrils pass, spat upon her. Mme. Elizabeth was guillotined a few days later. The dauphin probably died in the Temple of ill-treatment, though tales persisted of an escape to the prov- inces and even to America. The little- princess was the only member of the pathetic group to live through this time of horror. She married the duke of Angouleme. Internal dissensions grew sharper. The ex- tremists made use of the lawless Paris rabble against the more moderate element and a number of prominent Girondists were seized and plunged into the Conciergerie only to leave it to march singing to the guillotine. Marat's death by the knife of Charlotte Corday could not stay the turmoil. There were grades of radicalism even among the extremists. The most advanced struck at the very basis of social agreement. Religion they de- 306 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS clared out of date and substituted the worship of Reason. The Goddess of Reason, a dancer, they installed with her satellites in the most sacred part of Notre Dame, Saint Eustache became the Temple of Agriculture, Saint Gervais the Temple of Youth, Saint Etienne-du-Mont the Temple of Filial Piety, Saint Sulpice the Temple of Victory. Other sacred buildings were put to more practical uses — the Convent of the Cordeliers became a medical school, the Val-de- Grace a military hospital. Saint Severin a store- house for powder and saltpeter, Saint Jidien, a storehouse for forage, the Sainte Chapelle a storehouse for flour. The observation of Sunday as a day of rest was abolished, and men and animals died of fatigue. Many churches were closed, for " We want no other worship than Liberty, Equality and Fraternity," cried the radicals. Robespierre of a sudden took a stand against such a display of irreligion, probably that he might have yet another accusation to bring against his enemies. To replace the Cult of Reason he established with grotesque rites a Worship of the Divine Being, acting himself as the high priest. The ceremony took place in the Tuileries Garden where there is still standing the stone semicircle built for the occasion. Robespierre was adorned with a blue velvet coat. PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 307 a white waistcoat, yellow breeches and top boots and he carried a symbolic bouquet of flowers and ears of wheat. After he had made a speech there were games and the burning of effigies of Atheism, Selfishness and Vice. Destruction and change reigned. Churches were mutilated if the statue of some ancient saint wore a crown ; the relics of Sainte Genevieve were burned on the Greve; the Academies were sup- pressed; no street might be named after a saint; no aristocrat might keep the de of his name. The very calendar was altered, the new year beginning on September 22, 1792, which was the first day of the Year I of the Republic. The division of the year into twelve months was unaltered, but instead of weeks each month was divided into three decades of ten days each. This necessitated the addition at the end of the twelfth month of five extra days so that the new calendar might agree with that used by other peoples. These days were called by the absurd name, Sansculottides. The months were given names made appropriate by the season or the customary weather. They were: October, Vendemiaire, " Vintage month " November, Brumaire, " Fog month " December, Frimaire, " Hoar-frost month '* January, Nivose, " Snow month " 308 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS February, Pluviose, " Rain month " March, Ventose, " Wind month " April, Germinal, " Sprout month " May, Floreal, " Flower month " June, Prairial, " Meadow month " July, Messidor, " Harvest month " August, Thermidor, " Heat month " September, Fructidor, " Fruit month." On the other hand some excellent constructive work was accomplished by the foundation of several schools and libraries, of several museums, among them the Louvre, and of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, established in the ancient priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs. Thanks to the good sense of a private individual many architectural relics of priceless value were saved from destruction and converted into a museum in what is now the Palais des Beaux Arts. After the Revolution most of them were restored whence they had come. It has been computed that the Revolution cost France 1,002,351 lives. To make up these figures Robespierre was now killing two hundred people a week. At last, when he tried to establish his own position with some show of legality the end of the Terror was in sight. For the moment, however, it seemed as if there were only increased horror, for the Parisians took possession of PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 309 Robespierre and fought fiercely in his defence against the supporters of the Convention. It was the Greve, the theater of many wild scenes, which furnished the battleground. Robespierre and the mob were defeated and when Robespierre went to the guillotine, with his face, which has been de- scribed as looking like a " cat that had lapped vinegar," bound up because of a wound, then the Terror died with him. Thousands of suspects were released at once from prison, and the city, except for the vicious element whose worst spirit he incarnated, breathed freely once again. So strong was the reaction that the royalists hoped for a return of power, and even marched against the Tuileries where the Convention was sitting. They were hotly received, however, by the troops of the Convention, one of whose officers, Bonaparte, killed royalist pretenses now only to revive imperial aspirations later on. CHAPTER XIX PARIS OF NAPOLEON NAPOLEON was a very young and un- sophisticated Corsican when, in October, 179.5, he commanded the troops that pro- tected the Convention, in session in the Tuileries, against the Paris " sections " and the National Guard which had deserted to the royalists. He was still young, but a man rotten with ambition when, after Waterloo, he fled to Paris, and, in the Palace of the Elysee, signed his abdication of the throne of his adopted country. In the twenty years intervening he had raised himself to the highest position in the army, and he had won the confidence of an unsettled people so that they turned to him for governmental guidance, and made him consul for ten years, then consul for life and then emperor. In the two decades he had done great harm, for, abroad, he had embroiled in war every country of Europe, and at home he had exhausted France of her young men and had left the country poorer in territory than when he was first made consul. Nevertheless, by the inevitable though sometimes inscrutable law of balance, 310 PARIS OF NAPOLEON 311 the evil he had wrought was not without its com- pensating good. The countries of Europe learned as never before the meaning of the feel- ing of nationality and of the value of coopera- tion, while France — which, with her depend- encies. Napoleon, at the height of his career, had spread over three-fifths of the map of western Europe — had gained self-confidence and stability and had crystallized the passionate chaos of the Revolutionary belief in the rights of man. Aside from his military and political genius Napoleon's character underwent a striking de- velopment as his horizon enlarged. He belonged to a good but unimportant family which dwelt in a small town. His early manner of living was of the simplest, yet he grew to a love of splendor and to a knowledge of its usefulness in impressing the populace and in buying their approbation. Paris is connected with Napoleon throughout his whole career. He first appears when but a lad, brought to the Military School with several other boys by a priest. He lived in modest lodg- ings, at one time near the markets, and at another near the Place des Victoires. In 1795 the Convention drew up a new con- stitution by which the government was vested in a Directory of five members. Even in its early days Napoleon wi-ote from Paris to his brother of the change following upon the turbulent, sordid period of the Revolution. " Luxury, 312 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS pleasure and art are reviving here surprisingly," he said. " Carriages and men of fashion are aU active once more, and the prolonged eclipse of their gay career seems now like a bad dream." In the midst of this agreeable change to which even his natural taciturnity adapted itself he met and married Josephine, widow of the Marquis de Beauhamais who had been guillotined under the Terror. They both registered their ages in- correctly. Napoleon adding and Josephine sub- tracting so that the discrepancy between them, she being older, might appear less. This marriage introduced Napoleon to a class of people into whose circle he would not otherwise have pene- trated on equal terms, and he learned from them many social lessons which he put to good use later. Yet Talma, the actor, when accused of having taught Napoleon how to walk and how to dress the part of emperor, denied that he could have given instruction to one whose imagination was all-sufficient to make him imperial in speech and bearing. No descendant of a royal line ever wore more superb robes than Napoleon the emperor on state occasions, and the elegance of the throne on which he sat was not less than that of his predecessors. Bonaparte had risen slowly in the army be- cause of his open criticism of his superiors, but by the time of his marriage he had become a gen- eral, and three days after his wedding he was PARIS OF NAPOLEON 313 despatched to Italy to meet the allied Italians and Aiistrians. Less than two years later the war was ended by the Peace of Campo Formio. In the two months preceding its negotiation Bonaparte had won eighteen battles, and had collected enough indemnity to pay the expenses of his own army, to send a considerable sum to the French army on the Rhine and a still greater amount to the government at home. When it came to making gifts to Paris he had the splendid beneficence of the successful robber. Indemnities were paid in pictures as well as in money, bronzes and marbles filled his treasure trains, and the Louvre was enriched at Italy's expense. Of the wealth of rare books, of ancient illuminated manuscripts, of priceless paintings and statuary pillaged from Italy's libraries, monasteries, churches and galleries, even from the Vatican itself, no count has ever been made. With such treasures as Domenichino's " Communion of Saint Jerome " and Raphael's *' Transfiguration " under its roof and with booty arriving from the northern armies as well as the southern, it is small wonder that the Louvre be- came the richest storehouse in the world. After Napoleon's fall many of the works of art were returned whence they had come, but enough were left to permit the great palace to hold its reputa- tion. In the turmoil of the Revolution it had been 314. TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS impossible for any one person to please every- body. Napoleon was distrusted by a large body of the Parisians for the part that he had played in the support of the Convention in October, 1795, and these people Bonaparte set himself to conciliate. The Directory, also, was jealous of him. It meant that the victorious general must tread gently and not seem to have his head turned by the honors paid to his successes. There were festivals at the Louvre where his trophies looked down upon the brilliant scene, and at the Luxem- bourg, superbly decorated, upon the occasion of his formal presentation to the Directory of the treaty of Campo Formio. There were gala per- formances at the theaters at which the audience rose delightedly at Napoleon if he happened to be present, and the Institute elected him a life member. This honor gave him the excuse of wearing a civilian's coat, and, although when in Italy he had dined in public like an ancient king, here he lived quietly on the street whose name was changed to " Victory Street," by way of compli- ment, and showed himself but little in public, the more to pique the curiosity of the crowd which acclaimed Josephine as " Our Lady of Victories." If he had had any hope of being made a mem- ber of the government at this time, he soon saw that he was not yet popular enough to carry a PARIS OF NAPOLEON 315 sudden change, and that, indeed, it behooved him, as he himself said, to " keep his glory warm." To that end he set about arousing public sentiment against England. He concluded, however, that an invasion was not expedient at that time, and set sail for Egypt, taking with him the flower of the French army not only for their usefulness to himself, but that their lack might embaiTass the government if need for them should arise in his absence. A curious bit of testimony to the non-religious temper of the time is the bit of information that though Bonaparte included in his traveling library the Bible, the Koran and the Vedas, they were catalogued under the head of " Politics." In the next year and a half Napoleon met with both successes and reverses. He learned that, as he had foreseen, the Directory was involved in a war with Italy which threatened its finan- cial credit and its stability, while at home its ty- rannical rule was adding daily to its enemies. Bonaparte saw his chance and determined to leave Egypt, to put himself at the head of the Italian armies and then to go to Paris, fresh from the victories which he was sure to win, and to present himself to the people as their liberator. Leaving his army and setting sail with a few friends he touched at Corsica where he learned that France was even riper for his coming than 316 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS he had supposed, and accordingly abandoned the Italian plan and went directly home. So hope- fully did the people look to him for relief from their troubles that his whole j ourney from Lyons to Paris was one long ovation, while his reception by the Parisians was of an enthusiasm which be- trayed much of their feeling toward the govern- ment and promised much to the man who would bring about a change. Napoleon was only too glad to accommodate them. He tested the opinion of the chiefs of the Directory and skillfully put each man into a posi- tion where he felt forced to support the gen- eral. Josephine played her part in the political intrigue; Lucien Bonaparte, who had been elected President of the Five Hundred by way of compliment to his brother, played his. Ac- cording to pre-arrangement the Council of the Ancients sitting in the Tuileries decreed that both houses should adjourn at once to Saint Cloud that they might be undisturbed by the unrest of Paris, and that Bonaparte be ap- pointed to the command of the Guard of the Directory, of the National Guard, and of the garrison of Paris, that he might secure the safety of the Legislature. Napoleon, who was waiting for the order at his house (not far north of the present Opera) rode to the Tuileries and accepted his commis- PARIS OF NAPOLEON 317 sion. The next day, at Saint Cloud, he utilized his popularity with the soldiers to force the dis- solution of the Directory. The result was gained by trickery but it was nevertheless satisfactory to the people who went quietly about their affairs in Paris while the excitement was on at Saint Cloud and expressed themselves afterwards as amply pleased with the coup dfetat. A new constitution was adopted. The government was vested in three consuls, Napoleon, on December 15, 1799, being made First Consul for ten years. All three consuls were given apartments in the Tuileries but one of the others had the foresight never to occupy a building from which he might be ejected by the one who said to his secretary when he entered it, " Well, Bourienne, here we are at the Tuileries. Now we must stay here." Stay there he did, and the palace saw a more brilliant court than ever it had sheltered under royalty. Josephine was a woman of taste and tact, and the building which Marie Antoinette found bare even of necessary furnishings at the end of her enforced journey from Versailles, the wife of the First Consul arrayed in elegance and used as a social-political battle field in which she was as competent as was her husband in the open. " I win battles," Napoleon said, " but Josephine wins hearts." Dress became elegant once more and not only women but men were as richly 318 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS attired as if the Revolution with its plain democratic apparel had not intervened. Once more men wore knee breeches and silk stockings, and it was only the aristocrats whose property had been confiscated who advertised their poverty by wearing trousers, " citizen fashion." " Citizen," as a title, fell into disuse, and once again " Monsieur " and " Madame " were used as terms of address. At first the consuls were ad- dressed as " Citoyen premier consul," " Citoyen second consul," and " Citoyen troisieme con- sul." The clumsiness of these titles induced M. de Talleyrand to propose as abbreviations " Hie, Haec Hoc:' " These would perfectly fit the three consuls," he added; ''Hie for the mascu- line, Bonaparte; haec for the feminine, Cam- baceres, who was a lady's man, and hoc, the neutral Lebrun, who was a figurehead." Napoleon's acquaintance with other capitals spurred him to emulate their beauties and his knowledge of engineering helped him to bring them into being in his own. He opened no fewer than sixty new streets, often combining in the result civic elegance with the better sanitation whose desirability he had learned from his care of the health of his armies. He swept away masses of old houses on the Cite, he tore down the noisome prisons of the Chatelet and the tower of the Temple and laid out squares on their sites. PARIS OF NAPOLEON 319 he built sidewalks, condemned sewage to sewers instead of allowing it to flow in streams down the center of the streets, introduced gas for lighting, and completed the numbering of houses, an undertaking which had been hanging on for seventy-five years. He added to the convenience of the Parisians by building new bridges, two commemorating the battles of Austerlitz and Jena, and one, the only foot-bridge across the river, called the " Arts " because it leads to the School of Fine Arts and the Institute which houses the Academy of Fine Arts. He made living easier by opening abattoirs and increasing the number of markets. He helped business enterprises by constructing quays along the Seine and by establishing the Halle aux Vins where wine may be stored in bond until required by the merchants. This market also relieved such congestion as had tiu'ned the old Roman Thermes into a store- house for wine casks. New cemeteries on the out- skirts, one of them the famous Pere Lachaise, the names upon whose tombs read like a roster of the nineteenth century's great, lessened the crowding of the graveyards and the resulting danger in the thickly settled parts of the city. ^The First Consul's methods of reducing to order the disorder of France grew more and more stifling, his basic principle more and more that of 320 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS centralization. Independence of thought as it found expression in pohtics, he silenced as he silenced the newspapers and censored all literary- output. He set in action the modern machinery of the University of France, and he supervised the planning of the entire elementary school system, so centralized, that it is possible to know in Paris to-day, as he did, " What every child of France is doing at this moment." Unhampered trade and commerce, improved methods of transportation, a definite financial system headed by the Bank of France, a uniform code of laws — all these contributions to stability were entered into in detail by the marvelous visualizing mind whose vision could pierce the walls of the Tuileries and foresee that battle would be waged at the spot called Marengo on the map lying on the table. Early in 1800 war was renewed in Italy and Napoleon in person superintended the perilous crossing of the Alps. Yet although the news of the victory at Marengo was celebrated in Paris with cheers and bonfires, the successes of the French armies in Italy and in Germany did not secm-e full popularity to the First Consul in Paris, for on Christmas Eve, 1800, an attempt was made upon his life as he was driving through a narrow street near the Tuileries. The bomb which was meant to kill him fell too far behind PARIS OF NAPOLEON 321 his carriage, however, and the only result of the plot was that he was provided with an excuse for ridding himself by exile and execution of some two hundred men whom he looked upon as his enemies. In 1802 the Peace of Amiens put a temporary stop to the war, and Napoleon looked to France to reward him for winning glory and territory for the French flag. Already he was impatient of the ten-year limitation of his power, and it was his own suggestion that the people should be asked, " Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be made Consul for life?" This referendum resulted overwhelmingly in his favor. He was appointed Consul for life with the right not only to choose his successor but to nominate his colleagues. Then he encouraged French manufactures, he regulated taxes, he established art galleries in Paris and the departments, incidentally banishing the artists' studios whose establishment had been allowed in the Louvre and in the side chapels of the church of the Sorbonne. He offered exemp- tion from military service to students and other people to whom it would be a hardship, such as the only sons of widows, he assisted scientific men, among them our own Robert Fulton who, in 1803, built a steamboat which sank in the Seine. The nobility, whom Napoleon encouraged to re- turn from exile, were allowed to use their titles, 322 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS thereby establishing a precedent for the time when he himself would be creating dukes. For the moment he declared an aristocracy of merit by founding the Legion of Honor to which men are eligible by distinguished service to France in any field. The nation felt a soundness and a comfort that it had not known for many a long year. Even the outside nations that had been at war with France thought it safe to visit it again and Paris was full of travelers who admired the new rue de Rivoli whose arcades run parallel with the Tuileries gardens. They found, too, that the old names of before the Revolution were being adopted once more — the Place de la Revolution became again the Place Louis XV — and the old etiquettes and elegances of roj^alty resumed. Josephine's aristocratic connections helped to re- late the old nobility with the new court and its " new " members whose fortunes had risen with their leader's. Much of the glitter of the Tuileries came from the great number of soldiers always in evidence, for Napoleon's suspicious nature caused him to have a large military escort wherever he went. His professional zeal prompted the careful review of the troops which he made every Sunday, and which was one of the " sights " for the tourists of the day who looked PARIS OF NArOLEON 323 with an approach to awe upon the exact lines of grenadiers drilled to an astonishing accuracy. As in the days of Francis I and Louis XIV the classical in art and language touched the pinnacle of popularity. With the government in the hands of " Consids " it was appropriate that the legislative body should be called the " Tribunate." The Tribunate held its sessions in the Palais Royal which had been called Equality Palace during the Revolution and was now christened Palace of the Tribunate. It was through the Tribunate that Napoleon manipulated the offer of the title of Emperor which was made to him in 1804. It came as the crown of his ambition because it was the recogni- tion of both his military skill and his political and administrative ability. Pie expressed his feeling when he refused the suggestion for an imperial seal of " a lion resting " and proposed instead " an eagle soaring." Success is a heady draught. At the beginning of his career Bonaparte used to compliment his generals by saying, " You have fought splendidly." After a time he said, '' We have fought splendidly." Still later his comment was, " You must allow that I have won a splendid battle." With the pope Napoleon had made an ar- rangement, the Concordat, by which he restored 324 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS the Roman Catholic as the national church of France. The papal power was not accepted as in other countries, but the treaty gave him a hold over the pope so that when the new emperor, to conciliate the royalists who were all Romanists, summoned him to assist at his coronation, Pius VII felt himself constrained to obey. He was lodged in the Pavilion of Flora, the western tip of Henry IV's south wing of the Louvre, over- looking the Seine. Napoleon and Josephine had been married only with the civil ceremony, as was the custom during the Revolution. On the day before the coronation Cardinal Fesch, Napoleon's uncle, married them with the religious ceremony in the chapel of the Tuileries. The celebration of the Concordat had been conducted magnificently in Notre Dame, but the coronation on December 2, 1804, was the most splendid of the many splendid scenes upon which the Gothic dignity of the cathedral had looked down. In preparation, many small buildings round about were pulled down and many streets suppressed or widened. Decorated, with superb tapestries, resounding* with the solemn voices of the choir, the ancient church held a scene brilliant with the uniforms of generals and the rich costumes of officers of state and of representatives from all France, aflutter with plumes and glittering with the PARIS OF NAPOLEON 325 beauty and the jewels of the fairest women of the court. It was a scene unique in history, for never before had a man of the people commanded so superb a train every one of whom was alert with a personal interest in a ceremony which meant his own elevation as well as that of the aspirant to the power of that Charlemagne whose sword and insignia he had caused to be brought for the occasion. The pope and his attendants advanced in dignified procession, acclaimed by the solemn hail of the intoning clergy. Before the high altar the Holy Father performed the service of consecration, anointing for his office the man who had been chosen to it by the will of the people. Then, as he was about to replace the gold laurel wreath of the victor with a replica of Charlemagne's crown, Napoleon characteris- tically seized it and placed it on his own head. With his own hands, too, he crowned Jose- phine. She was dressed like her husband in flow- ing robes of purple velvet heavily sown with the golden bee which Napoleon had copied from those found in the tomb of Childeric, father of Clovis, and which he had adopted as the imperial emblem because he wanted one older than the royalist fleur-de-lis. Followed by ladies of the court, her mantle borne by her sisters-in-law, who had been made princesses, Josephine knelt, weeping, before Napoleon, who placed her crown 326 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS lightly on his own head and then laid it upon that of his empress. David's famous picture hanging in the Louvre has saved this moment for posterity. On the night before the coronation the city was plastered by royalist wits with j)lacards which read: " Final performance of the French Revolution. For the benefit of a poor Corsican family." A fortnight later the emperor and empress were entertained by the city fathers at a banquet. The Hotel de Ville had been gorgeously done over for the coronation, the throne room being himg with red velvet sown with the imperial bee. On the return of the distinguished guests to the Tuileries the streets were illuminated, and on the Cite a display of fireworks lighted up the ancient buildings. The " poor Corsican family " did indeed profit by the successes of its prosperous member. After the coronation the imperial court far ex- ceeded in elegance the court of the Consulate. Many of the ancient offices — Grand Almoner, Grand Marshal, Grand Chamberlain — were re- vived from the days of the Bourbons; many of them, indeed, were held by members of the old nobility; and it was one of Louis XVI's former ambassadors to Russia who held the post of Master of Ceremonies, instructing, rehearsing PARIS OF NAPOLEON 327 and laying down the laws of etiquette for public functions according to the customs of the old regime. Soon after the coronation Paris was again deserted of its foreign tourists for once again war was imminent. Napoleon was so sure of the suc- cess of his proposed invasion of England that he supplied himself with gold medals inscribed " Struck at London in 1804." Nelson's victory at Trafalgar put an end to the usefulness of these medals, and the great fighter turned his at- tention to other foes than the English. Six weeks later he defeated the combined forces of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz and sent to Paris one thousand two hundred captured can- non which were melted down to make the colmiin which stands to-day in the Place Vendome. Events of the campaign are pictured in relief on the bronze plates which wind in a spiral around the Vendome column. On the top stood a statue of Napoleon dressed in a toga according to the classic fashion of the moment. At the Restora- tion in 1814 this statue was taken down and its metal used for the making of a new statue of Henry IV on the Pont Neuf, the former statue having been destroyed during the Revolution. For seventeen years the white flag of the Bourbons floated from the Vendome column, and then Louis Philippe substituted a statue of 328 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Napoleon in campaign uniform. For thirty-two years this figm^e looked down the rue Castiglione to the Tuileries gardens, and then Napoleon III replaced it by a Napoleon once more in classic dress. He did not stand long, however, for in the troubles of 1871 the Communards pulled down the whole column. Four years later it was reerected and is now topped by Napoleon in his imperial robes. The Place Vendome in which the column stands, and the arcaded rue Castiglione which leads into it from the similarly arcaded rue de Rivoli, are, like the Place des Victoires, guarded against change by a municipal law. In the case of the squares, each laid out as a unit, it is easily seen that any change in the fa9ades would do serious injury to the harmony of the whole. The arcades of the rue Castiglione have their orna- mental value in furnishing an approach to the Place Vendome. To a dispassionate eye, how- ever, the chimney-pots and skylights of the rue de Rivoli so overbalance by their ugliness the symmetry of the arcades below that the im- pertinent traveler feels moved to ask for an amendment to the law as far as this street is concerned. The same ugly roofs mar the other- wise beautiful addition which Napoleon made to the L(Ou\Te. In 1806 Napoleon reconstructed the German PARIS OF NAPOLEON 329 Empire and secured the dependence of Naples and the Netherlands upon himself by placing his brothers on their thrones, and of other sections of Italy by granting their government to nine- teen dukes of his own creation. Then followed the battles of Jena, Eylau, and Friedland which humbled Prussia, and the festivals which wel- comed the conqueror to Paris surpassed in bril- liancy any that had gone before. Two of the triumphal arches which beautify Paris were raised to commemorate these victories. The Triumphal Arch of the Carrousel, a reduced copy of the arch of Septimius Severus in Rome, was built as an entrance to the Tuileries from the small square of the Carrousel. It must be re- membered that in the early nineteenth century the whole of the north wing of the Louvre was non- existent, its site being occupied by a tangle of small streets and mean houses, whose destruction was merely entered upon when Napoleon I began to build the section of the palace running east from the rue de Rivoli end of the Tuileries to- ward the ancient quadrangle of the Louvre. Upon the top of the arch was placed the bronze Quadriga from Saint Mark's in Venice which Bonaparte sent home after his first Italian cam- paign. After Napoleon's fall the horses were sent back to Italy and replaced on the arch by a modern quadriga. 330 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS The Arc de Triomphe de I'Etoile, a mammoth construction begmi by Napoleon on the crest of a slope approached by twelve broad avenues, is adorned with historical groups and bas-reliefs which repay a close examination, but the impres- siveness of the monument rests in its dominating position which makes it one of the focal points in a panoramic view of the city. It is a majestic finish to the vista of the Champs Elysees seen from the Place de la Concorde. Although many different forms of decoration have been suggested for the top of the arch, and some have even been tried by models, none has been found satisfactory, and the great mass remains incomplete. Though France had returned fom its Rev- olutionary wanderings and once again had an established religion, and though the Emperor went to mass as regularly as his army duties permitted, there was practically no building of new churches by Napoleon. It was a sufficient task to repair the mutilations of the Revolution. The church of Sainte Genevieve — the Pantheon — was consecrated in the early years of the Con- sulate. In 1806 the construction of the Made- leine, which had been begun some sixty years be- fore, was renewed, not, however, as a church, but as a Temple of Glory. Before it was finished the Restoration had come and had turned it into a church again. TRIUMPHAL ARCH OF THE CARROUSEL. TRIUMPHAL ARCH OF THE STAR. PARIS OF NAPOLEON 331 The Madeleine shows the classic influence, as does the Bourse, whose heavy columns, while decorative, do not seem to be especially appro- priate for an Exchange. Victor Hugo scorn- fully says that so far as any apparent adaptation to its purpose is to be seen the Bourse might be a king's palace, a House of Commons, a city hall, a college, a riding school, an academy, a store- house, a court house, a museum, barracks, a tomb, a temple or a theater. And it might ! The Bourse makes itself known at some dis- tance by the noise which rises from its coulisses or " wings " — our " curb " — where a constant fury of chatter is going on. The pillared facade on the Seine side of the present Palace of Deputies was designed to harmonize with the fa9ade of the Madeleine at the northern end of the rue Royale. This front, con- spicuous from the Place de la Concorde, is not the real front of the Palais Bourbon whose main entrance is on the rue de I'Universite. While anything in Europe remained apart from his control Napoleon was not happy, so after the Peace of Tilsit he turned his attention to the south once more. Portugal yielded to him through sheer terror. He compelled the abdica- tion of the king of Spain, but here England inter- fered, and the Peninsular War brought him its 332 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS reverses. Renewed war with Austria, however, added the battle of Wagram to the list of the great fighter's victories. He was at the summit of his power and his very successes made him increasingly conscious that he had no son to in- herit the fruits of his life work. He realized fully that Josephine's tact and diplomacy had won him many a bloodless victory, and he had an almost superstitious belief that she brought him luck. However, ambition conquered affection. Eugene Beauharnais, Josephine's son, was compelled to approve before the Senate the divorce which the pope would not confirm but which the clergy of Paris were forced to grant. Josephine, though stricken with grief, bore herself bravely before the court during her last evening at the Tuileries where the divorce was pronounced. She with- drew to Malmaison, some six miles out of the city, where she died in 1814, Napoleon's name the last word on her lips. Failing to arrange a Russian match Napoleon married Marie Louise of Austria, first by proxy in Vienna, then by a civil ceremony after the bride reached France, and lastly by the religious ceremony in the great hall of the Louvre. Car- dinal Fesch gave the benediction, for the new marriage was not approved at Rome. Indeed, thirteen of the cardinals refused to be present at the ceremony and were thereafter called the PARIS OF NAPOLEON 333 " black cardinals " because they were forbidden by the emperor to wear their red robes. Marie Louise came to Paris a frightened girl, for Napoleon had no reputation for gentleness, but she seems to have found him endurable. It is even related that at one time when he caught her experimenting with the making of an omelette he gave yet one more instance of his omniscience by playfully teaching her how to prepare it. That he dropped it on the floor would seem to prove that Jove occasionally nods. In the following March enthusiastic crowds about the Tuileries listened anxiously for the cannon which should announce by twenty-one re- ports the birth of a daughter to the empress, by one hundred and one the coming of a son. Their joy rose to frenzy when the twenty-second boom announced an heir who received the title of the King of Rome, and for days the city was given over to rejoicing. Napoleon himself told the news to Josephine in a letter dated Paris, March 22, 1811 My dear, I have your letter. I thank you for it. My son is fat, and in excellent health. I trust he may continue to improve. He has my chest, my mouth and my eyes. I hope he will fulfill his destiny. Josephine, who was staying at Evreux, com- 334 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS manded a festival to be held in the town, and when she returned to Malmaison Napoleon secretly had the baby sent to the country for her to see. Yet it soon seemed as if the loss of Josephine had, indeed, deprived Napoleon of his good fortune. He quarreled with the pope and even kept him a prisoner in the palace of Fontainebleau. This quarrel alienated Catholic Frenchmen, and they included practically all those with Bourbon leanings. To pimish Russia for not agreeing to his plan for humiliating Eng- land by cutting off its trade with the continent he entered the country in the invasion which destroyed his army by a death more bitter than that encountered in battle. During his fearful retreat from Moscow two adventurers almost succeeded in bringing about a coup d'etat in Paris by reading to a body of the soldiers a proclamation purporting to be from the Senate, and by capturing the Prefect of Police and the City Hall. The news reached Napoleon and when he realized that so much had been ac- complished without any outcry being made for a continuance of the Napoleonic line, he left the army and went post haste to the city, where he found hostile placards constantly being posted. His presence quieted the ominous disturbance, and he drove impressively with the empress to the PARIS OF NAPOLEON 335 Senate in a glassed carriage drawn by cream- colored horses, and there and elsewhere spread falsely reassuring reports minimizing the losses in Russia. Very soon, however, the truth carried mourning to almost every home in France, and with it hatred of the man who had brought it to pass. In January, 1813, the Emperor left once more for the front after appointing Marie Louise as regent and confiding her and the King of Rome to the care of the National Guard assembled be- fore the Tuileries. There is no doubt that the genius that had sent Napoleon to victory after victory with almost clairvoyant intelligence was now failing. He lacked decision and his generals were not trained to help him. He made blunder after blunder coldly disheartening to sorrowful France. " Have the people of Paris gone crazy? " he cried angrily when he heard that public prayers were being offered for the success of the campaign. Prayers were needed. The " army of boys," all that Napoleon could raise after the disastrous retreat from Moscow, was defeated at Leipsic late in 1813, and the allies — England, Russia, Prussia, Sweden and Austria — pressed upon Paris both from the north and the south. The city was no longer guarded by defensible walls and her reliance could be only in her garrison of 336 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS about twenty-five thousand men. Marie Louise, the regent, fled from the city on March 29, 1814, and on the next day Napoleon left Fontainebleau at the head of a few cavalry to lend his aid, but found that the city already had yielded. On the thirty-first the King of Prussia and the Czar entered Paris on the north by the faubourg Saint Martin, finding a welcome from the white-cockaded royalists. Within three weeks Napoleon had abdicated and had started for his modest throne on the island of Elba, and a fortnight later Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI, made his formal entry. The people, trained to Napoleon's magnificence, looked coldly on the fat, plainly dressed elderly man who di'ove to the Tuileries in a carriage be- longing to his predecessor, whose arms had been badly erased and imperfectly covered by those of the Bourbons. Paris was glad to be rid of the man it had come to look upon as a vampire draining the strength of France to feed his personal ambition, yet the city by no means enjoyed the presence of the allies. They insisted on the return to Italy of many of the art treasures on which the Parisians had come to look with the pride of possession. There were constant quarrels of citizens with the invading officers and the townsfolk were nettled at the frank curiosity with which they and their NAPOLEONS TOMB. PARIS OF NAPOLEON 337 city were scrutinized by the many travelers of all nations who poured in immediately. It was then that a rope was laid about the neck of Napoleon on the Vendome column and he was lowered to the ground to be replaced by the Bourbon flag. Less than a year afterwards Paris was aquiver over the report that the chained lion had broken loose and was advancing to the city in the march which he declared at Saint Helena was the hap- piest period of his life. The fickle peasants who had pursued him out of the country so that he had had to disguise himself as a white-cockaded post- boy to escape them, now received him joyfully. At his approach Louis fled from the Tuileries, but Napoleon did not occupy the palace. It was at the palace of the Elysee that he worked out his plans against the allies, and it was there that he signed his abdication when the defeat at Waterloo put an end to the Hundred Days. Three days later he went to Malmaison, and he never saw Paris again. He died in 1821 at Saint Helena, In December, 1840, Louis Philippe caused his remains to be brought to Paris where they were borne beneath the completed Arch of the Star and down the Champs Elysees, and were laid under the Dome of the Invalides that the request of his will might be granted: " I desire that my ashes repose on the banks of the Seine among the French people whom I have so greatly loved." CHAPTER XX PARIS OF THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS IT was the 25th of June, 1815, when Napoleon left Paris for the last time. On July 7 the allies entered the city after some unimportant skirmishing on the outskirts, and on the next day Louis XVIII again took up his residence in the Tuileries. The Second Restoration of the Bour- bons had come to pass. Louis found himself received with even less enthusiasm than on his first appearance, and his people loved him less and less during the nine years of his reign. He confirmed his earlier charter establishing personal and religious free- dom and equality before the law and the freedom of the press. He fell more and more, however, under the influence of the conservative element, with the result that he permitted a savage per- secution of the Bonapartists, let education come under sectarian control, and imposed on the laboring classes a narrow ecclesiasticism which aroused their ire. When he was forced by Russia, Austria and Prussia to fight in support of the tyrannical king of Spain, Ferdinand VII, against a democratic movement, he placed the Bourbons 338 THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS 339 of the Restoration on record as sympathetic with autocracy. Paris was in no peaceful state. There were many of Napoleon's old soldiers in town who were constantly quarreling with the monarchists in restaurants and theaters. An assassin killed the Duke of Berry, the son of Louis' brother who succeeded him as Charles X. The execution for political conspiracy of four young men known as the " four sergeants of La Rochelle " made a great stir among the lower classes of the city, al- ways an inflammable element. The town was forced, also, to pay her share of the war indemnity and of the support of the garrisons with which the allies saddled the frontier and the chief cities. One hundred twenty-five thousand dollars a day was the simi which Paris expended in hospitality toward her very unwelcome guests. Needless to say there was not much ready money for improving the city. One reverent monument, the Chapelle Ex- piatoire, the king did begin to the memory of his brother. The bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been buried in the graveyard be- hind the Madeleine. Their remains were removed to Saint Denis in 1815, but the small domed chapel, hemmed in to-day by busy Paris streets, rises in remembrance of them and sanctifies the 340 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS one great grave before it in which lie the bodies of two thousand unrecorded victims of the Revoki- tion, while the barrier on right and left is formed by the tombs of the seven hundred Swiss guards slain in defense of their sovereigns when the mob stormed the Tuileries on the tenth of August, 1792. The renewed religious feeling introduced by the royalists expressed itself in the erection of two churches, Saint Vincent-de-Paul and Our Lady of Loretto, both in the style of Latin basilicas, though Saint Vincent's is made majes- tic by two square towers not unlike those on Saint Sulpice. The approach to Saint Vincent's is by two semicircular inclined planes, divided by a flight of steps — a handsome entrance. There are but few at all like it in all Paris. More interesting than the architecture of these churches is their position, on the north and just within the " exterior boulevards " which mark Louis XVI's wall. Population must have in- creased heavily in this district to call for two churches of large size and so near together. Many of the fifty-five new streets laid out in this reign must have been in this section. An engraving of 1822 shows that the Champs lElysees had become a field for the perform- ances of mountebanks, jugglers, rope-walkers, stilt-walkers, and wandering musicians. THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS 341 Louis died iinlamented. He had been fat when first he entered the Tuileries; his manner of life was not one calculated to reduce adipose tissue. His subjects joked about his habits by punning upon his name, calling Louis Dixhuit (Louis XVIII) Louis des Huitres (Oyster Louis) . He was the last king to die in Paris or even in France, and the last to be buried with his kind in Saint Denis. That Charles X, Louis' brother, was prepared to follow that royal custom when the time came seems proven by his immediate return to the traditions of his ancestors. He was consecrated and crowned in the cathedral at Rheims which had witnessed the coronation of Clovis and that of every French king since Philip Augustus in the twelfth century. Like the Grand Monarque he " touched for the king's evil," believed in the divine right of kings, and thought himself all- wise in the conduct of government and his people all-foolish. He recalled the Jesuits whom Louis XV had banished and mulcted the masses to make restitution to the royalists whose property had been confiscated when they fled from Revolu- tionary France. Paris forgot that she had loved him in his gay and spendthrift youth, forgot the passing amuse- ment of his coronation festivities in the Place du Carrousel, forgot that his armies were winning 342 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS some successes along the Mediterranean, forgot everything but hatred when he outraged her con- fidence by disbanding the National Guard, on whose loyalty and prudence the whole city relied. When he tried to force through the legisla- ture a bill to muzzle the press, to censor all other publications and to forbid freedom of speech in the universities, that body flatly refused to follow his instructions. So determined was Charles to have his own way that this rebuff and the victories of the liberals in the election of 1830 taught him no lesson, and on July 26 of that year he issued a proclamation which brought about a second Revolution. He declared the new liberal leg- islature dissolved and summoned another to be chosen by the votes of property-holders only. He appointed a Council of State from his own sympathizers, and he abolished the freedom of the press. Thiers' paper, the National, and the Courrier issued a prompt protest against these tyrannical Ordinances, and were as promptly sup- pressed. Crowds gathered before the newspaper offices where Thiers showed the understanding and the grasp of the situation which later made him prime minister under Louis Philippe and first president of the Third Republic. It was not only the excitable classes — the right bank artisans and the left bank students — always ready for a fight, who engaged in this attempt to THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS 343 overthrow the king; the whole city took part, either by fighting or by taking into their houses fugitives hard pressed by the royal troops. The city was heavily garrisoned and the citizens naturally were at a disadvantage against well- trained, well-equipped regulars. They fought, however, with the ingenuity and the joyousness which always has marked the Parisian when he seized such opportunities. The narrowest streets in the old sections — just north of the City Hall around the church of Saint Merri, near the markets, and on the Cite — were barricaded and served for three days as a bloody battleground. On the twenty-eighth the bell on the City Hall rang out its summons and the republican tricolor side by side with the black flag of death told the crowd better than words for what they were to contend. Until the afternoon there was no fiercer struggle than here and on the near-by bridge to the Cite, where a youth, planting the tricolor on the top of the middle arch, was shot, crying as he fell, " My name is Arcole! Avenge my death! '* At least his death is remembered, for the bridge still bears his name, Arcole. Encouraged by their successes of the day, the people on the next morning marched to the Louvre where they fought and fell and were buried by hundreds beneath Perrault's colonnade. They poured through the Tuileries as in the days 34J* TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS of the Revolution, and they carried the throne from the Throne Room to the Place de la Bastille where they burned it as a symbol of tyranny. By way of expressing their feeling for the dignitaries of the church they sacked the archbishop's palace beside Notre Dame on whose towers the tricolor floated. When night fell twenty-four hours later at least five thousand Parisians had fallen in what they called, neverthe- less, the Three ' Glorious ' Days of July. Paris and Paris alone had achieved a revolution for all France. To commemorate the dead the July Column, Liberty crowned, was raised on the site of the Bastille, and beneath it in two huge vaults lie scores upon scores of the victims of the over- throw. The success of the revolution was a hint which even Charles could understand. He had been at Saint Cloud during the outbreak. He never went back to Paris. After his abdication he went to England and died in Austria six years later. The political revolution was not the only sud- den change of the year 1830. On the 25th of February occurred the " Battle of Hernani " when Victor Hugo's famous play in which he embodied the principles of the new " romantic " school of writing, had its first performance. The classicists rose with howls and hisses at the very THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS 345 first line, in which was an infringement of classical rules, and the evening passed tempes- tuously, even with an interchange of blows. The piece was allowed other hearings, however, and at last the novelty became no longer a novelty but the fashion. For all her desire for a republican form of government, France, during the great Revolu- tion, had not been so fortunate in her leaders that she was prepared now to elevate an ordinary citizen to the headship, the more as there was no man of especial distinction with the exception of the too-aged Lafayette. It was he who, in an interview with Louis Philippe, a member of the Orleans branch of the royal house, expressed the popular wish for " a throne surrounded by re- publican institutions." Louis Philippe, who was descended from a younger brother of Louis XI V,^ had served in the Revolutionary army, but had become entangled in a conspiracy which made it prudent for him to join his royalist friends in England. The Res- toration (1814) permitted his return and he had long lived the life of a quiet bourgeois dwelling in a Paris suburb, and educating his children in the public schools. He was generally liked and it needed but small artificial stimulation to start a boom for his candidacy. On the night of the 30th 1 See Appendix. 346 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS of July he walked in from Neuilly and went to the Palais Royal. Three days later Lafayette presented him to the still armed and still mur- muring crowds before the City Hall, and on the ninth of August the Chamber of Deputies de- clared him king not " of France " but " of the French " to emphasize in his title his summons from the people. In England during this part of the nineteenth century there was much popular upheaval over the suffrage and the revolution of industry by the introduction of machinery. France was equally disturbed, but over political problems. Louis Philippe apparently had been the choice of the people, he wore the tricolor and sang the " Mar- seillaise " beating time for the crowd to follow, and the provisions of his government were liberal. Yet he received cordial support only from the Constitutionalists. He was opposed by the Bonapartists, by the Legitimists, who wanted a representative of the Bourbons, and by the Re- publicans who urged a government like Amer- ica's. To the latter belonged the Paris rabble and they never let pass an opportunity to stir up trouble for the king. Only a year after his acces- sion when the Legitimists were holding a service in memory of the Duke of Berry in the church of Saint Germain I'Auxerrois the mob entered the building and seized the communion plate, the THE BOURSE. See page 331. CHURCH OF THE MADELEINE. See page 331. THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS 347 crucifix and the priests' vestments which they threw into the river as they crossed the bridge to the Cite where they first sacked and then destroyed the archbishop's palace/ Against this demonstration good-hearted Louis turned the firemen's hose instead of the soldier's bayonets. This riot was but one of many which marked the first ten years of Louis Philippe's reign. That of the fifth and sixth of June, 1832, is well known because Victor Hugo described it in " Les Miserables.'^ The king's life was attempted more than once, and it could have been small comfort to him to feel that his assassination was not under- taken for personal reasons but because he repre- sented a hated party. It is not to be wondered at that the " Citizen King " ceased to beat time while the crowd sang the " Marseillaise," and that he told an English friend who urged him to save his voice in the open air, " Don't be concerned. It's a long time since I did more than move my lips." Hated by the Republican rabble the king was no less shunned by his own class, the nobility of the left bank faubourg Saint Germain. They were so unwilling to frequent a court made up of worthy but uninteresting bourgeois that Louis is said to have remarked that it was easier for him ' Since then the Archbishop of Paris has lived near the In- valides. 348 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS to get his English friends from across the Chan- nel to dine with him at the Tuileries than his French friends from across the Seine. Added to the other troubles of this time was the cholera which swept Europe in 1832. Paris looked on it as something of a joke when it first broke out, several maskers at a ball impersonat- ing Cholera in grisly ugliness. When some fifty dancers were attacked by the disease during the evening the seriousness of the situation began to be understood. Before it left the city twenty thousand people had died. Such fearful mortality was enough to give matter for thought to any ruler, and enough was known then about sanitation to cause Louis to set to work clearing out some of the countless narrow streets with their unwholesome houses with which the older parts of the city still abounded, though fifty-five new streets, many of them erasing former ones, had been opened during the Restora- tion. The Place du Trone, now the Place de la Nation was completed. The handsome columns, erected just before the Revolution, mark the city's eastern boundary. They are surmounted by statues of Philip Augustus and Saint Louis. Before Louis Philippe's reign ended there were some eleven hundred streets within the city limits, and the extension and improvement of the lighting system increased their safety, while THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS 349 they were made beautiful by many fountains. Of these the best known is that in memory of Moliere. It is erected opposite the house in which the great dramatist died, and was made possible by one of those public subscriptions by which the French more than any other people ex- press the gratitude of the masses for a genius which has given them pleasm-e. The water service for domestic use was poor, water-carriers bringing water in barrels to sub- scribers and selling it in the street. The present fountains of the Place de la Con- corde are also of this period, and the obelisk of Luxor which the pacha of Egypt presented to the king of France, was brought from its place be- fore the great temple of ancient Thebes where it had stood for three thousand years to make the central ornament of the same huge square. The present fortifications of Paris date from this reign. Thiers built them during his ministry and some thirty-odd years later he had the satis- faction of knowing that it was through his efforts that the city was able to hold out for nearly five months against the Prussians. Of new works for the embellishment of the city Louis Philippe began but few. The one church of interest was twin-spired Sainte Clotilde, an accurate reproduction of thirteenth and fourteenth century Gothic. Though initiat- 350 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS ing little the king finished several important un- dertakings of his predecessors. One of these was the Palais des Beaux Arts where many American students now study art; another was the church of the Madeleine, and still another the Arc de Triumphe de I'Etoile. Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle were carefully restored to their original beauty by the skillful architect and antiquarian, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Palais de Justice was enlarged. A further example of the preservation of old buildings for the benefit of the people was the conversion of the Hotel Cluny into a museum of medieval domestic life, and of the adjoining Thermes of the Roman palace into a repository of Gallo-Roman relics. With bridges and railroads increasing the public comfort, a vigorous body of writers adding to the literary reputation of Paris, and the dis- covery of Daguerre introducing to the world photography whose developments have revolu- tionized many occupations and made possible many others, the eighteen years of Louis' reign was a rich period. It was increasingly turbulent, however, as each riot provoked severe rulings in an effort to prevent further trouble, and each access of severity enraged the mob more than ever. The proletariat had no vote, and the suf- frage advances across the Channel served only to irritate and make the French poor feel poorer THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS 351 than ever both in property and in political rights. The crisis came (in 1848) as often happens, over a comparatively small matter. The king forbade a banquet of his opponents, and the mob seized upon the refusal as an excuse to fight. The National Guards should have served as a buffer between the royal garrison and the rabble, but the rabble stole their guns and the worthy bourgeois of the Guards were of small service to anybody. There was fighting here and there all over the city, but chiefly in the neighborhood of the boule- vard of the Temple. There seems to have been no especial reason in these skirmishes ; the coatless fought the wearers of coats without stopping to inquire their political belief. Huge crowds col- lected along the rue de Rivoli and along the quay, hemming into the Place du Carrousel an- other throng packed almost to inmovability. His wife and daughters watching him anxiously from the windows, the king, now a man of seventy-five, came from the Tuileries, mounted a horse and moved slowly through the press. Only an occasional voice cried " Long live the king," and he soon returned to the palace. In a few minutes word flew from mouth to mouth that Louis Philippe had abdicated. It was true. An hour and a half later he left the Tuileries never to return. With him went his family, leaving behind 352 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS them all their personal belongings. At once a horde of roughs took possession of the palace, slashing pictures, breaking furniture, breakfast- ing in the royal dining room, and sending out to buy a better quality than the king's coffee which they drank in exquisite Sevres cups taken out through the broken glass of a locked cabinet. The royal cellars were emptied promptly. The princesses' dresses adorned the sweethearts of the most persistent fighters. Again, as in 1830, the throne went up in smoke after every rascal in town had had a chance to test the softness of its cushions. At the Hotel de Ville the second Republic was proclaimed, the poet Lamartine at its head for the money there was in it, it is said. A minor actor who was in a general's costume at a dress rehearsal and who put his head out of a theater window to see the cause of the uproar in the street, was haled forth, set upon a horse, escorted to the City Hall and introduced to the nonde- script and self-appointed members of the provi- sional government there gathered as " governor of the Hotel de Ville." They accepted him without question and Lamartine confirmed him in his office the next day 1 A republican government pure and simple, however, did not satisfy a large part of the citizens of Paris who were extreme socialists and THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS 353 demanded that the state provide work for every- body. So insistent were they that Lamartine estabhshed National Workshops and the actual development of the theory proved more convinc- ing than any possible argument. Thousands of people were soon enrolled. Many proved idlers, many were ignorant, much of the output was poor; yet, such as it was, it seriously disorganized trade and so flooded the market that prices went down and wages were forced to follow. The men who received $1.00 a day at first were reduced in a few months to $1.20 a week, while the government was saddled with a debt of $3,000,- 000 and with hundreds of citizens less than ever able to take care of themselves after this period of what was practically living on charity. The solid citizens demanded an immediate change, the government insisted that a larger number of the beneficiaries should either seek other work or go into the army. Again Paris was a battle field during three days when many of the streets were literally ankle-deep in blood. The Parisians could build a barricade right dexterously by this time and bourgeois and rabble killed each other heartily in the most pitiable sort of civil war. Archbishop Affre, who went in person to the fau- bourg Saint Antoine to use his influence with the fighters, was mortally wounded. His torn and 354 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS blood-stained garments are preserved in the sacristy of Notre Dame. Early in July an open-air mass in memory of the victims was solemnized at the foot of the obelisk, but it did not mean that peace was established, and for a few months more the country quarreled on under the provisional gov- ernment until Louis Napoleon was elected presi- dent of the Republic in December, 1848. CHAPTER XXI PARIS OF LOUIS NAPOLEON LOUIS NAPOLEON ^ was the son of Hortense, Josephine's daughter, who had been forced to marry Napoleon I's brother, Louis, who disliked her as much as she did him. By the time of Napoleon's downfall they were divorced and young Louis' life from his sixth to his twenty-first year was one of con- stant change as he traveled from one place to another with his mother who was not welcomed as a resident of their towns by many small officials afraid of their political heads. This long period spent out of the country of his birth gave Louis the accent which provoked the passage at arms with Bismark. Wishing to be polite to the great German he remarked blandly, " I never have heard a stranger speak French as you do; " to which Bismark promptly responded, " I never have heard a Frenchman speak French as you do." When a man grown Louis Napoleon became a soldier of fortune. He fought against the pope ; he tried to get up a revolution for his own benefit in the garrison at Strasburg; he entered ' See Appendix. 355 356 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS France from the sea near Boulogne, again with no success; he was captured and imprisoned for six years, escaping in the clothes of a workman. It was only after the abdication of Louis Philippe that he dared to appear in Paris. While he was made a member of the Constituent Assembly, and was wire-pulling to secure his election to the presidency he was so poor that a street vender, a woman well-known because of her skill in get- ting about on two wooden legs, offered him money from her savings. When his star was in the ascendant he offered her an annuity. She re- fused it, saying that he wouldn't take her money and so she wouldn't take his. Beranger, the " people's poet," and Victor Hugo believed in Bonaparte and used their influence in his behalf. The election in 1848 put an end to Louis' poverty but his appetite for power grew by what it fed on. The new constitution decreed that a president could not be a candidate for reelection until four years had elapsed after his first term of office. This arrangement did not suit Louis's ambition and in 1851 he followed the great Na- poleon's example in executing a coup d'etat. It meant more barricades and more slaughter in the Paris streets, but it disposed of his enemies and left him free to secure yet another constitution which lengthened the president's term to ten years. As with the great Napoleon, the people PARIS OF LOUIS NAPOLEON 357 elected him emperor for life only a year later. He took the title of Napoleon III. The cholera ravaged France for many months during the early part of Louis Napoleon's presidency. On one day there were six hundred and eighty deaths in Paris alone. Yet neither the epidemic nor republican simplicity prevented many elaborate public functions. In the autumn of 1848 the Palais Bourbon was the scene of many balls with a somewhat motley array of guests. It was currently reported in the city that before every ball there was such a washing and starching as never had been known before in the northern and eastern parts of the city, and that the tradesmen of those sections were ac- customed to say with an air of pride, " No, we have nothing in ladies' white kid gloves to-day except in small sizes — seven and under." In 1849 on the anniversary of the great Na- poleon's death, a memorial mass was solemnized at the Invalides, the old uniforms of the veterans adding their pathos to the impressive scene as the officers knelt while Louis visited the tomb of his illustrious predecessor. On the first an- niversary of Louis' election a splendid banquet at the Hotel de Ville expressed the people's satisfaction. Three years later, on New Year's Day, the guns of the Invalides fired ten shots for every million of votes that assured Louis' 358 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS position for ten years more. A Te Deum of gratitude was sung at Notre Dame, the choir chanting " T>omine, salvum fac praesidentem nostrum Napoleonem." The religious celebra- tion was followed by a ball given by the Prefect of the Seine at the Hotel de Ville. Realizing that the chances of success in Paris upheavals usually were with the side which the army favored Louis did his best to make himself popular with the soldiers. In the spring of this same year a series of brilliant festivals gave them recognition — a distribution of flags on the Field of Mars, a ball in honor of the army, a banquet at the Tuileries to the officers, and a banquet of twenty- four hundred covers to the students of the Military School. The proclamation of the empire was hailed in Paris with enthusiastic demonstrations. The citizens gave Bonaparte an almost solid support (208,615 votes out of 270,710), decorated the city with such inscriptions as " Ave Caesar Im- perator," and with elaborate illuminations. Na- poleon's entry into the city was a spectacle such as the Parisians always have loved. Heading a splendid array of soldiers he rode into town from Saint Cloud, ten miles out, and, hailed by the guns of all Paris, he entered the city under the Arc de Triumphe de I'Etoile, and then went down the Champs Elysees to the Tuileries. The PARIS OF LOUIS NAPOLEON 359 new emperor's decision to have no formal corona- tion but to give its cost, $50,000, to hospitals and orphanages throughout France, warmly endeared him to his subjects. The Exposition of 1855 was a drawing card for Paris. By the side of the monumental affairs into which these exhibits have grown the arrange- ments seem simplicity itself. Yet Queen Vic- toria, Prince Albert and the royal children spent a happy week visiting the Palais de 1' Industrie and being entertained by plays at Saint Cloud, fireworks and a ball at Versailles, a ball at the City Hall, a review of troops on the Field of Mars. When the queen drove to visit Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle the decorated streets were lined with enthusiastic crowds. Like his great predecessor Napoleon Ill's vision saw a noble Paris, and at once he set about improvements which would beautify the city, give work to the poor, make the bourgeois forget his limitation of their power in the municipality, and compensate the suburbs now included within the city limits for the increase of their taxes. Paris no longer had a mayor, but as to-day, two prefects, one *' of the Seine " and the other " of police." Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine, was a man amply fitted to carry out the emperor's plans, and it is to him that the city owes much of the openness which is one of her greatest 360 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS beauties and benefits. His was the idea of laying out streets radiating from a central point as do those around the Arch of the Star. This diagonal arrangement permits not only quick passage from one part of the city to another, but allows a small body of men and a few cannon to hold a com- manding position. Napoleon probably had the habits of the Paris mob in mind when he ordered this plan and the asphalt surface which is far less useful for missiles than are paving stones. The rue de Rivoli was carried on eastward partly do- ing away with an unsavory neighborhood which crowded closely upon the Louvre; a long boule- vard called " de Strasbourg " and " de Sebas- topol " swept northward from the Seine and southward across the Cite to join the boulevard Saint Michel on the right bank. In all twenty- two new thoroughfares were opened and three bridges. Between the Place du Chatelet and the Hotel de Ville was the old tower of Saint Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. It was restored to its former perfection and surrounded by one of the small parks which are the city's best gifts to the poor and for which she utilizes every available spot. A new Hotel Dieu on the north side of the Parvis de Notre Dame replaced the ancient building on the south side of the same square, and did a further good work in wiping out many wretched old streets. MiA PARIS OF LOUIS NAPOLEON 361 Remembering Napoleon I's intention with re- gard to the Louvre the emperor completed the long delayed project of joining the Tuileries and the older palace. On the side of the Seine he built the entrance to the Place du Carrousel, the connecting link between Henry IV's unfinished gallery and Catherine de Medicis'; on the north side he swept away the remaining tangle of small streets adjoining the rue de Rivoli, thereby enlarging the Place du Carrousel to its present size and permitting the building of three quad- rangles to match the three on the south/ which are partly of his construction. The architecture is massive, elaborate, over-decorated, yet, taken all in all, suj^erb. Its heavy magnificence lessens our regret at the loss of the Tuileries which completed the rectangle at the west, for those who remem- ber it say that the smaller palace was over- powered by the imposing " New Louvre." Several new churches added to the adornment of the city under the empire. One of these, Trin- ity, renaissance in style, is approached by a " rampe " somewhat recalling that of Saint Vin- cent-de-Paul. Another church, dedicated to Saint Augustin, is in the Byzantine style, and is in- geniously though not always acceptably adapted to the limitations of a small triangular space. Among the improvements were the buildings of 1 See plan, Chapter XXIL 362 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS the present Halles Centrales on the age-old spot where markets have served Paris. An early- morning visit to the Halles is an object lesson on the distribution of food for a large city. The crowd is terrific, the volubility ear-splitting. Certain characteristic stalls interest the traveler, as, for example, that where broken food from hotels and restaurants is sold for two sous a plate. To this time belongs the new building — on the Cite now — for the Tribunal of Commerce; enlargements of the National Library and of the Bank of France; the construction of two theaters on the Place du Chatelet, one leased now by Sarah Bernhardt, and of the Opera. This is huge and elaborate in renaissance style, a building much criticized but also much admired, especially for its staircase and for its decorative frescos and bronzes. It is the home of the National Academy of Music. The fountain showing the valiant figure of Saint Michel facing the bridge at the corner of the boidevard Saint Michel, has a position like that of the Moliere fountain, making a grace- ful and harmonious decoration for the end of a house lying in the acute angle between two meet- ing streets. The extension of the city's water supply was the more appreciated because it was belated. Twelve thousands gas lamps made a much- PARIS OF LOUIS NAPOLEON 363 needed illumination. Two railway stations added a convenient public service. Just outside the fortifications is the Bois de Boulogne, originally a forest, but now developed as a park, retaining its naturalness and charm with the addition of good roads, and attractive tea-houses. Finally, the lovely Pare Monceau was laid out to please the prosperous inhabitants of the re- cently developed quarter near the Arc de I'Eitoile, and an old quarry was ingeniously converted into a thing of seemingly natural beauty for the benefit of the poorer people of Belleville in the north-eastern part of the city. In 1861 the population of Paris was 1,667,841. Yet even all these public works and the bril- liancy of the not at all exclusive court which Napoleon and his wife, Eugenie (whom he had married with magnificent ceremony at Notre Dame in 1853), held at the Tuileries, could not entirely calm the restless and not yet satisfied Parisians. To the poorer classes " empire " did not ring as true as " republic." Napoleon boldly laid the question of the empire before the people of France once more, and once more they re- turned a handsome vote in his support, but Paris was unconvinced. She cast 184,000 Nos against 139,000 Yeses. As must always happen in connection with 364 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS foreign affairs the emperor's attitude provoked hostility as well as approval. There were op- ponents of the Crimean War as well as advocates ; there were adverse critics of the treaty with Austria which closed the war which France undertook in behalf of Italy. Long-continued friction with Germany had brought about a gen- eral wish for war. Napoleon planned to secure his own popularity by entering upon a struggle which he knew would be approved by the majority of his subjects. Paris was wildly enthusiastic, crying " On to Berlin I " regardless of the fact that the army was almost entirely unprepared. A trivial incident furnished the excuse and the emperor in person invaded Germany, but the list of encounters was almost entirely a list of de- feats and the Prussian army pressed the French forces back into their own country. Paris was so furious at the realization of what this inva- sion might mean that it is said that Napoleon never would have passed through the city alive if he had returned then. The battle of Sedan, fought on the first of September, 1870, not only was an overwhelming defeat, but there the emperor was taken prisoner. Never again did he see the city he had worked so hard to beautify. After he was released (in PARIS OF LOUIS NAPOLEON 8G5 1871) he went to England where he died in 1873. News of the battle reached Paris on the fourth of September and produced such utter con- sternation that the mob was frightened into com- parative quiet. A great crowd, however, eager and determined, entered the Legislature where the deputies were in session and demanded the abolition of the empire. Jules Favre, Gambetta, Jules Simon and several other deputies of the " opposition " party, led the crowd to the City Hall, formed a provisional government, and de- clared the Third Republic. The empress, meanwhile, who had only too good reason to fear the possible temper of the Paris mob, had heard the news in the Tuileries and took instant flight. Accompanied only by one lady and by the Austrian and Italian ambassadors, she traversed the whole length of the Louvre to its eastern end. As she came out on the street facing the church of Saint Germain I'Auxerrois she was recognized by a small boy who called her name. This recognition so ter- rified the ambassadors that they did not stop to find the carriage that was waiting for them, but pushed the empress and her companion into an ordinary cab, and called to the cabman no more definite direction than " To Boulevard Hauss- mann." The two frightened women had not 366 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS even a handbag with them and not so much as their cab fare. Fortunately the empress hap- pened to think of her dentist, an American named Evans. They drove to his house and through his help managed to leave the city and to escape to England. There Eugenie still lives. The new government represented to the Prus- sians that the war had been the emperor's affair, and that Prussia had declared that she was fight- ing the imperial idea. The enemy refused to grant peace, however, and Paris was besieged from September 19, 1870 to January 30, 1871. Several battles around the city resulted in de- feat for the French and the loss of some towns. Marshal Bazaine surrendered the " army of Metz " without a struggle. The king of Prussia made the palace at Versailles his headquarters and from it directed the bombardment. Within Paris suffering increased sadly during the four months and a half of the siege. Outside supplies of fuel and food were cut off and the city's stores ran very low, though reports of peace were apt to bring out collections which were being kept in hiding to secure high prices when the great pinch should come. The trees in the parks were cut down for fuel and warmth. Bomb- proof cellars were at premium. Just as during the siege of Henry IV, animals not usually eaten were now slaughtered for food. PARIS OF LOUIS NAPOLEON 367 Horace Vernet, the famous artist, mournfully complained to a friend, " They have taken away my saddle horse to eat him — and I've had him twenty years! " From which it is a fair assump- tion that the steaks which he provided were not all tenderloin. Indeed, it is said that while dishes made from the smaller animals were rather fancied so that when the siege was over dogs and cats were scarce, there were left thirtj^ thousand horses, which would seem to prove that even the starving do not like tough meat. Etiquette for- bade inquiry of one's hostess as to the nature of any dish served at a dinner, but it was entirely de rigueur to compliment it after partaking. Rat pies came to be considered a real delicacy. Toward the end the animals in the Zoological Gardens fell victims to the town's necessities. A camel was sold for $800 and netted a good deal more than that for the restaui'ant proprietor who bought him. A final brave sortie met with such complete defeat that it was clear that the city must sur- render. The provisional government yielded, promising to give up all Alsace and half of Lorraine, to pay an indemnit)^ of a billion dollars and, crown of bitterness for Paris, to permit the hostile army to take possession of the city. On the first of March the Prussians entered from the west. They found massed before the 368 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Triumphal Arch of the Star two thousand school boys. Their spokesman, a lad of twelve, approached the commander. *' Sir," he said, bringing his hand to his cap in salute, " we ask that you will not lead your men under our arch. If you do," he added firmly, " it will be over our bodies." The troops made a circuit. It was only three days that the Prussians remained in Paris, but during that time the city mourned openly. All the shops were closed, all business was discontinued. When the enemy left everything they had touched was treated as if defiled. It is said that because a Prussian soldier had been seen to leap over one of the chains which swing from post to post to keep a space clear around the Arch of the Star a new chain was substituted. The pride of Paris was humbled grievously. CHAPTER XXII PARIS OF TO-DAY WHEN the siege of Paris came to an end and the German troops were withdrawn the provisional government which had been making its headquarters at Bordeaux re- moved to Versailles. The violent element in Paris which had given Louis Philippe so much trouble had increased both in numbers and in strength of feeling during the third quarter of the century. Now these radicals asserted that Thiers, the head of the provisional government, had betrayed France to the enemy, and they won to their way of thinking the Central Committee of the usually conservative National Guard. From the City Hall they directed the election of a new city goverment, the Commune of Paris, which held itself independent of the Assembly at Versailles and defied it. Just a month after the hated Prussians had left Paris the commimists made a sortie toward Versailles. As a natural reaction the Versailles government invested the city, and Frenchmen were pitted against Frenchmen as in the days when Henry IV was besieging his own capital 369 370 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS town. Nor was the conflict merely between the people inside and the people outside — within Paris there was a constant struggle between the conservatives and the communists and even among the communists themselves. The conservatives disapproved of the drastic social changes made by the new government in closing the churches, and dispersing some of the religious orders, as well as of their confiscations of property on slight warrant and their onslaught upon monuments of sentimental and artistic value, such as the Vendome Column. The communists, on the other hand, were torn by internal dissensions and their constant quarrels brought about the usual weakness resulting from poor team work. Ferocity never failed them, however. Con- structive measures were postponed; revenge, never. No sufficent excuse ever has been offered for their massacres of hostages, good Archbishop Darboy among them; none for the senseless orgy of destruction with which, after a two months' struggle, they recognized their defeat by the government troops under Marshal Mac- Mahon. When the soldiers entered Paris their first work was the extinguishing of the fires which the communists had set in a hundred places. Men and women, urged by hatred and fanaticism, piled kegs of gunpowder into PARIS OF TO-DAY 371 churches, even into Notre Dame, relic and rec- ord of centuries, and poured petroleum upon the flames devouring the Palace of Justice, the Sainte Chapelle, the library of the Louvre, the Luxembourg palace, the Palais Royal. The houses on the rue Royale were a mass of broken brick. The Ministry of Finance on the rue de Rivoli was so injured that it was torn down, to be replaced by a hotel. Three hundred years of historical association did not avail to save the palace of the Tuileries whose ruins were con- sidered not sufficient to be restored. The Plotel de Ville was a mere shell and required practically entire rebuilding. Property amounting to a hun- dred millions of dollars was destroyed, while the historical and sentimental value of many of the buildings cannot be computed. The communists were as reckless with their own lives as with the buildings. Some two thousand persons — women and children as well as men — fell in the contest with the govern- ment. The last struggle was in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise whose tombs could serve only as temporary potection against shell and shot from the rash fighters who were soon to need a final resting-place. It was only after the execution of many of the insurgent leaders that Marshal MacMahon brought about a semblance of peace. With returning quiet all France turned its 372 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS attention to securing the payment of the war indemnity of a biUion dollars due to Prussia. Until that indebtedness was cleared off the hated uniform of the army of occupation was omni- present. So eager were the French to rid them- selves of this sight that every peasant went into his " stocking " or tapped his mattress bank until the necessary amount was subscribed many times over. Two years and a half after the capitula- tion of Paris not a German soldier was left in the country. There could be no stronger testi- mony to the national thrift fostered by the pinch of the pre-Revolutionary days and so alive to- day that the French are looked upon as the readiest financiers in Europe, prepared to invest in anything from a Panama Canal to a New York gratte-ciel (skyscraper). The terms of the peace with Germany re- quired the surrender of one-half of the border province of Lorraine and the whole of Alsace. It was a bitter day not only for these districts but for the whole country when the Germans took possession of the ceded territory. Fifty thousand people left their property behind and went over into France rather than lose the name of French- men. Many came to America. Now, forty years later, the memory of the loss is not dulled, and the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde wears perpetual mourning. PARIS OF TO-DAY 373 Many have been the problems faced by France since the Franco-Prussian war. Political adjust- ment has been of first importance, of course, but Paris has had her own questions to answer, and, because of her cosmopolitanism, her solutions have been of interest to the whole world. Much time and thought have been spent on the repairs required by the excesses of the communists. The rebuilding of the City Hall on the same spot on which it had stood for five hundred years and in the style which Francis I initiated three centu- ries before, was a task on which Paris lavished thought and money. The exterior is a finely harmonious example of renaissance. The mural paintings of the interior are a record of the work of the best French artists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They are enhanced by heavily handsome gildings and by chandeliers of glittering crystal. As a whole, however, the city has put more expenditure into the perfecting of public utilities, the beautifying of streets and the construction of parks — works of use to the many — than into the erection of buildings of less general service. The panorama which make the frontispiece of this volume shows the care with which pavements and curbs and tree-guards are ordered. A small tricycle sweeper is 1912's latest device for remov- ing any last reproach of Lutetia's mud — a re- 374 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS proach formulated to-day only by Parisians made fastidious by a century of cleanliness. The panorama shows also the arrangement of the quays and the orderliness which makes them possible in the very center of the city, even when there is discharged upon them huge loads of freight brought from the sea by the strings of barges (seen in the picture of the Eiffel Tower opposite page 360) which are moved by a tug and a chain-towing device. In some parts of this city of three million in- habitants the quays disclose scenes that are al- most rural. Under the fluttering leaves of a slender tree a rotund housewife is making over a mattress, exchanging witticisms with a near-by vender of little cakes. Not far off the owner of a poodle is engaging his attention while a pro- fessional dog clipper is decorating him with an outfit of collar and cuffs calculated to rouse envy in the breasts of less favored caniches. When the hero of an old English novel orders his servant to call a " fly " we wonder whether the misnamed vehicle which responds has been christened from the verb or the noun. There is no doubt in Paris as to the origin of the " fly boats " on the Seine. These busy little travelers are of insect origin — they are bateaux mouches. What these boats are on the river the fiacres have been on land. These small open carriages p^ PARIS OF TO-DAY 375 are now being replaced by motor taxis. The use of the meters on the horse-propelled vehicles as well as on the machines has deprived the tourist of one of the daily excitements of his visit — the heated argument with the driver concerning his charge. Another change which has been con- summated since 1913 began is the passing of the horse-drawn omnibus with its " imperial " or roof seats, from whose inexpensive vantage many travelers have considered that they secured their best view of the city streets. The two subway systems have many excellent points, not least of which is a method of ventilation which makes a summer's day trip below ground a relief rather than a seeming excursion on the crust of the infernal regions. The Champs Elysees is thought to offer the finest metropolitan vista in the world, when the Arc de Triomphe de I'Etoile is seen across the Place de la Concorde from the Tuileries gardens, over two miles away. Such vistas are frequent in Paris, offering a " point of view " in which a handsome building or monument finds its beauty enhanced. The regularity of the skyline adds to this effect. By a municipal regulation no fa9ade may be higher than the width of the street and the consequent uniformity provides a not unpleasing monotony. 376 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS Paris parks are world famous, not only for the beauty of such great expanses as the Bois de Boulogne, just outside the fortifications, with its forest and lake and stream, its good roads and its alluring restaurants, but for the intelligent utilization of small open spaces in crowded parts of the city. Wherever any readjustment of lines or purposes gives opportunity, there a bit of grass rests the eye and a tree casts its share of shade. If there is space enough a piece of statuary educates the taste or the bust of some hero of history or of art makes familiar the features of great men. The demolition of the old clo' booths of the Temple gave such a chance, and amid tall tenements and commonplace shops mothers sew and babies doze and one-legged veterans read the newspapers beneath the statue of the people's poet, Beranger. At one end of this square rises the Mcdrie of the Third Arrondissement (ward). These Mairies, of which there are twenty, are decorated with paintings, often by artists of repute, and al- ways symbolic of the Family, of I^abor or of the Fatherland. The Hall of Marriages in which the Mayor of the arrondissement performs the civil ceremony required by law, receives especial attention and usually is a room handsomely ap- pointed and adorned. The French imagination likes to express itself MAIRIE OF THE ARRONDISSEMENT OF THE TEMPLE. SALLE DES FETES OF THE HOTEL DE VILLE. PARIS OF TO-DAY 377 in symbols. Throughout the city there are many large groups, such as the Triumph of the Re- public, unveiled in 1899, which dominates the Place de la Nation — a figure representative of the Republic attended by Liberty, Labor, Abundance and Justice. Even statues or busts or reliefs of authors, musicians or statesmen fre- quently are supported by allegorical figures. Such is the monument to Chopin which includes a figure of Night and one of Harmony, and such is the monument of Coligny whose portrait statue stands between Fatherland and Re- ligion. In the Fountain of the Observatory sea- horses, dolphins and tortoises surround allegor- ical figures of the four quarters of the globe. The young women lawyers who, in cap and gown, pace seriously through the great hall of the ancient Palace of Justice, are living symbols of twentieth century progress. Haussmann's plan of laying out broad streets radiating from a center served the further pur- pose of adding to the city's beauty by providing wide open spaces and of wiping out narrow streets and insanitary houses. The Third Re- public has continued to act on this scheme and has succeeded wonderfully well in achieving the desired improvement with but a small sacrifice of buildings of eminent historic value. On the Cite a web of memories clung to the tangle of 378 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS streets swept away to secure a site for the new Hotel Dieii on the north of Notre Dame which replaced the ancient hospital which has stood since Saint Louis' day on the south side of the island. The completion in 1912 of the new home of the National Printing Press near the Eiffel Tower brings to mind a Parisian habit indicative of thrift and of a respect for historical associations. The Press has been housed for many years in the eighteenth century hotel of the Dukes of Ro- han built when the Marais was still fashionable. Anything more unsuitable for a printing estab- lishment it would be hard to find. The rooms of a private house become a crowded fire trap when converted to industrial purposes. This use of the house has tided over a crisis, however, and once the last vestige of printer's ink has been removed the old building probably will be restored to the beauty which the still existing decorations of some of the rooms show, and will be used for some more suitable purpose. One proposal is that it be used as an addition to the National Archives, since its grounds adjoin those of the Hotels Clisson and Soubise, their present home. The Hotel Carnavalet houses the Historical Musemn of Paris, and part of the Louvre is used for government offices — two other instances of Paris wisdom. PORTIONS OF THE LOUVRE BUILT BY FRANCIS I, HENRY II, AND LOUIS XIII. COLONNADE, EAST END OF LOUVRE, BUILT BY LOUIS XIV. PARIS OF TO-DAY 379 There have been three Expositions in Paris under the Third Republic. Each has left behind a permanent memorial. The Palace of the Trocadero, dating from 1878, is a huge concert hall where government-trained actors and singers often give for a strangely modest sum the same performances which cost more in the regular theaters with more elaborate accessories. The architecture of the Trocadero is not beautiful but the situation is imposing and the general effect impressive when seen across the river from the south bank where the Eiffel Tower has raised its huge iron spider web since the World's Fair of 1889. The tower is a little world in itself with a restaurant and a theater, a government weather observatory and a wireless station. Since avia- tion has become fashionable the frequent purr of an engine tells the tourist sipping his tea " in English fashion " on the first stage that yet another aviator is taking his afternoon spin " around the Tour Eiffel." The latest exposition, that of 1900, gave to Paris the handsome bridge named after Czar Alexander III, the Grand Palais, where the world's best pictures and sculptures are exhibited every spring, and the Petit Palais which holds several general collections and also the paintings and sculpture bought by the city from the Salons 380 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS of the last thirty-five years. Such public art galleries are found throughout France, a develop- ment of Napoleon's idea of bringing art to the people. Like Paris the provinces take advantage of the Salons to add to the treasures of their galleries. Near the two palaces is the exquisite chapel of Our Lady of Consolation. It is built on the site of a building destroyed during the progress of a fasliionable bazaar by a fire which wiped out one hundred thirty-two lives. The architectural details are of the classic style popular in the reign of Louis XVI. Already rich in beautiful churches Paris has been further graced in recent years by the majestic basilica of the Sacred Heart gleaming mysteriously through the delicate haze that al- ways enwraps Montmartre. The style is Ro- manesque-Byzantine, and the structure is topped by a large dome flanked by smaller ones. The interior lacks the colorful warmth of most of the city churches, but time will remedy that in part. Construction has been extremely slow for the same reason that the building of the Pantheon was a long process — the discovery that the sum- mit of the hill was honeycombed by ancient quarries. It became necessary to sink shafts which were filled with masonry or concrete. Upon this strong sub-structure rises the splendid SECTION OF LOUVRE BEGUN BY HENRY IV, TO CONNECT THE EASTERN END OF THE LOUVRE WITH THE TUILERIES. NORTHWEST WING OF THE LOUVRE, BUILT BY NAPOLEON I, LOUIS XVIII. AND NAPOLEON III. PARIS OF TO-DAY 381 work of expiation for the murder of Archbishop Darboy. The city owns the church. To the tourist whose attention is not confined to the stock " sights " of Paris the city streets offer a wide field of interest. They show the stranger within the walls the neatness of the people and the orderliness which manifests itself in the automatic formation of a queue of would-be passengers on an omnibus or a bateau moucJie. They disclose little that looks like slums to the eye of a Londoner or a New Yorker, for dirt and sadness rather than congestion make slums, and the poor Parisian looks clean and cheerful even when a hole in his " stocking " has let all his savings escape. History lurks at every corner of these streets. It commands attention to the imposing pile of Notre Dame, it piques cm'iosity by the palpably ancient turrets of the rue Hautefeuille. The non-existent is recalled by the tablet on the site of the house where Coligny was assassinated, by the outline of Philip Augustus's Louvre traced on the eastern courtyard of the palace, by the name of the street that passes over the mad king's menagerie at the Hotel Saint Paul. [Etienne Marcel sits his horse beside the City Hall he bought for Paris; Desmoulins mounts his chair in the garden of the Palais Royal to make the passionate speech that wrought the destruction 382 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS place SfCerm*!/) f'Auxer^.ais O 3 fc*S c a m o 00 t^ S'^ s t-o:2S 3 a) © S «3 H H o (B t- 9 Egg's 4? Tuj/ert'es PARIS OF TO-DAY 383 of the Bastille. Even the boucheries chevalines, the markets that sell horse steaks and " ass and mule meat of the first quahty," bring back the days when Henry IV cut off supplies coming from the suburbs of Paris and when, three hun- dred years later, the Prussians used the same means to gain the same end. That the Parisians of to-day are willing to take chances on universal peace in the future seems attested by the recent vote (1913) of the Municipal Council to convert the fortifications and the land adjacent into parks. The people of the markets, at any rate, are not worrying about any possibilities of hunger for they continue as hard-working and as fluent as when they acted as Marie Antoinette's escort on the occasion of the "Joyous Entry" from Versailles, though kinder now in heart and action. Paris charms the stranger as the birdman of the Tuileries Gardens charms his feathered friends — making hostile gestures with one hand and popping bread crumbs into open beaks with the other. The great city of three million people, like all great cities, threatens to overcome the lonely traveler; then, at the seeming moment of destruction, she gives him the food he needs most — perhaps a glimpse of patriotic gayety in the street revels of the fourteenth of July, perhaps the cordial welcome that she has bestowed on students since Charlemagne's day, perhaps the 384 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS less personal appeal of the beauty of a wild dash of rain seen down the river against the western sky, perhaps the impulse to sympathy aroused by the passing of a first communion procession of little girls, wide-eyed from their new, soul- stirring experience. In a quiet corner behind a convent chapel where nuns vowed to Perpetual Adoration unceasingly tend the altar, rests the body of America's friend, Lafayette. If for no other reason than because of bis friendship, Americans must always feel an interest in the city in which he did his part to- ward crystallizing the bourgeois rule which makes the French government one of the most interest- ing political experiments of Europe to-day. Yet Paris needs no intermediary. In her are centered taste, thought, the gayety and exaggeration of the past, light-heartedness in the stern present. The city is a record of the development of a people who have expressed themselves in words and in deeds, and by the more subtle methods of Art. The story is not ended, and as long as the writing goes on, vivid and alluring as the " Gallic spirit " can make it, so long there will be no lack of readers of all nations, our own among the most eager. APPENDIX GENEALOGICAL TABLES OF THE SOVEREIGNS OF FRANCE CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF RULERS, 1792-1913 385 386 TWENTY CENTURIES OF PARIS 2 M o g M So 2 2? So o O <^ 0.2 _I-H O . '5^ ''^ ^r o p 6 i. 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