North and east and west of the municipal centre, the Maison des Piliers, or old Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, was a maze of streets filled with the various crafts of Paris. The tower of St. Jacques de la Boucherie, as yet unfinished, emerged from the butchers’ and skinners’ shops and slaughter-houses, which at the Rue des Lombards met the clothiers and furriers; the cutlers and the basketmakers were busy in streets now swept away to give place to the Avenue Victoria. Painters, glass-workers and colour merchants, grocers and druggists, made bright and fragrant the Rue de la Verrerie, weavers’ shuttles rattled in the Rue de la Tixanderie (now swallowed up in the Rue de Rivoli); curriers and tanners plied their evil-smelling crafts in the Rue (now Quai) de la Mégisserie, and bakers crowded along the Rue St. Honoré. The Rue des Juifs sheltered the ancestral traffic of the children of Abraham. At the foot of the Pont au Change, on which were the shops of the goldsmiths and money-lenders, stood the grim thirteenth-century fortress of the Châtelet, the municipal guardhouse and prison; further on stood the episcopal prison, or Four de l’Evêque (the bishop’s oven). Round the Châtelet was a congeries of narrow, crooked lanes, haunts of ill-fame, where robbers lurked and vice festered. A little to the north were the noisy market-place of the Halles and the cemetery of the Innocents with its piles of skulls, and its vaulted arcade painted (1424) with the Dance of Death. Further north stood the immense abbey of St. Martin in the Fields, with its cloister and gardens and, a little to the west, the grisly fortress of the Knights-Templars. This is the Paris conjured from the past with such magic art by Victor Hugo in “Notre Dame,” and gradually to be swept away in the next centuries by the Renaissance, pseudo-classic and Napoleonic builders and destroyers, until to-day scarcely a wrack is left behind.

With the Italian campaigns of Charles VIII. and of the early Valois-Orleans kings, France enters the arena of European politics, wrestles with the mighty Emperor Charles V. and embarks on a career of transalpine conquest. But in Italy, conquering France was herself conquered by the charm of Italian art, Italian climate and Italian landscape. When Charles VIII. returned from his expedition to Naples he brought with him a collection of pictures, tapestry, and sculptures in marble and porphyry, that weighed thirty-five tons; by him and his successors Italian builders, Domenico da Cortona and Fra Giocondo, were employed. The latter rebuilt the Petit Pont and after the destruction of the last wooden Pont Notre Dame in 1499—when the whole structure, with its houses and shops, fell with a fearful crash into the river—he was employed to replace it with a stone bridge, which was completed in 1507. This, too, was lined with tall, gabled houses of stone, seventeen each side, their façades decorated with medallions of the kings of France, which alternated with fine Renaissance statues of male and female figures bearing baskets of fruit and flowers on their heads. These houses were the first in Paris to be numbered, odd numbers on one side, even on the other, and were the first to be demolished when, on the eve of the Revolution, Louis XVI. ordered the bridge to be cleared.

PONT NOTRE DAME.
PONT NOTRE DAME.

Worthy Friar Giocondo wrought well, for the bridge still exists, though refaced and altered. Louis XII., with his own hand, entreated Leonardo da Vinci to come to France, and his great minister, the Cardinal of Amboise, employed Solario at the château of Gaillon.[98] But the French Renaissance is indissolubly associated with Francis I., who in 1515 inherited a France welded into a compact[99] and absolute monarchy, inhabited by a prosperous and loyal people, for the twelfth Louis had been a good and wise ruler, who to the amazement of his people returned to them the balance of a tax levied to meet the cost of the Genoese Expedition, which had been overestimated, saying, “It will be more fruitful in their hands than in mine.” Commerce had so expanded that it was said that for every merchant seen in Paris in former times there were, in his reign, fifty. Louis introduced the cultivation of maize and the mulberry into France, and so rigid was his justice that poultry ran about the open fields without risk. It was the accrued wealth of his reign, and the love inspired by “Louis, father of his people,”[100] that supported the magnificence, the luxury and the extravagance of Francis I., the patron of the Italian Renaissance. The architectural creations of the new art were first seen in Touraine, in the royal palaces of Blois and Chambord, and other princely and noble chateaux along the luscious and sunny valleys of the Loire. Italian architecture was late in making itself felt in Paris, where the native art made stubborn resistance.

Portrait of Francis I. Jean Clouet.
Portrait of Francis I. Jean Clouet.

The story of the state entry of Francis I. into Paris after the death of Louis XII. is characteristic. Clothed in a gorgeous suit of armour and mounted on a barbed charger, accoutred in white and cloth of silver, the young king would not remain under the royal canopy, but pricked his steed and made it prance and rear that he might display his horsemanship, his fine figure and his dazzling costume before the ladies. “Born between two adoring women,” says Michelet, “the king was all his life a spoilt child.” Money flowed through his hands like water[101] to gratify his ambition, his passions and his pleasures. Doubtless his interviews with Da Vinci at Amboise, where he spent much of his time in the early years of his reign, fired that enthusiasm for art, especially for painting, which never wholly left him; for the veteran artist, although old and paralysed in the right hand, was otherwise in possession of all his incomparable faculties.

The question as to the existence of an indigenous school of painting before the Italian artistic invasion is still a subject of acrimonious discussion among critics; there is none, however, as to its existence in the plastic arts. The old French tradition died hard, and not before it had stamped upon Italian Renaissance architecture the impress of its native genius and adapted it to the requirements of French life and climate. The Hôtel de Cluny, finished in 1490, still remains to exemplify the beauty of the native French domestic architecture modified by the new style. The Hôtel de Ville, designed by Dom. da Cortona and submitted to Francis in 1532, is dominated by the French style, and it was not until nearly a century after the first Italian Expedition that the last Gothic builders were superseded. The fine Gothic church of St. Merri was begun as late as 1520 and not finished till 1612, and the transitional churches of St. Etienne and St. Eustache remind one, by the mingling of Gothic and Renaissance features, of the famous metamorphosis of Agnel and Cianfa in Dante’s Inferno, and one is tempted to exclaim, Ome come ti muti! Vedi che già non sei nè duo nè uno![102]

After the death of Da Vinci Francis never succeeded in retaining a first-rate painter in his service. Andrea del Sarto and Paris Bordone did little more than pay passing visits, and the famous school of Fontainebleau was founded by Rosso and Primaticcio, two decadent followers of Michel Angelo. The adventures of that second-rate artist and first-rate bully, Benvenuto Cellini, at Paris, form one of the most piquant episodes in artistic autobiography. After a gracious welcome from the king he was offered an annual retaining fee of three hundred crowns. He at once dismissed his two apprentices and left in a towering rage, only returning on being offered the same appointments that had been enjoyed by Leonardo da Vinci—seven hundred crowns a year, and payment for every finished work. The Petit Tour de Nesle was assigned to Cellini and his pupils as a workshop, the king assuring him that force would be needed to evict the possessor, adding, “Take great care you are not assassinated.” On complaining to the king of the difficulties he met with and the insults offered to him on attempting to gain possession, he was answered: “If you are the Benvenuto I have heard of, live up to your reputation; I give you full leave.” Cellini took the hint, armed himself, his servants and two apprentices, and frightened the occupants and rival claimants out of their wits. It was at this Tour de Nesle that the king paid Cellini a surprise visit with his mistress Madame d’Estampes, his sister Margaret of Valois, the Dauphin and his wife, Catherine de’ Medici, the Cardinal of Lorraine, Henry II. of Navarre, and a numerous train of courtiers. The artist and his merry men were at work on the famous silver statue of Jupiter for Fontainebleau, and amid the noise of the hammering the king entered unperceived. Cellini had the torso of the statue in his hand, and at that moment a French lad who had caused him some little displeasure had felt the weight of the master’s foot, which sent him flying against the king. But Cellini had done a bad day’s work by violently evicting a servant of Madame d’Estampes from the Tower, and the injured lady and Primaticcio, her protégé, decided to work his ruin. When Cellini arrived at Fontainebleau with the statue, the king ordered it to be placed in the grand gallery decorated by Rosso. Primaticcio had just arranged there the casts which he had been commissioned to bring from Rome, and Cellini saw what was meant—his own work was to be eclipsed by the splendour of the masterpieces of ancient art. “Heaven help me!” cried he, “this is indeed to fall against the pikes!” Now the god held the globe of the earth in the left hand, the thunderbolt in the right. Cellini contrived to thrust a portion of a large wax candle as a torch between the flames of the bolt, and set the statue up on its gilded pedestal. Madame entertained the king late at table, hoping that he would either forget or see the work in a bad light; but when the king entered the gallery late at night, followed by his courtiers, “which by God’s grace was my salvation,” says Cellini, the statue was illuminated by a flood of light from the torch which so enhanced its beauty that the king was ravished with delight, and expressed himself in ecstatic praise, declaring the statue to be more beautiful and more marvellous than any of the antique casts around. His enemies were thus discomfited, and on Madame d’Estampes endeavouring to depreciate the work, she was grossly mocked by the artist in a very characteristic and quite untranscribable way. Benvenuto was more than ever patronised by the king, who did him the great honour of accosting him as mon ami, and approving his scheme for the fortification of Paris. The artist often remembered with pleasure the four years he spent with the gran re Francesco at Paris.

“The French are remembered in Italy only by the graves they left there,” said De Comines, and once again the Italian campaigns ended in disaster. At the defeat of Pavia, in 1525—the Armageddon of the French in Italy—the efforts and sacrifices of three reigns were lost and the gran re went captive to the king of Spain in Madrid, whence he issued, stained by perjury and three years later, signed “the moral annihilation of France in Europe,” at Cambray.

Boulevard St. Michel.
Boulevard St. Michel.

During the tranquil intervals that ensued on this rude awakening from dreams of an Italian Empire, and the third and fourth wars with the emperor, the king was able to give effect to a project that had long been dear to him. “Come,” says Michelet, “in the still, dark night, climb the Rue St. Jacques, in the early winter’s morning. See you yon lights? Men, even old men, mingled with children, are hurrying, a folio under one arm, in the other an iron candlestick. Do they turn to the right? No, the old Sorbonne is yet sleeping snug in her warm sheets. The crowd is going to the Greek schools. Athens is at Paris. That man with the fine beard in majestic ermine is a descendant of emperors—Jean Lascaris; that other doctor is Alexander, who teaches Hebrew.”

The schools they were pressing to were those of the Royal College of France. Already in 1517 Erasmus had been offered a salary of a thousand francs a year, with promise of further increment, to undertake the direction of the college, but declined to leave his patron the emperor. The prime movers in the great scheme were the king’s confessor, Guillaume Parvi, and the famous Grecian, Guillaume Budé, who in 1530 was himself induced to undertake the task which Erasmus had declined. Twelve professors were appointed in Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, philosophy, rhetoric and medicine, each of the twelve with a salary of two hundred gold crowns (about £80), and the dignity of royal councillors. The king’s vast scheme of a great college and magnificent chapel, with a revenue of 50,000 crowns for the maintenance (nourriture) of six hundred scholars, where the most famous doctors in Christendom should offer gratuitous teaching in all the sciences and learned languages, was never executed. Too much treasure had been wasted in Italy, and it was not till the reign of Louis XIII. that it was partially carried out. The first stone was laid in 1610, but the college as we now see it was not completed till 1770; before the construction the professors taught in the colleges of Treguier and Cambray. Chairs were founded for Arabic by Henry III., for surgery, anatomy and botany by Henry IV., and for Syrian by Louis XIV. Little is changed to-day; the placards, so familiar to students in Paris, announcing the lectures, are indited in French instead of in Latin as of old; the lectures are still free to all, and the most famous scholars of the day teach there, but in French and not in Latin.[103]

How dramatic are the contrasts of history! While the new learning was organising itself amid the pomp of royal patronage, while the young Calvin was sitting at the feet of its professors and the Lutheran heresy germinating at Paris, Ignatius Loyola, an obscure Spanish soldier and gentleman of thirty-seven years of age, was sitting—a strange mature figure—among the boisterous young students at the College of St. Barbara, patiently preparing himself for dedication to the service of the menaced Church of Rome; and in 1534, on the festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a little group of six companions met around the fervent student, in the crypt of the old church at Montmartre, and decided to found on the holy hill of St. Denis’ martyrdom the first house of the Society of Jesus.

In 1528, says the writer of the so-called Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, the king began to pull down the great tower of the Louvre, in order to transform the château into a logis de plaisance, “yet was it great pity for the castle was very fair and high and strong, and a most proper prison to hold great men.”

The tall, massive keep, which darkened the royal apartments in the south wing, was the tower here meant, and after some four months’ work, and an expenditure of 2500 livres, the grim pile, with its centuries of history, was cleared away. Small progress, however, had been made with the restoration of the old château up to the year 1539, when the heavy cost of preparing the west wing for the reception of the Emperor Charles V., induced Francis to consider a plan which involved the replacement of the whole fabric by a palace in the new Renaissance style. In 1546 Pierre Lescot was appointed architect without salary, but given the office of almoner to the king, and made lay abbot of Clermont. Pierre Lescot was an admirable artist, who has left us some of the finest examples of early French Renaissance architecture in Paris. But Francis lived only to see the great scheme begun, most of Lescot’s work being done under Henry II.

From the same anonymous writer we learn something of Parisian life in the reign of Francis I. One day a certain Monsieur Cruche, a popular poet and playwright, was performing moralities and novelties on a platform in the Place Maubert, and among them a farce, “funny enough to make half a score men die of laughter, in which the said Cruche, holding a lantern, feigned to perceive the doings of a hen and a salamander.”[104] The amours of the king with the daughter of a councillor of the Parlement, named Lecoq, were only too plainly satirised. But it is ill jesting with kings. A few nights later, Monsieur Cruche was visited by eight disguised courtiers, who treated him to a supper in a tavern at the sign of the Castle in the Rue de la Juiverie, and induced him to play the farce before them. When the unhappy player came to the first scene, he was set upon by the king’s friends, stripped and beaten almost to death with thongs. They were about to put him in a sack and throw him into the Seine, when poor Cruche, crying piteously, discovered his priestly tonsure, and thus escaped.

Public festivities were held with incredible magnificence. When the English envoys entered Paris in 1518, there was the finest triumph ever seen. The king, the royal princes, five cardinals and a train of lords and dukes and counts, with a gorgeous military pageant, met them and conducted them to Notre Dame, whose interior was almost hidden under decorations of tapestry and of cloth of silver and of gold. A pavilion of cloth of gold, embroidered with the royal salamander, moult riche et fort triomphante, supported by four columns of solid silver, was erected, and was so large that some of the masonry between the choir and the high altar had to be removed to give it place. The banquet by night at the Bastille was the most solemn and sumptuous ever seen; the whole courtyard was draped and the edifice lighted by ten thousand torches; words fail to describe the triumph of the meats and table decorations. The feast ended at midnight and was followed by dances of moriscos attired in cloth of silver and of gold, by jousts and princely gifts. The extravagance of Francis was prodigious; a Venetian ambassador estimated the annual ordinary expenses of the court at 1,500,000[105] crowns; another describes the people as “eaten to the bone by taxes.” Cellini declares that the king on his travels was accompanied by a train of 12,000 horse.

After the defeat at Pavia, the king became excessively pious. By trumpet cry at the crossways, games—quoits, tennis, contre-boulle—were prohibited on Sundays; children were forbidden to sing along the streets, going to and from school. Blasphemers[106] were to be severely punished. In 1527 a notary was burned alive in the Place de Grève for a great blasphemy of our Lord and His holy Mother. In June of the next year some Lutherans struck down and mutilated an image of the Virgin and Child at a street corner near St. Gervais; the king was so grieved and angry that he wept violently, and offered a reward of one hundred gold crowns, but the offenders could not be found. Daily processions came from the churches to the spot, and all the religious orders, clothed in their habits, followed, “singing with such great fervour and reverence, that it was fair to see.” The rector and doctors, masters and bachelors, scholars of the university, and children with lighted tapers, went there in great reverence. On Corpus Christi day the street was draped and a fair canopy stretched over the statue. The king himself walked in procession, bearing a white taper, his head uncovered in moult gran révérence; hautboys, clarions and trumpets played melodiously. Cardinals, prelates, great seigneurs and nobles, each with his taper of white wax, followed, with the royal archers of the guard in their train. On the morrow a procession from all the parishes of Paris, with banners, relics and crucifixes, accompanied by the king and nobles, brought a new and fair image of silver, two feet in height, which the king had caused to be made. Francis himself ascended a ladder and placed it where the other image had stood, then kissed it and descended with tears in his eyes. Thrice he kneeled and prayed, the bishop of Lisieux, his almoner, reciting fair orisons and lauds to the honour of the glorious Virgin and her image. Again the trumpets, clarions and hautboys played the Ave Regina cælorum, and the king, the cardinal of Louvain, and all the nobles presented their tapers to the Virgin. Next day the Parlement, the provost and sheriffs, came and put an iron trellis round the silver image for fear of robbers.[107]

Never were judicial and ecclesiastical punishments so cruel and recurrent as during the period of the Renaissance. It is a common error to suppose that judicial cruelty reached its culmination in the Middle Ages. Punishments are described with appalling iteration in the pages we are following. The Place de Grève was the scene of mutilations, tortures, hangings and quarterings of criminals and traitors, the king and his court sometimes looking on. Coiners of false money were boiled alive at the pig-market; robbers and assassins were broken on the wheel and left to linger in slow agony (tant qu’ils pourraient languir). The Lutherans were treated like vermin, and to harbour them, to possess or print or translate one of their books, meant a fiery death. In 1525 a young Lutheran student was put in a tumbril and brought before the churches of Notre Dame and St. Genevieve, crying mercy from God and Mary and St. Genevieve; he was then taken to the Place Maubert, where, after his tongue had been pierced, he was strangled and burnt. A gendarme of the Duke of Albany was burnt at the pig-market for having sown Lutheran errors in Scotland; before his execution his servant was whipped and mutilated before him at the cart-tail, but was pardoned on recantation.

On Corpus Christi day, 1532, a great procession was formed, the king and provost walking bare-headed to witness the burning of six Lutherans—a scene often repeated. The Fountain of the Innocents, the Halles, the Temple, the end of the Pont St. Michel, the Place Maubert, and the Rue St. Honoré were indifferently chosen for these ghastly scenes. Almost daily the fires burnt. A woman was roasted to death for eating flesh on Fridays. In 1535, so savage were the persecutions, that Pope Paul III., with that gentleness which almost invariably has characterised Rome in dealing with heresy, wrote to Francis protesting against the horrible and execrable punishments inflicted on the Lutherans, and warned him that although he acted from good motives, yet he must remember that God the Creator, when in this world, used mercy rather than rigorous justice, and that it was a cruel death to burn a man alive; he therefore prayed and required the king to appease the fury and rigour of his justice and adopt a policy of mercy and pardon. This noble protest was effective, and some clemency was afterwards shown. But in 1547 the fanatical king, a mass of physical and moral corruption, soured and gloomy, went to his end amid the barbarities wreaked on the unhappy Vaudois Protestants. The cries of three thousand of his butchered subjects and the smoke from the ruins of twenty-five towns and hamlets were the incense of his spirit’s flight.

LA FONTAINE DES INNOCENTS.
LA FONTAINE DES INNOCENTS.

CHAPTER XII

RISE OF THE GUISES—HUGUENOT AND CATHOLIC—THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW

“BEWARE of Montmorency and curb the power of the Guises,” was the counsel of the dying Francis to his son. Henry II., dull and heavy-witted that he was, neglected the advice, and the Guises flourished in the sun of royal favour. The first Duke of Guise and founder of his renowned house was Claude, a poor cadet of René II., Duke of Lorraine. He succeeded in allying by marriage his eldest son and successor, Francis, to the House of Bourbon; his second son, Charles, became Cardinal of Lorraine, and his daughter, wife to James V. of Scotland. Duke Francis, by his military genius and wise statesmanship; Charles, by his learning and subtle wit, exalted their house to the lofty eminence it enjoyed during the stirring period that now opens. In 1558, after the disastrous defeat of Montmorency at St. Quentin, when Paris lay at the mercy of the Spanish and English armies, the duke was recalled from Italy and made Lieutenant-General of the realm. By a short and brilliant campaign, he expelled the English from Calais, and recovered in three weeks the territory held by them for more than two hundred years. Francis gained an unbounded popularity, and rose to the highest pinnacle of success; but short time was left to his royal master wherein to enjoy a reflected glory. On the 27th June 1559, lists were erected across the Rue St. Antoine, between the Tournelles and the Bastille. The peace with Spain, and the double marriage of the king’s daughter to Philip II. of Spain and of his sister to the Duke of Savoy, were to be celebrated by a magnificent tournament in which the king, proud of his strength and bodily address, was to hold the field with the Duke of Guise and the princes against all comers. For three days the king distinguished himself by his triumphant prowess, and at length challenged the Duke of Montgomery, captain of the Scottish Guards; the captain prayed to be excused, but the king insisted and the course was run. Several lances were broken, but in the last encounter the stout captain failed to lower his shivered lance quickly enough, and the broken truncheon struck the royal visor, lifted it and penetrated the king’s eye. Henry fell senseless and was carried to the palace of the Tournelles, where he died after an agony of eleven days. Fifteen years later, Montgomery was captured fighting with the Huguenots, and beheaded on the Place de Grève while Catherine de’ Medici looked on “pour goûter,” says Félibien quaintly, “le plaisir de se voir vangée de la mort de son mary.” The tower in the interior of the Palais de Justice, where the unhappy Scottish noble was imprisoned after his capture, was known as the Tour Montgomery, until demolished in the reign of Louis XVI. There was, however, little love lost between Henry’s queen, Catherine de’ Medici, and her royal husband, who had long neglected her for the maturer charms of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers.

WEST WING OF LOUVRE BY PIERRE LESCOT.
WEST WING OF LOUVRE BY PIERRE LESCOT.

Henry saw Lescot’s admirable design for the reconstruction of the west wing of the Louvre completed. The architect had associated a famous sculptor, Jean Goujon, with him, who executed the beautiful figures in low relief which still adorn the quadrangle front between the Pavilion de l’Horloge and the south-west angle, and the noble Caryatides, which support the musicians’ gallery in the Salle Basse, or Salle des Fêtes, now known as the Salle des Caryatides. The agreement, dated 5th September 1550, awards forty-six livres each for the four plaster models and eighty crowns each for the four carved figures. Lescot preserved the external wall of the old château as the kernel of his new wing, and the enormous strength of the original building of Philip Augustus may be estimated by the fact that the embrasures of each of the five casements of the first floor looking westwards now serve as offices. So grandement satisfait was Henry with the perfection of Lescot’s work, that he determined to continue it along the remaining three wings, that the court of the Louvre might be a cour non-pareille. The south wing was, however, only begun when his tragic death occurred, and the present inconsequent and huge fabric is the work of a whole tribe of architects, whose intermittent activities extended over the reigns of nine French sovereigns.

Luxembourg Gardens.
Luxembourg Gardens.

Europe was now in travail of a new era, and unhappy France reeled under the tempest of the Reformation. A daring spirit of enquiry and of revolt challenged every principle on which the social fabric had been based, and the only refuge in the coming storm in France was the Monarchy. Never had its power been more absolute. The king’s will was law—a harbour of safety, indeed, if he were strong and wise and virtuous: a veritable quicksand, if feeble and vicious. And to pilot the state of France in these stormy times, Henry II. left a sickly progeny of four princes, miserable puppets, whose favours were disputed for thirty years by ambitious and fanatical nobles, queens and courtesans.

Francis II., a poor creature of sixteen years, the slave of his wife Marie Stuart and of the Guises, was called king of France for seventeen months. He it was who sat daily by Mary in the royal garden, on the terrace at Amboise overlooking the Loire, and, surrounded by his brothers and the ladies of the court, gazed at the revolting and merciless executions of the Protestant conspirators,[108] who, under the Prince of Condé, had plotted to destroy the Guises and to free the king from their influence. It was the first act in a horrible drama, a dread pursuivant of the civil and religious wars in France. The stake was a high one, for the victory of the reformers would sound the death-knell of the Catholic cause in Europe. There is little reason to doubt that the queen-mother, Catherine de’ Medici, who now emerges into prominence, was genuinely sincere in her disapproval of the horrors of Amboise, and in her efforts to bring milder counsels to bear in dealing with the Huguenots; but the fierce passions roused by civil and religious hatred were uncontrollable. When the Huguenot noble, Villemongis, was led to the scaffold at Amboise, he dipped his hands in the blood of his slaughtered comrades, and, lifting them to heaven, cried: “Lord, behold the blood of Thy children; Thou wilt avenge them.” A savage lust for blood among the Christian sectaries on either side, drawing its stimulus from the records of the ferocity of semi-barbarian Jewish tribes, smothered the gentle voice of Jesus, and during thirty years was never slaked. Treachery and assassination were the interludes of plots and battles. In 1563 the Duke of Guise was shot by a fanatical Huguenot with a pistol loaded with poisoned balls. In 1569, when the Protestant leader, Admiral Coligny, was surprised and attacked by the forces of the Duke of Anjou, Prince Condé, although wounded in the arm, hastened to his succour. As the prince passed on, his leg was broken by a kick from a vicious horse. Still charging forward, he cried: “Remember how a Louis of Bourbon goes to battle for Christ and Fatherland!” His horse was killed, himself captured; as he was handing over his sword to his captors, the Baron de Montesquieu, “brave et vaillant gentilhomme,” says Brantôme, arrived on the scene, and, on learning what was passing, exclaimed, “Mort Dieu! kill him! kill him!” and blew out Condé’s brains with a pistol. The body of the heroic Bourbon was then tied on an ass, and a mocking epitaph set upon it:—

The defeated Protestants were, however, soon roused to enthusiasm by the arrival of Jeanne of Navarre at their camp, leading her son Henry by one hand and the eldest son of Condé by the other. “Here,” cried the widowed queen, “are two orphans I confide to you; two leaders that God has given you.” One of these orphans was to become Henry IV. of France.

Tritons and Nereids from the old Fontaine des Innocents. Jean Goujon.
Tritons and Nereids from the old Fontaine des Innocents.
Jean Goujon.

The treaty of St. Germain, which has so often been charged on Catherine as an act of perfidy, was rather an imperative necessity, if respite were to be had from the misery into which the land had fallen. Its conditions were honourably carried out, and Catholic excesses were impartially and severely repressed. Charles IX., who was now twenty years of age, began to assert his independence of the queen-mother and of the Guises,[109] and his first movement was in the direction of conciliation. The young king offered the hand of his sister, Princess Marguerite, to Henry of Navarre, and received Coligny and Jeanne of Navarre with much honour at court. Pressure was brought to bear upon him, but, pope or no pope, the king said he was determined to conclude the marriage. The Catholic party, and especially Paris, were furious. The capital, with the provost, the Parlement, the university, the prelates, the religious orders, had always been hostile to the Huguenots. The people could with difficulty be restrained at times from assuming the office of executioners as Protestants were led to the stake. Any one who did not uncover as he passed the image of the Virgin at the street corners, or who omitted to bend the knee as the Host was carried by, was attacked as a Lutheran. When the heralds published the peace with the Huguenots at the crossways of Paris, filth and mud were thrown at them, and they went in danger of their lives: now Coligny and his Huguenots were holding their heads high in Paris, proud and insolent, and the heretic prince of Navarre was to wed the king’s sister.

Jeanne of Navarre died soon after her arrival at court,[110] but the alliance was hurried on. The betrothal took place in the Louvre, and, on Sunday, 17th August 1572, a high daïs was erected outside Notre Dame for the celebration of the marriage. When the ceremony had been performed by the Cardinal de Bourbon, Henry conducted his bride to the choir of the cathedral, and went walking in the bishop’s garden while mass was sung. The office ended, he returned and led his wife to the bishop’s palace to dinner, and a magnificent state supper at the Louvre concluded this momentous day. Three days of balls, masquerades and tourneys followed, amid the murmuring of a sullen populace. These were the noces vermeilles—the red nuptials—of Marguerite of France and Henry of Navarre.

Meanwhile Catherine and Coligny had differed on a matter of foreign policy, and the king, bent on freeing himself from his mother’s yoke, openly favoured the Huguenot leader. Catherine, terrified at the result of her own work, determined to regain her ascendency, and she conspired with her third son, the Prince of Anjou (later Henry III.), to destroy and have done with the Protestants. Coligny had often been warned of the danger he would run in Paris, but the stout old soldier knew no fear, and came to take part in the festivities of the wedding. The sounds of revelry had barely died away when Coligny, who was returning from the Louvre to his hotel, walking slowly and reading a petition, was fired at from a window as he passed the cloister of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and wounded in the arm. He stopped and noted the house whence the shot came: it was the house of the preceptor of the Duke of Guise. The king was playing at tennis when the news came to him: he flung down his racquet, exclaiming, “What! shall I never be in peace? must I suffer new trouble every day?” and went moody and pensive to his chamber. In a few moments Prince Condé and Henry of Navarre burst in, uttering indignant protests, and begged permission to leave Paris. Charles assured them he would do justice, and that they might safely remain. In the afternoon the king, his mother and the princes, went to visit the admiral. The king asked to be left alone in the wounded man’s chamber, remained a long time with him, and protested that though the wound was his friend’s, the grief was his own, and he swore to avenge him.

Portrait of Elizabeth of Austria, Wife of Charles IX. François Clouet.
Portrait of Elizabeth of Austria, Wife of Charles IX.
François Clouet.

Coligny once again was warned by his friends to beware of the court, but he refused to distrust the king. Many and conflicting are the reports of what followed. We shall not be accused of any Protestant bias if we base our story mainly on that of the two learned Benedictines[111] who are responsible for five solid tomes of the Histoire de la Ville de Paris. On the morrow of the attempt on Coligny’s life, the queen-mother invited Charles and his brother of Anjou to walk, after dinner, in the garden of her new palace in the Tuileries: they were joined by the chief Catholic leaders, and a grand council was held. The queen dwelt on the perilous situation of the monarchy and the Catholic cause, and urged that now was the time to act: Coligny lay wounded; Navarre and Condé were in their power at the Louvre; for ten Huguenots in Paris the Catholics could oppose a thousand armed men; rid France of the Huguenot chiefs and a formidable evil were averted. Her course was approved, but the leaders shrank from including the two princes of Navarre and Condé: they were to be given their choice—recantation or death. By order of the king 12,000 arquebusiers were placed along the river and the streets, and arms were carried into the Louvre. The admiral’s friends, alarmed at the sinister preparations, protested to Charles but were reassured and told to take Cosseins and fifty arquebusiers to guard his house. The provost of Paris was then summoned by the Duke of Guise and ordered to arm and organise the citizens and proceed to the Hôtel de Ville at midnight. The king, Guise said, would not lose so fair an opportunity of exterminating the Huguenots. The Catholic citizens were to tie a piece of white linen on their left arm and place a white cross in their caps that they might be recognised by their friends. At midnight the windows of their houses were to be illuminated by torches, and at the first sound of the great bell at the Palais de Justice the bloody work was to begin. Midnight drew near. Catherine was not sure of the king, and repaired to his chamber with Anjou and her councillors to fix his wavering purpose; she heaped bitter reproaches upon him, worked on his fears with stories of a vast Huguenot conspiracy and hinted that cowardice prevented him from seizing the fairest opportunity that God had ever offered, to free himself from his enemies. She repeated an Italian prelate’s vicious epigram: “Che pietà lor ser crudel, che crudeltà, lor ser pietosa,”[112] and concluded by threatening to leave the court with the Duke of Anjou rather than witness the destruction of the Catholic cause. Charles, who had listened sullenly, was stung by the taunt of cowardice and broke into a delirium of passion; he called for the death of every Huguenot in France, that none might be left to reproach him afterwards.

Catherine gave him no time for farther vacillation. The great bell of St. Germain l’Auxerrois was rung, and at two in the morning of Sunday, St. Bartholomew’s Day, 24th August 1572, the Duke of Guise and his followers issued forth to do their Sabbath morning’s work. Cosseins saw his leader coming and knew what was expected of him. Coligny’s door was forced, his servants were poignarded, and Besme, a German in the service of Guise, followed by others, burst into the admiral’s room. The old man stood erect in his robe de chambre, facing his murderers. “Art thou the admiral?” demanded Besme. “I am he,” answered Coligny with unfaltering voice and, gazing steadily at the naked sword pointed at his breast, added, “Young man, thou shouldst show more respect to my white hairs; yet canst thou shorten but little my brief life.” For answer he was pierced by Besme’s sword and stabbed to death by his companions. Guise stood waiting in the street below and the body was flung down to him from the window. He wiped the blood from the old man’s face, looked at it, and said, “It is he!” Spurning the body with his foot he cried, “Courage, soldiers! we have begun well; now for the others, the king commands it. “Meanwhile the bell of the Palais de Justice, answering that of St. Germain, was booming forth its awful summons, and the citizens hastened to perform their part. Some passing the body of Coligny cut off the head and took it to the king and queen, others mutilated the trunk, which, after being dragged about the streets for three days, was hanged by the feet on the gibbet at Montfaucon, where Charles and Catherine are said to have come to gaze on it.

All the Huguenot nobles dwelling near the admiral were pitilessly murdered, and a similar carnage took place at the Louvre. Marguerite, the young bride of Navarre, in her Memoirs, tells of the horrors of that morning, how, when half-asleep, a wounded Huguenot nobleman rushed into her chamber, pursued by four archers, and flung himself on her bed imploring protection. A captain of the guard entered, from whom she gained his life. She entreated the captain to lead her to her sister’s room, and as she fled thither, more dead than alive, another fugitive was hewn down by a hallebardier only three paces from her; she fell fainting in the captain’s arms. Meanwhile Charles, the queen-mother, and Henry of Anjou, after the violent scene in the king’s chamber, had lain down for two hours’ rest and then went to a window which overlooked the basse-cour of the Louvre, to see the “beginning of the executions.” If we may believe Henry’s story, they had not been there long before the sound of a pistol shot filled them with dread and remorse, and a messenger was sent to bid Guise to spare the admiral and to stay the whole undertaking; but the nobleman who had been sent returned saying that Guise had told him it was too late: the admiral was dead, and the executions had begun all over the city. A dozen Protestant nobles of the suites of Condé and Navarre, who had taken refuge in the Louvre, were seized; one was even dragged from a sick-bed: all were taken to the courtyard and hewn in pieces by the Swiss guards under the eyes of Charles, who cried: “Let none escape.” Meantime the Catholic leaders had been scouring the streets on horseback, shouting to the people that a Huguenot conspiracy to murder the king had been discovered, and that it was the king’s wish that all the Huguenots should be destroyed.

A list of the Huguenots in Paris had been prepared and all their houses marked. None was spared. Old and young, women and children, were pitilessly butchered. All that awful Sunday the orgy of slaughter and pillage went on; every gate of the city had been closed and the keys brought to the king. Night fell and the carnage was not stayed. Two days yet and two nights the city was a prey to the ministers of death, and some Catholics, denounced by personal enemies, were involved in the massacre. The resplendent August sun, the fair sky and serene atmosphere were held to be a divine augury, and a whitethorn in the cemetery of the Innocents blooming out of season was hailed as a miracle and a visible token from God that the Catholic religion was to blossom again by the destruction of the Huguenots. A famous professor at the university was flung out of a window by the scholars, his body insulted and dragged in the mud. The murders did not wholly cease until 17th September. Various were the estimates of the slain—20,000, 5,000, 2,000. A goldsmith named Cruce went about displaying his robust arm and boasting that he had accounted for 400 Huguenots. The streets, the front of the Louvre, the public places were blocked by dead bodies; tumbrils[113] were hired to throw them into the Seine, which literally for days ran red with blood.

The princes of Navarre and Condé saw the privacy of their chambers violated by a posse of archers on St. Bartholomew’s morning; they were forced to dress and were haled before the king, who, with a fierce look and glaring eyes, swore at them, reproached them for waging war upon him, and ordered them to change their religion. On their refusal he grew furious with rage, and by dint of threats wrung from them a promise to go to mass.

The Louvre—Galerie D’Apollon.
The Louvre—Galerie D’Apollon.

Charles is said to have stood at a window in the Petite Galerie of the Louvre and to have fired across the river with a long arquebus on some Huguenots who, being lodged on the southern side, had escaped massacre, and were riding up to learn what was passing. The statement is much canvassed by authorities. It is at least permissible to doubt the assertion, since the first floor[114] of the Petite Galerie, where the king is traditionally believed to have placed himself, was not in existence before the time of Henry IV. If the ground floor be meant, a further difficulty arises from the fact that the southern end was not furnished with a window in Charles IX.’s time.

On the 26th of August the king boldly avowed responsibility before the Parlement for measures which he alleged had been necessary to suppress a Huguenot insurrection aiming at the assassination of himself and the royal family and the destruction of the Catholic religion in France. The ears of the Catholic princes of Europe and of the pope were abused by this specious lie; they believed that the Catholic cause had been saved from ruin; the so-called victory was hailed with transports of joy, and a medal was struck in Rome to celebrate the defeat of the Huguenots.[115]

Similar horrors were enacted in the chief provincial towns. Some few governors, to their honour, declined to carry out the orders of the court, and the public executioner at Troyes refused to take part in the butchery, protesting that his office was not to kill untried persons. At Angers some of the rich Huguenots were imprisoned and their property confiscated by order of Henry of Anjou. “Monseigneur, we can make more than 150,000 francs out of them,” wrote his agent.

Such was the massacre of St. Bartholomew. The death-roll of the victims is known to the Recording Angel alone. It was a tremendous folly no less than an indelible crime, for it steeled the heart of every Protestant to avenge his slaughtered brethren.

PETITE GALERIE OF THE LOUVRE.
PETITE GALERIE OF THE LOUVRE.

Many of the Huguenot leaders escaped from Paris while the soldiers sent to despatch them were pillaging, and the flames of civil strife burst forth fiercer than ever. The court had prepared for massacre, not for war; and while the king was receiving the felicitations of the courts of Spain and Rome, he was forced by the Peace of La Rochelle to concede liberty of conscience to the Protestants and to restore their sequestered estates and offices. After two years of agony of mind and remorse, Charles IX. lay dying of consumption, abandoned by all save his faithful Huguenot nurse. The blood flowing from his nostrils seemed a token of God’s wrath; and moaning “Ah! ma mie, what bloodshed! what murders! I am lost! I am lost!” the poor crowned wretch passed to his account. He had not yet reached his twenty-fourth year.

PLAN OF PARIS WHEN BESIEGED BY HENRY IV. IN 1590.
PLAN OF PARIS WHEN BESIEGED BY HENRY IV. IN 1590.

CHAPTER XIII

HENRY III.—THE LEAGUE—SIEGE OF PARIS BY HENRY IV.—HIS CONVERSION, REIGN AND ASSASSINATION

Less than four years after St. Bartholomew the Peace of 1576 gave the Huguenots all they had ever demanded or hoped for. In 1582 died the Duke of Alençon, Catherine’s last surviving son and heir to the throne; Henry gave no hope of posterity and the Catholic party were confronted by the possibility of the sceptre of St. Louis descending to a relapsed heretic. A tremendous wave of feeling ran through France, and a Holy League was formed to meet the danger, with the Duke of Guise as leader. The king tried in vain to win some of the Huguenot and League partisans by the solemn institution of the Order of the Holy Ghost,[116] in the church of the Augustinians, to commemorate his elevation to the thrones of Poland and France on the day of Pentecost. The people were equally recalcitrant. When Henry entered Paris after the campaign of 1587, they shouted for their idol, the Balafré,[117] crying, “Saul has slain his thousands but David his tens of thousands.” The king in his jealousy and disgust forbade Guise to enter Paris; Guise coolly ignored the command, and a few months later arrived at the head of a formidable train of nobles, amid the joyous acclamation of the people, who greeted him with chants of “Hosannah, Filio David!” Angry scenes followed. The duke sternly called his master to duty, and warned him to take vigorous measures against the Huguenots or lose his crown; the king, pale with anger, dismissed him and prepared to strike.

Catherine de’ Medici. French School, 16th Century.
Catherine de’ Medici.
French School, 16th Century.

On the night of the 11th May a force of Royal Guards and 4000 Swiss mercenaries entered Paris, but the Parisians, with that genius for insurrection which has always characterised them, were equal to the occasion. The sixteen sections of the city met; in the morning the people were under arms; and barricades and chains blocked the streets. The St. Antoine section, ever to the front, stood up to the king’s Guards and to the Swiss advancing to occupy their quarter, defeated them, and with exultant cries rushed to threaten the Louvre itself. Henry was forced to send his mother to treat with the duke; she returned with terms that meant a virtual abdication. Henry took horse and fled, vowing he would come back only through a breach in the walls. But Guise was supreme in Paris, and the pitiful monarch was soon forced to yield; he signed the terms of his own humiliation, and went to Blois to meet Guise and the States-General with bitterness in his heart, brooding over his revenge. Visitors to Blois will recall the scene of the tragic end of Guise, the incidents of which the official guardians of the château are wont to recite with dramatic gesture. Fearless and impatient of warnings, the great captain fell into the trap prepared for him; he was done to death in the king’s chamber, like a lion caught in the toils. Henry, who had heard mass and prayed that God would be gracious to him and permit the success of his enterprise, hastened to his mother, now aged and dying. “Madame,” said he, “I have killed the king of Paris and am become once more king of France.”[118] The Cardinal of Lorraine, separated from the king’s chamber only by a partition, paled as he heard his nephew’s struggles. “Yes,” said his warder, “the king has some accounts to settle with you.” Next morning the old cardinal was led out and hacked to pieces. The two bodies were burnt and the ashes scattered to the winds to prevent their being worshipped as relics. It was Christmas Eve of 1588.

The stupid crime brought its inevitable consequences—